> 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.
I presume it was Postrel, not Kling, that called the descendants of the Scotch-Irish Borderers the "leave me alone" type alleged to be "nasty." This is a bigoted wholesale smear. I am surprised Kling would repeat it without qualification.
"Calling people by their preferred pronouns and avoiding micro-aggressions can be seen as an attempt to be polite."
That from Postrel is just ridiculousness. The attempts to enforce new pronoun usage is nothing but a power play and is, in fact, a macro-aggression, and it won't stop at pronouns either. If I know you are a male, you will be talked about by me to others as "he"; if you are a female it will be she; and if we are talking to each other, it will be "you". What comes out of my mouth is under my control, not anyone elses. My only concession is that I will use your chosen name, but that isn't a concession at all since it is what I have always done.
Pronouns are essential parts of language. It is not polite for a minority to attempt to change the meanings of these bedrock words for a whole society, and to do so by coercion. Politeness is not the first word that comes to mind in regard to these weird attacks from the social and psychological margin.
Anecdotes without control groups: I observe a cultural shift to be more empathetic as well as an undercurrent of seething rage that may be part of growing up. Being self righteous feels good, especially when the world is more civilized and you can't go to war to rape and pillage (for example, the Middle Ages had its fun for some, "thanks" to the Crusades). Pronouns may be today's battlefield.
Think "rebels without a cause" - seeking out injustices and feeling certain that yours is the first generation to care. There have been horrible injustices throughout the history of humankind, and throughout the animal kingdom. Many people are ignorant of history (20th century wars, genocides, Middle East complexities, the realities of the horrors of slavery in the US as well as other places and other times, the list is endless). Yet they don't or can't think through negative implications of overly progressive policies that ignore human nature, history, economics, and grammar.
To the comment below "I challenge readers to find any recent message from a mainstream source urging women to restrain their sexual conduct," my guess is that data on rapes shows the vast majority are men raping women. Women could wear burkas, but they're stuffy and not part of the executive-suite dress code. Please be careful out there to avoid attack by sexually crazed women. Oh, maybe you didn't mean the issue was violence, you meant "if I have to wear a mask you have to..."? Sorry, that was snarky but I just couldn't resist. :-)
Thanks for arranging the fascinating interview of Virginia Postrel.
Re: The new politeness as a component of wokeness.
The new politeness involves also new conceptions of “coercion” and “violence.”
Traditional concepts of coercion and violence involve physical force or threats.
By contrast, polite society now believes that a choice isn't free if the chooser's alternatives are lousy. For example, the new polite posit that a market for kidneys for transplantation would intrinsically involve coercion, because only a very needy person would sell a kidney. They believe this would be the case, even if a legal kidney market would have paternalistic safeguards — e.g., counseling sessions and waiting periods — to prevent ill-informed and rash decisions.
Similarly, they have a broad concept of violence, which encompasses also offensive speech and murky sexual interactions.
An irony is that the new polite don't hesitate to apply strong pressure and institutional rules to make everyone conform.
I have always viewed system dynamics as time dependent and a way to describe how systems behave over time (often using complex mathematics -- √-1 ). It does cover supply/demand feedback system, but the delays between printing money and inflation have disappeared from the discussions I see in the popular press. In dynamic systems, delays can cause instabilities resulting in failures.
> 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.
Would totally support a discussion of Albion's Seed.
I presume it was Postrel, not Kling, that called the descendants of the Scotch-Irish Borderers the "leave me alone" type alleged to be "nasty." This is a bigoted wholesale smear. I am surprised Kling would repeat it without qualification.
"Calling people by their preferred pronouns and avoiding micro-aggressions can be seen as an attempt to be polite."
That from Postrel is just ridiculousness. The attempts to enforce new pronoun usage is nothing but a power play and is, in fact, a macro-aggression, and it won't stop at pronouns either. If I know you are a male, you will be talked about by me to others as "he"; if you are a female it will be she; and if we are talking to each other, it will be "you". What comes out of my mouth is under my control, not anyone elses. My only concession is that I will use your chosen name, but that isn't a concession at all since it is what I have always done.
Pronouns are essential parts of language. It is not polite for a minority to attempt to change the meanings of these bedrock words for a whole society, and to do so by coercion. Politeness is not the first word that comes to mind in regard to these weird attacks from the social and psychological margin.
Anecdotes without control groups: I observe a cultural shift to be more empathetic as well as an undercurrent of seething rage that may be part of growing up. Being self righteous feels good, especially when the world is more civilized and you can't go to war to rape and pillage (for example, the Middle Ages had its fun for some, "thanks" to the Crusades). Pronouns may be today's battlefield.
Think "rebels without a cause" - seeking out injustices and feeling certain that yours is the first generation to care. There have been horrible injustices throughout the history of humankind, and throughout the animal kingdom. Many people are ignorant of history (20th century wars, genocides, Middle East complexities, the realities of the horrors of slavery in the US as well as other places and other times, the list is endless). Yet they don't or can't think through negative implications of overly progressive policies that ignore human nature, history, economics, and grammar.
To the comment below "I challenge readers to find any recent message from a mainstream source urging women to restrain their sexual conduct," my guess is that data on rapes shows the vast majority are men raping women. Women could wear burkas, but they're stuffy and not part of the executive-suite dress code. Please be careful out there to avoid attack by sexually crazed women. Oh, maybe you didn't mean the issue was violence, you meant "if I have to wear a mask you have to..."? Sorry, that was snarky but I just couldn't resist. :-)
Thanks for arranging the fascinating interview of Virginia Postrel.
Re: The new politeness as a component of wokeness.
The new politeness involves also new conceptions of “coercion” and “violence.”
Traditional concepts of coercion and violence involve physical force or threats.
By contrast, polite society now believes that a choice isn't free if the chooser's alternatives are lousy. For example, the new polite posit that a market for kidneys for transplantation would intrinsically involve coercion, because only a very needy person would sell a kidney. They believe this would be the case, even if a legal kidney market would have paternalistic safeguards — e.g., counseling sessions and waiting periods — to prevent ill-informed and rash decisions.
Similarly, they have a broad concept of violence, which encompasses also offensive speech and murky sexual interactions.
An irony is that the new polite don't hesitate to apply strong pressure and institutional rules to make everyone conform.
Not sure what you mean by: "dynamists"
I have always viewed system dynamics as time dependent and a way to describe how systems behave over time (often using complex mathematics -- √-1 ). It does cover supply/demand feedback system, but the delays between printing money and inflation have disappeared from the discussions I see in the popular press. In dynamic systems, delays can cause instabilities resulting in failures.