The Wolf Pack of Central Park // Confront evil for what it is

`There seem," says a professor described as a specialist inadolescent behavior, "to have been some socioeconomic factorsinvolved." Ah.

Here is what those "factors" were "involved" in.

More than 30 boys, most under 16, went "wilding." In theirrampage, they raped and battered nearly to death a 28-year-old joggerin Central Park near Harlem. They hit her with a pipe, hacked herskull and thighs with a knife, pounded her face with a brick, boundher hands beneath her chin with her bloody sweatshirt, which alsoserved as a gag. Seven or more boys raped her. (One boy says he"only played with the lady's legs" and another says he only felt herbreasts and held her down while others raped her.)

Her larynx may have been crushed. She lay undiscovered fornearly four hours, losing three-quarters of her blood. The puddleshe lay in hastened hypothermia and her temperature fell to 80.

Various experts say they know why this happened. Alienation,anomie, boredom, rage - raging boredom? - peer pressure, inequality,status anxieties, television, advertising.

The professor who says "there seem to have been somesocioeconomic factors involved" elaborates: "The media, especiallytelevision, is constantly advertising these various things that arenecessary to define yourself, to be an acceptable person, and thejoggers may represent a level of socioeconomic attainment that themedia has convinced everybody is necessary to be an acceptableperson. So, to that extent, such people become a target." Ah.

Who is the victim? Well, yes, of course, the woman. But heridentity, even her reality, disappears as she recedes into acategory: high attainers. The boys, too, are victims. They wereprovoked by high attainers and disoriented by media-imposed criteriaof acceptable personhood.

We have here another triumph of the social science ofvictimology. Its specialty is the universalization of victimhood,the dispersal of responsibility into a fog of "socioeconomicfactors."

Another theorist speaks of the boys' "unfocused rage." Thefrequent references to the attackers' "rage" are fascinating becausethere is not a scintilla of evidence of rage. Actually, one of theboys blurted out the reason they did it. The reason he gave istheoretically unsatisfying, politically unuseful and philosophicallyunsettling, so he will not be heard: "It was something to do. It wasfun."

Newspaper reports have repeatedly referred to the "wilding"attacks as "motiveless." But fun is a motive. Policemen, with theirknack of the language of unvarnished fact, refer to "wildings" -packs of boys looting stores and inflicting random beatings - as a"pastime." Pastimes are adopted for fun.

In earlier, simpler - or were they? - days, descriptions of anepisode like the one in Central Park would have begun with a judgmentthat today is never reached at all: The attackers did what they didbecause they are evil.

Today people respond: " `Evil'? Such a primitive notion - notat all useful as an explanation." But that response is not realsophistication, it is a form of flinching. It is a failure of nerve.A vanishing moral vocabulary is being replaced by academic rubbishcollected reflexively by "serious" newspapers. They serve up a richsauce of sociological cant that coats reality, making itunrecognizable.

We have lost the ablity to speak the language of emphaticjudgment. As James Q. Wilson says, "Our habits of the heart havebeen subverted by the ambitions of the mind."

The ambition of the modern mind is to spare itself a chillingsight, that of the cold blank stare of personal evil. The modernprogram is squeamishness dressed up as sophistication. Its aim is tomake the reality of evil disappear behind a rhetorical gauze oflearned garbage.

Until relatively recently in most societies, people who did whatthe "wilding" boys did would have been punished swiftly and withterrible severity.

Punishment in this case will be interminably delayed andludicrously light. The boys know that; that is one reason they weresinging rap songs in their jail cells.

A society that flinches from the fact of evil will flinch fromthe act of punishment. It should not wonder why it does not feelsafe.