“There’s no question that publicly shaming someone, whether it is a politician or a company, is the best way not only to get their attention but to change their behavior,” said Jeff Chester, executive director for the District-based consumer-advocacy group Center for Digital Democracy. “People are going to be very sensitive to it.”

I’m skeptical. Sure, Internet shaming leads to results, such as in the case of the girl who stole someone’s expensive mobile phone: she was arrested. But it seems to me that when the target is a corporation, the results are not as clearly a change of behavior. (I question even whether shaming the phone-thief actually changed her behavior—she and her family were defiant even after the police arrived.)

Look at the recent examples the Post mentions: the AOL support technician who wouldn’t let a customer cancel and the Comcast repairman who fell asleep. In each case, the companies involved fired a lower-level employee. AOL, for employee John’s rote following of his script. As the New York Times pointed out, what made the conversation remarkable was not the employee’s transgression, per se:

If John’s behavior had been that of a person in the grip of genuine pathological madness, the recording of the call would not have drawn the attention of so many people, nor would it have been replayed on national television and radio programs. What one hears in John is an actor performing clumsily, to be sure, but working with a script provided by his employer that confuses “customer service” with “sales.”

In other words, John was simply following company policy; he wasn’t a particularly malicious individual. Of course, he should have exercised better judgment about when to abandon the script. But instead of addressing an internal culture that contributed to such behavior, AOL made him a scapegoat. Someone lost his job, and the real problem lives on (in another anecdote suggesting this isn’t isolated behavior for AOL, a woman couldn’t get the ISP to cancel her deceased mother’s account).

Likewise, Comcast fired the employee videoed sleeping on the job, but the real problem is a company that puts even its employees on hold for so long that they can fall asleep. And I know from personal experience that Comcast treats its customers the same way. I used to have a phone whose battery would quit after an hour; on hold with Comcast that long, my phone died, and I had to return to the back of the queue.

Finally, the vigilantism that online shaming definitely does seem to accomplish is of questionable value. As the Times reported a few weeks ago, Internet mob justice can escalate to dangerous levels, as it has in China, where strangers harass in person men accused online of adultery.

Without doing either, I’d like to register my concern at what the Washington Post describes as a growing trend: the dissemination and enjoyment of videos portraying real violence. The Post profiles a number of people including Blake Cater, who says “I’m not in any way a violent person,” but regularly records himself in “brutal” fights. And there’s Rogier Both, who picks fights with rival soccer fans, enjoying video replays:

“It’s like an addiction,” he adds. “You can’t leave it. When there is a good football fight, the best sex is not better. . . . People who have never been in football matches in Europe will never understand it, but it’s like a second life.”

His description reminded me of a friend of Augustine’s, who though having left enjoyment of the gladiatorial games was drawn back into it by his friends, at first against his will:

But he, closing the passage of his eyes, forbade his mind to range abroad after such evil; and would he had stopped his ears also! For in the fight, when one fell, a mighty cry of the whole people striking him strongly, overcome by curiosity, and as if prepared to despise and be superior to it whatsoever it were, even when seen, he opened his eyes, and was stricken with a deeper wound in his soul than the other . . . .

For so soon as he saw that blood, he therewith drunk down savageness; nor turned away, but fixed his eye, drinking in frenzy, unawares, and was delighted with that guilty fight, and intoxicated with the bloody pastime. Nor was he now the man he came, but one of the throng he came unto, yea, a true associate of theirs that brought him thither. Why say more? He beheld, shouted, kindled, carried thence with him the madness which should goad him to return not only with them who first drew him thither, but also before them, yea and to draw in others.

The press also applauded Hanks when he was asked if he had been under any pressure by the Greek Orthodox community, of which he and his wife Rita Wilson are members. “No, absolutely not,” he replied. “My heritage and that of my wife communicates that our sins have been taken away, not our brains.

