Tag: Civility

The Rights Revolution & a Code of Etiquette

The Rights Revolution & a Code of Etiquette

Posted on by jabittan
“The prohibition of dodgeball represents the overshooting of yet another successful campaign against violence, the century-long movement to prevent the abuse and neglect of children,” writes Steven Pinker in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature. Pinker argues that the Rights Revolution, endowing people with unalienable human rights that need to be defended by the state, is part of a progressive civilizing campaign stretching back hundreds of years in human history. This civilizing process includes taboos against behaviors such as knifing a dinner guest who says something mean, urinating in public, beating up strangers, and as Pinker notes, dodgeball. Humanity has slowly been civilizing and that has brought about more peaceful behaviors which we can see in how we think about violent (but not necessarily super dangerous) children’s games and sports.
 
 
Pinker continues, “it reminds us [the dodgeball prohibition] of how a civilizing offensive can leave a culture with a legacy of puzzling customs, peccadilloes, and taboos. The code of etiquette bequeathed by this and the other Rights Revolutions is pervasive enough to have acquired a name. We call it political correctness.”
 
 
I find the way that Pinker places political correctness within a frame of a civilizing process to be interesting and helpful. People often complain that political correctness means they can’t say what they think and what they believe to be true. (Personally, my sense is that people dislike political correctness because they can no longer say mean things about minority populations with cultural traditions they find strange, people with disabilities, or people who are not cisgender). As Pinker notes, this is part of a civilizing process revolving around human rights. Civilization continues to recognize more people who have been marginalized and to affirm their rights, which may include prohibitions against minor discriminatory actions, like name calling or refusing to bake someone a cake.
 
 
Political correctness is a code of etiquette that helps us be more civilized toward each other. We can argue about where it overshoots (as Pinker does with dodgeball – an activity I don’t have a problem being prohibited in schools) but we should all be able to recognize that it is a response to a continually evolving cultural civilization process. Political correctness is not some form of mind control or some form of deliberate feminization of society. It is a continued movement and ever developing code of etiquette which guides us to be more respectful of human rights and less tolerance of belligerence and violence in human society.
Ignoring Old Testament Violence

Ignoring Old Testament Violence

Posted on by jabittan
I am by no means a biblical scholar and I am not a religious person in general, but my understanding is that the Christian god in the Old Testament is a wrathful and vengeful god. I understand that there are examples of genocide perpetuated by said deity, that there are murders ordered and condoned by the god, and that the text is quite violent in general. But much of that violence seems to be ignored, referenced as not being literal but symbolic and metaphoric, and generally less of a focus among religions that view the Bible as a sacred text.
 
 
Steven Pinker writes about this phenomenon in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature to demonstrate how people and societies have become less violent over time. “In recent millennia and centuries,” he writes, “the Bible has been spin-doctored, allegorized, superseded by less violent texts …, or discreetly ignored. And that is the point. Sensibilities toward violence have changed so much that religious people today compartmentalize their attitude to the bible. They pay it lip service as a symbol of morality, while getting their actual morality from more modern principles.”
 
 
Pinker references the violence of the Old Testament and the lack of violence in subsequent religious texts while demonstrating that the world has become a less violent place. Religious violence and violence condoned by a deity is simply less common. Texts which followed the Old Testament became less violent as the people writing those texts also became less violent. Today, violent sections of religious texts are almost entirely ignored or explained in a way that deemphasizes their violence. The modern world is less violence and accepts less violence in policing, maintaining authority, and organizing society. This is a huge change for humanity, and can be observed in our cultural products such as our religious documents and attitudes.