"Everything in Moderation" Doesn't Prevent Extremism

“Everything in moderation” (or EIM, for short) is a hegemonic commonplace in 21st century American culture. That means, it is a belief that is so commonly accepted as to be nearly unquestionable. And it’s a serious problem for supporters of democracy in the 21st century.

The reasons for the phrase’s popularity are easy to see. We need salt and fat in our diets, for instance, but too much salt or fat is unhealthy. A little liquor can be a nice way to celebrate a holiday with friends, but too much can lead to bad behavior, addiction, and death. Solitude is restorative; isolation is destructive. Illustrative examples of things that are good in moderation but bad in excess are countless, but I’ll stop here in a nod to moderation. “Everything in moderation” is so obviously a virtue that it hardly bears a second thought.

But one major problem with EIM being a hegemonic commonplace—that is, a belief we tend to take as a given—is that it is not always applicable. “Everything in moderation” can start to fall apart, for example, when we apply it to political philosophies. “We need a little totalitarian dictatorship, but you know, in moderation.” I’d wager that most people who live in democratic societies would find such a comment curious (I’d hope enraging, but I’d bet actual money on “curious”).

For that matter, “Democracy in moderation” is not a phrase I’d seriously expect to encounter in the wild, even on the internet where anything ridiculous can be found if one looks hard enough. I’m not talking about moderate democracy, I’m talking about democracy in moderation.

The reasons people don’t talk about “democracy in moderation” are pretty straightforward. We can talk about pragmatic limits on democracy—the need for representatives, for example, or the maintenance of non-public, and therefore non-democratic, decision making—but the idea that we just need a little democracy, not too much, just a smidge, is nonsensical. How do you have just a little democracy? “Democracy in moderation” begs the question of what other systems we’re going to also adopt in moderation. Some democracy in the spring, a light communism in the summer, maybe a nice monarchy in the fall, and a hearty totalitarian dictatorship in the winter, when it’s most likely to thrive?

My point here is that “everything in moderation,” reasonable though it may initially seem, is often not very good advice for making decisions. Sometimes, frankly, it just doesn’t belong in the conversation. But, because it is a hegemonic commonplace, like any hegemonic commonplace, the taken-for-grantedness of “everything in moderation” can show up in places it doesn’t belong, and it can short-circuit thinking even in areas where it doesn’t make very good sense. As a result, EIM can appear to be virtuous even when it’s actually really dangerous. Such is the case of politics and media in the current moment in America (and really, for at least the last decades, but probably longer).

In late December, as just one example, Chuck Todd gave an interview to Rolling Stone to promote an upcoming MSNBC special about political misinformation and disinformation, which he is suddenly all worried about. Todd is the Political Director for NBC News and the current moderator of NBC’s wildly popular political show, Meet the Press. Despite being one of the most influential (and presumably most knowledgeable) political commentators in the country, Todd admitted that he was “just so absurdly naive in hindsight” about American politicians’ willingness to spread conspiracy theories and misinformation to accomplish their political goals. Todd was specifically talking about Republicans since Trump’s election in 2016, but the party affiliation is actually beside the point here.

As Jay Rosen helpfully points out at PressThink, a key premise of Meet the Press is that there is a basic symmetry between the two major political parties. Todd is just now realizing that symmetry doesn’t exist anymore, if it ever did. Rosen is not the only person to observe this premise, nor is it the first time he’s found good reason to comment on it. Nevertheless, the assumption of symmetry that Rosen notices really is grounded in the “everything in moderation” commonplace. EIM is the backbone of “both-sides” political press. If you have a Democrat on, it only makes sense to have a Republican for balance. Give everyone a voice and the plurality will naturally moderate the conversation.

As Todd (finally) figured out more than 2000 years into the common era, and probably at least 3000 years too late, the assumption that moderation will magically materialize if you include a little bit of “everything” is plainly not true. Never has been. There is no state of equilibrium to which political discussion naturally resolves. Apparently no one bothered to tell him, and he wasn’t smart or curious enough to figure it out on his own until, like, yesterday.

I’m picking on Todd here, but he is not uniquely blinkered. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN, three supposedly liberal news organizations, are constantly playing the both-sides game, often to what seem like painfully ridiculous ends.

