The first to state his case seems right until another comes and cross-examines him.
—Proverbs 18:17
Recently, this man has been excoriated by millions of people.
Why?
There was a brief clip of him that went viral. In the clip, his wife is carrying a child and food (to clarify, these were not the same) to their seats at a baseball game. While she has their child still on her lap, he begins eating. He eats first, even though she brought the food to him along with the child.
Now, the fact that it’s impossible to scry the character of someone’s soul from a 30-second clip without any sound was seemingly lost on the internet. Incredible numbers of people weighed in; the man’s name was identified, he was treated as an obvious and visible symbol of male entitlement, and thousands even suggested that the woman should leave him!
So unhinged was the media meltdown, that the woman (named Erika) took to Substack to tell the real story. Some relevant bits of context she provided:
The man (named Ramses) is quite an attentive and loving father.
When she went to the bathroom “Ramses offered to take Anastasia off my hands. I wanted to keep her. San Francisco night games get chilly, and we call her our little “hot pocket” because her body heat keeps you warm in the carrier.” After going to the bathroom, she decided to bring food back.
Then, when she returned, he offered to let her eat first. Instead, she suggested he eat first because she had eaten before leaving, while he hadn’t had a full meal all day.
So even if we set aside the procedural wrongness of this kind of speculation, it seems abundantly clear that he didn’t act wrongly! At the very least, the alleged “victim” of his behavior didn’t seem to regard it as wrong—and surely her testimony is considerably more pertinent than attempted psychoanalysis from random people on the internet.
Somehow, this did not stop the media meltdown. Believing the perspective of women stops, apparently, when you have the amazingly powerful contrary evidence of a 30-second clip with no audio taken at a Giants’ game. Huge numbers of people on the internet continued their self-righteous goblin-like sniping at the family dynamics of total strangers, even after the record had been corrected.
Of course, the people doing it told themselves that they were doing something noble—that it is vital, in the name of feminism, to criticize male misconduct. Obviously, this claim, applied to this case, is total nonsense. The reason people weighed in was because they enjoyed it. It’s fun to gossip, so we dress up our gossip in moralistic garb. A general heuristic: if some activity is suspiciously similar to an obvious vice, but the people doing it tell themselves that they’re behaving virtuously, it is very likely that this is just an excuse to indulge in the pleasurable vice.
Obviously, this whole thing is completely deranged. The public has no moral right to dredge through the personal lives of anonymous strangers. Doing so is voyeuristic and vicious. The ill-concealed glee of the internet commentariat is a clear indication that there was no serious moral case for doing this sort of thing; people did it because they like a spectacle.
There are two primary reasons that these public show trials are a bad idea. First, the intermittent drip of information that leaks to the public is often totally discordant with the relevant facts. The public generally has no special information.
Second, you cannot be declared innocent in the court of public opinion. Even if 99% of people agree with you, 1% will hate you. They will find out who you are. They will call your employer. Even when a person is totally vindicated by publicly available evidence, they will still be eternally haunted by the specter of their alleged malfeasance.
It is not desirable to have people’s lives ruined, without due process, in the event that they happen to, by bad luck, have the public eye trained on them. The punishment for offenses should be just (only punishing the guilty), consistent, and proportionate. The court of public opinion is none of those things. It is more akin to the trials at Salem than the ones we have in the modern day.
Probably you know where I am going with this.
Another case has dominated the headlines recently: that of the Cornell 7. Seven men have been accused of a gang rape. They have not yet been charged; there is currently a reopened DA investigation plus a civil suit. All the men’s faces and names, as well as the faces and names of the woman accusing them, have circulated publicly. This is a very serious accusation, and it should be adjudicated in court, after a careful examination of the facts. Note that many of the key facts are not public, and if you rely on a one-sided partisan explanation, then you won’t even have a good sense of the public information.
I’m not going to tell you what I think about the case. Because this is not the right way to decide on guilt. The way to assess whether people committed serious crimes is via a trial by a jury of their peers. It’s not by public guesswork based on limited information. If you don’t know the relevant facts, and are just going based on whether the person being guilty flatters your partisan sympathies, then you are doing something obviously immoral. You are joining the mob out of convenience. You are contributing to the destruction of people’s lives.
Imagine that you were either the victim of a violent crime or accused of one. Would you want the whole internet speculating on it, even without the facts being public? Would you want your name released, your guilt affirmatively declared, even without any serious attempt at a trial?
Here is another thing you should not do. You should not immediately claim to know who is right, and then suggest that this is indicative of some broader problem with men, or women, or feminism, or anything else. Rather than immediately rush to judgment, one should wait for the facts to come in. I realize that this delay may make it harder to use the incident as a political battering ram, but that is what one ought to do if one is a serious person.
I spent some time watching Instagram reels recently. Huge numbers of people declared the alleged perpetrators guilty, going so far as to treat the story as definitive evidence about corruption in the male soul. None of these people seemed to have even the slightest bit of doubt as to their guilt, even at a time when virtually no relevant information had been released. Similarly, I saw a number of conservative commentators weighing in and declaring it beyond obvious that the seven men were innocent and treating the whole thing as an indictment of modern feminism.
Does anyone seriously think that a trial in the public square, where all the “jurors” are self-appointed, there’s no selection process, and each of the members of the “jury” is fed partisan slop from their side that flatters their preexisting political views is a good way of deciding upon guilt or innocence? If you agree that this is obviously a horrible way to go about deciding whether someone is guilty, then you should not participate.
A jury is a much better way to ascertain guilt than a media spectacle.
What’s so good about juries? Two main things. First, they impartially consider all the facts, minus the ones that would be expected to be more prejudicial than probative. Rather than being fed a partisan slurry of one-sided truths, they hear both sides. Second, lots of people serve on the jury. Thus, the wisdom of the crowds generally leads to pretty reasonable decisions. In general, I trust juries more than even political commentators I like! In the vast majority of public cases, I find juries to be significantly more reasonable than the public commentary. I can usually figure out how the jury will vote. For example, I predicted a Chauvin conviction, a Rittenhouse acquittal, and I was uncertain about the outcome of the Daniel Penny case.
If you hear partisan commentators complaining about the results of a jury trial, you should think of it rather like someone who did a convenience sample complaining about the result of a randomized control trial that disagreed with them. It is of course possible that the political commentator is right and the jury wrong, just like it is possible that the convenience sample was higher quality than the RCT. But by and large juries are vastly more reliable than political commentators, like RCTs are more reliable than convenience samples.
This kind of public speculation demonstrably destroys the lives of innocent people, all in the pursuit of allowing strangers on the internet to self-righteously opine. We may get a kind of self-righteous thrill when we do it. But if we’re serious about justice and due process, then we should not arbitrarily destroy people’s lives by speculating about their guilt from afar—even when it’s fun to do, even when their guilt would be really convenient for our side politically. When we do, we lose a little bit of our soul.
