Law & Society Blog

So recently my alma mater’s student paper, The Gazette, published their annual spoof issue. One satirical article, titled “Labia Majora Carnage”, included a mock-scene which involved the rape of a local feminist-activist by the chief of police. Many readers interpreted the passage to be trivializing rape, if not promoting it. It caught a lot of flak from students, alumni, and staff, and drew national media attention.

The editors wrote two follow-ups. The first dismissed the outrage with hoots and catcalls. When it became obvious that the condemnations would not subside (”What?! Rape isn’t teh funney??!!”), they wrote another follow-up which expressed something sort of like regret. They claimed that they were attempting to satirize feminist stereotypes, not feminists, and certainly not rape. Rushing to the defence of the Gazette were those who felt that the article was just a joke, and ought to be treated as such; and, failing that, those who try to fudge interpretations at the edge of plausibility (i.e., “that wasn’t rape”, or “they were obviously misunderstood”). Many have suggested that too much condemnation is overkill, and will strangle free speech and perhaps even ruin the career prospects of those involved.

However, the “trivialization” interpretation gained enough political momentum to earn strong words of condemnation from the University’s president, Paul Davenport, and from the London chief-of-police. They are now setting up review-boards, which (some worry) would PC-ify the paper.

I’ve read the thing a number of times. And for what it’s worth, I also condemn the article, despite the fact that I know (and like) many of the people who work at the Gazette. The article was, at best, poorly written; at worst, an attack peice against an activist and vocal critic of the Gazette, and — yes — a trivialization of rape.

One gets the sense that the satirists — some of them English majors — don’t “get” that the target of a satire needs to be clear in order for it to be an effective peice of writing. (For scorchingly effective satire, see the English spoof of journalism, Brasseye.) But the article wasn’t clearly attacking stereotypes: actually, quite the opposite. No matter how much context you inject into your reading of the article, it only comes off as a hit peice on specific people. And when professed intentions don’t match up with the content of some peice, you can only roll your eyes and give up wasting any more time trying to understand who meant what: it’s a mug’s game. (If I wanted to waste my time, I’d go and try to beat the underwater level of Nintendo’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I don’t need help in this department.)

As far as I’m concerned, the moral status of the article is obvious. It sucks. The writer sucks. The paper sucks. Suck, suck, suck. The only pressing question is, “What level of response is appropriate?”. The answer to the question, whatever it may be, is abstract enough that it might be able to apply to greater issues, and go beyond this particular situation — be it to Imus in the morning, or to contemporary American political discourse.

As it happens, I have come to certain conclusions. It seems to me that a reasonable person, once they have reflected upon certain issues, must arrive at the following:

It has only been seven years, but already I am sick of the twenty-first century.

Let me explain by reviewing the people involved, and try to apply Kohlberg’s developmental model of moral reasoning.

Western is known as a “party-school”, yet it also has a collegial sort of atmosphere. That’s sort of why I went there. Socially, I’m a block of ice, and it’s nice to be around nice people. If it were the kind of school where rules tied down any kind of dissent or free-thinking, I would have gone elsewhere. Advocates of political correctness, to the extent that they drown us in rules that are well-meaning but mostly inane, create a sense of fatalism and moral anxiety that turn off brains. Still, Lawrence Kohlberg’s account of moral reasoning would peg such persons at Stage Three. The stage three moralist is someone who follows the Golden Rule to the letter, whose overriding maxim is to be nice, to behave in a good way.

That having been said, it is also a university with a right-wing underculture — usually not close enough to the surface to be noticed. But one venue where this underculture has sprung up over the years, quite noticeably, was in the Gazette. The long line of editors-in-chief have been at the outermost edge of sanity, with as much moral sensibility as Pat Robertson or Trey Parker. Whenever a joke is challenged for being morally sociopathic, these people cry out “free speech”. Some of them try to defend a vulgarized moral deontology, claiming that the content of speech is (or ought to be) immune from any kind of moral condemnation. This lunatic fringe, on Kohlberg’s scale, would be stage two. The stage two moralist views morality in terms of warring tribes who are out to pursue their own ends. For them, any overriding notions of improving the wellbeing of persons, etc., is morally piffle.

