So You've Been Publicly Shamed (PSY8)

by Jon Ronson

  This was the happy ending Jonah believed Americans wanted. As I sat on the plane I realized I had no idea if his speech was good or bad, if it would go down poorly or well. The FBI stuff was overly tangential and evasive. Jonah wasn’t really like the FBI. As it happens I’ve done my own research on the perils of confirmation bias and agree with Jonah that it is a powerful bias indeed, often found at the heart of miscarriages of justice. In fact ever since I first learned about confirmation bias I’ve been seeing it everywhere. Everywhere. But even a confirmation bias aficionado like me could see that Jonah hadn’t succumbed to it. Deliberately padding out Bob Dylan quotes to fit a thesis about the creative process wasn’t confirmation bias.

  So I found the FBI digression a bit slippery, but there was still a good chance his speech could be like the end of Neil Diamond’s The Jazz Singer, where the disgraced synagogue cantor wins over the congregation by reminding them how beautiful his singing voice is. I emailed Jonah to say I thought his speech was fantastic. He sent me an appreciative reply. I asked him if I could come with him to Miami. He said no.

  *

  ‘I am the author of a book on creativity that contained several fabricated Bob Dylan quotes … I lied to a journalist named Michael Moynihan …’

  Jonah was at the Knight Foundation lectern, standing very still. I was watching at home on my computer. In his old lucrative public-speaking days his voice would rise and fall to emphasize this word or that, but now he sounded flat, like a scared child in front of the class. This was the most important speech of his life. He was begging for a second chance. As if things weren’t stressful enough for him, the Knight Foundation had decided to erect a giant-screen live Twitter feed behind his head. Anyone watching from home could tweet their ongoing opinion of Jonah’s request for forgiveness using the hashtag #infoneeds and their comment would automatically appear, in real time and in gigantic letters, right next to Jonah’s face. A second screen was positioned within his eyeline.

  I saw Jonah’s eyes flicker to it.

  Wow. Jonah Lehrer talk dives directly into a listing of failures, errors and mea culpa.

  And that, people, is how you apologize.

  During the preceding seven months Jonah had been disgraced and ridiculed and cast out. He had shuffled the canyons of Los Angeles in a never-ending sweat of guilt and shame, a constant clenched pain. And now, suddenly, there was light. I felt like I was witnessing a kind of miracle. Just like with my spambot men, we knew when to shame and when to stop. It was like we instinctively understood that Jonah’s punishment had reached an appropriate peak and now it was time to listen to what he had to say.

  And then Jonah moved on to the FBI analogy.

  *

  ‘I’d like to tell you a story that has given me a little hope. It’s a story about a mistake and how it was fixed. It’s a story that I was working on at the time my career fell apart. The story is about forensic science …’

  It quickly became extremely clear to Jonah, and to me watching at home, that the audience had no interest in his opinions on forensic science. Perhaps they would have had at some point in his career. But not any more.

  Jonah Lehrer boring people into forgiving him for his plagiarism.

  I am not feeling terribly convinced by the deadpan mea culpa droning on by @jonahlehrer.

  I can’t handle watching the @jonahlehrer apology. He is boring and unconvincing. Time for something else.

  Jonah carried on. He talked of how, a month before he resigned from his job, he interviewed the behavioural economist Dan Ariely on the subject of how ‘the human mind is a confabulation machine …’

  ‘The human mind is a confabulation machine.’ Now *that’s* passing the buck.

  Using shoddy Pop-psych to explain inability to even write shoddy Pop-psych from scratch.

  Jonah Lehrer is a friggin’ sociopath.

  Trapped at the lectern, Jonah had twenty minutes of his speech to go, followed by the Q&A.

  I agreed with the tweeter who wrote that Jonah was passing the buck when he said that the ‘human brain was a confabulation machine’. But by mid apology it seemed irrelevant whether the criticisms had legitimacy. They were cascading into his eyeline in a torrent. Jonah was being told in the most visceral, instantaneous way that there was no forgiveness for him, no possibility of re-entry:

  The only way @jonahlehrer can redeem himself from his failures is by doing completely different work. He is tainted as a writer forever.

