From my journal: 13 July 2012 (after release of the Freeh Report)

We have this instinct to simplify complex situations. We have trouble with ambiguity and some people are uncomfortable with anything that isn’t clear-cut. When they encounter gray, they reflexively convert it to something less nuanced. Everything must be either black or white.

But humans aren’t simple in that way. The balance between the good and bad a person does is irreconcilable — the one doesn’t count against the other, they don’t cancel each other out.

No one is innocent and all do good and bad and that applies to Gandhi and Paterno and your mother and Jerry Sandusky and the Dali Llama and every other person who has lived.

You can’t accurately quantify the value or impact of any particular good or evil act in the first place — the repercussions of each are fundamentally immeasurable.

So for instance, say that Jerry Sandusky molested 30 kids, and he made varying degrees of positive impact on hundreds or thousands of kids through his charity, and the impact of his trial and associated scandals brought great shame upon a university and at the same time brought an issue to light that maybe prevented the same type of situation arising for many other kids… and these are just the first order effects. If you can put that on a scale and get any kind of meaningful balance from it, you are either God or you’re fooling yourself.

Go on to second and third order effects, and it becomes infinitely complex. Maybe one of those molested children still manages to accomplish something in his life, and maybe it’s because of strength he gained from the ordeal he was subjected to. And maybe another of them commits suicide and never makes a contribution that he otherwise would have made. The cascade of effects, both good and bad, is too complex to begin to calculate — it’s all just part of how things go, and if you believe in fate or destiny or a controlling power of any sort than you must also believe that this is how things were meant to go. If not, well it’s still how things have gone whether there was intent or not.

It is deeply unsettling (but not surprising) to see people’s responses to this Freeh report, to see how logic and a sense of justice and a scientific approach to evidence and proof and so on is so very absent from most people’s sense of things. They leap to the conclusions they want to leap to, to confirm or deny their preexisting ideas (and restore that unambiguous state of black or white they crave). Surely we can do better.

Rough (adj): not perfected; a disorderly, unrefined, or unfinished state

(More about Roughs)