I am, technically, I suppose, a journalist. But I really prefer not to call myself one, for two reasons: a) I don’t really do what I consider journalistic work: rather I just say what I reckon - and mostly I say what I reckon about TV shows, which is as unimportant as it gets, so I don’t feel like the fact that I write for newspapers to justify the label; and b) a lot of the time it’s a label I think I’d be ashamed to carry, given how basically revolting a hell of a lot of journalism is.
The latter point was yet again hammered home to me in the last few days by the hideous beat-up over Shore School headmaster John Collier’s newsletter, in which he tried to make sense of something horribly senseless: the horrific murder of Lilie James at St Andrews, where Collier had previously been headmaster.
The article I linked to above made me incredibly angry, as did this one reporting that Tanya Plibersek had shoved her oar in to grab some cheap political credit at the headmaster’s expense. Plibersek said “This violence-excusing behaviour must stop before yet another woman’s life is taken” - this is an outright lie on the minister’s part and she should really be ashamed of making such a dishonest defamatory statement.
It makes me angry because it’s an example of what I consider a grossly distasteful habit of the media: the habit of capitalising on tragedy by finding a scapegoat to smear, by whipping up outrage and directing hate towards an innocent person so that the public’s fear and anger can be focused in a way that maximises clicks.
The first point that should be made is that the only reason anyone beyond a minuscule percentage of the population ever heard about this newsletter is due to media reports on people denouncing it. If John Collier’s views are really reprehensible, it’s those loudly claiming as much who are reponsible for them being widely disseminated.
The second point is that, unlike the people criticising him, John Collier is close to this case. He knew the alleged murderer. Until recently he was a part of the school community that has been shattered by the crime. He, like many people, is struggling to comprehend the extreme horror of what happened, and his newsletter was an attempt to work through his own feelings and offer some kind of comfort to others who were struggling in a similar way. Even if he had stumbled and said something wrongheaded or insensitive in his newsletter, I would give him a pass, and would see absolutely no benefit to anyone in taking a document distributed to a small group of people and using it to vilify him to a national audience.
However, as it happens, such is not the case. This isn’t a case of the punishment not fitting the crime, it’s a case of there being no crime to punish. I want to be really clear here: John Collier has done nothing wrog. Nothing at all. The ABC article cherrypicks quotes to make it look like he’s said something heinous - and fails in that job anyway - but here is the full text of what he wrote.
As you’ll see from that, it’s probably a little heavier on the Christian angle than a lot of us would personally prefer, and I myself am never going to be on board with the idea that Jesus is the answer to the worst of human behaviour. But as he’s the head of a religious school, it’s not surprising that his thoughts come through a religious lens, and frankly it’s far lighter on the “Jesus is the answer” line that one might expect.
He also asks whether the murderer had a “psychotic” episode, as well as speculating on links between violence and pornography. Again, not hypotheses I’d back, but then he’s not backing them either: he’s questioning. He admits in the same breath that he doesn’t know, and we may never know, just why the killer killed. The whole point of the piece is thinking out loud, expressing the questions that run through our heads at times like these, the ways in which we try to find meaning in atrocities. But those questions have been interpreted by some as a claim that the murderer WAS having a psychotic episode. But everything in the newsletter makes clear that Collier is not making any claims, just trying to figure things out like anyone else.
Take note of this passage, which ends the newsletter:
Domestic violence is never OK. In later teen and early adult years when young people are assessing if a current relationship will be permanent, young men and young women need permission to end relationships without reprisals. Revenge is a base motive which is unworthy of us. Forgiveness literally is from the Divine. The extreme mode of ending a relationship where, sadly, usually a male will decide that if he cannot “have” this woman, no one can, is at the pathological end of the spectrum and is always going to lead to enormous grief amongst a number of people. Where young men exhibit such tendencies, help is available and needs to be accessed quickly.
As we proceed through our Building Good Men programme, we need to ensure that these elements of respect for other people, and oneself, need to be prominent as we endeavour to help our boys build the kind of characters that will be regarded as exemplary by men and women. We earnestly desire to build, in conjunction with parents, young men of broad perspective and character who will be, in the deepest sense, beautiful men.
If you have a problem with that passage - again, apart from any quibbles about whether forgiveness “literally is from the Divine” - then I am afraid I will have to differ with you. He condemns violence, condemns the attitudes that lead to violence, says we need to do better, and affirms that he and his school are committed to working to make positive change.
That passage, naturally, not the focus of reporting, because it would not assist the narrative of “let’s get this guy” that the media wants to promote. Instead we are invited to concentrate, and become furious about, this bit:
What is chilling about the tragedy that unfolded at St Andrew’s, the shock and grief of which will cascade for a long time, is that the young man concerned was, in everybody’s estimation, an absolute delight. I knew him years ago as a fine student, a Prefect, a role-model. This is what makes the situation chilling, in that on every indicator, he appeared to be just like the best of us. An hour before he committed the atrocity, he was speaking in a relaxed, friendly mode with staff at that school. Now two young lives are destroyed in their prime, two families have had their lives upturned in the most blistering in a way which will never really recede, and multiple friends, relatives and staff in two schools have been left in deep turmoil. He was not a monster; rather, in the last five hours of his life, he committed a monstrous act which was in complete contradiction to what everyone who knew him observed in the rest of his short life.
