Could Social Media Have Stopped Sandusky?
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Does the case of Jerry Sandusky, the Penn State defensive football coach who is on trial for sexually abusing or raping ten children, show that we are getting better as a culture, or worse? Maureen Dowd, in the Times, sees it as a sign of our era’s declines, asking whether “with formerly hallowed institutions and icons sinking into a moral dystopia all around us, has our sense of right and wrong grown more malleable?”
Inundated by instantaneous information and gossip, do we simply know more about the seamy side? Do greater opportunities and higher stakes cause more instances of unethical behavior? Have our materialism, narcissism and cynicism about the institutions knitting society—schools, sports, religion, politics, banking—dulled our sense of right and wrong?
She then quotes the author of a book called “The Death of Character,” who also complains about how “we no longer trust the authority of traditional institutions,” and Cory Booker, who tells her that his run into a burning building last month was an act of resistance against “consumerism and narcissism and me-ism” and “shallow celebrity” culture.
But this is a puzzling perspective. The cases Dowd discusses—Sandusky, the Catholic Church’s child-sex-abuse scandal, recent revelations about Horace Mann—involved crimes and misdemeanors that went on for years or decades, hidden by the “hallowed” status of schools or sports or religion, and that we’ve finally, more recently exposed. This feels like progress. When is the “then” when everyone was good? (Dowd mentions Thomas More, but the sixteenth century wasn’t actually utopia.) The narrative of the past few years seems less about “sinking into moral dystopia” than about the draining away of a swamp that hid bad behavior. It’s lately that we’ve learned to stand up to, say, bishops protecting abusive priests, and to not to tolerate that sort of crime any more. If cynicism about such institutions means not trusting them to police themselves, it has sharpened, not dulled, our sense of right and wrong. We have, if anything, been more engaged than ever with the question of accountability—and that’s good.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2012/06/could-social-media-have-stopped-sandusky.html