On Joe Paterno’s Passing

When I read about Joe Paterno’s passing this weekend — on two separate occasions, strangely — I found it impossible to separate the coaching legend of so many decades from the sexual abuse scandal of recent memory. For good or ill, one event or choice can fundamentally alter public perception of a person’s life and legacy.

Indeed, this is a central element of the book project on classical heroism that I just finished. The image of ourselves that we want to present to the world isn’t necessarily the one that will actually be presented or accepted, especially if there is some sort of anomalous behavior that doesn’t fit with that image. At bottom, there are only so many decisions we can make in a short lifetime, which is why each decision we make matters a great deal.

Now, it’s almost certainly the case that few people will be able to line up every single decision and say, “Everything you see here tells one complete, clear, and consistent story about me.” But it’s so important to think critically about what we do and say because of the basic fact of our existence. As Shakespeare (5.5.27-29) pointed out, “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage / And then is heard no more.” Macbeth, into whose mouth Shakespeare puts these words, is nearing his own death and is correct that the most basic fact about human beings is that their lives are brief.

But he is wrong about the very next line that he utters, for life is not necessarily “a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing” (5.5.29-31). Macbeth might be somewhat consoled by this conclusion; he has done terrible things to others in his pursuit of power so that his life has turned out to be one that has been lived badly. But each life, however brief, can have great significance if lived well. As Janusz Korczak wrote, “The lives of great men are like legends – difficult but beautiful.”

That the best lives are filled with hardships whose navigation or endurance contributes substantially to their virtue is an idea that runs throughout the stories handed down to us from the Greeks. This is why we continue to find these stories so compelling. And it’s also the reason why we still find the lives of contemporary moral heroes to be so compelling: These are people who assign more weight to living a good life than they do to living a long life and who, as a result, end up risking more than most other people.

In no small part, they do this because they understand the stakes.

If we cling to the false hope that we might somehow stretch out our lives, we fail to recognize the finitude of our choices and thus we fail to imbue each decision or action with the importance that it rightly ought to have. When human beings face the fact of their mortality, when they give up all hope for continued existence, then they are able to think most clearly about the sort of life they want to have lived. It is only in doing so that morally heroic action becomes a possibility.

What is Moral Heroism?

In thinking about the abuse scandal at Penn State, I think we can make a pretty straightforward argument that a great many people were morally obligated to act and failed to do so. Whether or not Joe Paterno or Mike McQueary fulfilled their legal obligation by reporting what they knew to their superiors at the university, they failed to act when they might have stopped on-going crimes against defenseless children. This is a moral failure.

Moral heroes, by contrast, are those who actively choose the way their lives will unfold and act on behalf of others because they both learned altruistic behavior from a respected model and, rather than accepting the privileged status of a non-victim, can empathize with those who are suffering.

Over the past few years, I’ve written a lot about moral heroism and how it differs from others sorts of heroic behavior. In one of the first papers I’ve published from this on-going project, I consider one case of heroic behavior from amongst the many that might be found from the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Paul Rusesabagina’s heroic struggle to save lives has been told a number of times (cf. Gourevitch 1998 and Rusesabagina 2006) and is also the subject of the acclaimed film Hotel Rwanda. Rather than rehearse the details of his well-known story, I look closely at an unexamined aspect of his efforts. I am interested not only in what Rusesabagina did or how he did it – saving more than a thousand refugees from the violence with little more than his charm, his connections, a telephone, and a well-stocked bar – but in why he was motivated to act as he did during the genocide. When so many others, all across the country, turned their backs on friends, neighbors, and even family members, Rusesabagina repeatedly endangered himself and his own family in an attempt to protect others with whom he had no particularly strong bond.

I argue that Rusesabagina was primarily motivated by an awareness of his own mortality, his personal history, a desire to distance himself from the negative behavior of Hutu like himself, and a strong identification with the Tutsi refugees under his protection. Able to cut through the genocidal rhetoric that gripped so many of his countrymen, he viewed these Tutsi not as a collective group of Others but as individual husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, children, and parents. Just as important was the experience of growing up in a household that placed little value on the Hutu/Tutsi distinction and then creating a similar household himself. Aware of himself as a Hutu from an early age, Rusesabagina was also affected by the injustice of privileging or punishing someone on this basis alone. Given this identification, paired with his recognition that the violence surrounding him would likely claim his life and the lives of his family members, Rusesabagina determined that he should do what he could to help others before he died. This focus on suffering individuals and the understanding that one’s own life is terribly brief ultimately led Rusesabagina to act against the tidal wave of violence in what he viewed as his own small way.

