[I haven’t posted anything for a long while because I have been discouraged. My letters to the editor of the Knoxville News Sentinel and my op-ed submissions used to be published regularly, but now the letters they publish are few and are carefully curated, while my op-eds are ignored because the choice is to publish only solicited submissions (as implied by the editor’s comment that only op-eds from people with standing or expertise would be published – no nobodies need to bother to submit anything). Nobody seems to read my blog anyway, so I am writing only for myself. However, I am getting very old, so it seems to me that if I have any serious last words to say, now is the time. So I am restarting my blog and I hope to post every week or two from now on.]
It amazes me that so many people are, in the words of a writer in the National Review, “sitting there waiting expectantly to be offended”. That is, so many people seem to take extreme offense at what used to be regarded as just things stupid people say, in situations in which taking offense openly would be worse than just letting it go. Today, it seems that nobody can say anything that might offend another person even slightly, even if the speaker is unaware of giving offense. That is just nuts: if we can’t be a little tolerant of others’ faults and failures, we certainly can’t expect them to be tolerant of our faults and failures. That is kind of a bedrock statement about the human race, I think.
In the scientific-technical world, tolerance refers to the amount that something – say a screw – is off from the nominal spec. Tolerances are very fine – i.e., very minimal – in the case of, say, the Hubble telescope or medical devices, but they are often greater where the degree of wobblyness is not so critical. One would think that in human relationships – a famous minefield of interactions – the tolerance would skew to the wobbly side, but today that seems to be less and less true. “Live and let live” is not considered a motto to live by any more.
As the legal phrase goes, “de minimus non curat lex” – the law does not concern itself with trifles. Rightly so. And yet, many people have tried to use the court system to drive a stake through the hearts of people they consider to have offended them. Even more, people have used less formal but similarly life-changing methods, e.g., employing college boards or committees to enforce speech codes on campus; when that happens, free speech usually gets tossed out the window, especially since there are minimal due process safeguards for the accused in such arenas. Once upon a time people went to college to get an education and, in the process, become truly adult, truly independent, and truly aware of the variations in how people think about things. But when people have to hunker down and be very, very careful about expressing opinions that might offend even one other person on campus, it would be hard for them to become anything but little yes-men and nicey-nicey women.
A particular concern, in fact, has to do with girls and young women. Certainly we don’t want lechers and misogynists to get away with saying disgusting things to them. But the best way for this to be dealt with is for the females to “grow a pair”, figuratively speaking – to feel empowered to speak up immediately and call out the lecher/misogynist loudly. Furthermore, they should promptly tell everybody in their workplaces or schools what happened. I think that the first time a young woman does this, the bad guy will stop bothering her and there will be no need for Human Resources to get involved. Pretty soon everybody at the company or school will have the bad actor’s number and will deal with him accordingly. This might take the form of the older or more experienced workers, teachers, and students counseling the newbies that if So-And-So starts saying things that make you uncomfortable, you need to tell him sharply to knock it off and then tell us what happened and we will make it stop.
Another concern is for children. Some parents are “helicopter” parents and others believe in the “free-range” theory of child-rearing, while most parents today go back and forth between the two. Most people would agree that regardless of their parents’ approaches to bringing them up, children need to become fairly independent and self-propelling by the time they graduate from high school. Otherwise, as we have seen, they will expect to live at home forever and be supported by their parents whenever they are between jobs. (If baby birds did that, whole species would go extinct in a generation.) But how can children toughen up if they are never allowed to fail or to be challenged when they feel less competent or attractive than other children? If, for example, everybody on the elementary school soccer team gets the same little participation trophy and every child at school is constantly reminded that he or she is worthy and special, why would there be any incentive to improve? The truth is that not all children are created equal; some are competitive and some are not, and some will win and some will lose. The better approach would be to shore up the confidence of the children who aren’t good at physical games or math or art by providing them with opportunities to excel in their own way or to have hope for the future. A lot of craftspeople, say electricians and mechanics and plumbers, did not do well in high school, but they don’t seem to lack self-confidence today. Could that be because their trade gave them a way to deal with scientists and lawyers and doctors on an different level, where they are the experts and earn what many people with degrees would call a very decent living? Snowflakes will not get there, but strivers will.
