Wrong things stigmatized
Posted on Friday, June 13, 2008
The flap over Jim Webb’s views on the Confederacy confirmed my suspicions. We socially stigmatize all the wrong things. Webb, a Virginia Democrat and former secretary of the Navy who is serving his first term in the U. S. Senate, is reported to be a prospective running mate for Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. Our national conscience has been corrupted by decades and generations of erosion on the social stigmas that served as the protein of our collective character. Increment by increment on issue by issue, we’ve allowed the “defining of deviancy down,” as alliteratively termed by the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. We’ve kicked sand in the face of the old maxim about character—it’s what you do when nobody’s looking—and attempted to replace the stigmas that guided private morals with laws that govern only public behavior.
Even worse, we’ve substituted a new set of stigmas of the worst sort that serve to regulate not deeds, as in the past, but thought.
Historically, stigmas surrounded things like philandering and divorce, unethical business dealings, illegitimate children, abortion, homosexuality and crime. The general thinking was that behavior should be shaped around those things that best contribute to the common bond of a people into stable communities and societies that adhered to American founding principles.
Thus stigmas (and their accompanying shame and guilt ) served as sanctions far superior to mere statutes, whose only shaping force was risk of punishment.
Crime is a perfect example. The fight against crime has become relegated to the police organizations among us. The implicit theory is that beefing up police and security, like cameras and lights in parking lots, increases “protection.” Put another way, our modern approach is purely lawbased: increase the risk of getting caught and / or going to jail to sufficiently high levels so that criminals are deterred.
But how safe can one ever feel in an environment overpopulated by criminals who are just waiting for the police to look away ? And what kind of reformation can we ever expect of a criminal if he is never held morally accountable beyond what deal his lawyer can plea-bargain ?
When the stinging stigma of social rebuke toward criminals is replaced with the currency of purely legal punishment, law-breakers discount the immorality of their actions. Absent the moral restraints shame and guilt provide, a conscienceless criminal can logically conclude that it’s better to mug an old woman for drug money than fail to pay a ruthless dealer or shoot a witness than go to jail.
Philosophical writer and columnist Roger Scruton called this kind of demoralized and devoid-of-blame crime a “market in which deeds are judged by their price, not their value.” When criminals think only in terms of the price of their crime (the legal punishment ) and when society assents that a criminal’s only debt to society is paid upon completion of a sentence, he wrote, “you remove the real motive for good behavior, which is the fear of judgment.” Instead, we now stigmatize judgment and typically bend over backward to avoid sounding “judgmental” about criminals. They “never had a chance,” you’ll hear it said, because of background or upbringing. Even attorneys plead for acquittal or leniency because of drug addiction, single parenthood and so forth.
That compassionate understanding quickly dissipates on the more modern stigmas, like any of the insensitive “isms” or, in Jim Webb’s case, failing to toe the politically correct revisionist line on history.
When’s the last time you heard a thug called mean-spirited ? A lazy, cowardly criminal can steal a child’s bike and pistol-whip his mother to the street and he’s never called names. Instead, if we refer to him pejoratively, we’re the mean ones. And forget outright condemnation or criticism. Simply fail to embrace the formerly offensive deviant behavior of a minority and you risk being stigmatized as a racist; of a woman, you’re sexist; of a homosexual, you’re homophobic.
Now that the magnifying glass is on Webb, the new stigma police are tapping their batons in hand and gesturing toward the “no facts allowed” sign over near the Democratic platform. The main offense that Webb, a recent-vintage Democrat, is accused of is not checking his historian credentials at the party door.
Because only one in 20 Southerners owned slaves, and because slaveholders in the North were excluded from the Emancipation Proclamation, Webb has remarked as long as 18 years ago and as recently as this week that for Confederate soldiers, the Civil War was more about loyalty to state sovereignty than slavery.
Apparently, Webb didn’t get the memo that the only appropriate usage of the word “slavery” is in affirmative conjunction with “reparations.” Or that the word “honor” can never appear in the same paragraph as “Confederacy.” I doubt whether anybody would really want to debate the issue on the merits with Webb, who by all accounts is as knowledgeable a writer on military history as he is prolific. He also not only comes from a strong Scots-Irish lineage of soldiers, he personally earned the Navy Cross, the Silver Star, two Bronze Stars and two Purple Hearts while serving in Vietnam for four years. But the last thing misguided stigmas designed to shame and quell thought and discourse need is analysis getting in the way of good ole PC dogma. Ultimately, Webb may or may not get the nod from Obama. What he doesn’t deserve either way is a hatchet job for being well-read on an issue and letting it show.
—–––––•–––––—Dana D. Kelley is a free-lance writer from Jonesboro.
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