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I set out this morning to write about our culture's fascination with public scandals. I wanted to examine why we are drawn so intensely to horrific stories like those coming out of Penn State--where top administrators and an iconic football coach failed to bring Jerry Sandusky, a known sexual predator, to justice, and are now losing their jobs and respectability--and possibly facing prison time.
I planned to list the theories, one-by-one, and examine the strengths and weaknesses of each. Scandals attract us because they make us feel better about ourselves, glad that we're not the ones being shamed. There is also, when the mighty fall, a bit of Schadenfreude--joy in another's disgrace--and this feeling brings with it the pleasure of feeling superior, morally or otherwise, to one who was once above us in fame and wealth. The ignominies of others moreover offer us much-needed scapegoats onto whom we can heap anger that we might have otherwise directed towards our own flaws. Finally, shared derision strengthens communities: we know our friends by what they mock.
But as I was going about the business of analyzing the Penn State scandal, a blunt fact stopped me. The grand jury report describes a scene in which a graduate assistant football coach at the University, saw, one Friday night in the locker room showers, a naked boy, about ten-years-old, "with his hands up against the wall, being subjected to anal intercourse by a naked Sandusky."
I lost all volition to explain. My reason and my language were impotent to account for such a heinous act and its consequences. It was an inscrutable act of cruelty.
I thought of an essay Jonathan Hayes wrote soon after watching the video of Iraqi terrorists beheading Nicholas Berg. Though as a forensic pathologist Hayes had studied death many times, he regretted watching the Berg video. The violence, he said, "unearthed emotions I had no desire to feel: fury, despair, the desire for revenge. I no longer cared about the atrocities committed in Abu Ghraib, the images of which had outraged me the week before. I wanted every man in that little death club captured, torn from their families, and dragged into the darkest basement interrogation room." Watching the video, he confessed, "crushed the necessary buffer between the abstract examination of a dead body and the pain and horror of that death."
I have not seen footage of Sandusky's molestation (there isn't any), and I can't even begin to imagine how the boy, now grown, must have felt and now feels, how his family has been devastated. I'm distant from the tragedy, no matter how hard I try to empathize. I can stop thinking about it. I can go on with my comparatively untroubled life.
But I know what Hayes means by the "buffer" required for understanding a gruesome event. The buffer is the mind's ability to separate itself from the disaster and discover meaning in the suffering, maybe even cautionary wisdom. Raw emotions--anger, fear--overpower this capacity, leaving us mute, confused.
When this happens, we can throw up our hands and walk away, admitting that some things are just beyond our grasp, and that's that. Or we can flee to the comforts of our favorite theories, fantasies of deciphering disturbing particulars with familiar generalities.
Or, we can--when the macabre engulfs cognition--remain for a while longer in the darkness, and ask: is there sense in the fact that we can't make sense? Perhaps it is when the reason shuts down that we are most connected to bare existence--something irreducibly complex, indifferent to human values, as vicious as it is vivifying. Feeling this nearness to what is, we surmise that what binds us together is precisely our inability to apprehend anything fully, and the fear and bewilderment that ensue.
This frailty hurts us, but also, in moments we call merciful, inspires us to solace one another. When we realize how terrible life is, we rise to the gentleness that assuages nightmares. The child crying the hardest calls forth our most graceful comforts.
Sometimes humility before what horrifies us, confounds us, shames us, can lead to understandings that are deeper than those of reason, and more essential, like how impossible true empathy is but also how necessary for our thriving.
In the end, though, these conclusions, however tentative, are just like most other theories: defenses against the unspeakable. Instead of offering yet another hypothesis, I should have said just this and been done with it: I have a nine-year-old child, and I love her more than anything right now, because I'm terrified that something awful could happen to her in this appalling world.