Our current national touchiness is very concerning, contributing as it does to the national political polarization. On the one hand, we have the cake baker case, the wedding Web site designer case, etc., where someone refused to provide service because he or she was against homosexuality on principle and believed that providing a service related to a same-sex marriage was condoning that marriage. One can argue whether or not that is logically true, but one can’t deny the sincerity of the belief. Personally, I am for free association, which means that you can choose with whom you associate (e.g., by providing a service) as long as you are not denying people essential services, such as medical services or the emergency repair of a furnace in winter. Wedding cake making and Web site design are not essential, so I think the courts made the right ruling. (This is in spite of the fact that I have a gay relative whom I love very much and whose right to love whoever he wants to I support absolutely.)
That said, I do have a message for the baker and designer: get over yourselves. Why do you think you are constrained to make moral judgments in everything you do? Why are you so rigid? And in making the moral judgment, are you so sure your actions are correct – would Jesus really support your refusal to bake the cake and set up the site? Wouldn’t it be more Jesuslike to lead by example and show how to support your fellow man compassionately, whatever he is? Don’t you think that it is better to promote social stability by helping to persuade people to live in committed relationships, e.g., marriages? Besides, nobody but a few people (and, apparently, some judges) would think that baking a cake was free speech in the sense of making a public statement. It’s just a cake, people, not the 95 Theses. In fact, if you, like my shoe repairman, took advantage of your freedom of speech by posting religious signs and pictures in your personally owned workplace, would you not be gently nudging your clients toward God? Would you not in fact want to attract a wide variety of people who might eventually ask you about your abiding faith?
Just sayin’.
The woke folk have demonized the cake baker and the Web designer, but really, if the shoe were on the other foot, they would shout just as loudly as the baker’s and designer’s supporters. Taking the baker and designer to court? Really? Why not just go to someone who is willlng to give you what you want on the grounds of customer service? How presumptuous it is to demand services on your terms regardless of anybody else’s sensibilities. In fact, many woke folk are hypocrites. In academia and business, they have tried to have people who don’t toe the woke line banished from participation in decisionmaking, or even tried to have them fired. I agree that a professor who uses class time to promote his personal agenda apart from the standard class content should be disciplined, but should a professor who disagrees with high woke principles in a mild and considered way in, say, a memo to a fellow faculty member or in a letter to the student newspaper be penalized? That, as many have pointed out, is abridgment of academic free speech, without which a college or university is just an indoctrination facility.
If an institution of higher learning is an openly religious place, as many Bible colleges are, then everybody knows what it is and there is no expectation of entertaining many points of view. The students are self-selected and choose to be presented with the prevailing point of view. Again, this is the principle of free association. But for a public or private institution that is ostensibly devoted to the wider world of learning and experience, there is no greater failure than trying to pressure all the students into one way of thinking. Some such schools now resemble the fictional town of Stepford.
Recently I was tutoring a college student in a course in which he was calculating floor and wall areas and the consequent rug and paint requirements. He had a layout diagram of a house and I noticed that “Master Bedroom” was crossed out and “Primary Bedroom” was written in by his teacher. I asked him about it and he said it was because “master” harks back to slave times and so “we” are getting away from using that word. Say what? Does that mean that master-slave manipulators (used in research and industry) have to be renamed? How about master carpenters, master plan, master class, and special masters? I didn’t tell him how very stupid I thought that the change was because he was a cheerful kid with a good attitude and had apparently completely bought the explanation about why the change was made; besides, he was black and I didn’t want to offend him. We tutors are not supposed to criticize the professors, however richly some of them might deserve it. But I wished that I could in that instance.
And then there are the pronoun dictators. Who do they think they are to dictate to others which pronouns to use to refer to them by? Who are they to say that practically overnight the plural pronoun, which in the past many loosely used to refer to an unknown person, is not only appropriate but mandatory for reference to themselves by others? I have already written in a previous column how referring to a single person as “they” and “them” repeatedly in a news story thoroughly confused the chronology of what happened. Certainly the confusion issue is very important, but it pales in comparison to the issue of who gets to dictate others’ speech. Getting angry and claiming to have been insulted by people who use the “wrong” pronoun either in ignorance or on principle is not going to help the cause of the amorphously gendered. The offending people are not necessarily anti-LGBQT; mostly it is just that it is a lot of work to remember everybody’s pronoun preference and to understand stories in which the plural replaces the singular. We did not, as a nation, vote on this change; it was simply decreed by the woke folk. Why are the few people who don’t want to claim a gender allowed to dictate to the rest of us?
