Cyreenik Says
The Stubenville Rape case highlights a potent mixture of panic-and-blunder and blind spot thinking. The panic and blunder is to take an incident of fairly common teenage partying excess and turn it into a national showcase trial. The blind spot thinking consists of picking one incident out of this medley of teenage crazy, having sex with a dead-drunk girl, and getting black-and-white about which side of this incident to be on and how much excess to call down upon the other side as punishment. (Here's the Wikipedia coverage of the topic.)
Here are the human thinking issues I see:
o How did this come to center on rape?
This was a party of teenagers gone overly wild. This is hardly a rare occurrence. At such affairs many teenagers/minors are doing silly things, and many of those things will either make good stories in their future or ugly stories that they will later regret. This mix of outcomes is also hardly rare: it's called learning the consequences of your actions.
In spite of the commonness of such occurrences, the Internet chattering classes have made this one a cause.
One difference I see in this case is that modern communication technology has let what happened behind closed doors be broadcast to the whole world. This ability is new, and so our social mores need to do some catching up. Previously, such escapades would be talked about in hushed tones for months after the event, but talk would be all that made it out of the room unless some physical evidence -- such as broken noses, trashed furniture, or a pregnancy -- also showed up after the event.
But now we have easy pictures, videos and Facebook. It's going to take a while for the conduct of teenage excess, and community and parental judgment, to catch up with this new harsh reality.
o Why are the chattering classes coming down so hard on some media people?
Some media people are pointing out that this specific incident was both common stupidity and surrounded by lots of other stupid things being done by a group of teenagers engaged in drinking excess. This is far from the first or last time a teenager will drink themselves senseless and their fellow partiers will prank them when they do. The media people taking this point of view are being pilloried by the Internet chatter classes.
What I see of this incident through my old man's eyes is a teenage party gone wild and then wrong. Wrong... when looked at through the morning-after prism of adult behavior standards. Lots of foolish stuff happened that night that seemed quite right at the time. In the days thereafter the community has had to sort through that mountain of silliness and pick and choose who, if anyone, would suffer in the eyes of the law. Choices were made, and then, oddly, the whole world got involved.
To see the oddity in making the rape so special, think of this situation this way:
You're a sixteen year old girl with a crystal ball. You gaze into it and you know you're going to a party with classmates. You know it's going to get wild and wooly. You know you're going to drink yourself silly. You know that after you do, you're going to have an accident. The only choice you have is which accident to endure.
Would you like that accident to be:
Case A -- You get staggering drunk. You fall down the stairs and break your arm.
Case B -- You get staggering drunk. You make it to a couch were you will sleep it off. While you're on the couch and senseless one of your classmates has sex with you. In truth, you don't remember much of anything about it. If he asked, you don't remember what you answered.
Which one is the worse outcome for that disaster of a party? Which would you choose to suffer?
With the broken arm you're going to be in the hospital for hours, spend weeks in a cast, and months after that finishing a recovery. You're going to have to learn how to eat and write with your off hand. Whew! lots of inconvenience.
With the sex you wake up in the morning with one hell of a hangover, perhaps visit a doctor later that day for a morning-after pill and an STD checkup, and within a week it becomes just another lesson learned.
Which do you choose?
Personally, I'd take the sex. ...But then, I don't have lots of friends and associates around me watching carefully to see if I'm becoming "loose", and ready to take action if I do.
Many of the chattering classes feel differently. For them, the instinctive feeling is strong that a demon enters a woman's body when a man "knows" her. If the woman says "Yes.", the demon is kept in check with conjugal or romantic bliss. If the woman says "No." -- before, during, or after the event (remorse) -- the demon is unleashed and it seriously messes up her life in untold ways for an untold time.
It's a scary instinct to have, and it leads to an impressive shrillness when unleashed, as it has been for many followers of this incident.
The curious part of this incident to my eyes is the shrillness of the conversation about rape. In this day and age, with the technology we have available for disease and pregnancy prevention, the physical damage done by nonconsensual sex is less than that of having a bone- or tooth-breaking accident -- which means this is not a physical issue.
With no physical reason for the shrillness, that leaves emotion -- pure emotion. And in this case the root emotion is a potent mix of fear and sex. Since pre-history girls maturing from childhood into sexually attractive and interested young womanhood have worried a lot about being labeled "loose" by their contemporaries. This worry is deeply instinctive so it is active among many people today, even though modern technology should make that worry irrelevant.
That thinking seems to be the root of this interest and shrillness.