(The supposition that there are two sides is another major problem. In short, there aren’t two sides to every issue—there are an endless number of sides, but they’re collapsed into two because it’s more marketable. But that’s another problem for another day, or hey, read this post, which includes a fine explanation of the problem.)

But it’s not ridiculous if your guiding belief is “everything in moderation.” When EIM is your basis for decision making, even if it’s unconscious, then a little racist science—as long as it’s just a little—isn’t so bad (for an example, you can check out Bret Stephens’s recent NYT op-ed about the superiority of Ashkenazi Jews, but I’m not linking to it). Or short-circuiting discussions about whether or not a Supreme Court justice nominee sexually assaulted a woman (or several women) and lied about it is fair game—after all everything in moderation. So maybe just a little good-hearted reflection on his carpooling prowess. Don’t get carried away though! Anti-deliberative, rape-obscuring deflection should be done in moderation!

CNN, for its part, has repeatedly hosted and/or hired people pushing racist conspiracy theories (Lou Dobbs famously engaged in birtherism for months before he was taken off-air), people advocating discrimination and violence against LGBT people (at least until 2013, CNN regularly hosted guests from the Family Research Council, an organization deemed a hate-group by the SPLC), and people accused of physically assaulting members of the press (dude, they hired Corey Lewandowski). Because “everything in moderation”—taken to a logical extreme really can mean “EVERYTHING.” Not too much, of course. Just a little.

For CNN, the NYT, and WaPo, and frankly for the vast majority of politics and news organizations, EIM short-circuits their ability to think carefully about what they’re actually doing to public discourse. As a result, someone like Chuck Todd can sincerely claim in 2019 that he didn’t notice that some people weren’t playing by the moderate rules. It’s like they were taking advantage or something.

Put another way, even when “everything in moderation” starts to break down as an value for some people, it can remain an unquestioned value for others because it’s hegemonic. It’s just taken for granted. In those asymmetrical circumstances, people who are willing to act immoderately can wreak profound changes on the culture almost without challenge.

 In and of themselves, profound cultural changes are not necessarily bad. But when powerful people like Chuck Todd, CNN executives, and decision makers at the NYT and WaPo ignore those changes and carry along as if everything is the same as it always was, it’s a recipe for bad things. Because they’ve been including “fascism in moderation” and “Nazism in moderation” and “white supremacy in moderation” in their “moderate” coverage for decades without stopping for two minutes think if that’s good standard to work by. And they’ve blithely ignored everyone yelling at them to pull their heads out of their moderation.

Of course, the appropriate reaction to “everything in moderation” is not “everything to the extreme.” The appropriate next step, which Todd is hopefully sincerely beginning to take, is to begin to notice how EIM and false balance shape our thinking and how they allow coverage, commentary, and conversation to progress in ways that we don’t want them to. And when you have the chance, to act and advocate differently.

Not everyone is Chuck Todd, however, and not everyone has the opportunity to reshape the political landscape. But “everything in moderation” also has serious, and potentially damaging effects on how voters look at the candidates. In the moment, this is Democratic voters. There is a pretty common assumption—in the political press and also among individual voters—that there is a sort of moderate equilibrium on the table in the 2020 election. But moderation is a chimera. It’s a moving target in politics and always has been. Or rather, moderation as a value can appear to stay constant even when the grounds for moderation have moved radically to one extreme or another, but it ain't.

Aiming at moderation does not absolve us of the responsibility of looking carefully at our candidates, at their records, at their policies and actions. It is not a substitute for making careful, thoughtful decisions. Moderation will not save our politics any more than it’s saved Chuck “Absurdly Naive in Hindsight” Todd from looking like a novice.

‘Remediation’ in the United States: A Brief History

‘Remediation’ in the United States: A Brief History
San José State University Academic Retreat
February 11, 2016


My area of research is the history of writing instruction in American higher education. More specifically, I study the functions that writing instruction plays in institutions of higher education. The organizers of today's event invited me to talk today about the history of remediation in America, because, as it happens, writing instruction—often combined with reading instruction—is the commonest form of remedial education in American high education, and it has been for nearly two centuries.

Before I get into the history, I want to set out some basic parameters. First, remediation is a relatively specific term that refers to programs designed for quote/unquote “underprepared students.” The assumption, and often the accompanying assertion, is that remedial students did not get some key aspect of the education they were supposed to bring to college. Remediation, therefore, is commonly cast as the repetition of some fundamental training that students should already have mastered.

