Death by Vodka

The local newspaper had another story today about the young man who died of alcohol poisoning a few weeks ago. Seems like he was "kidnapped" by a couple of sorority girls, duct taped up, painted blue, and offered vodka to drink. Indictments are to be handed down: the fraternity and the sorority will be arrested for felony hazing, there will be a gaggle of arrests for hazing and for providing alcohol to a minor.
A number of things emerge from the murk that surrounds the story. First, the fraternity and the sorority had apparently knowledge of the hazing. If so, this is stupid almost beyond belief. Second, the young man was not forced to drink. He was offered liquor. Different thing entirely. Third, it turns out that the young man had a history, albeit not a long one, of binge drinking.
Taken altogether, it seems that the hazing incident and the death from drinking are only tenuously connected. That is, the young man apparently did all the drinking on his own hook, and might have killed himself at another time. It happens.
So, what about the hazing, that people are being arrested for it? It seems to consist of the "capture" of a strong, aware, alert, young man by two young women. Second, the program included stripping the young man to his shorts, painting him (it is to be hoped) Aggie blue, duct taping him, and letting him drink himself to oblivion.
One if tempted to ask, "What would have happened if the young man had not died?" The answer is, probably, nothing. No charges, no arrests, no really screwed up lives.
Hazing is a dumb activity. It can be dangerous. It can be fatal. However, in this case, it was only dumb. Certainly one would not choose to be duct taped and painted blue. The kidnapping is a little more problematical; I don't think I'd mind that.
It's the death that has engendered this lust for justice (read "revenge"). The boy died; somebody has to pay.
The charges brought against the people involved are "just." That is to say, they are within the purview of the law. It's the motive behind all this that is a little unsettling. That and the fact that the newspaper hasn't remarked at all on the evolution of the story as more and more facts come out.

Fraternity revisited

This thing about the fraternity and the young man's death keeps hanging around in my mind. I am bothered by the events it generated, and I think I have figured out why. It's all about presumption. There's an old rhetorical doctrine that nobody thinks much about anymore, but that is very operative in our lives. It's called the "doctrine of presumption." What the doctrine says is that in nearly all situations in which we have to make a decision, you can make presumptions about the argument. In the case we know best, consider a guilty/innocent problem. The doctrine of presumption here is that, in America at least, a person is presumed innocent. This means that the "guilty" forces have to prove their case; the "innocent" forces don't have to. In other countries, the doctrine might be different: that one is guilty unless proven innocent.
Another of the cases where the doctrine might hold is in the matter of change. Traditionally, the doctrine has been that a new "ism" has to prove its case before it can replace the status quo. Conservatives like this presumption. Liberals, on the other hand, would rather, I think, prefer that the new is presumed to be better than the old.
Back to the frat question. The situation seems to me to be that the university acted on a presumption that if something bad happened, the fraternity had a hand in it. Thus the speed of the action that banned the fraternity from campus.
There is nothing inherently wrong in a presumption of guilt approach. Sometimes you just gotta pull the trigger when you're not quite sure.
In this case though, I wonder if it doesn't spring from either PR or CYA, rather than a desire for justice. But, as I've said, not all the evidence is available to me.

Confusion on Campus

About a week ago, a young man attending my university did some serious drinking off campus, lay down and, sometime during the night, died of alcohol poisoning.
That's what we know. Details are frustratingly rare and couched in tentative terms. The Utah Statesman, the campus paper, said, "The drinking was part of an initiation " into a fraternity, "which could consititue hazing." Coulda woulda shoulda. Again, from lack of details, I'd assume that frat-rats were involved in the drinking, but haven't the faintest clue whether it was countenanced by the fraternity (If it was, the fraternity is dumb as a post. If they were getting around campus regs, they're criminal to boot).
We can assume the young man got the booze from somewhere, and that means that at least one law was broken in the process, since the young man was under the legal drinking age.
However, people assumed a lot more than that, at least from the published reports. The university president immediately shut down the fraternity and a sorority, though there doesn't seem to be any evidence forthcoming that they were culpable in the young man's death. Sort of a "shoot from the hip and ask questions later," approach. The words "hazing incident" were also bruited about, and a round-robin of finger pointing ensued.
As I write this a week later, the account from today's newspaper tells me nothing new. The frat and the sorority are still closed, and police are investigating.
First off, the death was horrible. It was devastating to the young man's friends and family.
But. Was there hazing? Hard to tell, but from what I know so far (very skimpy, true) I'd say probably not. Somebody gave the young man booze. That's wrong and stupid to boot. But unless someone sat on his chest and poured vodka down his throat, it doesn't seem to be hazing. Nor does evidence point to active involvment by the fraternity.
But -- and here's the crux of this problem for me. The attitude seems to be: The young man died and someone has to pay. In all this pother, no one has thought to concentrate on the person most responsible for the young man's death -- the young man himself. He played a major role in his own death. That sounds harsh, doesn't it? Yet that has to be taken into account as we assign blame and punishment.

The doctrine of an eye for an eye was never meant to be taken literally. It was simply a way of assessing what a transgressor owed those he or she had transgressed against. A life has been lost. But who the transgressors are and what the transgressions were is a more difficult problem. You can't simply say: "A young man died; someone must pay." At least not at the life-for-a-life level. The part the young man played in his own death has to be taken into account, as painful as that may be.

I honestly think that as the investigation stretches out it will become less of an emotional posse gettin th' varmints and more of a rational process under the guidelines of law. After all, that's what the law is for. Here's what I think will happen. A couple of people will be charged with offenses like providing alcohol for a minor. The frat and the sorority will be quietly reinstated, and that will be it.
It's entirely possible, though, that the lives of more than one young person will be ruined because they were stupid and weak. I hope not. It's also possible that the fraternity and sorority will be closed permanently. I won't grieve over this, as the greek system has always seemed to me a place where lead-heads get together to convince each other that they are superior. But I wouldn't like for them to get railroaded either.
I am sincerely sorry for the loss of this young man. I hope, though, that the loss doesn't lead to a rush to make somebody pay at all costs.