Ostracism

"That Guy? He's A -----!"

1

When I was in the fifth grade in Waban, MA, our class had an unmistakable queen and king. They were at the pinnacle of our local pecking order.

The queen of the grade was named Becky. She was tall and lithe, and she could run faster than almost all of the boys. The girl had game.

We were just 11 years old, too soon for crushes (I think), but we all knew that Becky was something special. She was full of fun, and she was edgy, too. She was Athena. (She was not as beautiful as her friend Nancy, whose time would come, but not until two years later.)

The unmistakable king of the grade was named Randy. He was the best athlete in the school, and he was the only one of us who could outrun Becky. Randy was earnest and kind. He was not edgy. But because he was so good in sports, he didn’t need to be edgy. He was Hermes. We admired him, and we liked him a ton.

2

One day, a rumor, stated as a fact, an evidently dreadful fact, went around our grade: Randy was “a Mormon.”

I put the term in quotation marks, because I had no idea what it meant. What was “a Mormon”? I think that few, if any, of the local fifth graders knew the answer.

But we did know this: “A Mormon” was something very bad to be. Randy went from the top of the heap, our king, to something like a nonperson. No one wanted to be friends with him - not any more.

I have some recollection of asking my parents what “a Mormon” was. My father had no idea. He might have said, obscurely, “it’s a religion.” I am pretty sure that my mother said a bit more. I have some vague recollection of her saying that she thought that Mormons “did not like black people.” My mother did not like racism, so that would be a mark against Mormons.

Note well: Randy, big and grown-up as he then seemed to me (and still seems to me, in retrospect), was just 11 years old.

This little event has stuck in my mind for decades; I think I know why (and will tell). I did not wonder, until now, what it all must have been like for Randy. Did he know why his fifth-grade friends and admirers suddenly refused to talk to him? Did he ask his parents? (There is a fair bit of research on ostracism: https://jbnezl.people.wm.edu/Reprints/2012-Goup-Dynamics-Ostracism.pdf)

3

Sometimes people are ostracized because of their deeds. People might violate some kind of taboo, and so they are ostracized. Of course there is an important social function to ostracism for bad deeds: The ex ante threat deters the deeds. It also reinforces the taboo.

But there is a proportionality problem here. The deed may not justify anything like ostracism. For example, Frank might have done something not-at-all good, but it’s important to have a sense of proportion. Anyway, here are some of Shakespeare’s greatest lines:

The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.

Sometimes people are ostracized not because of their deeds but because of some feature of their “identity” (terrible word, I think! - what’s your “identity”? do you even know?), which may or may not be thought, by those who are doing the ostracizing, to be inextricably intertwined with some bad beliefs, character, or acts. If my fifth grade class ostracized Randy on the ground that he was a racist, something like that would have been at work.

But we did not ostracize Randy because he was a racist. We ostracized him because he was “a Mormon,” and we had essentially no idea what that meant. All we knew was that it was terrible.

Ostracizing someone - cutting them off - is a bit like the death penalty. It can be wildly excessive. It often depends on social signals, and cascade effects, rather than on sensible moral reasoning.

4

Why have I remembered this little incident, the ostracism of Randy, for so long? Why has it haunted me, even though I have never told the story to anyone?

Three reasons come to mind. First, it was awfully dramatic. Second, it was genuinely baffling. It must have confused me terribly. (One more time: The word “Mormon” had no meaning to us; it was as if Randy had been said to be a “blyph.”) Third, I am pretty sure that eleven-year-old-me hated what happened. It seemed unfathomably cruel.

A very good friend of mine recently said to me, “I could not be friends with someone who” did X, where the “someone” who did indeed do X is a friend of mine, and where X is a violation of a widely held norm. (I want to keep X in the background for now. It was not murder or rape, or anything like that.)

When my very good friend said that, I felt myself recoiling. It reminded me of what happened to Randy.