Second, in keeping with this definition, remedial education nearly always refers to “Basic Skills” —usually reading, writing, math, and/or study skills. It is worth noting that designating reading, writing, math, and studying as “basic skills” reinforces a pervasive belief that they are sub-collegiate. As I noted before, remediation refers to relearning fundamental skills, and those fundaments—reading, writing, math, and studying—are therefore designated as sub-collegiate.

The definition and domains I’ve sketched here are well understood and widely used, and they feed a long-standing belief that remediation is transitory—that we are in a period of uniquely underprepared students, and that we might one day reform education to the point where remediation is not necessary. However, what my historical work suggests is something like the opposite. In fact, what I plan to argue today is that remediation and American universities are, and have always been, mutually dependent.

There is no better place to start such a history than at the beginning. Harvard College was the first institution of higher education founded in what is now the United States. It was established by the Massachusetts legislature in 1636 as a sort of finishing school for future clergymen. Harvard’s earliest curriculum was a thoroughly classical one, conducted primarily in the so-called “learned languages.” As such, the entrance requirements were simply that students could read and speak Latin and Greek. Despite its reputation as a [QUOTE] “haven for the world’s most ambitious scholars,” matriculating students were not always fully prepared. Consequently, beginning in 1636, Harvard offered remedial Latin classes.

Harvard’s remedial Latin class offers us some useful points of consideration. For one, it suggests the omnipresent tension in remedial education between access on the one hand and standards on the other. Harvard offered remedial Latin because the school needed matriculants in order to stay solvent. There was not a ready supply of college bound youth in the American colonies, and Harvard’s survival literally depended on their ability to attract students who were geographically close enough to attend and pay tuition. Harvard educators made the college accessible to whomever they could and provided whatever education students needed.

Harvard’s Latin course also points to the aspirational nature of college standards. Harvard faculty and administrators wanted students to be fluent in Latin prior to entering college, but that was an unrealistic expectation under the circumstances. Hence the need for remedial Latin. In other words, Harvard’s early standards were actually goals, not standards. For the next two centuries or so, Harvard was exemplary where remediation was concerned. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, as new colleges were founded throughout the colonies and states, faculty and administrators went to great lengths to attract enough students to stay in business. Despite explicit “standards” that required students to be prepared before entering, underprepared students seemed to proliferate. Consequently, remediation was a ubiquitous survival mechanism.

In the early 1800s, as colleges strengthened, remediation took on a new cast in American higher education. Specifically, it became a more overtly political tool. In 1828, for example, a faculty committee at Yale published a report designed to defend the classical curriculum against the encroachment of modern, elective curricula. Among the arguments for maintaining the classical curriculum was that Yale (and other colleges) could provide appropriate remediation in the classical subjects (which, by that point included, quote “VULGAR ARITHMETIC”), but faculty would be less capable of serving underprepared students if the fields were expanded too greatly.

One important aspect of this argument is that it conjures remediation in support of a distinctly political cause—defending the classical curriculum—by attempting to balance access for students with quote “deficient preparation” against the standards of the college, which the authors claimed were rising every year. Perhaps more importantly, however, is the assertion of rising standards. In fact, Yale’s standards had risen considerably in the century and a quarter between when it was opened and when the Yale report was produced. The defense of the classical curriculum belies the fact that the curriculum had changed a great deal over the years. What had been courses for graduating seniors in 1701 had gradually moved toward the first year or even down into the secondary schools by the early 19th century (Broome 35-37). Even more plainly, when the Yale report was published, what counted as “deficient preparation” was very different than it had been just decades earlier. This was the case at virtually every institution of higher education.

The importance of Yale’s ever-rising standards is important in a history of remediation because it indicates that standards are moving targets. Remember I noted earlier that standards are aspirational. Once they’re achieved to any meaningful degree, standards are reimagined. This process of raising standards, which is observable throughout the history of American education, undermines one of the important claims made by the Yale authors, which is that remediation is temporary. As the argument went, if the classical curriculum was maintained, the lower schools would eventually get up to speed, and students eventually wouldn’t need remedial education. But the persistently rising standards suggests that remediation is absolutely necessary, and in fact, the need for remediation is indispensible for balancing the goals of access and standards because institutions can claim to be holding standards high enough that they’re rigorous enough to need remedial education as a bridge to underprepared students.