  I have zero inclination to forgive or read his future work.

  Rantings of a Delusional, Unrepentant Narcissist

  Jonah Lehrer’s speech should be titled ‘Recognizing self-deluded assholes and how to avoid them in the future.’

  Still, he was forced to continue. He had no choice. He had to reach the end. He flatly intoned that he hoped that one day, ‘when I tell my young daughter the same story I’ve just told you, I will be a better person because of it. More humble …’

  Wait, Jonah Lehrer is speaking at a journalism conference? Did they run out of people who aren’t frauds with interesting stuff to say?

  Jonah Lehrer putting on a great demonstration of the emptiness of pop behavior-psych: a moral defective tries to blame cognitive failure.

  He has not proven that he is capable of feeling shame.

  The speech ended with a polite round of applause from the people in the same room as him.

  Amid the tidal wave of abuse there had been some calls for humanity, a few tweeters noting the terrible strangeness of what was unfolding:

  Ugh, Jonah Lehrer is apologizing next to a live Twitter feed of people mocking him. It’s basically a 21st century town square flogging.

  Jonah Lehrer is a real person. Twitter is making me so uncomfortable right now.

  Jonah Lehrer’s crimes are significant, but apologizing in front of a giant-screen Twitter feed seems cruel and unusual punishment.

  But all that was wiped away when someone tweeted:

  Did Lehrer get paid to be there today?

  ‘Of course he didn’t,’ I thought.

  And then Knight answered that question.

  Jonah Lehrer was paid $20K to speak about plagiarism at Knight lunch.

  Wish I could get paid $20,000 to say that I’m a lying dirtbag.

  And so on, until late that evening, when finally:

  Journalism foundation apologizes for paying $20,000 to disgraced author Jonah Lehrer.

  Jonah emailed. ‘Today was really awful. I’m filled with all sorts of regret.’

  I sent him a sympathetic reply. I said I thought he should donate the $20,000 to charity.

  ‘Nothing can turn this around,’ he replied. ‘I’ve got to be realistic about that. I shouldn’t have accepted the invitation to speak, but now it’s too late.’

  *

  ‘Fuck off, you can’t even do your apology without slotting it into some stupid Jonah framework,’ Michael Moynihan said to me over lunch at the Cookshop in New York City. Michael shook his head in wonder. ‘That wasn’t an apology. It was a string of Gladwellian bullshit. He was on auto-pilot. He was a robot: “Let me get this study from some academic.” All the words he used to describe his dishonesty. It was like a thesaurus had landed on his head.’ Michael paused. ‘Oh!’ he said. ‘Someone sent me a text. I thought he was reading way too much into it. But he pointed out to me that Jonah said “I lied to a journalist CALLED Michael Moynihan.” I love that. I said, “Yeah. I see what you’re saying.” He didn’t lie to “journalist Michael Moynihan”. That’s the great trick of the language. “A journalist CALLED Michael Moynihan.” “Who’s this fucking schlub?”’

  Michael took a bite of his steak. The fact was, his was a great scoop. It was great journalism, and what did Michael get from it? Some congratulatory tweets, which probably give you a bit of a dopamine rush or something, but otherwise nothing: $2,200 plus a veiled insult from Jonah, if Michael and his friend weren’t being paranoid about that part.

  Michael shook his h
ead. ‘Nothing came out of this for me,’ he said.

  In fact it was worse than nothing. Michael had noticed that people were starting to feel scared of him. Fellow journalists. A few days before our lunch some panicked writer - someone Michael barely knew - had confessed out of the blue that a biography he’d written might have inadvertently veered into plagiarism.

  ‘Like I adjudicate these things …’ said Michael.

  Whether Michael liked it or not, there was fear in the air now because of what had happened to Jonah. But Michael didn’t want to be some Witchfinder General, roaming the countryside with writers blurting out declarations of guilt to him, begging his forgiveness for crimes he hadn’t known they’d committed.