“I view this film as I would any number of films,” he continued, “as a great opportunity to discuss and to perhaps clarify one’s own feelings about their place in the universe and the cosmos and the mind of God. This was just one of a great many pieces of fiction that could spur, I think, a better understanding of that for the individual.

I’m not sure how a mystery thriller is supposed to be “a great opportunity to discuss and to perhaps clarify one’s own feelings about their place in the universe and the cosmos and the mind of God,” but then again I’m among the half-dozen people that haven’t read the book or seen the movie.

What I have observed is a disproportionate amount of skepticism directed at orthodox Christianity, something Joseph Loconte addressed in today’s OpinionJournal (HT: SharperIron). I think he’s right: let’s spread the skepticism around.

[C. S.] Lewis, I suspect, would also point out that theories about massive coverups presented in fanciful works such as “The Da Vinci Code” ignore an elephant-sized fact: There are any number of people and events in the Bible that are frankly embarrassing to believers. Recall, for example, that the family tree of the Messiah includes a prostitute (Rahab), a king who commits adultery and murder (David) and another king who leads his nation headlong into religious idolatry (Manasseh). Yet the earliest Christians failed to excise these characters from their story.

The first “conspiracy theory” about Jesus, in fact, actually appears in the Gospel of Matthew. After the crucifixion, religious leaders ask Pontius Pilate to post a guard at the tomb of Jesus because they suspect his disciples “may come and steal the body and tell the people that he has been raised from the dead.” Why keep a story about a possible conspiracy lodged at the heart of your sacred text if you’re determined to cover up a deception about the credibility of that text?

Here is the real harm of these modern conspiracy theories: They may appeal to our emotions, but they violate our common sense. They reject reason, just as surely as they reject revelation. “I do not wish to reduce the skeptical element in your minds,” Lewis explained. “I am only suggesting that it need not be reserved exclusively for the New Testament and the Creeds. Try doubting something else.”

Sounds like good advice to moviegoers this week–for the skeptics as well as the faithful.

Nevertheless, a number of voters did sign the petition, including BU School of Management Dean Louis Lataif, as BU’s student newspaper, The Daily Free Press, reports. Lataif had no comment, but the paper’s reporter had no trouble finding students willing to describe the current state of campus free speech:

“I’m surprised,” SMG sophomore Natalya Kamenetsky said. “You wouldn’t expect that from a dean from any school because BU is so diverse.”

Who would ever expect diversity of thought at a “diverse” university?

Now, you might think that only a reactionary conservative would oppose making website lists of one’s political opponents. Consider this: recently the conservative “Bruin Alumni Association” of UCLA published website lists of UCLA professors it considers liberal proselytizers. What do liberal academics think of that?

Adrienne Lavine, chairwoman of UCLA’s academic senate, agreed that the university could do little more at this point. She said she found the profiles on the alumni group’s website “inflammatory” and “not a positive way to address the concerns that Mr. Jones has expressed.”

. . .

On one of its websites, the Bruin Alumni Group names education professor Peter McLaren as No. 1 on its “The Dirty Thirty: Ranking the Worst of the Worst.” It says “this Canadian native teaches the next generation of teachers and professors how to properly indoctrinate students.”

McLaren, in a telephone interview, called the alumni group’s tactics “beneath contempt.”

“Any sober, concerned citizen would look at this and see right through it as a reactionary form of McCarthyism. Any decent American is going to see through this kind of right-wing propaganda. I just find it has no credibility,” he said.

The website also lists history professor Ellen DuBois, saying she “is in every way the modern female academic: militant, impatient, accusatory, and radical — very radical.” In response, DuBois said: “This is a totally abhorrent invitation to students to participate in a witch hunt & against their professors.”

What of KnowThyNeighbor.org? Is it “inflammatory” and “not a positive way to address the concerns”? Is it true that “any sober, concerned citizen would look at this and see right through it as a reactionary form of McCarthyism [and that] any decent American is going to see through this kind of [left]-wing propaganda”? Perhaps it’s “beneath contempt” as “a totally abhorrent invitation to [citizens] to participate in a witch hunt against their [neighbors].” You decide.