Through the course of the 19th century, the argument that remediation was transitory took on new dimensions, usually in keeping with evolving political goals. In 1848, the University of Wisconsin opened, and the next year, despite their dismay at having to do so, they opened a preparatory department to bridge the gap between secondary and post-secondary. The department lasted 31 years, and it was replaced with remedial classes, rather than a department, soon after. The University of Wisconsin was hardly unique in this regard.

In the 1870s and 1880s, Harvard sought attract public high school students by offering an elective curriculum. Although the goal was to boost enrollments, Harvard’s efforts were predicated on arguments bemoaning the woeful underpreparation of students. When the elective curriculum was fully in place, several courses were required in the first year, all but one of which Harvard’s president called [QUOTE] “obviously matters which properly belong to the secondary schools” [END QUOTE]. In other words, they were remedial. The notion was that they would eventually be returned to secondary schools, once the high schools got up to speed. One of the remedial courses Harvard introduced at that point was the original first-year composition course, English A, which became a model for first-year composition nationally. First-year composition has been attacked routinely and viciously over the years as belonging in high schools, and yet, it has enrolled more students than any other course in the past century.

To read through the history of remediation is to discover that on the one hand, administrators, faculty, trustees, legislators, and commentators have been complaining about the need for remedial education for centuries. But the goal, as I’ve been arguing, is tied to the moving target of standards and the unfortunate albatross of access. The results of this situation—in which standards move, access must be maintained, and remediation persists—are complicated. Burgeoning numbers of students with diverse cultural and educational backgrounds have attended colleges and universities over the past two centuries because of access to remedial education. According to recent research, underprepared students are often very well served by remediation, and many go on to graduate in similar timeframes as their [QUOTE/UNQUOTE] college-level counterparts.

At the same time, the myth that we will rid ourselves of remediation has persisted. Despite the demonstrable shifts in what constitutes “college-level” reading, writing, math, and study skills, producing well-wrought laments about the dire state of education and the regrettable need for remedial work is practically a cottage industry. Often these complaints have described courses or students using highly derogatory labels including “bonehead courses,” “the awkward squad,” and “the vandal horde.” Likewise, because of the belief that they are “sub-collegiate” basic skills courses, remedial courses have often been outsourced, degraded, defunded, and even outlawed.

Even when schools attempted to rid themselves of remediation, however, it nearly always creeps back in. In 1960, the California Master Plan for Higher Education relegated remedial instruction to California’s Community Colleges. Soon thereafter, the California Legislature cut funding to the CSU that had been earmarked for writing clinics that served underprepared students. Less than a decade later, in 1974, the CSU issued a report indicating the need for remedial courses, and two years after that the CSUs introduced the English Placement Test and remedial courses. The UCs, as well, have long found ways to accommodate underprepared students even when they were pretending not to accept them.

Rather than continuing to enumerate examples, I want to finish by returning again to Harvard. From what I can ascertain, Harvard has offered some form of remedial work in almost every year of its existence, even when it wasn’t officially requiring remedial courses. In 1914, after about 20 years of requiring remedial students to take “special instruction,” Harvard finally reintroduced an official remedial writing course. The course shifted and changed over the years, and in the 1970s, they renamed it “Expos 10: Introduction to Expository Writing.” It remains on the books to this day. What is so striking about this remedial class is that Harvard is so unlike most other post-secondary institutions in America. In 2015, they accepted fewer than 6% of their applicants—less than 2000 of the more than 37,000 people who applied. These are some of the most accomplished applicants in the world—maybe the history of the world. And Harvard still needs to offer remedial writing courses for some of them.

It’s worth asking why, and the simple answer is that students need reading, writing, math, and study skills instruction. Notwithstanding the political value of remediation in arguments about post-secondary education, the history of remediation helps us to recognize that basic skills are not basic in the sense of being prior to more complex instruction—they are basic in the sense of being fundamental to all instruction. Remediation is not going away any time soon, and perhaps counter intuitively, the final expulsion of remediation would be a bad sign for higher education because it would signal the end of aspirational standards. Remedial education allows universities to serve student needs and pursue higher standards, and I think we would do well to recognize it.

Conservatives: Hanging Tough?