  ‘You turn around and you suddenly realize you’re the head of a pitchfork mob,’ Michael said. ‘And it’s, “What are these people fucking doing here? Why are they acting like heathens? I don’t want to be associated with this at all. I want to get out of here.”’

  ‘It was horrible,’ I said. ‘All this time I’d been thinking we were in the middle of some kind of idealistic reimagining of the justice system. But those people were so cold.’

  The response to Jonah’s apology had been brutal and confusing to me. It felt like the people on Twitter had been invited to be characters in a courtroom drama, and had been allowed to choose their roles, and had all gone for the part of the hanging judge. Or it was even worse than that. They had all gone for the part of the people in the lithographs being ribald at whippings.

  ‘I’m watching people stabbing and stabbing and stabbing Jonah,’ Michael said, ‘and I’m, “HE’S DEAD.”’

  *

  The next day I drove from New York to Boston to visit the Massachusetts Archives and the Massachusetts Historical Society. Given how vicious the resurgence of public shaming had suddenly turned, I wondered why that type of punishment had been phased out in the nineteenth century. I had assumed - as most people do, I think - that their demise was due to migration from the villages to the cities. Shame became ineffectual because a pilloried person could just lose themselves in the anonymous crowd as soon as the chastisement was over. Shame had lost its power to shame. That was my assumption. Was it right?

  I parked my car outside the Massachusetts Archive, a slab-like brutalist building on the waterfront near the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. Inside were the microfilms that preserve the earliest legal documents handwritten by the Puritan settlers. I took my seat at a microfilm reader and began to carefully scroll through them. For the first hundred years, as far as I could tell, all that happened in America was that various people called Nathaniel had purchased land near rivers. The spindly words swirled on the fraying pages. They really should have spent more time on paragraph breaks back then and less time on the letter f. I began to speed up, scrolling unprofessionally, decades passing before me in seconds, until I suddenly found myself face to face with an early American shaming.

  It was 15 July 1742. A woman named Abigail Gilpin, her husband at sea, was found ‘naked in bed with one John Russell’. They were both to be ‘whipped at the public whipping post twenty stripes each’. Abigail was appealing - not the whipping itself, but was begging the judge to ‘let me have my punishment before the people are stirring. If your honour pleases, take some pity on me for my dear children, who cannot help their mother’s unfortunate failings.’

  The documents don’t reveal whether the judge consented, but straight after that I found a transcript of a sermon that offered a clue as to why she might have pleaded for a private whipping. The sermon, by the Rev. Nathan Strong of Hartford, Connecticut, was an entreaty to people to be less exuberant at executions: ‘Do not go to that place of horror with elevated spirits, and gay hearts, for death is there! Justice and judgment are there! The power of government, displayed in its most awful form, is there … The person who can go and look on death merely to gratify an idle humour is destitute both of humanity and piety.’

  After lunch I travelled the few miles to the Massachusetts Historical Society, a grand old townhouse on Boylston Street. I remembered something Jonah had emailed me before I flew to Los Angeles: ‘The shaming process is fucking brutal.’ I thought about the phrase: ‘shaming process’. It was probably reassuring for a shamee to envisage their punishment as a process rather than a free-for-all. If you’re being destroyed you want to feel that the people tearing you apart at least know what they’re doing. Well, maybe less delicate shamees wouldn’t care how orderly their shaming was, but Jonah struck me as someone for whom structure was important and who had only ever wanted to impress people and fit in.

  It turned out that public shaming had once been a process. A book of Delawarean law I discovered at the Massachusetts Historical Society revealed that if Jonah had been found guilty of ‘lying or publishing false news’ in the 1800s, he would have been ‘fined, placed in the stocks for a period not exceeding four hours, or publicly whipped with not more than forty stripes’. If the judge had chosen a whipping, local newspapers would have published a digest detailing the amount of squirming that had occurred. ‘Rash and Hayden squirmed considerably during the performance, and their backs were well-scarred,’ wrote The Delawarean of an 1876 whipping. If Jonah’s whipper had been deemed not to have whipped hard enough, the reviews would have been scathing. ‘Suppressed remarks were expressed by large numbers. Many were heard to say that the punishment was a farce. Drunken fights and rows followed in rapid succession,’ reported Delaware’s Wilmington Daily Commercial after a disappointing 1873 whipping.

