Re: Politically Correct

HVS <harvey.news@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 05 Jul 2006, dontbother wrote
HVS <harvey.news@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 05 Jul 2006, Tony Cooper wrote

Yet, doing something or not doing something because we think
that others will bully us - if even by a frown directed our
way - is part of the reason we observe conventions.

I'm happy to concede that it may be one of the reasons, or
part of the reason, why some people observe conventions.

I don't think, though, that the possibility of bullying
(however one decides to define that) universally and
invariably forms part of the reason why conventions are
observed.

Uh-oh. Next we'll be reading that most people are conventional
because they feel or think or believe that that's the right
way to be and because they'd rather be right than wrong, not
because of the shame involved in being wrong, but because
they're altruistically committed to rightness and goodness
because people are basically good at heart.

You seem to want my statement -- that bullying does not
universally and invariably form part of the reason for observing
conventions -- to imply that "most" people are conventional for
non-bullying reasons. Sorry, but it doesn't say that.

I'm wary of the sort of fashionably

I'm nothing if not unfashionable.

world-weary cynical stance you present in your response;

Cynical, yes, to the nares and above. I've seen too many too and much
that have helped create a not uncommon cynicism. I wouldn't call it
fashionable, just unavoidable for some of us.

World-weary. No, were I so, I'd check out, but I am weary of do-gooders
with humanitarian motives and the best of intentions. Social engineering
is a dangerous game to play because the consequences of that game are too
unpredictable. Sometimes things work out well and sometimes they don't.
The '60s should've taught everyone that lesson. An idealistic age with
lots of people who thought that love was all ya needed and righteousness
would prevail once we raised our consciousnesses. What crap! There were
some good things that happened, but nothing was a great success. We just
learned all about how unfairness (a recent and maybe still current topic
here) comes around after it goes around long enough. That was a valuable
lesson, but it won't have any lasting effects, I fear.

but that doesn't mean that I was implying anything towards
"most people" (let alone the rest of it).

I inferred the rest of it.

YMMV, but I think it is indeed possible that some people -- not
all, not even most, but a reasonable number -- may well observe
convention without ever having thought of the consequences of not
doing so, let alone because they've been bullied by those
consequences.

No, I agree that there are unthinking people in the world, the kind that
act in certain ways just because that's all they know and all they've
ever done and would be loath to do otherwise because otherwise is
unfamiliar, unknown, and even unthinkable at times. I think we're all
guilty of that when we act. Some more and others less, but all guilty
nonetheless. But I'd expect most of those people to be the kind that
Clifford Geertz described in his wonderful essay "The Impact of the
Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man". Hint: they're the ones who say
"to be human is to be Javanese".

http://tinyurl.com/f6jv2

I wrote a little essay on being bullied a couple of years ago. I'd have
to look for it, but my thesis was that everyone is bullied by parents,
older siblings, and other relatives until sufficiently socialized. We all
know the consequences of flouting convention, not because that knowledge
is hard-wired into our brains, but because we've all suffered for doing
it. And then, of course, there's peer pressure, the "But, mommy,
everybody else {does it/has one} and if I don't, they'll all think I'm a
dork" school of behavior, the one that most of us go through during our
extended childhoods, which for some of us is a birth-through-death affair
lasting from a nanosecond to more than a century.

--
Franke: EFL teacher and medical editor
Unmunged email: /at/hush.ai
Native speaker of American English, posting from Taiwan
It's all in the way you say it, innit?
.

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