In the last few years, at least in the 8 years between 2000 and 2008, Americans got a good look at many forms of conservatism. One fundamental tenet of modern conservatism, especially if you recognize the views of people like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and Joe the Plumber as representative of modern conservatism, is that conservatives are tough. They're tough on crime, tough on terrorism, tough on foreign policy. They support rugged individualism, hard work, and making tough choices. They supported the war in Iraq, war in Afghanistan, and the war on terror. They support a strong military, tough border policies, and guns for everyone. Conservatives  would have you believe that they are the only people standing between Americans and those that would massacre them.

In contrast, liberals are supposedly soft, weak-willed naifs. If Republicans are the party of strong national security, Democrats are the party of cut-and-run and surrender. According to conservatives, liberals only care about making everyone feel good with politically correct language, affirmative action policies, and massive government spending. As Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reilly and Beck are all too happy to announce, liberalism (also called "socialism," "fascism," and "communism" by voices of the conservative movement) is going to result in America's fall from grace.

If all you listened to was the way the two sides talked about themselves, it would be easy to fall into the trap of believing that conservatives are hardened, realistic defenders of American values and liberals are gentle, vulnerable, sentimental weenies.

And yet, conservatism is, at least in its current incarnation, nothing less than the fear of nearly everything. American conservatives' entire platform is based on the fear of something: terrorist attacks, government bankruptcy, higher taxes, divine retribution, the weakening of traditional marriages, feminists, the siege of illegal immigrants, Muslim infiltration, watering down of the 2nd Amendment, and on and on and on. I'm not saying they're wrong to be worried about some of these things, but for tough guys, they spend a lot of time cowering in fear of every shadow on the wall and breath of wind in the trees. On the other hand, those sad-sack, weakling libruls are getting pepper sprayed for protesting Wall Street abuse and getting their asses kicked in support of free speech.

Just as I'm not saying all conservative fears are misguided, I'm not saying all liberal demonstrations are justified. I'm simply pointing out that from where I'm standing, the "tough guys" look like a bunch of fraidy cats, and the supposed fraidy cats are standing tough for what they believe.

So I'm left wondering, how did conservatives get the reputation for toughness, again?

What Really Scares Me About Evil, Deranged Lunatics

In the last 36 hours or so, Americans have been collectively weighing the shooting of 71 people in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. There are already volumes of commentary on the pertinent issues, a healthy dose of which I’ve wallowed in since I saw the first headline yesterday morning. Although there are many troubling aspects of this event, I’ve been struck by the insistence of most people to brand the shooter “evil” (Mitt Romney and Barack Obama), “deranged” (Anderson Cooper), and “a lunatic” (EJ Dionne). One thing people across political, religious, and news network lines agree on is that the man was crazy. I understand, and even agree, that these characterizations of the shooter may be true, but I’m troubled by what they seem to me to imply about where responsibility lies.

Certainly, the lion’s share of responsibility must be laid at the shooter’s door—hell, he shot 71 unsuspecting people. It’s both inconceivable and horrific, and there’s no excusing his actions.

What concerns me, however, is that the characterizations of the shooter as evil, crazy, deranged, disturbed, unbalanced, etc. leave ALL responsibility on his doorstep. He was solely, individually, and unstoppably responsible for his actions. You can’t stop evil, after all, you simply must resist it where possible and heal when evil manifests. I heard one commentator, David Brooks, make this point on the radio yesterday—he essentially said, you’ll never be able to prevent a psycho from wounding innocent people if they’re determined to do so. He implied, "So why even try?" The commonplace acceptance of the shooter’s “insanity” reflects our real understanding of what makes a person randomly open fire on a crowd of strangers, but it also indicates that we believe his craziness made us helpless to stop him. We have no responsibility because you can't prevent evil, so why even try?

 If we’re talking about stopping him once he made the decision to arm himself and rampage, I suppose I agree. But to a significant degree, I think that dismissing this shooter (and all the others, at least since Charles Whitman shot up UT Austin in 1966) as “crazy” is a cop out that allows the rest of us—the "normal" people—to excuse ourselves from thinking or worrying about our own involvement in this kind of violence. Calling the shooter "crazy" and "evil" excuses his actions by pretending they couldn’t have been prevented with better mental health care in America, stronger gun control laws, less general romance attached to violence, more social support for students, and on and on. If the perpetrator was "evil," we don't have to bother talking about these things—not really, not for any longer than it takes for the news cycle to pick up something else worth repeating over and over again. Because again, there's nothing we can do.

