This month, after a scathing investigation by Steve Coll, Sheila Coronel, and Derek Kravitz of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Rolling Stone magazine officially retracted its November story about a supposed gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity house.  Managing editor Will Dana writes, “We would like to apologize to our readers and to all of those who were damaged by our story and the ensuing fallout, including members of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity and UVA administrators and students.”

The only mystery here is why Rolling Stone waited five months.  As Dana admits, critics had questioned the journalistic failings of the story within days of its publication.  We now know that although the magazine’s “fact checker” had interviewed “Jackie,” the young woman who made the allegation, at length, the staff made no attempt to contact those whom she accused.  In fact, they couldn’t have, because she refused to provide the name of the alleged leader of the alleged assault.  In other words, there was no fact checking at all.  But the reporter, the editors, and the fact-checker-who-didn’t-check-facts “believed firmly that Jackie's account was reliable,” so they reported it as fact.

Then again, perhaps the long delay isn’t so mysterious.  The psychology of this sort of journalism is exhibited in a December essay titled “Why We Believed Jackie’s Rape Story,” published in the UVA student newspaper, the Cavalier Daily, by Julia Horowitz, who was then its assistant managing editor and has since been elected as its editor-in-chief.  “[I]t is becoming increasingly clear that the story ... has some major, major holes,” she said at that time.  “Ultimately, though, from where I sit in Charlottesville, to let fact checking define the narrative would be a huge mistake.”

People accustomed to speaking frankly may be baffled by the meaning of that statement.  Let’s decode it.  In plain English, Ms. Horowitz is saying that journalists shouldn’t base their stories on the facts; they should trim the facts to fit the stories they have already decided to tell.  For her, there would have been no need to find out whether the allegations of gang rape were true, because reporting them as true made women feel “comfortable sharing their stories.”  The important thing isn’t whether a story is accurate, but whether it promotes her preferred view of reality.

But Ms. Horowitz is wrong.  Sexual assault is a filthy crime; so is false accusation.  We don’t have to be cavalier about the possibility of lying just to prove how serious we are about rape.  Truth is not served by indifference as to which things are true.

Tomorrow:  Getting the Bugs Out of Humbug

I’m breaking my “Monday for students” rule again.  This letter is from an attorney in Jamaica.

Query:

Why is it that we humans find nothing wrong in defying physical laws, for example by flying, yet we do consider it wrong for us to defy moral laws?  Just thinking.

Also, doesn’t the fact that some people have defended slavery as "natural" show that we cannot be certain about the content of natural law?

Reply:

I’m glad to answer.  There are two mistakes in the way you pose your first question.  The first mistake is that we don’t defy violate natural forces; we only make use of them.  When an airplane flies, it responds to a number of forces at once.  Gravity pulls it down, lift raises it up, and thrust drives it forward.  The motion of the airplane is the resultant of all of these forces together.

The other problem is that you are mixing up natural forces with natural laws.  A law is a rule and measure of right and wrong, suitable to guide the acts of a free and rational being.  From this point of view, “Never murder” is a natural law, but gravity isn’t a law; it is merely a natural force.  When we call gravity a “law,” we are speaking analogically, because the airplane is not thinking to itself, “Golly, I am in a gravitational field – I ought to fall down.”

We see then that the original form of the question has things backwards.  The airplane cannot defy the force.  But a rational being can defy the precept – although it shouldn’t.

As to your second question:  Some pre-Civil-War American masters defended the enslavement of black Africans on ground that the slaves were naturally inferior.  They were gravely mistaken.  So doesn’t that show that we can’t be sure about right and wrong?

No, it shows just the opposite.  After all, if you weren’t sure that slavery was wrong, then how could you call them mistaken?  It is only about real matters of fact that it is possible to make mistakes – and it is only about real matters of fact that it is possible to correct these mistakes.

You wouldn't say that since physicians once mistakenly believed that bloodletting could cure everything from cancer to acne, therefore we can never be sure that it doesn't.  Or that since astronomers once mistakenly believed that there were canals on Mars, therefore we can never be sure that they don't exist.  Or that since surgeons once operated without washing their hands, therefore we can never be sure about the benefits of asepsis.  So why should you worry that since some slaveowners once tried to convince themselves that Africans were natural slaves, therefore we can never be sure that they aren't?

Tomorrow:  On Not Letting Facts Get in the Way

Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosopher of will to power who originated the motto “God is dead,” wrote, "I think of myself as the scrawl which an unknown power scribbles across a sheet of paper, to try out a new pen" (letter to Peter Gast, August, 1881).

He was not the only one.  It seems that in our age a number of new pens are being tried out – in politics, literature, music, culture, mendacity, disgrace, and oppression.  A day is coming when the scribble will seem to fill every inch of every sheet, every placard, every wall.  And yet it will not prevail.

Tomorrow:  Defying the Natural Law

“Ten million young women rose to their feet with the cry, ‘We will not be dictated to,’ and went off and became stenographers.”

-- G.K. Chesterton

Tomorrow:  A Word to the Wise

New graduate seminar

The rise of the view that “it’s all about me” is commonly viewed as a decline in morality.  Vanderbilt law professor Edward Rubin says that’s all wrong.  He writes in his new book Soul, Self and Society: The New Morality and the Modern State that we aren’t seeing a decline in morality, but merely the rise of a new morality.

This new morality turns out to have just as many rules and prohibitions as the old one.  For example – this is Rubin’s example, not mine – one must not express disapproval of the sexual behavior of anyone else, or one will be punished by those in authority.

Well, yes, I suppose one can call such a thing a new morality.  And yes, I agree, it is strenuous and burdensome.  If anything, this dreary code of correctness has more taboos than the old one, and its strictures are not gates of life, but portals of death.

But why stop with one new morality?  The possibilities are endless.  Abortion is the token of a child-free morality.  Wife-beating expresses the exuberance of a morality of male empowerment.  Theft is the anthem of a morality more open to the sharing of wealth.

I do think Rubin misrepresents the old morality.  He writes as though fulfillment is something new in the history of ethics.  Poppycock.  Aristotle wrote that ethics is about human flourishing; St. Thomas Aquinas wrote that the ultimate goal of human life is that complete and final happiness which leaves nothing further to be desired, which turns out to be the vision of that God whom we naturally love more than ourselves.

The really distinctive mark of the so-called new morality isn’t its insistence on fulfillment, but its confusion of fulfillment with self-indulgence.  But that’s not really new either.  The old-fashioned word for it is “sin.”

Tomorrow:  What Feminism Has Achieved for Women