Jay Tea at Wizbang! uses the Muslim community of Lodi, California, as an example to argue that snitching is good.
Over the weekend, I picked up on this story (courtesy Mike Pechar of The Jawa Report), about the militant Islamists awaiting trial in Lodi, California.It turns out that most of the evidence against the father and son accused of being part of Al Qaeda is tape-recorded conversations, and the local community says that a man who had made himself an integral part of them has now vanished. The locals say that he must have been the FBI informant.
This is exactly why so many people -- myself included -- tend to be suspicious of the average Muslim. Here we have pretty clear evidence of a couple of would-be terrorists in their midst, and they are far more concerned with who ratted them out than the fact that they had a member of Al Qaeda living among them.
It's very normal for groups to want to protect their members from outside punishment, either because they want to reserve the power of disapproval and punishment for their own group, or because don't respect the laws and morality of the greater community.
So when is it ok to snitch? We generally teach children that it isn't good to gossip or be a tattle-tale, but there are obviously many situations in which you'd want your kids to tell on each other, just as there are for adults. Is the seriousness seriousness of the offense the determining factor? Should groups generally be allowed to self-police until and unless they demonstrate inability or unwillingness?
The use of non-violent social pressure to police members of a group is typically very effective, as long as the culture of the group lines up with that of the larger society. Kids can't self-police because their naive culture is barbaric and kids as individuals are incompetent. But adults aren't as limited, which is why when kids break the law their parents are often given a chance to correct the matter, with society only stepping in if the parents are ineffective.
What we see in the case of the Muslims in Lodi is that they didn't exert social pressure to prevent the potential terrorists in their midst from acting in furtherance of their destructive goals. If the local Muslim community had confronted these men and condemned them privately, it's unlikely that they would have continued along the path that brought them to the attention of the FBI. We know they had the power to stop the terrorists, and most likely the knowledge, but they decided not to. Did they agree with the terrorists' goals? Who knows. What we do know is that, as Mr. Tea points out, whoever snitched on them was a hero, not a traitor.
Is the rightness of snitching purely in the eye of the beholder, or can some more objective criteria be established?
Severity may be it, or perhaps it's more a a matter of victimless crimes vs. victimful ones. Then again, I consider DUI a victimful crime because it puts everyone at risk, even though it doesn't actually hurt someone every time or even most times; yet, I'd be reluctant to snitch on someone from DUI if no one got hurt. Maybe this is a Potter Stewart case where we know it when we see it. Terrorism certainly qualifies, but then again, so does a mob beating a defensless woman within inches of her life and then having no one report the incident to police for more than three years afterward.
In all of the cases I can think of, the taboo against snitching serves no purpose at all except to protect wrongdoers from punishment (where I distinguish "snitching" to an authority from "informing" to an enemy). I can't think of any cases where the anti-snitching community actually tries to correct the wrong behavior on their own. Children, prisoners, gangs. In all cases, the group does not punish the wrongdoer, only the snitch.
Did you have some groups in mind?
The question with snitching is the level at which one's strongest loyalties lie. We all feel loyalty to our families and friends. Many also feel loyal to community, state, nation, ethnic group, high school, college, fraternity, etc.
The question is the relative strength of those loyalties, both as they are and as they should be. If your brother is a drug-crazed criminal loose in the city, and you know where he is, do you 1) tell the police where he is to protect your community, or 2) stay quiet out of family loyalty? If a graduate of your alma mater gets a job with your employer, and you catch him stealing office supplies, do you 1) turn him in out of loyalty to your employer, or 2) stay quiet out of loyalty to a fellow [insert college sports team name here]?
The idea that snitching is morally wrong boils down to saying that our small-scale loyalties should be stronger than our higher-scale loyalties, e.g. our friends should count for more than our country. These days it comes more from the Left: We rarely see movies, for example, in which the hero fights for something big like his country or religion. It’s far more common to see movies that stress loyalty to friends as the highest moral good. Only the bad guys consistently believe in causes significantly larger than themselves.
Even in war movies, where you might expect at least a little sense of grand crusade, the soliders fight only for their buddies and their own selfish reasons. Contrast this with actual interviews of soldiers in Iraq today, who consistently emphasize their sense of higher purpose in liberating and helping the Iraqis. Somebody needs to tell Hollywood that sometimes even soliders in the trenches believe in great causes.
Today the pendulum is swinging away from the primacy of frienship and evils of snitching, and back towards higher-level loyaties. 9/11 certainly pushed it in that direction, encouraging people to proudly self-identify as Americans. I think that it’s a good sign when people don’t think of snitching as morally suspect.
DR: Lots of groups come to mind. How about the Amish? They punish their members for many crimes without relying on the cops (by my understanding). Many churches are similar, but not all. Families often do this sort of thing, punishing kids for stealing without calling the cops. Etc.
So do the LDS.
DR and I have a different meaning for 'snitch' than what MW and Barry are talking about. Snitching to prevent someone from escaping punishment for their evil deed is entirely different from snitching to pile extra punishment on someone who has already been punished effectively.
The proper goal is to find the right level of punishment, and snitching or not should depend on the circumstances. In an authoritarian regime, it might be preferable to let someone go unpunished for a petty crime rather than report them and have them subjected to unreasonably harsh punishment.
FYI, my prior example of the Oakland woman being beaten for snitching now appears to be wrong. Since the video surfaced on the Internet and TV news, she came forward and talked to the police. Apparently, she didn't snitch on anybody, nor did she even know her attackers. All she did was rebuff a pimp's advances, he felt "dissed" and turned his animals on her.