I’m not, necessarily, advocating better mental health care, gun control, etc., though it shouldn’t be hard to see where I stand on these issues. What I am advocating is a realization that Americans' naïve idealization of individualism, personal responsibility, and social insularity are intimately involved in this shooter’s actions. We are, at least partly, responsible for his actions because we are, at least partly, responsible for the conditions that allowed him to act. The political, religious, and cultural decisions we make collectively create the conditions for these kinds of horrific mass shootings. This should be clear in the shooter's actions—he didn't set out to hurt an individual; he set out to hurt society, presumably because he felt that society hurt him. There's no other reason to attack a theater full of strangers.

While a good deal of time is being and will be spent on determining who's to "blame" for the shooting in Colorado, I submit that we all are in some way because of decisions we make collectively. When we vote to defund mental health institutions in order to save ourselves the tax burden, as was done in California in the 1980s and in several places since, we collectively accept the responsibility for turning people with mental health challenges out of hospitals and into the streets, prisons, and our neighborhoods. When we devise and accept movie ratings that punish moviemakers with strict ratings for sexual content but don’t punish moviemakers with equally strict ratings for violent content, we accept that we will be continually exposed to depictions of graphic violence, as will our children. When we advocate education systems that equate “rigor” to over-working and under-supporting students—where students earn their stripes by surviving the gauntlet—we accept that students' mental and physical health will be tested, and sometimes broken, in the service of “weeding out the weak.” (Incidentally, this happens at every level of the education system, not just at the highest levels of graduate education.) When we claim, as Texas Representative Louis Gohmert and others have, that mass shootings are some sort of divine retribution, we reaffirm the attitude that only "good" people who think like us and believe what we believe deserve our support and care. We also reaffirm the romanticized American attitude that tells people they’re on their own because no one cares about anyone else unless they’re legally or economically obligated to be.

Defining the "evil" people in the world lets us imagine they're not us, and we therefore have no responsibility to them or for them. When we spend our time defining who the good people are, who the bad people are, and who the people are that just aren’t worth our time and money, we accept that some people will be left to struggle and suffer on their own. We accept that some of them will be estranged, and we ultimately accept that some of them will become violent against "us" because we've cast them aside. Perhaps that’s inevitable in a world shared by 7 billion people, but it’s something I think we should do better to try to prevent because it ultimately ends up hurting us all.

To reiterate, the political, religious, and cultural choices that we make collectively create the conditions for the evil, deranged, lunatic actions of people like the shooter in Colorado. If we genuinely want to stop them, we need to collectively decide that “every man for himself” is not the best way to live together. But such decisions take serious dialogue, and they take the realization that “evil” isn’t something that exists beyond the responsibility of “normal people.” Maybe if we’d collectively take more responsibility, instead of writing these kinds of horrific acts off as “crazy,” we’d be better able to have conversations that reach beyond what's good for everybody individually. We'd be able to talk about what we can and should do for ourselves as a collective—a group of people who live together and need to be responsible to and for everyone else, not just the people who agree with us. Or to put it another way, instead of waiting for an evil, deranged lunatic to shoot up a movie theater, college campus, or summer camp to bring us all closer together, maybe we try and get our collective goals together before tragedy happens. Maybe, if we take a little more responsibility for one another, we even end up preventing it.

"Where Have You Gone, Joe Paterno?"

In the week or so since Jerry Sandusky was arrested for violations that don't need rehearsing here, Penn State officials have been under the microscope. In particular, Joe Paterno, the revered coach of Penn State's football team and apparent icon of moral righteousness, has been castigated for his inaction after learning in 2002 that an assistant coach witnessed Sandusky raping a 10-year-old boy in the Penn State locker room showers. Paterno claims that he “referred the matter to university administrators,” but he didn't call the police, he didn't follow up with the people to whom he reported the matter, and he seems to have put the whole sordid situation out of his mind. This week, he paid for his inaction by being unceremoniously relieved of his position after 46 years as head coach.

