Heroes

Penn State is an odd organization. Run much like a government bureaucracy, its inner workings are so mundane and boring they only necessitate analysis when something bad happens (and something bad rarely happens).

Over the course of the past 48 hours, through news reports, radio interviews, a newspaper, and some grand jury testimony, I got to know Jerry Sanduski. See, I'm not a fan of college football, and while a student at Penn State is expected to live and breathe and eat football, I found college football's rules absurd and inconvenient, its playoff system incomprehensible, and I couldn't get over the simple fact that there are too many teams and too many players (as compared to the NFL, which makes complete sense). So I had no clue who Jerry Sanduski was until about Saturday morning. Turns out he's the former defensive coordinator for Penn State, and also the proprietor of a charity called "The Second Mile". Turns out he also molested up to twenty young boys between 1994 and 2009, escaping capture due to the legal failure of Penn State's Athletic Director Tim Curly and Vice President Gary Schultz and the moral failure of head coach Joe Paterno and President Graham Spanier.

Let me explain Penn State a bit more. The response to these allegations has not been the angry retort of a pissed-off populace against a hated leadership. We like Joe Paterno. We like Graham Spanier. It's a little difficult to contort yourself into hatred against them, even though ignoring a possible sexual abuse claim is absolutely reprehensible. However, as thousands of Happy Valley residents and a few overturned vehicles can attest to, we need to learn that even our heroes can do wrong things and they need to be held accountable when they do.

There's been quite a bit of talk about the inherent "goodness" of Joe Paterno. Says one local editorialist, "All of these men that were involved, excluding Sandusky, are undoubtedly good men." Really? They may have ignored a reasonable and prescient claim of child rape in the interest of protecting a goddamn football team, but aside from that, I'm sure they are all great men who love their wives, Jesus, and America. In fact, one could say that through the annual Four Diamonds fundraiser THON, Penn State is one of the most philanthropic universities in the country. However, a person's morality is only relevant when acted on consistently. Sure, Joe Paterno and Graham Spanier had the potential to be good men in this situation, but they summarily failed.

Let me relate a story. At my high school, an English teacher was fired for carrying on a lustrious and illegal love affair with a male student. The teacher was well-liked by students, relatively popular amongst teachers, and a fairly well-known personality even for those who did not have her in class. While disgust for what she did was fairly widespread, it was difficult for both faculty and students to admonish her outright because of their allegiance to her as a mentor and as a friend. The relative badness of her actions did not match up with our belief that she was, inherently, a good person, creating a degree of cognitive dissonance.

This emotion, fellow Nittany Lions, is called "disappointment". Disappointment in a school which prides itself on the moral high ground. Disappointment in a leadership we trusted appearing to be the worst kind of self-interested organization not even the worst cynics could have predicted it to be. Disappointment in a wholesome folk hero making a large and consequential mistake at the expense of the well-being of 9 children and counting.

Let us not, however, lose sight of the actual villain. Joe Paterno is a nationally-renowned celebrity and the face of Penn State, so yes, he has unfairly become the face of this controversy. But, as allegations become far more undeniable for Sandusky, the selfish evil he unleashed on the childhood of these people, many of them grown adults now, over the course of 15 years is of the worst kind and no human with a conscience will blink if he never sees daylight again. That Sandusky is a bad person is inarguable and self-evident. But, as a famous quote (often misattributed to Edmund Burke but actually from a Russian film narration) goes, "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."

Materialism

No, not that materialism. I'll let neuroscientist David Eagleman explain:

"The materialist viewpoint states that we are, fundamentally, made only of physical materials. In this view, the brain is a system whose operation is governed by the laws of chemistry and physics-- with the end result that all of your thoughts, emotions, and decisions are produced by natural reactions following local laws to powest potential energy. We are our brain and its chemicals, and any dialing of the knobs of your neural system changes who you are."

The Eagleman book that quote is from, Incognito: The Secret Lives Of The Brain, is a journey into the subconscious which serves as an excellent introduction to the fascinating world of neurobiology. When you are an atheist and are identified at a gathering as such, you are often asked very long-winded questions about the creation of life, the cosmos, and the soul by those with a religion to answer these questions for them. Unless you are a scientific genius yourself, it can be overwhelming to face people who feel it is your responsibility to provide the answers to questions it has taken science millenia to even come close to solving. So it helps to have a book like Eagleman's to explain the science in a clear, understandable, and entertaining fashion.

The above quote about the philosophical view of materialism, while never mentioning the soul, is a direct retort to any worldview which attempts to explain human behavior as having an amorphous, indescribable engine behind it. Indeed, all human behavior, from crying out of the womb to drafting a will, is driven by the baseball-sized glob of neurons and biological gelatin behind your forehead and under your scalp. This view of humanity is, from a theist's standpoint, rather unpoetic and unsatisfying. Guess what? I don't care. The correct explanation is not the one that is most settling, or the most comforting. Galileo knew this when he endorsed the Copernican view that the Earth revolved around the sun, not the other way around. The history of science can be described as diminishing the value of human life until we are only slightly more important than the bacteria under our feet. I'm sorry if this is an unsatisfying view, but the universe does not exist for our own satisfaction.

What the materialist worldview presents is the idea that we are merely the functions of physical systems. Throughout Incognito, Eagleman raises examples of how dependent our judgement and actions are upon our brains. This is not to say that the scientific world currently has explanations for every perceptible action we commit; the key word is "currently." Are there some things science may never discover? Certainly (though particle physics seems to have a lot more questions to answer than neuroscience). But this is not reason to chalk up mysteries to fairies, gods, or spirits. Holes have been left in science for centuries that are just in the past few decades being filled. The important thing to remember is not to pretend we know the answers to things we (currently) do not.

The soul is a comforting thought. It attaches meaning and responsibility to our actions and emotions. The organ that makes your heart tick on time, that reminds you how to ride a bicycle, that allows you type while looking away from the keyboard; that's the brain, most people say. But how I love my partner, how I feel about God, my morals and values and virtues; those are the surely the soul. If you agree with this, you're creating a needless agent for aspects neuroscience already can explain with the brain. Occam's Razor 101.

The main opponent to materialism is merely human emotion. It isn't a pleasant thought to believe that all that you love, all that you hate, all you distrust, and all you save are the products of chaotic and fragmented electrical signals. However, it isn't just our emotions that are trapped in the brain. All those physical machinations actually are ourselves. The brain is not a tool we use to drive the body because we are that tool. Your ability to read this article, your forming opinion of the topics I bring up, and any response you may give are all the products of an unimaginably-complicated physical organ. And when your brain stops, so do you.

Again, this isn't the happiest worldview, but there is beauty to see. Consider the lowly brain functions of ants, which express little emotion other than hunger and fear. Or consider the aforementioned bacterium and single-celled organisms. They have no brain to speak of, no manner of perceiving the world other than simple sensors which guide them towards proteins and lipids. Millions and millions of years of evolution has produced this deceptively-simple organ inside our heads which actually stores the full range of human action and reaction. The decision to get a venti or grande is handled by the same organ which tells you to stay or leave the scene of an accident, respond or ignore an attractive person who confronts you, or start a nuclear war. All the majesty and anger and awe we see in art, poetry, and music is actually a natural product of a handful of jelly inside your head. Now that's satisfying.