The rape of a name

(Warning: Link above is to an MP3 file.)

Last week, Dennis Prager spent an hour discussing his thesis that "the rape of a name can be as bad, or worse, than actual rape of the body."

Of course, this round of that topic is in response to what happened to the Duke University Lacrosse players. Not only did their families have to spend significant chunks of their inheritances defending them from charges that turned out to be false, their names and faces were splashed all over the New York Times, and they were labeled rapists by the District Attorney and a piano-full of professors (eighty-eight kiesters) at Duke. Fortunately for them, the fact that they were found innocent (not just "not guilty") was also headline news.

Dennis comes to this sort of situation with a statement from Judaism: He who publically humiliates another is regarded the same as if he had shed that person's blood. In other words, to harm or destroy a person's reputation is the same as harming or destroying that person.

He spent an hour on this topic because he's gotten any number of e-mails differing with him. There are any number of people who, at least on first thinking about it, have decided being physically raped is worse than having one's name dragged through the mud. This is even true for some of his callers.

Then he started getting calls from people who have seen the aftereffects of both. One person cited the statistic that many women refuse to report their rapes, because the damage to their reputation is more painful. (This may not be entirely valid – a woman may reasonably decide ten units of pain is enough, and she doesn't want to face the eleventh.)

And then the most telling caller was a woman who had been raped, and later had been accused of molesting one of her children. She stated the rape of her name was much worse.

So, after all that, we get to the point I want to discuss. Dennis was quite puzzled that one's reputation had come to be held so lightly, when in the past it was known to be extremely important. I think he's missing a bit of historical perspective.

In the past, when just about everyone lived in small communities, everyone knew everyone else. Whatever you did followed you around, often for the rest of your life. If you screwed up, your only option was to hope you could "live it down" – spend the next however many years atoning, and particularly doing very much other than what you had done to earn your reputation, so that people would come to disregard your past.

You could, of course, pick up and move to another village, if you had the freedom to move from place to place (many people were bound to the land and not free to leave). You also had to be willing impoverish yourself (money existed, but most people didn't have any, and there were no banks, especially none with branches in other cities). In effect, you had to abandon your life in one village, and trek to another one where you wouldn't be known.

And since you were an unknown in the new village, you would be forever regarded with suspicion. The process of relocating was hard enough that people only did it for very pressing reasons – like escaping a major stain on their reputation. You could probably not count on living long enough to be an accepted member of your new community.

With increasing freedom of movement, and with the increasing ability to pick up and move from one place to another, it became easier to outrun a reputation. If a person had learned his lesson, and mended his ways, it was actually possible to sail to a new country, or drive to a new state, and start a new life. There were enough people around who had done just that to make any other person who did so – well, not that strange. (And in places like the Foreign Legion or California mining towns, everyone was from somewhere else.) It became possible to outrun a reputation.

Fast forward a few years, and we have the anonymity of the big city. In a small town of a few hundred, it's possible to know everyone personally. In a small town of a few thousand, it's conceivable that everyone will be known by reputation. In a city of a hundred thousand or a few million, forget it. Most of the people you run into in a big city will be strangers, and chances are, you'll never see them again. Your reputation is whatever you do in the seconds or minutes you're interacting. Reputation is something you share with a fraction of the people you meet.

To be sure, it's possible for someone to attain "repute". People can become famous, or infamous. Paris Hilton has a reputation, as does Kato Kaelin. (Remember him? I only remember him because he's in an ask.com spot.) Or, you can be made famous against your will, like the Duke Lacrosse Players.

Part of being a member of a Global Village is that any reputation you have, or any reputation that is created for you, can be spread far and wide, whether you want it so or not. In your preindustrial village, your reputation was based on what you did, and word of it spread to everyone, for good or for ill. But villagers had limited power to shape another's reputation. If someone made up lies about others, enough people would compare the stories with the actual facts to earn the storyteller the reputation of a gossip. There were some incentives to watch what you said about others.

But now, in the global village of the 21^st Century, our cultural institutions and our sensibilities have lagged behind our power to spread information. Anyone can say anything about some other person, and post it where a Google search will find it.

Now, the insult one school child posts about another in her MyFace blog will probably not be counted as highly significant by a prospective employer doing a Google search. But I guarantee those Lacrosse players will have the tale of their rape charges following them forever. Every time someone does a Google search on their names, that story will come up. Thousands of links will pop up.

To be sure, Mike Nifong is no longer an attorney, and he's likely to die in poverty after he loses the lawsuit from the families of the three players. His reputation is now carved in digital stone. But no one in the justice system is proposing that Crystal Mangum (Janette Rivers) suffer any sort of penalty for what she did.

Back in the days when reputations were harder to run away from, laws developed to help safeguard them. In Jewish law, for example, the penalty for bearing false witness (in court) was that the one bearing false witness would be sentenced to the penalty the subject of the falsehood would have gotten, had the lies been believed. Crystal Mangum should be sent to prison for the same length of time the Lacrosse players would have had to serve, had they been convicted. If she's suitably remorseful, maybe she could be allowed to serve those terms concurrently. But she did serious damage to the reputation of the three defendants, as well as to the rest of the Lacrosse team. She also did serious damage to the credibility of anyone who steps forward with an accusation of rape. Her case will now be cited as proof that women do, sometimes, lie about being raped.

We're in a culture now where we can't run away from a reputation any more, and our laws have to allow us to protect them, or else we'd better forget our cultural and evolutionary past and learn that reputations don't mean anything.