A common refrain among commentators in the past week has been, "How could they let this happen?" The answer that seems to be emerging, especially in light of what looks like widespread covering up of Sandusky's crimes, is that Penn State officials and others were determined to protect the power and prestige of the school and its football program at the cost of failing to protect Sandusky's victims. In a number of commentaries, Paterno is painted as a power-monger, a back-room politician, an arrogant egotist, interested only in keeping his iron-grip on the football program. It is suggested that he knew Sandusky was raping children and simply cared more about his program than he did about children. Why else, asks ESPN's Gene Wojciechowski, "didn't Paterno contact the police when first informed in 2002 by then-graduate assistant Mike McQueary of an alleged locker room incident involving Sandusky and a young boy?"

Wojciechowski's question invites a more thoughtful answer than much of the torch-and-pitchfork analysis of the past week has allowed. I want to state unequivocally here that I have no intention of excusing Paterno's behavior or inaction. He owed everyone, especially the victims, better. And I'm not interested in arguing that his firing was wrong--honestly, I have no skin in that game. But, I have been really rather disturbed by the reaction I’ve witnessed because of the anger directed at Paterno. Not that he’s without blame, but I’ve heard far more anger directed at Paterno than I have at Sandusky. Sandusky, it seems, is just some pathetic pervert, while Paterno is the real villain.

I want to grant Paterno a modicum of humanity. However arrogant and egotistical Paterno may be, and whatever power he exercised at Penn State, (Wojciechowski says "often vast and overpowering") I imagine that Paterno must also have experienced an awful lot of fear when he learned of Sandusky's violations. Nothing that I’ve read has been willing to grant Paterno that fear in any kind of real way, and I think it’s worth considering.

The fear that I'm talking about may well include the fear of damage to the football program. After all, Paterno was Penn State football. Penn State football was his identity, and as any rhetorician worth their salt can tell you, there is an incredible, often irrational, kind of fear that accompanies any threat to a person's identity. That's why people often hold tight to ideological commitments even after they've been logically and empirically disproved. But even beyond the fear of damaging the football program, Paterno had an awful lot to be fearful of. For one, I'm sure he feared losing Sandusky's friendship. Paterno had known Sandusky for at least 39 years by 2002. They'd worked together as coaches for more than 30. It may sound stupid to fear losing a child rapist's friendship, and rationally it is. But when you've known someone, especially someone you consider a close friend, for decades, it's hard to turn on that person, even in the face of horrible, disgusting acts. You don't want to see your friends humiliated and punished, even when you know they deserve to be.

The loss of Sandusky's friendship is just the tip of the iceberg. If Paterno thought consciously about things he feared, he probably thought about losing his own job. By 2002, they'd coached for 33 years together. Certainly questions that have come up this week would have come up then. Among them, "How could Paterno not know Sandusky was a predator after working with the man for 33 years?" After all, how can you be intimately involved in everything having to do with Penn State football and not know that your assistant coach and heir apparent is a pederast? If Paterno was in the considering mood, he would have considered the possibility that he'd face serious scrutiny from university officials and the public that might have cost him his job.

Paterno might also have feared misrepresenting, and thereby ruining, Sandusky. After all, allegations of sexual misconduct can ruin a person's life, even if that person is innocent (The McCuan-Kniffen case from the 1980s is one of the more famous and sensational examples). I imagine for someone in Paterno's position, there is always the fear, probably rarely acknowledged aloud, that a disgruntled student or colleague will level false accusations about sexual misconduct as a way to get even for some perceived slight. That fear, I might add, is fairly common among men who hold positions of power, even when that power is relatively minimal. It may very well be irrational, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. And I'm sure it crossed Paterno's mind that his actions could contribute to just such a situation.

What seems most likely to me, however, is that Paterno experienced a deep and abiding fear that was both indeterminate and inchoate. The kind of fear that small children feel when they're lying in bed at night. Something unnamed, but very-deeply felt. Except unlike the fear of a bogey monster, the fear I imagine Paterno felt was that everything he knew about his life and believed about himself would be slowly (or quickly) unraveled.

None of these fears justifies doing nothing. But the strain of moral damnation in newspaper articles and blog posts that elicited Paterno's removal suggests that he was malicious and uncaring, driven only by power and prestige. I don't doubt that there was an element of unacceptable self-preservation involved in his decision to “refer the matter to university administrators,” but we would have to accept that he's a monster on par with, even perhaps worse than, Sandusky to accept the characterization of Paterno as full-aware and still completely callous. The fact that he reported it up the chain of command weakens this reading, even if it doesn’t completely undercut it.

