Yeah, the military is known for claiming that its bonding rituals are incomprehensible to mere mortals. Noooo, racial integration won’t do … noooo, can’t have women in combat … noooo, homosexuals destroy unit cohesion. Every time there’s a uniform change, there are service members who throw a fit.
But the fact is that people in the military will always resist change, so those earnest claims that they are oh-so-different from regular people have to be taken with a grain of salt. The military has to be subject to the scrutiny of daylight.
Indeed, since we do trust them with the power to kill on our behalf, the military should expect to be held to stricter standards than anyone else. And if the policy decision is “You don’t get to bruise each other for your bonding rituals,” then they should expect to be held to that standard.
It’s not ritual slaughter. We don’t have them kill people so they can feel close to each other. It’s done to execute public policy. It’s professional and it’s public service.
A few years ago I started a thread about hazing. To my amazement, there was a substantial number of people who defended it. It looks like not a lot has changed.
Maybe this just got swept under the rug in the accounts I’ve read of life in U-boats, but what the stories always emphasized was the camaraderie, not inflicting pain and humiliation on new sailors.
My personal take on hazing is that it is a self-perpetuating nastiness that lets people take pleasure from causing harm to others in a socially acceptable fashion, and to make up for their own painful experiences by passing along the hurt to others. I have not heard of a lot of hazing in medicine, but I sense that much of the resistance in certain specialties (i.e. surgery) to cutting back on tremendously long hours is resentment that the new people won’t have the undergo the same crap they did.
I support making hazing (in the inflicting of marked physical and/or emotional damage) completely socially unacceptable. Ban the fraternities and sororities involved, reform the military, give the offenders real criminal penalties. “We’ve always done it this way” should go the way of the dodo. Here’s a substitute form of “hazing” for a fraternity - make the new guys do so many hours of community service before they can be accepted as full members, instead of being beaten and/or drinking until they pass out (and hopefully be revived later).
Yes, but in the particular case of the military, you and the people around you may be called upon to kill people, while those people are trying to kill you (and the people around you). Bonding rituals have a greater significance than to, say, some nine-to-five office worker in the Department of Transportation because of the occasional life-and-death aspect of the job where being a good co-worker means more than “don’t eat other people’s lunches out of the break-room fridge”.
Heck, the DOT worker might even more impact on the day-to-day lives of ordinary citizens, but nobody’s expecting him to run into a firefight to pull out a wounded buddy.
I gather, though, that “we’ve always done it this way” is not the problem - if there was a strict set of unchanging rituals, supervised by people who know to not let it get out of hand, it wouldn’t be a big deal. The deaths occur when there’s an unsupervised tendency to “enhance” the ritual, make it rougher or more alcohol-using or more extreme or what have you.
Hazing is like fire. It can be useful in certain situations, but it must be closely monitored and kept in check because it has a tendency to get out of control very quickly, and if it gets out of control, then people can get hurt or killed. It shouldn’t be used at all if it’s not necessary, or in fragile circumstances.
I want to reiterate that I’m not defending Ascenray’s definition of hazing. There’s never any need for “extreme physical, mental, or emotional distress”. The “beating in” that happened in that band is ghetto gang bullshit and shouldn’t be tollerated in any situation.
And I think the line should be different for different situations. While I don’t have a problem with “tacking” when someone earns their airborne wings, if anyone in my fraternity did this with pledge pins or badges I can assure you it would be stopped as soon as responsible brothers found out about it.
This thread has been completely baffling to me, particularly the varying definitions of hazing. Perhaps I’m just an odd breed of duck, but I can’t for the life of me figure out why any “new guy” in any organization should be subjected to anything remotely approaching hazing.
I’ve always hated, hated, HATED the territoriality that comes from present employees / members / whatever looking down on the new people. Even when it’s pretty well benign, it bothers me. For example, in surfing new learners are supposedly referred to as “hodads”. I think even that is out of order. I’ve run flight schools for a while, and I forbid students to be called anything but “flight students”. It’s perfectly obvious who is a student and who is a rated pilot, so there’s no respect issue that needs to be solved. And they have enough tricky stuff to learn without being made to feel even more inferior.
Same at the workplace. I’ve always been compelled to help the new guy along - show him how to get a copy made, how to get an outside line, where the best lunch places are - without making him feel like a moron. Want people to behave professionally? Then treat them that way.
Whenever this sort of thing comes up I think about the Metallica documentary that came out a few years ago. After years of hazing their bass player, he finally quit. They realized they had made a big mistake, and were so determined to keep the replacement they hired that they gave him a million dollar signing bonus and went out of their way to treat him as a respected member from the start.
I’ve never heard of a hazing incident where I live.
But I feel like its a product of our culture. I don’t understand why anyone would participate in the act though, either the volunteer or the perpetrator. It goes beyond idiocy.
Of course, we didn’t evolve with frats. There was always the logical oversight of elders. I suppose this is what happens when there isn’t, and a bunch of frat boys get too comfy in their ability to utterly dominate others.
As for the military, well, I don’t mind if they do hazing. Some people are suited for military service and some are not. I don’t think either type of person is better than the other. But the military, maybe the police and fire services, well, those are special jobs and they need to work as a group in very stressful situations and if hazing somehow helps that, well, haze away.
There is no way a college band needs hazing to function as a group. Nope, not going to buy that.
I was a music major in college btw. Hazing wasn’t part of our band. Since I was a “Music Education Major” and “hazing rituals” wasn’t something taught there, I’m pretty damn sure it isn’t necessary.