My conclusion has an important connection to the coverage of the abuse scandal at Penn State. Many people are baffled or disgusted by the moral failure of a supposed leader like Paterno and assume they would have acted differently; others are so troubled by Paterno’s failure that they want to suggest the problem is systemic and tied to the place of athletics at American universities. The most honest among us are asking how they would have acted if they found themselves in such a difficult and ugly situation.

My answer to all of these people is that moral heroism doesn’t arise from nowhere. Rusesabagina’s story highlights the ways in which people can be primed to act heroically, even when it’s clearly going to be very costly to do so. With that in mind, I end by arguing that it’s important to tell the stories of those who did what they could to help others, even if they were ultimately much less successful in accomplishing what they set out to do. For in celebrating moral heroism of any kind we might motivate others to act heroically, whether in a similar situation to Rusesabagina’s or a world away from such life-or-death choices.

That said, more than simply telling these stories, it is also necessary to look closely at the motivation behind the courageous actions of men like Rusesabagina. In doing so, we can learn a great deal about heroism and we can untangle heroic behavior from extraordinariness. In general, it is difficult for most people to believe Rusesabagina’s claim that he is an ordinary man, just as it is difficult not to feel awed in his presence. His actions, on the surface, seem too extraordinary. And, indeed, in looking closely at the man behind those actions, it seems clear that Rusesabagina was quite different –- even before the genocide –- than a great many of his countrymen. He was far less willing to adopt an extreme position, and far more tolerant and self-aware, than many were. In this, he was somewhat unusual for his time and place.

But this is not to say that only extraordinary people can act heroically, nor is it to suggest that he is wrong about the way he sees himself. Indeed, there is something extraordinary about Rusesabagina’s ordinariness. Rather than seeming remote from the rest of us, his example can help us to think about how we might act in his place. If an ordinary man can act so heroically, might we also be capable of it? Fortunately, for most of us, a terrible situation that calls for such heroism is unlikely to arise. But if it did, most of us would like to think that we would not be so quick to trade our values for a bit of comfort or even for an extra few hours, days, or years of life; instead, we would stand up for others. While we might never face such a test, the way to be sure we could pass it seems clear. We can follow the example put forward by people like Paul Rusesabagina by working toward greater personal identification with those who initially seem unlike us, thinking critically about the values that have been instilled in us by our families, and making choices that take into account the kind of life we want to live in the limited amount of time we have.

Scandal, Celebrity, and Morality

My friend Steve Finamore raises an interesting point this morning, namely that there’s very little media coverage of Jerry Sandusky right now; the bulk of the reporting on the Penn State scandal at this point seems to be about Joe Paterno.

My initial reaction was that it was a foregone conclusion that Sandusky would go to prison and so the focus turned, over the past few days, to the relatively long list of people who were involved in keeping things quiet or failing to take action. Because this list included some unknown and unidentifiable university administrators and Joe Paterno, the attention was bound to be on Paterno; he’s one of the most recognizable coaches in American sports, he’s coached at Penn State for more than forty years, and he’s the winningest coach in college football.

Because he’s famous, because we know a lot about him, Paterno gives us someone upon whom we can focus our anger. In no small part, this because he seems to have done the morally wrong thing in this case by not coming forward himself (and thereby enabling the abuser). But that wrong undoubtedly pales in comparison to the moral and legal wrongs committed by university officials and, most of all, by Sandusky. No one’s going to hold a rally or overturn cars on behalf of the ousted university administrators or former assistant coach because those people are unknown to us, because they seem like replaceable parts, and because — of course — they seem to have committed a series of terrible acts. People will rally and protest for Paterno because they want to contrast him with Sandusky, to be sure, but also because he’s the living incarnation of their beloved football program.

But this isn’t really a football or sports story; it’s a story about rape, abuse, cover-up, and criminal justice. Strangely, with the firing of Paterno, it’s become a sports story that — somewhat predictably — now also includes college students behaving very badly as a result of their love of college sports. But Paterno and football aren’t really at the heart of this story; that seems to me to be more a narrative of convenience. This story is really about those who prey on children and those who fail to recognize the responsibility they have to take action when faced with allegations of rape and abuse; as I think Finamore rightly points out, we ignore that central part of the narrative at our moral peril.