If you're still with me, you might be worried that I want here to let Old JoePa off the hook because he looked fear in the face and took some action. He may not have done enough; but he didn't exactly do nothing. I don't want to let him off the hook. But I do want to consider that his fear is indicative of a systematic failure as much as it is a personal one. To put it a different way, whether or not Paterno actually experienced the fears I introduced above, it's not hard to imagine that he did. Fear is indicative of the culture we live in, particularly where there are entrenched systems of power. Indiscretions (or crimes) are routinely covered up for financial and political gain. The examples are too copious to begin naming. Confronting those systems, most of which sustain the lives we live, the jobs we have, and the communities of which we're a part, is to risk being exiled by family, friends, and employers.

It's hard enough when the accuser is also a victim because of how injury is heaped on injury. To take a prominent example, in a recent “news” story about one of Herman Cain's accusers, the "journalist" speculated about the fact that this woman had filed sexual harassment charges at another job she'd held. The unstated verdict: gold digger. Suddenly, she's under as much scrutiny as Cain. This is not an isolated example. Bill O'Reilly famously noted that abductee, Shawn Hornbeck, found things to like about his imprisonment by Michael Devlin. When Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas of harassment, she was all but accused of being a whore. And, rape victims are routinely accused of "asking for it" by the authorities to whom they report, especially when the alleged rapist is rich, famous, or both. It is no surprise that many victims of one kind of abuse or another choose never to report it. But victims who do report can at least draw from their personal experience to help steel them in the arduous pursuit of justice.

For whistle blowers who aren't victims, like Paterno, the choice is much different. They generally do not have to live with the pain of having been victimized. As a result, their choice is whether to keep quiet or to subject oneself to the kind of pressures that accusers seem inevitably to face. Take for example, Thomas Tamm. He was a Department of Justice lawyer who reported NSA wiretapping during the Bush Administration. For his troubles, Tamm was subjected to a six-year FBI investigation, which continued even after it was widely acknowledged that the program was illegal. During that period, he spent tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees, lost his job at the Department of Justice, and faced imprisonment at the hands of the government.

For people like Paterno and Tamm, the moral decision is clear. You report the crimes because it is the right thing to do. But faced with the available options, it's not hard to imagine that saving the football program is only a small part of the calculation involved in making such a decision. Paterno's silence, while shameful and immoral, is not entirely incomprehensible. His decision to keep his report in-house seems like an attempt to balance the two options available to him. He followed protocol and contented himself that he'd done the right thing and saved himself in the process. It turns out he was wrong on all counts.

All this points to an incredibly complicated situation that raises many more questions than it answers: How should we hold people accountable for turning in possible criminals? How do we begin to reconcile our moral duties with the fears of complete undoing? What does it mean to fulfill ones responsibilities when the people to whom you report are at liberty to forgo their own? In a culture that values everything (and I mean everything) as a potential asset, how do we protect children, and other people, from being coveted as things to “have”? How do we begin to unravel the unacceptable relationship between economic success and silence in the face of sickening crimes? There aren't easy answers to these questions, but they need to be asked, along with many other complicated ones. The real danger is in not asking these questions to begin with and being content with the punishments that have been, and will be, meted out.

Which brings me back to Paterno's ouster. I suppose what I find most disturbing about Paterno’s dismissal is the level of contentedness it seems to grant people. Paterno's dismissal (coupled with Sandusky's arrest) allows people to go back to believing that, now that the cancer has been excised from Happy Valley, things can return to normal. The evil has been purified from the system, the monster has been chased out of town. Except it hasn't. Sandusky's actions aren't the result of football; the cover-up isn't a failing that can be localized to central Pennsylvania; and JoePa's forced retirement doesn't solve a thing other than to soothe the seething mobs (with the exception of the rioters who turned out to support Paterno by destroying their beloved campus--they were apparently not soothed). Paterno is gone, Sandusky will most certainly end up in jail, but the system will roll on until the next shocking abuse of the system and the revelation of its cover-up demands that more heads roll (Even as I type this, I am reading an article about the Catholic Church’s lead investigator into child sex scandals being arrested for possessing troves of child pornography images). The Penn State tragedy isn't just that kids were harmed and the violator was protected; it's also that what happened in Penn State is part of our culture in a way that the tarring-and-feathering of all involved can't touch, much less solve.