Somewhat the same thing occurred in my young days, when feminists were demanding that everybody use the “Ms.” Form of address on demand. The difference was that that did not happen overnight and it was a change that had been backed for a long time by many women. The point of the change was that with two forms of address for women, undue emphasis was being put on a woman’s marital status, unlike the case with men. (“Mrs.” was used in the olden days because a woman always changed her name to the man’s when she married; “Mrs.” was used in common speech to address her and in legal documents to identify who she was/belonged to as per, e.g., the legal doctrine of coverture.) Using “Ms.” allowed women to avoid that emphasis and signaled that a woman considered herself to be a person in her own right even if she was married. It was useful also because it meant that women like me and two of my three sisters, who kept our own last names after we married, could use “Ms.” and not have to be called “Mrs.” (the latter implying that the woman’s last name was also the husband’s last name to people who didn’t know the husband’s actual name). It took years of patience to persuade everybody to change, but eventually everybody did. I think that eventually we might go to addressing all women as “Ms.”, which would be a useful simplification now that women are truly equal in law. After all, women no longer have a need to be “Mrs. Him”.
The differences between the switch to “Ms.” and the use of the plural pronouns are that the latter do not make a useful distinction, either in law or in speech; that the confusion that results could be dangerous in an emergency (e.g., that 911 call in which the single injured or shot person is referred to as “they” to the 911 operator); and that the demand for immediate and perfect change is presumptuous. Even the strident feminists of yesteryear did not expect instant results.
Beyond the often unreasonable nature of both the woke and the rigid people’s huffing and puffing about the insults to their beliefs or identities, consider the modern corollary: that the mere existence of people who disagree with them is an evil and that such dissenters should be punished, now and forever, by having their reputations trashed, their financial standing ruined, and their children harassed at school. In some cases, it is said, offenders should pay with their lives. Yikes!
In business there are undoubtedly people losing sleep over the possibility that someone will discover an act of unwoke behavior in their pasts: they put on blackface for some Halloween party at their fraternity in college or they dated someone who later became a white supremacist or they spoke out against affirmative action in some high school essay. It is ridiculous for someone in his forties to be raked over the coals and threatened with being fired for something he did when he was young and clueless, but that has happened. We have seen speakers at universities shouted down by (usually) young and clueless protestors who think that anybody who holds any different opinion on diversity-equity-inclusion, gender identity, abortion, climate change, the situation of the Palestinians, etc., does not deserve to be anywhere in their vicinity and in fact should be silenced everywhere.
All this intolerance of other opinions is scary to us older folks. Some friends of my vintage agree with me that in our young days we were taught that America is a melting pot: tolerance is extended toward other cultures, but immigrants – or at least their children – were expected to learn English and leave behind certain customs that were illegal in the United States, such as plural marriage, circumcision of girls, execution of children who dishonored their families, etc. We older people remember how over time other people’s customs, and especially their food, were embraced and enjoyed for their symbolism of the human experience. There was the St. Patrick’s Day parade, the flood of customers to Mexican restaurants on Cinco de Mayo, the interesting affinity shown by many Jewish people for Chinese food, and more recently the celebration of the Day of the Dead and the exuberant growth of ethnic restaurants serving, e.g., Thai food. This all seemed pretty delightful to my friends and me: variety is the spice of life and of course the older you are, the more you realize that you have, in fact, not seen it all.
Besides the immigrant absorption, there is the wider acceptance of gays and lesbians, with all that that implies for safety and inclusion. Same-sex marriage, homosexuals’ adoption of children on an equal basis with heterosexuals, and the celebration of gay culture (as in “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy”) have all been horizon-broadening for the country as a whole. It epitomizes the expression “Live and let live”. Besides, in the Christian religion it is said (or at least this is what I was taught in my young days) that we die we will become pure souls without gender or age or color identities. I believe that this will be true also of sexual identity differences. (As a person with a physics degree, I would liken this to matter changing to energy: matter might have a charge or a chemical identity, but as energy all that is stripped off.)
The other day my husband and I were listening to Sirius radio as we drove along. The Ray Stevens song “Everything Is Beautiful (In Its Own Way)” came on the air. The song starts out not with Stevens singing but with a choir of children, whose message is:
Jesus loves the little children,
All the children of the world.
Red and yellow, black and white,
They are precious in his sight.
Jesus loves the little children of the world.
