On tattletales

Elizabeth Bruenig has an interesting report in The Atlantic on a scandal involving Yale Law School. Apparently a well-known or notorious professor and two students were the target of accusations of… something. As Bruenig notes, the reporting has been vague, with the result that the rumors are wild, not to mention histrionic and self-righteous. (A lot of this is happening on Twitter after all.) The scandal apparently began when a “friend” of one of the students involved submitted a personally-prepared 20-page “dossier”—“complete with screenshots of text messages, summaries of conversations, a reference to a secretly recorded phone call, and some offhanded musings on his peers’ moral laxity”—to Yale Law’s relevant authorities. I’ve had a handful of bad friends, but never one on that order.

I was totally and blissfully ignorant of the scandal and the circumstances surrounding it until this morning, but I’m glad I read Bruenig’s report because of this valuable aside:

When I was a little girl growing up in suburban North Texas not so very long ago, my grandmother, a housewife of the ’60s, would turn my cousins and me outside to play in the summer so she could sit at her kitchen table and chain-smoke her way through her library of paperback bodice-rippers. And when one of us would inevitably bolt back inside to complain about being annihilated with a Super Soaker at close range or nailed with a Nerf dart to the eye, she would always eject us with the same dismissal: Don’t be a tattletale. As far as childhood admonishments go, it was an interesting one—she wasn’t telling us not to do something, but rather not to be something.

As it happens, this is counsel I and my siblings and cousins were given under similar circumstances in our day, and that I am daily dispensing to my kids. (For fellow parents: when you get reports of sibling misconduct, I’ve found “Why are you telling me this?” a useful followup question.) Bruenig continues:

I don’t credit homespun wisdom with any special salience. But the suggestion that it may be useful to morally evaluate oneself before volunteering to monitor everyone else’s conduct isn’t a ridiculous one.

Emphasis mine.

This “suggestion” dovetails with a “rule” from a very different person, namely Jordan Peterson: “Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.” And from a source much older and—I think they would also agree—more authoritative than either Bruenig or Peterson:

[W]hy beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.

Bruenig insightfully expands on her observation before returning to her report:

It’s wise to be careful that, in one’s zeal for justice or fairness or the more prosaic things that ride beneath those banners, one doesn’t lose sight of one’s own moral obligations or aspirations. And it’s decent, if you have a problem with someone, to take it up with them before running it up the nearest flagpole. But this is something people with the right views and the best degrees, it seems, simply do not do; just as the distinction between tattling and whistleblowing—resting, as it does, on a sober evaluation of one’s own motives and the stakes at hand—is one they often fail to make.

Bruenig’s entire piece is worth the read, if only to get a glimpse of how debased and petty the supposed elite can be, especially those positioning themselves as our—and their own—moral watchdogs. Alan Jacobs, through whom I discovered this article, offers two good questions about the story the article relates.