Welcome to the latest front in America’s culture wars. The Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI), the Calvary Chapel Schools and six Calvary Chapel students are suing the university, whose campuses include that traditional bastion of liberal thought, Berkeley, as well as the huge UCLA campus, for what they call “viewpoint discrimination”. The Christian schools add that the university is violating the students’ constitutional right to freedom of speech and religion. The university naturally denies the charges, and this week a federal judge in Los Angeles began considering the preliminary arguments of a contest which could eventually reach the Supreme Court.

. . .

UC denies it practices secular intolerance and “viewpoint discrimination”. It notes that it has approved plenty of courses at Christian schools and in the past four years has accepted 24 of the 32 applicants from the Murrieta school. And it says that if the courses had used these textbooks “as supplementary, rather than primary, texts, it is likely they would have been approved.”

What is really being challenged, says the university, is its right to set its own academic standards and admission requirements. In which case the question is what that right implies. The Christian plaintiffs say they have no objection to science students, for example, being taught conventional wisdom, but “their constitutional rights are abridged or discriminated against when they are told that the current interpretation of scientific method must be taught dogmatically, and must be accepted by students, to be eligible for admission to University of California institutions.” In other words, what the case involves is not so much the now-familiar tussle over intelligent design, but a student’s freedom of speech and thought.

The Economist thinks that this conflict will escalate until evangelicals play a greater role in higher education.

Fifty years ago there were only a handful of “megachurches”, drawing more than 2,000 each Sunday; today, there are more than 1,200 such churches, three of them with congregations of over 20,000. Not only is the nation’s president a born-again Christian, but so (according to the Pew Research Centre) are 54% of America’s Protestants, who are 30% of the population.

Will America’s public universities take on a similar tinge? To the extent that educational establishments reflect cultural reality, it may be inevitable. After all, before the liberal era of the 1960s, there were no such things as courses in “Women’s Studies” or “African-American Studies”. Now, no prudent American university would be without them. It would be odd if conservative Christians did not leave similar footprints on the syllabus.

I think the Economist is right on both counts: this issue is much larger than Calvary Chapel’s perceived lack of standards, and this kind of conflict is not likely to disappear.

I know nothing about Calvary Chapel’s quality of education in particular, but having some familiarity with the Christian school movement, I’m fairly confident that UC’s claims are not really about standards. Often, many students educated in the Christian school movement are better-prepared than their secular counterparts in this sense: they learn both the secular dogmas as well as the religious ones. For example, I’ll wager that a good student at Calvary Chapel would be able to explain the theory of evolution as well as creationism, whereas we would expect her public high school counterpart to know only about evolution.

The same is true of conservative students in general. Because those with liberal political views dominate the American higher education system, conservatives are forced to learn both languages. The UC officials should appreciate how that tension–between politically liberal educators’ beliefs and conservatives’ beliefs–actually offers some pedagogical advantages. For one thing, a somewhat adversarial position and skeptical mind on the part of the student further critical thinking skills. For another, the different beliefs and cultural background of conservatives further universities’ vaunted “diversity.”

However, the cynic in me suspects that the UC officials are less interested in improved critical thinking and cultural or viewpoint diversity than in hegemony over California’s secondary schools.

I’ve been saying the same thing for a long time, so it’s gratifying to see I’m in good company: First Things’ section “The Public Square” was the first blog, albeit in print. Richard John Neuhaus tries to deny that fact on First Things’ new web-blog (that supposedly also isn’t a blog; whatever it is, it’s certain to be frequently viewed in my feed reader):

Andrew Sullivan — who could be a much nicer and more sensible person if he really tried — once remarked that, as the writer of The Public Square, I was the world’s first blogger. That is not true.