Stage four is a system-level perspective. It is, perhaps, the closest thing to utilitarianism that you will find in Kohlberg’s theory. (As it happens, it is also the last stage of the theory that has any empirical bones to it.) But there is a dearth of stage four voices in the discussion. And when they do show up, they are given the John Kerry treatment: nuanced and measured argument is regarded as a flip-floppy bag of comprimises. To the usual suspects, the stage-four moralist is like a cat stuck in Schrodinger’s box: unpredictable, on-again, off-again.

This, I think, is unfortunate. For the question becomes, “How can a joke be condemned?”. From a system-level view, it is at least clear what the bad answers are.

The appeal to free speech is a irrelevant so long as you’re dealing with the relationship between people with people, and not talking about institutions. Independent moral voices condemn jokes all the time for crossing the line. And it’s expected. Hell, that’s what gives the jokes an edge in the first place: most humor is about failure, mistakes, errors. (Even regardless of the norm, even if you come from the “nothing is sacred” school of comedy — the kind that says, “hey, if I want to use rape/the Holocaust/incest/etc. as a punchline in my joke, then that’s okay” — well, that’s one thing. Another thing is actually making victims of rape/Holocaust/incest/etc. the target. One is morally ambiguous, and the other is clearly wrong. And it doesn’t take much effort on behalf of chuckleheads to admit it.)

I mean, there are surely levels of blameworthiness, where each level involves punishments that are more severe than the last. A person may be accountable on some levels and not on others. Restriction upon freedom of speech, at least as it is typically used and morally salient, deals with restrictions upon free agents by political institution(s). Those among us with a feeling for non-arbitrariness may widen the “protected speech” net to include consideration of restrictions by social and economic institutions. The political restriction of free speech (or lack of intervention in favor of free speech by an institution) seems to be more blameworthy than the restriction by social institutions: it demands severe consequences when that trust is violated. However, social institutions are still blameworthy to some degree — in this case, the Gazette. But crucially, you have to care about the difference between social and political institutions in order to be able to appreciate that something really can be condemned, and how we have the moral room to react, and to appreciate that there are limits to the amount of blame you can make before you become tiresome. (A political institution is that which is empowered by a certain set of people with a common trust that recognizes the institution’s right to coercion; a social institution is that which is empowered by trust alone.)

This is vital when trying to figure out what the upper limit of condemnation is supposed to be. Political condemnation goes to lengths that social condemnation doesn’t. The paper needs independence. It needs to be student-run. I don’t know whether or not review-boards will help that along, or just obscure the underlying point — it depends on how the suggestion is implemented. I suspect, though, that something like clear and sensible editorial judgment would make it moot. I hope that the demonstration that the editors have once again failed to keep the trust of the people who fund them — and pay them — is at least enough to give them pause. Or maybe next year the whole cycle will just repeat itself. Meh.

So, how much condemnation does this thing deserve? I’d like to see an apology. I’d also like to see the editors to gain a sense of reason, and be willing to think things through a bit more. That would suffice. Anything that moves beyond the fundamental issue, the failure of trust, seems to be excessive.

But so long as the discussion is bogged down by the usual suspects, the Chuckleheads versus the Fatalists, we’re not going to see anything, any genuine moral growth, as a culture, as a species, as an anything. This is my stage-two moment: these are the warring tribes I care about.

Anyway. Instead, I expect that, as per usual, nuance will be sacrificed and replaced with characatures, South Park impressions (lol, rabble, lolomg), censorship and review boards of the Gazette, and (perhaps worst of all), the vague cynicism of people like me who know that everything is going terribly wrong but usually don’t have the words to express why.

Only seven years. And by all indications, this is how it will be for the next 93.

So whatever. I’ll be playing Ninja Turtles if you need me.

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