Pointless contrarianism

Teresa Nielsen Hayden is impressed by the article Michael Bérubé wrote about why he gave up his Paterno Family Professorship in Literature at Pennsylvania State University. Joe Paterno is of course the football coach at Penn State who allegedly helped cover up the paedophile activities of another coach, Jerry Sandusky; obviously holding a professorship in the Paterno name, even if it’s the family’s endowment rather than the man, should lead to some soulsearching, as Bérubé has done.

But while I think he did the right thing in giving up this endowment, his explenation is muddled and comes over as apologetic, excuse making, perhaps more than he intended, by how he writes about his doubts and second thoughts about taking this step. I think the greatest “mistake” he makes in it is in comparing how nice the Paternos were to him and his family personally with the reality of Joe Paterno, for whatever reason, covering up Sandusky’s sexual crimes. I’ve known people with criminal records myself, career criminals even, who’ve spent more time in jail than outside it, who were perfectly nice and decent folk to me, because we were friends or family; but that doesn’t mean I should close my eyes for their crimes. The Paterno family’s actions after the Sandusky crimes and coverup became know have been reprehensible, as they have tried their best to keep the truth covered up, more concerned with keeping their own good names than the victims of Sandusky’s crimes, not wanting to take responsibility for what their father and husband did. It is hard and understandable that they would respond that way, but not a laudable thing to do. They should be called on it and their behaviour should’ve been reason enough alone to resign.

Had Bérubé stuck to explaining his personal struggle to reconcile the Paterno family as he knew them personally with their behaviour once the coverup became known I would have no real problems with this article, but unfortunately he moves on to more generalised apologetics for the rest of it. It’s the usual mix of arguing that the facts might not be quite as against Paterno as the news reporting and investigations have made out to be, that there is a hypocrisy at the heart of the scandal as other colleges have also behaved badly in the name of football (but to the extent of covering up child molestation?), that Paterno has done good things as well, that this has been an excuse for the Paterno haters to stoke the fires, that Penn State in general has been unfairly treated and that it’s all media hyped hysteria. (It’s also revealed at the end of the article that Bérubé traded in one chair for another, but that’s beside the point, though it makes the moral gesture that much easier, obviously.)

It all leaves you with a bad feeling if you’re not inclined to agree with Bérubé, as these are the sort of arguments that would be rejected out of hand in other situations. As any parent knows, “but all the other kids did it” is not an excuse and should never be used to minimise crimes like these, especially when the comparison is between covering up for a child molester or making things a bit too easy for athlete students to get a good grade. I therefore don’t quite understand why Teresa thinks this article was a good argument against (internet) pileons. Will people with their own agendas use a tragedy like this to attack those who are already their enemy? Perhaps, but that doesn’t excuse the perpetrators and should not be used as an argument to lessen their crimes.

I do know that Teresa and Patrick Nielsen Hayden both had bad experiences with internet pileons during the whole Racefail debacle, when they were insufficiently critical of certain people being caught in racist acts, caught in the same dilemma Bérubé found himself in. At the time I felt they were judged much too harshly, but I can also see the other side, as in the end for most people it is immaterial if the latest racist douche is your friend or not…

So back when the western media were finally noticing the Tunesian and subsequent Egyptian revolutions the angle they took on it to sell to their audiences was by stressing the role Twitter and Facebook played in them, even going so far as to call them “Twitter revolutions”. Unsurprisingly, people objected to this as the actual people building the revolution where reduced to bit players in a narrative that was once again all about us and our toys. You’d think somebody as bright as Clay Shirky would get that, but instead he reduces these complaints to an abstract point about ascribing agency to inanimate objects:

Despite their affirmation of the importance of social media during the uprisings, these authors (and many others) want to assure us that their analysis remains appropriately human-centered, that they are not making the terrible mistake of describing tools as if they had some sort of agency.

But here’s the funny thing—we describe our tools as having agency all the time. This isn’t a mistake, or an accident. It’s an essential part of our expressive repertoire around technology.

[…]

What puzzles me is why we should want to avoid those phrases in the first place. What is it about communications tools that seems to arouse more anxiety about our usual, agency-encapsulating shorthand than other kinds of technologies?

His examples are not saying what he wants them to, in fact have to be deliberately misread for Shirky to be able to have his argument. So why is he doing this? Why built an argument on a technically correct yet irrelevant objection anybody can tell has nothing to do with the issue at hand? Perhaps it’s just a question of a thesis going in search of an issue to apply it to?

This is an argumenting technique quite a few academics are found off, to seize on an abstract side issue rather than to engage directly an the argument. It can be done in both good and bad faith, it’s often seen on Crooked Timber and Shirky’s post is the platonic ideal of it…