  The common assumption is that public punishments died out in the new great metropolises because they’d been judged useless. Everyone was too busy being industrious to bother to trail a transgressor through the city crowds. But according to the documents I found that wasn’t it at all. They didn’t fizzle out because they were ineffective. They were stopped because they were far too brutal.

  The movement against public shamings was already in full flow in March 1787 when Benjamin Rush, a United States founding father, wrote a paper calling for them to be outlawed - the stocks, the pillory, the whipping post, the lot:

  ignominy [being] universally acknowledged to be a worse punishment than death. It would seem strange that ignominy should ever have been adopted as a milder punishment than death, did we not know that the human mind seldom arrives at truth upon any subject till it has first reached the extremity of error.

  In case you consider Rush too much of a bleeding-heart liberal, it’s worth pointing out that his proposition for alternatives to public shaming included taking the criminal into a private room - away from the public gaze - and administering ‘bodily pain’.

  To ascertain the nature, degrees, and duration of the bodily pain will require some knowledge of the principles of sensation and of the sympathies which occur in the nervous system.

  - Benjamin Rush, ‘An Enquiry into the Effects of Public Punishments Upon Criminals and Upon Society’, 9 March 1787

  Public punishments were abolished altogether within fifty years of Rush’s paper, with only Delaware weirdly holding out until 1952 (which is why the Delaware-located whipping critiques I excerpt above were published in the 1870s).

  The New York Times, baffled by Delaware’s obstinacy, tried to argue them into change in an 1867 editorial:

  If it had previously existed in [the convicted person’s] bosom a spark of self-respect this exposure to public shame utterly extinguishes it. Without the hope that springs eternal in the human breast, without some desire to reform and become a good citizen, and the feeling that such a thing is possible, no criminal can ever return to honorable courses. The boy of eighteen who is whipped at New Castle [a Delaware whipping post] for larceny is in nine cases out of ten ruined. With his self-respect destroyed and the taunt and sneer of public disgrace branded upon his forehead, he feels himself lost and abandoned by his fellows.

  - Quoted in Red Hannah: Delaware’s Whipping Post by Robert Graham Caldwell, University of
Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia 1947

  As Jonah Lehrer stood in front of that giant-screen Twitter feed on 12 February 2013 he experienced something that had been widely considered appalling in the eighteenth century.

  I left the Massachusetts Historical Society, took out my phone, and asked Twitter, ‘Has Twitter become a kangaroo court?’

  ‘Not a kangaroo court,‘ someone replied quite tersely. ‘Twitter still can’t impose real sentences. Just commentary. Only unlike you, Jon, we aren’t paid for it.’

  Was he right? It felt like a question that really needed to be answered because it didn’t seem to be crossing any of our minds to wonder whether whichever person we had just shamed was OK or in ruins. I suppose that when shamings are delivered like remotely administered drone strikes nobody needs to think about how ferocious our collective power might be. The snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche.

  *

  Lehrer’s intention in submitting himself to a public grilling was to show the world that he’s ready to return to journalism, that we can trust him because he knows now not to trust himself. All he proved is that he’s not wired like the rest of us. If he can figure out why that is, that would be a neuroscience story worth publishing.

  - Jeff Bercovici, Forbes magazine, 12 February 2013

  I’ve been banging the drum for Lehrer to quiet his detractors and bank some goodwill by donating that $20,000 to charity … Finally, I managed to get him on the phone this afternoon. ‘I’m not interested in commenting,’ he told me. Could he at least say whether he planned to keep the money? ‘I read your article. I have nothing to say to you,’ he said, before hanging up.

  - Jeff Bercovici, Forbes magazine, 13 February 2013

  ‘I’m still not entirely sure what I can give you …’ Jonah’s voice trailed off. He was talking to me down the phone from his home in Los Angeles.