This afternoon a young man in a black suit and a yarmulke stopped me and asked if I were Jewish. I told him sorry I wasn’t, and he said “it was the nose.” It amused me because of a family story about my great-grandfather, named “Yacob,” who with his hooked nose was frequently misidentified as a Jew, to his exasperation. But in our enlightened times, I took it as a compliment.

The us-them divide that conservative Christians maintain holds that, historically, they have Christian morality on their side while others have only their Enlightenment gods of science and reason. And some of their opponents like to believe this as well.

But it’s a false divide. Both the Puritans who settled New England and who bequeathed to American politics much of their dogma, and the Dutch founders of New York based their societies on Christian principles. They just had different approaches to theology. The Puritans were more typical of their era, when religious intolerance was official policy in most nations. (It’s true the Puritans themselves fled intolerance, but once they established themselves in America, they set up their own brutally intolerant regime.) Dutch Protestants, however, had experienced horrific violence at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition, and many had had enough of religious absolutism. Tolerance became codified into Dutch law, and Dutch cities, which had high concentrations of minorities, flourished. As a result, when the Dutch founded their New World colony centered on Manhattan Island, it, too, was a mixed society, and it, too, had as its social glue this notion of tolerance.

The point is that tolerance was at the time seen most fundamentally as a theological issue. The Puritans’ righteousness came from the conviction – common to all absolutists – that their faith was the only correct one, so that God compelled them to uphold it and to vanquish others. Those who argued for tolerance did so from a more humble, but equally theological, stance. In the words of one early advocate of tolerance, “Many will be damned on Judgment Day because they killed innocent people, but nobody will be damned because he killed nobody.”

Looking all the way back, then, New York’s mixed society, and with it America’s, owes its origins not to accident or geography but at least in part to a Christian conviction, won by the experience of slaughter and mayhem, that we – whoever we are at the moment – may not be smart enough to know God’s mind. The unlikeliest notion in the world therefore follows: that New York’s cultural mosh pit is built on a foundation of humility.

The attacks of 9/11, with their apocalyptic overtones, were pure protein for the Puritan impulse, with its conviction of America’s God-ordained role in history. Those who would stand up to the Puritan strain, which many people believe has reached the stage of posing an unprecedented danger, might want to exploit the fact that their tradition, just as much as the Puritans’, sits on a religious foundation. Pluralism and morality aren’t two separate things but are joined, and it’s from that juncture that much of what we call American comes. After Frances Perkins served as F.D.R.’s secretary of labor, she was able to say, referring to the New Deal, “I came to Washington to work for God, F.D.R. and the millions of forgotten, plain, common working men.” Nobody saw a conflict of interest.

I can’t prove it, but I suspect Shorto might be confusing humility with political expedience. When New York politicians appear “tolerant” regarding a particular issue, it’s usually an attempt to get votes by appealing to a wider political base. But their “tolerance” won’t encompass views that are statistically insignificant within that base. For example, New York Senator Clinton may seem “tolerant” when she supports gay rights, a winning strategy in New York, but ask her to confirm an obviously qualified judicial nominee, and her “tolerance” is hard to find. That’s why “tolerance” is such a hollow word. Those who are “tolerant” are doing so because they’re already committed to other principles, principles usually far from humility.

I’ve been reading the Gulag Archipelago on and off for a while. Solzhenitsyn wittily lances the Soviet insanities while recognizing that the problem is not mainly with a particular government but with the human condition.

I credited myself with unselfish dedication. But meanwhile I had been thoroughly prepared to be an executioner. And if I had gotten into an NKVD school under Yezhov, maybe I would have matured just in time for Beria.

So let the reader who expects this book to be a political exposé slam its covers shut right now.

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various stages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn’t change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.

Socrates taught us: Know thyself!

Confronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were the executioners and we weren’t.

