The Bangus Ultimatum

(Slightly updated)

The law school (and the University in general) is ablaze with news of another dead student – apparently due to hazing. Initial reports suggest that the Sigma Rho, a law-based fraternity priding itself to be “a campus force” and “a national force”, is involved. The backlash will be temporary as it is predictable. There will be statements and press conferences. Interviews and features and forum exchanges about what violent low-life scum-bags these frat men are. The argument will be raised that not all of them are the sort of sadistic murdering bastards that the media has portrayed them. And that would appeal to our moral intuition, being, at a certain level, almost self-evident. Passions will cool down, and we’d be back to our own merry ways. That is, until the next dead student.

Professor Te once wrote in his blog that he considered all frat men equally guilty. It was a hard position to support. Professor Te himself taught me Criminal Law, and I found it difficult to reconcile his statement with what he told us about the presumption of innocence, criminal intent, and the burden of proof. Surely my teacher was overreacting, perhaps even oversimplifying the problem. Surely this was a generalization, and I often find generalizations awkward tools for problem solving. From where I stood at that time, what I saw was a paradox: the individual frat men that I know are pretty decent individuals. They’re smart, capable, courteous and man, are they funny. Every other frat man I know is a Sigma Rhoan – and they’re not exactly a lineup of Huns. Senator Salonga, a man who I deeply admire, is an alumnus of Sigma Rho. And yet fraternities have been involved in the most ghastly episodes of violence in campus, and I sense a morbid fear whenever I see a cluster of them in the hallways. What mediates between the individuals that I know and the roving death squads of my darkest nightmares?

A vogue explanation is that frat men and fraternities aren’t the problem per se, but the “culture of violence”. It has a nice ring to it, and the notion that we’re up against a culture (the way we must wage war against “terror”) bypasses the tiresome and inconvenient business of actually assigning blame or, in a non-judicial setting, determining contributions to the problem. As a student of social science, I can’t buy into the idea of an amorphous, autonomously brooding omnipresence directing these frat men to beat another human being to death. It takes individual agency to adopt and reinforce and sustain and propagate the symbols and practices that comprise a culture. It is individuals who, having been failed by intellect or imagination, resort to violence to achieve their ends.

Cultures don’t kill people, people do.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 1st, 2007 at 9:48 am and is filed under General, Law School. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.