The Rude World Order

Two days ago I reported on Theodore Dalrymple’s analysis of the current and dismal cultural climate in Great Britain. As you recall, I compared the situation over there with the situation over here. Britain notwithstanding, we have little to be proud of culturally speaking.

American culture has descended into constant psychodrama and rudeness. 

For example, the current rage to prosecute Donald Trump is influencing the culture negatively. Making the courtroom the arbiter of truth damages all human relationships. 

Persecuting and prosecuting your political opponents counts among the lowest forms of human governance. The story is not going to end well. 

It defies democratic deliberation and precludes serious discussion of the issues. It does not merely appeal to the more base human instincts-- don’t debate the opposition; destroy him-- but also appeals to the products of our educational system-- functional illiterates who cannot understand anything beyond the conflict between guilt and innocence, crime and punishment. That is, people who cannot evaluate two opposing points of view.

Our educational system is producing a generation of idiots who do not have the intelligence to debate issues. They are perfectly happy to cover up their inadequacies by saying that opposing ideas are beyond the pale, and need not be debated.

Worse yet, deliberative debate requires decorum. It requires an ability to argue both sides of an issue, and it also requires that participants respect their opponents. People who debate effectively see the value in differences of opinions. They do not see their opponents as criminals.

If you think that the two sides of a debate are innocence and guilt, and that your opponent must be prosecuted and punished, if not silenced, you have mistaken the debating society for a courtroom.

So, we no longer live in a debating society or even in a society that resembles a tennis match. We want drama, we want to punish our opponents, we believe in constant struggle,  and then we cannot understand why everyone is so rude to everyone all the time. 

Authors of some of the recent good articles about the rude world order spend more time chronicling instances of rudeness and less space offering ways and means to overcome it. After all, rude behavior is more dramatic than decorum.

In truth, full disclosure, I am writing a book about how to overcome rudeness. In it I offer many pages showing how to be courteous, considerate and ethical. 

Importantly, rudeness is not a crime. You can be obnoxious and indecorous,  and you will not be breaking the law. No one is going to prosecute you for spitting in your soup or failing to wash your hair. You will not, normally, be prosecuted for it. True enough, you will not be making friends or forging alliances, but you will still not be guilty.

It is not difficult to understand. If the wide receiver drops a pass, it’s an error, a fault, a failing. It is not a crime. If you want to criminalize it, you need to create a narrative whereby the wide receiver is either betting on the game or is in thrall to gamblers who are doing so. At that point, his error becomes a crime.

In a culture that sees the world through a culture of guilt and punishment, you must wrap the event in a narrative, to render meaningful. That is, to reveal it as bespeaking criminality. In a guilt culture we are always working to advance the narrative, to persuade people that anyone who disagrees with us is committing a thought crime, and that our errors and mistakes can only be corrected by punishing thought criminals.

For those who care, such thinking is characteristic of Freudian psychoanalysis. 

It’s one thing to disagree. It’s one thing to resolve disagreements through negotiation and debate. It is one thing to choose one proposal over another, and then to allow reality to decide whether or not it works. In those cases you accept that you might be wrong, so you respect the other point of view.

In today's culture, people tend to reject deliberative debate and criminalize differences of opinion, by denouncing anything they do not like or understand as hate speech. They then declare that disinformation is a crime, that it is killing people.

So, we have thought crimes and the thought police. We are told, by supposedly serious thinkers, that the purveyors of misinformatoin must be punished. This relieves us of the need to debate and deliberate, to discuss and to test ideas. Where science deals in testable hypotheses, the new guilt culture deals in dogmas. When dealing with a dogmatic belief, there is no such thing as a fact that can disprove it.

Seeing the culture as a courtroom also produces pervasive rudeness. As long as you are not committing a crime, you can do as you please. And that means, a guilt culture countenances rudeness. 

When the only standard of bad behavior is criminality, we can make ourselves into public spectacles and reject anyone who judges us ill. We feel liberated from custom and convention, but are happy to punish those who disagree with us.

Writing on Axios, Tina Reed appraises the current cultural climate:

Concertgoers throwing things at performers, people talking on their cell phones through movies, tourists defacing historical landmarks in pursuit of the perfect selfie — the first truly post-pandemic summer has shown the bad behaviors unleashed during the stress of COVID aren't slowing down.

She adds this:

Obviously, not everyone has lost all sense of decorum. But anyone you ask likely has their own fresh anecdote of witnessing entitled customers barking demands at staff or an angry outburst at a restaurant. "Adult tantrums, rule-breaking, rudeness and general bratty behavior has not only become increasingly common on airplanes, it has spread," the Los Angeles Times recently wrote.

The result, feelings of social disconnection, leading to poor mental health:

Why it matters: A mix of worsening mental health and decaying societal connections, both exacerbated by the pandemic, may be driving this trend in rude behavior that could extend far beyond COVID's upheaval, mental health experts told Axios. Though other factors are also at play, they said.

What they're saying: "I think it's a breakdown of social norms," Megan Ranney, dean of the Yale School of Public Health, told Axios.

Dare I say that I am unwilling to blame it all on a virus. America has been entering the rude world order for decades now. The pandemic offered an excuse for something that had been a long time forming. 

At the least, we should understand it as the consequence of a movement to turn America into a guilt culture, to judge disputes and disagreements as thought crimes, to police speech and other forms of human behavior. Correlation is not necessarily causation.

Nothing about the virus has forced us into this degrading culture. The virus did not make people stupid, and stupidity is the basis for this simplistic reduction.

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