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(Tenured Radical)

Saturday, April 08, 2006

The Individual Soul

In tomorrow’s New York Times, David Brooks suggests that in considering why the Duke lacrosse thing happened we “steer…back past the identity groups to the ghost in the machine, the individual soul.”

It’s a useful corrective to the all but universal “environmental, sociological explanation of events” there.


Several decades ago, American commentators would have used an entirely different vocabulary to grapple with what happened at Duke. Instead of the vocabulary of sociology, they would have used the language of morality and character.

[C]haracter ha[s] been corroded by shock jocks and raunch culture and [some of the lacrosse players have] entered a nihilistic moral universe where young men entertain each other with bravura displays of immoralism. A community so degraded, you might surmise, is not a long way from actual sexual assault.

You would then ask questions very different from the sociological ones: How have these young men slipped into depravity? Why have they not developed sufficient character to restrain their baser impulses?



Yet what UD finds particularly interesting about this explanatory approach is that many of the young men on the team went to extremely morally serious Catholic schools for boys. When Brooks laments the weakening of the belief that “each of us ha[s] a godlike and a demonic side, and that decent people perpetually strengthen[ed] the muscles of their virtuous side in order to restrain the deathless sinner within,” he overlooks the fact that it’s precisely within such a belief system that a number of the Blue Devils grew up and were educated.

We all share raunch culture; only a few of us spend twelve years of our lives in Benedictine-run schools. What happened?
Posted at: 4/08/2006 10:39:00 PM