Welcome statement


Parting Words from Moristotle (07/31/2023)
tells how to access our archives
of art, poems, stories, serials, travelogues,
essays, reviews, interviews, correspondence….

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Tuesday with Another Voice

Today's voice belongs to
Contributing Editor
motomynd
When the minority take power through bullying and incivility: Why are the majority so over-understanding about it?

What do Joan of Arc, born 1412, a 14-year old girl in Pakistan in 2012, and at least half of modern-day Americans, all have in common? They are all victims of societies that for some mysterious and unexplainable reason choose to tolerate minority groups taking control through bullying and brutish behavior, instead of stopping it.
    Since this blog is based in civility and understanding, the bitter irony is that if you are reading this, you are very likely one of the people enabling the problem, rather than someone actively doing your part to resolve it.
    Why is that? Highly-educated and liberal-minded people tend to think in terms of understanding and tolerance, rather than taking confrontational action. To paraphrase Yasser Arafat’s line about freedom fighters and terrorists, “One person’s understanding is another person’s enabling.”


Before we target more modern events, some perspective.
    If you believe the scriptural accounts, Moses came down from Mount Sinai with two stone tablets with Ten Commandments inscribed on them by God. Translators tell us that those rules to live by, for lack of a better term, included “thou shall not kill” and “thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s” property, which meant land, wife, servants, and so on.
    If you believe the further accounts, it was not too many years later that Moses was leading his followers on slash-and-burn raids where they wiped out every man, woman, and child in neighboring villages, and took everything worth having. Some historians today even theorize that Moses was finally killed by his own people because they were fed up with his tyrannical and seemingly psychopathic leadership
    Turn Moses loose today and he would most likely be tried in the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Back then, the majority just got tired of his out-of-control minority rule, and they killed him. The majority often famously did the same in later similar cases with leaders such as Rome’s Julius Caesar, who came to power on the strength of a civil war he helped start, and many others.


Somewhere along the way, however, the majority became over-understanding of the minority, and the latter learned to use this to their advantage. The minority learned how to take control, even though they were often exponentially outnumbered by people who disagreed with them.
    Take Joan of Arc for example. According to historical accounts, “The Maid of Orleans” was simply amazing. She reportedly had a divine vision at age 12 in which God told her to recover her French homeland from English domination during the Hundred Years’ War. While only a teen, she helped lead several military victories that basically saved France from being divided amongst foreign powers. There may be some uncertainty about her actual prowess in battle, but it is believed she took an arrow in the neck and returned to lead her troops to victory, so that seems credential enough.
    Her reward? She was betrayed for money, tried by a religiously fanatical minority in a politically motivated trial, and burned at the stake.
    Why didn’t the majority rise up and save the woman who saved their country? Why didn’t the king she helped put on the throne do something? Those are good questions without good answers. Maybe they were simply over-understanding of the minority?


On the bright side, things have surely changed in the 600 years since, right?
    That brings us to 14-year-old Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousufzai. According to the Associated Press, “Malala was targeted by the Taliban for promoting girls' education and criticizing the militant group's behavior when they took over the scenic Swat Valley where she lived.” Because the teen dared to speak out on such issues, Taliban gunmen boarded a bus she was riding home from school, and shot her in the head. A week later she was still alive, but the Taliban vowed to come back and finish her off if she lived.
    So, again, like Joan of Arc, we have an idealistic teenager who dares to take action while adults hide in fear, and her reward is to be attacked by a religiously fanatical minority for political reasons. In Pakistan the Taliban are violent, but they are a minority of the overall population. Why are the majority so over-understanding? Again, a good question without a good answer.


