Sympathy or schadenfreude?

My indecisive gene is on overtime again, thanks to two articles in a recent New Yorker. The first, from Nancy Franklin, reported on Madoff's visit to court, replete with "a damnable smile ... language that betrayed even more lies, deceit, and pathological self-righteousness ... sweet-talking, disingenuous ..." and so on. The passive self-justification in Madoff's supposedly apologetic statement to the court is truly amazing, and the moment at the end of the account - when "two court officers approached Madoff, who stood silently and still, and then he moved his arms a little so that his hands were behind his back. And then there was a click" - is the closest this armchair liberal has come to glorifying in punishment in a pretty long time.

The second compared Madoff's Ponzi scheme to an example from the past, a guy called Ivar Kreugar. Here we see how greed comes on slowly, not all in a rush, that massive fraud builds first from cutting corners here and there, a desire to please and impress; and can only work its magic when it builds upon the greed of clients sucked in by the promise of magical returns. In this sense, the process of fraud seems more seduction than thievery.

To explain is not necessarily to permit, and the difficult bit about any such supercase like this is balancing the moral and the social. One way of looking at things it to focus on the collective delusion fostered by cheap credit, and stress how we were all in our own ways suckered in by dirty little promises of wealthy living beyond our means. Madoff, in this sense, was just the stand-out representative of an era of generalised inattention to the foundations of our economy. Moral respondents will rightly reply that, even under these conditions, Madoff need not have taken the choices he did. Other financiers, who knew how to, nevertheless avoided the temptation to engage in massive fraud. To stress systemic factors that draw attention away from Madoff's own moral responsibility as an individual runs the risk of invalidating their prudence and honesty.

I must admit, I'm very pleased to hear the click of those handcuffs.

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