I experienced a shock of recognition. I commented to my husband later that we sang that children’s song in my Presbyterian Sunday school in the Southwest from my toddlerhood on. He said that it was sung in his Baptist Sunday school in Louisiana too. That was one of the earliest religious messages that we were taught in my young days, an indication of where priorities in inculcating religious principles lay among our religious leaders and our parents.
Stevens’ song went on with his singing as follows:
Everything is beautiful in its own way,
Like a starry summer night,
Or a snow-covered winter’s day.
And everybody’s beautiful in their own way.
Under God’s heaven
The world’s gonna find the way.
Okay, it’s somewhat trite, but it is also the sincere wish of so many of us older folks. It is distressing to us that the trend toward tolerance, the melting pot idea, that we thought had taken hold forever has seemingly been reversed and people are again being harassed for being different. Chinese-Americans when the Covid epidemic hit, mixed-race children, Jewish people seemingly throughout all time, etc.: these are the targets of hatred of The Other. They are harassed by people who apparently are seeking to react against someone else – any excuse will do. It is as though the harrassers are allergic to the harassees and they blame them for how they feel about the harassees. (“Look what you made me do!”) This hypersensitivity, which goes beyond any rational or defensible cause, is the ultimate in Snowflakehood.
The progression from words to deeds is a feature of Snowflakehood. If you feel you have been offended, somehow it seems to be okay to act out your indignation. TP’ing the house progresses to ugly phone calls and then to threats and finally to vandalism, assault, arson, and murder….
Some people would say that there is a difference between what you might call local or national intolerance and world intolerance. But I think that the same factors we see in local intolerance are essentially the same as those we see in intolerance all over the world. Demonizing your enemies seems to be the first step on the road to suppression of all kinds of their speech and behavior and then to overt persecution or warfare against them.
Some international Snowflakes are full of grievance over generations, like the Hatfields and the McCoys: the Provisional Irish Republican Army, the Hamas/Hezbollah/Taliban/Isis crowd, and so forth. Many people in those groups and others aren’t really aggrieved on a personal level and aren’t acting on principle; they are just in it for the fun of intimidating and even torturing and killing others. They are just thugs, a topic I may address in a future post. But the residue, either truly aggrieved to their cores or just lemmings piling on the bandwagon, are genuine Snowflakes. “You can’t criticize me/my religion/my ethnic group”, they say, and vow death to anybody who does criticize or oppose them. Poor Salman Rushdie has had to contend with these people for decades; he’s still standing, but of course somewhat the worse for wear.
Again, who the heck do these people think they are, to say that other people are not allowed to write about them, or draw cartoons about their holy man, or burn a Koran, under penalty of death to them – and to their children? Their god, their holy book, etc., may be sacred to them, but those are not necessarily valued to the same extent by other people. So for someone to say that you deserve to die for dissing his religion is the height of arrogance. In effect, he is saying that the world has to live by his rules. This is a complete denial of the reality of human interactions, especially on a global scale. But at the same time, what’s up with that burning of the Koran? You who burn books just because you disagree with some of the religion’s adherents, who do you think you are? Unlike cakes, books matter a lot because they contain words that may impel people to action. Even so, burning someone else’s sacred text is just showing off – and showing your essentially intolerant character.
In conclusion, it is one of my fondest wishes that everyone in the United States and around the world would lean toward more tolerance and less overt condemnation. We should have principles we live by and personal codes of conduct that we adhere to; we can show disapproval or resentment in our hearts, in our facial expressions, and even in, say, letters to the editor. But we should be cautious about when we choose to show disapproval with actions. Other people may be wrong according to our lights, but that doesn’t per se make them bad people or people not entitled to live their lives as they choose. If they transgress to the extent of violating the law, then they should be prosecuted – but not necessarily persecuted – for it and forced to make amends to the extent possible. In school, bullies need to be “recalibrated”, crybabies need to be directed to pull up their socks, linecutters need to be called out forcefully, and at times slackers need to be given the verbal equivalent of a cattle prod. In ordinary life, a neighbor may need to be taken to court for encroaching on the property line, drivers who endanger others should be honked at when no policeman is around, litterers at the beach should be admonished, and in all cases of juvenile misbehavior the village should step in to effect corrections. But in the gray area of behavior – the moral area – we need to give elbow room to others to do what they feel they need to do to make themselves happy. Just as we would want them to give to us.
