Monica Lewinsky on public shaming

First of all, I highly recommend you watch this. Our online lives have become toxic, and it feels awful. I can zing with the best of them — but I don’t usually want to. After all, as I’ve always told my kids, “I’ve yet to see someone on their deathbed say, ‘I really wish I’d been meaner to people.'”

I try to keep this site boring that way. I like the thoughtful people who come here, and I’m not interested in building traffic by viciously trashing people. (Well, occasionally. But then I have that guilt hangover.)

Chris Cillizza writes about his response to her TED talk:

Here’s the critical piece of Lewinsky’s talk:

For nearly two decades now, we have slowly been sowing the seeds of shame and public humiliation in our cultural soil. Gossip Web sites, paparazzi, reality programming, politics, news outlets and sometimes hackers traffic in shame.

Public humiliation as a blood sport has to stop. We need to return to a long-held value of compassion and empathy.

Her words echo the moving eulogy that former Sen. John Danforth (R-Mo.) delivered recently for Missouri state auditor Tom Schweich, who apparently committed suicide amid a whisper campaign about his Jewish heritage. Here’s a part of what Danforth said:

We read stories about cyberbullying, and hear of young girls who killed themselves because of it. But what should we expect from children when grownups are their examples of how bullies behave? Since Thursday, some good people have said, ‘Well, that’s just politics.’ And Tom should have been less sensitive; he should have been tougher, and he should have been able to take it. Well, that is accepting politics in its present state, and that we cannot do. It amounts to blaming the victim, and it creates a new normal, where politics is only for the tough and the crude and the calloused. Indeed, if this is what politics has become, what decent person would want to get into it? We should encourage normal people — yes, sensitive people — to seek public office, not drive them away.

I find myself at something of a crossroads on all of this. On the one hand, I have long subscribed to the “politics ain’t beanbag” school of campaigns — meaning that the most important thing in politics is winning actualvictories, not moral ones.

On the other hand, as a victim of bullying in ninth and 10th grade that left me miserable, as well as the dad of two little boys, I am acutely aware of and concerned about the damage bullying can and does do — especially now, as Lewinsky notes, in the Internet age.

I haven’t totally resolved whether my two competing realities are incompatible or not. But, what I do believe is that there is a line — societally — that shouldn’t be crossed when it comes to how we treat each other. Sure, the anonymity of the Internet makes it incredibly easy to say whatever you want about virtually anyone. That cloak of anonymity frees you from the responsibility of owning your allegation, providing proof or doing something as simple as coming face-to-face — even electronically — with the person you are sliming.

When it comes to politics, winning can’t be the rationale to excuse this sort of behavior. It’s important to remember that using people as tackling dummies to score political points is ultimately detrimental to what our society should value. It turns people into caricatures, two-dimensional cardboard cutouts rather than fully realized individuals. Again, Lewinsky says it well: “I was branded as a tramp, tart, slut, whore, bimbo and, of course, ‘that woman.’ I was known by many, but actually known by few. I get it. It was easy to forget ‘that woman’ was dimensional and had a soul.”

All of this is easier said than done — for me and, I think, most of us. The realities of human nature (we all love a bit of schadenfreude) and business (Lewinsky drew eyeballs and readers like few other stories before or since) make drawing a line in the sand and saying “enough” very difficult. What I hope is that it doesn’t take another Lewinsky or, even worse, another Schweich, to convince people in politics and journalism that there is such a thing as “too far,” and it’s at least in part up to us to help define what it looks like.

We see a lot of this kind of piling on these days, and it always makes me queasy. Here’s a recent example: Last week, a college baseball player reacted to the news that Disney was making a movie about young baseball hero Mo’Ne Davis by calling her a “slut” on Twitter. Yeah, horrible, right? And when an online feminist tweeted her outrage to the coach and the school, she asked only that the guy be benched. I agreed with her, I retweeted what she wrote.

But he was kicked off the team. And I don’t feel very good about that. He’s a young hothead who said something really stupid. Did the punishment fit the crime? More importantly, did it teach him anything? Does the joy of dominating and the desire for public humiliation take precedence over changing his views?

It’s even more upsetting when I see people lose their jobs over this stuff. It depends on the job — when someone’s in a position of influence, well, that goes with the turf. But when it’s some guy who works in a factory, and we’ve taken his job away in a recession? This is bad.

Just because we can do these things doesn’t mean we should.

UPDATE: Mo’ne Davis weighs in:

On SportsCenter today, Davis revealed that she had sent the university a letter asking that Casselberry be reinstated. “Everyone makes mistakes,” she said, and “I know I would want to take that back.”

“Everyone deserves a second chance,” she added. “I know he didn’t mean it in that type of way, and I know a lot of people get tired of seeing me on TV, but sometimes you’ve just got to think about what you’re doing before you actually do it.”

Davis said that she has not received an official response from the university at this time.