Hugo Chavez, long time president of Venezuela, died at just the right time in his life to carve himself a big slice in legendary history. Like Lenin he was a leader promoting a big populist dream, and like him he died while while developing that big dream was in progress and the happy ending still looked possible. Like Lenin he was controversial in his time -- there were a lot of skeptics -- but those won't matter to the admirers who will build his place in history.
He was also a ruthless leader. He promoted using conspiracy theory to explain why things didn't go as well as planned and hypocrisy on every scale was just fine.
One big difference between Chavez and Lenin was the surrounding economic circumstance. Chavez's Venezuela was in an optimistic time, not a scary time. Lenin was leading a war-torn, defeated and bankrupt country. Chavez was leading an oil-rich country during an oil price boom -- he could throw around a lot of wealth without having to demonize a class and confiscate their wealth. This let his ruling style be much more moderate -- a deep blessing, indeed.
Now he's gone. Now we get to see if Venezuela has had enough of ruthless populist leadership and is ready to move back to a more moderate business-as-usual style of governance. It may be, but it's far from a sure thing. Example: Peronism, the legacy of Juan Peron's populist governance in the 1940's, is still very popular in Argentina and supports a lot of "crazy" in the current governing style.
This thought is inspired by the 9 Mar 13 Economist article, Venezuela after Chávez: Now for the reckoning, which does a nice job of describing Hugo Chavez, the man, who built this populist legacy. It describes him as a man of extraordinary energy as well as political talent, and one who was in the right place at the right time. In sum, this is the stuff legends are made of.
The pyramids, the early Mormon temples in Utah, the Grand Canal in China. These are a few examples of a community dreaming big. Even while most of the community was living in mud huts, the people of these communities came together to produce a marvelous work and a wonder. These community members, rich and poor alike, felt that spending resource on their marvelous work was producing more value than spending that same resource on uplifting the average infrastructure of the community -- things such as better roads, housing and food.
Why?
In these cases the importance of unifying the community was recognized. Each of these projects gave community members the opportunity to learn about cooperating with lots of other people, especially strangers. They learned cooperation and tolerance instead of learning "just standing around watching others", or even worse, taking cheap shots at others' projects with activities such as mocking, stealing and vandalism.
This lesson in cooperating with a larger group than family and friends is one each generation must learn. It isn't instinctive, which means it isn't easy to learn. It's not easy, but it's a vital lesson for civilized living.
As vital as it is, its importance is under appreciated more often than not. The community chattering classes who follow their instincts pay attention to divisive issues, not those which unify the community behind a big vision. The famous media truism, "If it bleeds it leads." is an example of following instinct, and the result of following this instinct is more divisive thinking in the community. When people of the community aren't picking up the cooperator lesson, the community learns acrimony instead of cooperation, and this is death on trust, which is death on progress.
For this reason having periodic big dreams for a community to pursue is vital to the community bettering itself. If these are not developed and pursued vigorously, the community will decline... sinking into a sea of acrimony, and a status quo which accepts steady decline as part of the local living package. A personal example of seeing this happening was the Midwest Disease that sank Cleveland and Detroit starting in the 1960's. I grew up in Cleveland.
Picking a big vision to follow is vital, but it isn't easy. Kennedy got it right with the Space Race to the moon, Bush Jr. got it wrong with the War on Terror. One surprise turnabout was FDR as World War Two loomed. Through most of the 1930's neither he nor anyone else in America could come up with a good big vision. We had the Great Depression. But when he decided that fighting Fascism in Europe was more important than fighting class warfare in the US, he did an impressive about-face and came up with a hugely successful series of big visions, starting with building the Arsenal of Democracy. After a decade of learning acrimony in the 1930's, Americans learned to cooperate again during the harsh times of World War II in the early 1940's, and were rewarded with fifty years of booming prosperity following it.
It isn't easy, but if you get the dream right, and promote it right, some in the community will grumble, but everyone will get on board and love the result. If you get it wrong, a lot of people choose to watch from the sidelines and there's a whole lot more grumbling. And it will be followed with a lot of harsh "I told you so!" when the dream founders. Another personal example of experiencing first bad, then good, big dreams was my decade of working at Novell in the 1980's. The good big dream produced a billion dollar company that changed history by being at the heart of a newly developing multi-billion dollar industry. Now that was a heady experience! I have written this up in my book Surfing the High Tech Wave.
In sum, communities need a periodic big vision. It teaches people how to cooperate. If people don't learn to cooperate, they learn to be acrimonious. If they learn to be acrimonious the community will support status quo instead of innovation, and slow, steady decline instead of rapid disruptive growth.
-- The End --