Gulag Harper & Row, 1973 page 168

But whereas one can’t lay all the blame at the feet of social institutions, neither is an unjust society simply the fault of the individuals it comprises. A particular culture can encourage or discourage various virtues and vices. The problem with the Soviet culture, Solzhenitsyn seems to suggest, is that it deliberately unmoored itself from any cultural tradition. The result was that when it came time to make legal rulings or set public policy, those in charge acted on what was most expedient for them at the moment. Solzhenitsyn quotes from a 1919 trial transcript:

Accuser: “This tribunal is not supposed to concern itself with any nondescript criminal actions but only with those which are counterrevolutionary. In view of the nature of this crime, I demand that the case be turned over to a people’s court.”

Presiding Judge: “Ha! Actions! What a pettifogger you are! We are guided not by the laws but by our revolutionary conscience!”

Gulag Harper & Row, 1973 page 304

Note how the judge glosses arbitrariness and expediency as a “revolutionary conscience.” The October Revolution overthrew not just those in power but centuries of Russian legal tradition, tradition which had ended the death penalty and restricted torture. “Revolutionary conscience” allowed the Soviets to sneak them back in.

The court must not exclude terror. It would be self-deception or deceit to promise this, and in order to provide it with a foundation and to legalize it in a principled way, clearly and without hypocrisy and without embellishment, it is necessary to formulate it as broadly as possible, for only revolutionary righteousness and a revolutionary conscience will provide the conditions for applying it more or less broadly in practice.

With Communist greetings,
Lenin

Gulag Harper & Row, 1973 page 353

Solzhenitsyn comments:

With the exception of a very limited number of parliamentary democracies, during a very limited number of decades, the history of nations is entirely a history of revolutions and seizures of power. And whoever succeeds in making a more successful and more enduring revolution is from that moment on graced with the bright robes of Justice, and his every past and future step is legalized and memorialized in odes, whereas every past and future step of his unsuccessful enemies is criminal and subject to arraignment and a legal penalty.

Gulag Harper & Row, 1973 page 355

I’m not sure that’s exactly right. Take the American Revolution. Although the United States overthrew the British rule, it did not abandon the authority of British legal precedent, some of which is cited still today. Moreover, to justify their actions many of the the American revolutionaries appealed to what they saw as over-arching principles in natural law, law which theoretically included the British as well as the Americans. So while the Americans revolted and seized power, they didn’t try to create legal principles from whole cloth, as did Lenin. And I don’t think the United States is exceptional in that regard. The Soviet Union invited the kind of injustice Solzhenitsyn describes, not simply because its founders overthrew the government but because they overthrew moral and legal authority as well. By trusting in “revolutionary conscience,” they allowed the sinful human heart alone to cut the public line between good and evil, with terrible consequences.

Now, the question’s supporters must collect 65,825 signatures from registered voters, and approval from 25 percent of state lawmakers to get the question on the 2008 ballot.

Lang, 42, said the name, street address, hometown and ZIP code of everyone who signs the petition will be posted on the Web site KnowThyNeighbor.org.

“Everyone’s scrambling to know who in their town would sign this,” Lang told the Boston Herald. “And this Web site will give gay people the tools to know, to defend themselves and their families, to let them go neighbor-to-neighbor and say, ‘I don’t appreciate your signing this.’”

“I’m going to be aggressive personally,” he said. “I want to know that the people I do business with are not against (gay marriage). This is going to be won by economics.”

The parallel to the Nuremberg Files, that website listing abortion doctors, is obvious, as are the equally insidious motives hidden behind the “right to know.”

Note what Lang and Westerhoff want to stop so much that they’re willing to harass private citizens: not abolishing gay marriage but putting it up to a vote.

Their website, KnowThyNeighbor.org, alludes to the Golden Rule, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” Is the irony lost on them? What would they think if “extremists” published a website with lists of homosexuals?

It seems as though their attack is against more than just the issue of the referendum; it’s an attack on the democratic process: they want to replace the civic goods of neighborly “love” and free elections with the intimidation of “knowledge” and judicial fiat.