From the (Frat) House to Society

Front Porch Republic’ s R. J. Snell offers some worthwhile reflections on the recent allegations at Dartmouth involving the fraternity culture there. Moving beyond a visceral reaction to the details, which manage to be both tawdry and pathetic, Snell looks to Wendell Berry to make a broader point about the degradation the human body. Disrespect for what seems to be an isolated unit (even one’s own body) naturally segues into broader social consequences, he says:

In his essay, “The Body and the Earth,” Wendell Berry argues that “the question of human limits, of the proper definition and place of human beings . . . finally rests upon our attitude toward our biological existence, the life of the body in this world.” If we devalue the body but separate and elevate the mind, we cannot be surprised to find that we begin to dehumanize our own bodies first, then the bodies of others, and then the entire world.

One could also easily add the influences of early and powerful formative influences, including the (likely minimal, in this case) ones of faith and family. To that end, in fact, Snell points to the notion of the household as the ordering model by which, and in which, we first find integration:

As the body is sent to war with itself, it is sent to war against other bodies (the horrific use of women in the frat scene is well documented), and then to war against everything.

Berry articulates as a sign of health the household, for the household is a responsible means of ordering sexual energy, as well as the bodies and persons and relations sustained by the household. Rather than existing for our own isolation, we exist for household; further, household exists not for its own sake against other households, but rather as an exercise of creative fidelity for the whole, for the whole world.

The Church has often referred to the family as a “miniature” of itself and also as a proto-state that trains for citizenship, so it is ironically apt that the Dartmouth students profiled live in “houses,” albeit ones that invert the foundations of those which successfully shape character. In that sense, the breakdown documented in the original expose is not merely a problem of individual behavior (though it is definitely that, too) but, in some sense, also a problem of politics. So an inquiry into fraternity “culture,” though it (like all post-scandal investigations) can be misappropriated as a punting device to avoid personal responsibility, is essentially correct. For as this unfortunate example illustrates, when the foundations of a shared public system are missing or warped, you wind up with strange outgrowths, indeed.