Now, here is the thing about that passage: there is nothing wrong with it. If you think there is, you’re wrong. That’s pretty hard to write, because I am a nice person who wants to allow room for all viewpoints and avoid insulting anyone, but there it is: you’re wrong. I understand why you’re wrong: I think you can be forgiven for being wrong given all the circumstances; but you’re still wrong.
The ABC article I linked at the start demonstrates the wrongness pretty well. It’s there that that passage is held up as a horrible example of disgusting male attitudes that perpetuate the problem and justify the epidemic of male violence against women. Sexual consent advocate Chanel Contos, who never saw a tragedy she couldn’t seek publicity from, says the newsletter is “symbolic of a much larger problem”. She says, “The whole point is that normal people do these crimes. It’s problematic to ‘other’ people who perpetrate violence because by doing that, we’re allowing people who exhibit normal behaviours in in other forms of life to go unnoticed without accountability.”
OK, cool. The problem with that? It is exactly the same thing that John Collier said in his newsletter.
Yes! The whole point is that normal people do these crimes! That is what the headmaster was saying! He was describing that very phenomenon! He was pointing out that such things are not done by “monsters”, but by men who seem perfectly nice and normal.
In a nutshell, HE IS AGREEING WITH CHANEL CONTOS!
This is not the “good bloke” syndrome. In fact, I think half the time the “Good bloke” syndrom is invoked it’s not really a thing. It’s a problem when a man is accused of a violent crime and people who knew him claim he can’t really have done it, or that it’s not a really big deal, because he is a “good bloke”. But in this case, and in a lot of others in which this cliche is decried, that’s not what’s happening. Nobody, least of all John Collier, is denying the killer’s guilt or excusing the act by saying he was a nice guy. He’s saying that it’s sobering to consider that people who we think are nice guys are capable of these acts, and that’s important to remember.
Chanel Contos is also saying this, and yet somehow she’s got herself in the news positioned as attacking John Collier.
The conversation goes like this:
Advocates: It’s wrong to think that men who commit violence against women are monsters - we need to realise that it’s ordinary men who do these things, and that exhibiting normal behaviour in other areas of life doesn’t mean a man isn’t capable of terrible acts.
Person commenting on specific tragedy: Yes, this case demonstrates very clearly that fact: that it’s ordinary men who do these things.
Advocates: Oh my god how dare you say that.
It’s not the first time this conversation has played out, and it won’t be the last.
Why is this? Why are we doomed to keep seeing “advocates” blame violent crime on people who agree with them?
Well, firstly, because the media sucks and journalists are incentivised to write articles that generate anger rather than illuminate truth.
Secondly, because people whose careers are based on publicising themselves by providing quotes on prominent news stories are incentivised, by the media which wants to generate anger, to tailor those quotes as attacks on other people, and denunciations of wrongthink, in order that every issue dealt with in a public forum be framed as a battle between the forces of good and evil.
And thirdly, because when a baffling, senseless tragedy occurs, especially when the perpetrator is dead and can’t properly be held to account, we are all desperate for someone to blame. We have fear and anger and hatred bubbling up inside us, we have howls of pain at the state of the world and the gut-wrenching nightmare of humanity’s worst moments that we need to give voice to. We need someone to howl at. We need someone to hate. We need to know that the world is not a terrifying bloody mystery. We need to feel that the root of evil is easily discerned and explained, and that we could stop it if only we can shame and re-educate the right people.
Not that evils like the murder of Lilie James are simply random manifestations of a darkness without source. Acts like this don’t occur in a vacuum and we know that in a violent, cruel and misogynistic world, it would be ridiculous to suppose that the appearance of violent, cruel and misogynistic men is just a coincidence.
But we can’t know exactly why. We can’t ever establish an easy chain of causation between a normal boy and a bestial murderer. And more unnervingly, we can’t ever get justice. Even when a murderer lives to stand trial and be appropriately punished, it won’t undo what’s done. When violence comes into the world, its ripples spread, and they don’t stop.
So we crave a simple answer, and as we thirst for justice, for some kind of righting of the ledger, we fall upon whatever we can to satisfy the urge. And what we find is how easy it is to grab hold of an innocent person and find something they’ve said that can be twisted into an appalling offence. And because they’re an innocent person, who possesses a natural human desire to not be the cause of hurt, they are easy to hurt. Much easier to hurt than the actual culprit, who even if he’s alive is existing on far too hellish a plane to feel the bruises of social opprobrium.
But the headmaster of a school, who wrote a newsletter attempting to make sense of it all? Oh yes, we can hurt him. We can make him feel terrible. If we try really hard, maybe we can even damage his career. And after all, look how privileged he is! This rich old man, dripping with the kind of entitlement that causes these crimes in the first place. It’s HIS fault. We must hold the innocent to account, because the guilty don’t care enough about what we think.
But John Collier did not do anything wrong. He didn’t say that a murderer was an absolute delight - he said that the fact that he was thought to be an absolute delight made the murder hard to process. He didn’t say that the murderer was a good person. He didn’t say that the murderer should be cut any slack. He didn’t make excuses for violence, or try to downplay it. All he did was express the distressing and confusing thoughts in his head about the crime, and affirm a commitment to improving the state of the world. Not only did he not say anything deserving of attack, he didn’t even say anything that his attackers have disagreed with.
I hope I live to see the day when something awful happens, and the only people who are publicly denounced for it are those who are actually responsible.
But my hope is not all that strong.