Notes from Virginia Postrel Discussion, 7/21
coming next: Allison Schrager
Virginia Postrel had many interesting things to say at our subscriber discussion the other night.
Asked about what she thinks is driving Wokeness, she said that it is multi-causal. But one factor she cited is a desire on the part of young people to be polite. Calling people by their preferred pronouns and avoiding micro-aggressions can be seen as an attempt to be polite. Of course, by my standards these forms of politeness are not admirable, and the activists on Twitter are anything but polite.
Some more of my thoughts:
If you go back to the 1950s, there were standards of politeness that people followed. You were not supposed to use four-letter words. Men went to baseball games in white dress shirts. Nobody went to the theater or went on a plane trip in blue jeans.
We boomers treated these norms of politeness as at best unnecessary and at worst hypocritical. We threw out the whole concept.
But maybe there is a human longing for standards of politeness. Adhering to standards of politeness shows respect for other people and puts them at ease. When I see a group of young black men using the F-word and the N-word with one another, I wonder whether they would have more self-esteem if those words were not used.
Just as young people seem to want to re-introduce some norms of restraint into sexual conduct, perhaps they want to re-introduce some norms of politeness into conversation.
Postrel was asked how she would update The Future and its Enemies. I could see spending an hour dealing with questions related to this. Are there any dynamists prominent in politics today? Are there countries that are more dynamist than the U.S.?
Postrel said that libertarianism in the United States is an awkward alliance between nasty “leave me alone” types and nice “don’t dictate to others” types. She invoked David Hackett-Fischer’s classic Albion’s Seed. That might be a good book to discuss at some point. The nasties are the descendants of the Scotch-Irish “borderers.” The nice are the descendants of the Quaker migration. The former are Trump supporters. The latter are more likely to be #neverTrumpers.
Next Monday, July 25, at 8 PM New York time, Allison Schrager will be our guest.
The politest man I ever knew (and the best example of positive masculinity) was a borderer. He was a working class streetfighter, and although he was not formally educated, and capable of great violence on a professional level, he was neither stupid nor rude. In fact, he was courteous, and even charming; he recognised that it is one's behavior rather than one's presentation that is important with regard to making others feel at their ease, which is the goal of politeness, and he tailored his behavior to his company to that end. He knew (and taught me) what I think of as The Rules, which are old and based ultimately in the psychological requirements of human biology, and have nothing to do with pronouns.
Albion's Seed should be taught in middle school. It'd lead directly to a society that recognizes what's important about cultural differences and what isn't.
> We boomers treated these norms of politeness as at best unnecessary and at worst hypocritical. We threw out the whole concept.
Indeed. Was it purely a youth phenomenon, though, or were there specific elite milieus - perhaps small and relatively isolated ones? - where this attitude flourished? Might these have had the opportunity, for the first time, to short-circuit the conventional status hierarchy - perhaps by means of mass communications - to appeal directly to the status antennae of boomer adolescents?
> young people seem to want to re-introduce some norms of restraint into sexual conduct
Into straight men's sexual conduct, perhaps. From the messaging around monkeypox (see CDC's communications guidelines published just the other day, or this WaPo opinion and comments thereto https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/18/monkeypox-gay-men-deserve-unvarnished-truth/) we see that gay men's sexual conduct is sacred and the thought of asking them to restrain it, much less the thought of restraining it by threat of law and force as was done with much non-sexual conduct on account of coronavirus, is almost sacrilegious. Women's sexual conduct is sacred too. I challenge readers to find any recent message from a mainstream source urging women to restrain their sexual conduct.