Which brings us to modern Americans. No, we don’t have people burned at the stake for their religious beliefs, and we don’t have students shot on school buses for their political persuasion—thank goodness for that. We do, however, have teens bullied at school to the point they commit suicide, and adults who endure similar situations at work. We used to think of bullying happening mainly at school or on the playground. Now it is such a problem at the adult level there is a Workplace Bullying Institute.
    And we all know the tenor of U.S. politics. For a Republican to win a party nomination they have to pander to the radical right, just as a Democrat has to play to the far left. How did minority factions achieve such power?
    And where do you, the reader, fit in? Are you part of the problem, or the solution? Do you speak up and take action when needed, or do you resort to “slacktivism” and just think positive thoughts instead of taking positive steps?
    According to a 2010 poll conducted by KRC Research in collaboration with global public relations and communications firm Weber Shandwick, two-thirds of Americans believe incivility has become a major problem, and 75% of them think it is going to get worse. In the poll, politics and roads topped the voting for least civil places. Perhaps not surprisingly, those who identified themselves as Democrats think only 22% of elected Republicans are civil, and Republicans think only 20% of elected Democrats are.
    Possibly the most intriguing statistic is that Republicans think only 50% of elected Republicans are civil.
    As for highway incivility, you don’t need statistics to assess that. If you have been driving more than ten years you have seen the quantum change. Tailgating used to be part of the big-city mindset; now if you see another car on a quiet country road it is likely to be a half-second behind you.


So, what is causing the new culture of incivility, and why are people putting up with it? And are you one of the people making it worse by tolerating it?
    Speaking for a generation that remembers a day when someone who punched you knew you had every right to punch them back, some of us wonder if all the over-understanding is the problem. Do bullies being protected by the politically-correct educational system become corrupt adults? Bullies don’t fear a parent’s attorneys; they do fear a broken nose. Do they learn at an early age they can use the system to their advantage and then spend the rest of their lives exploiting it?
    We don’t want to go back to the day of taking dagger in hand to get rid of a tyrannical leader, or settling issues at high noon with six-guns, but it seems time for the majority to make some sort of stand to limit the overly-leveraged and unjustified power being claimed by the minority.
    When someone tailgates you on the highway, you don’t want to slam on the brakes and cause a wreck, but a tap on the pedal to bring on the brake lights could be in order. And when you are cornered at a social event by someone speaking loudly instead of talking sense, you don’t want to start a fight, but politely saying “I’m walking away because I won’t listen to such nonsense” can make your point. And if, unfortunately, your child is the target of a school bully, you don’t want them branded a felon for defending themselves with a weapon, but educating them on how to use some basic self-defense tactics might be better than teaching them to spend a lifetime living in fear and over-understanding.
_______________
Copyright © 2012 by motomynd

23 comments:

  1. Moses, Julius Caesar, Joan of Arc, Malala, politics, incivility, tailgating, bullying—I don't get it. Is this DeMille extravaganza all about timidity? Class warfare? The majority as pathetic boobs? The drawbacks of anger management? I can't find the theme. Where is my vertigo medicine?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Phil, for a guy who says he can't find the theme you did a brilliant job of pinpointing it in much more direct fashion than I did. Yes, I guess you could call it the majority as at least apathetic, if not quite pathetic, boobs.

      Delete
  2. Amazing job to weave thousands of years of human history into a rationale for civil backlash. Me and my sisters are ready to march on the Mall if Mitt Romney's incivil use of Big Mormon Money succeeds in defeating our brother Barack.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Amygdahlia, if you know that your sisters are ready to march with you, it would seem that you have been talking about the possibility. Is that because you fear that President Obama won't win today?

      Delete
    2. Amygdahlia, even though your brother Barack won I hope that won't keep you from marching - to remind your bother Barack why he was re-elected. The last thing we need is for him to waste as much of his second term begging compromise as he did his first. He may not have won in a landslide this time but he still has a clear mandate. Please march to make sure he delivers on it.

      Delete
  3. You seem to be saying that most people (the majority) are complacent. This isn't news—it's the way history works. It's always the minority that ignites change. Causes arise in their midst, and they are passionate about them. If the majority is destitute or hungry or without a voice in their lives, the passion of the minority can catch fire. Examples abound: the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, Nazi Germany, Communist China, the Arab Spring. The entire anti-colonial movement, in fact. So it will always be. If the majority is comfortable and think they have a role in shaping their future, radical calls for change always go pfft.

    The minorities cited above did bully and act uncivilly toward those that held power. Americans published the Declaration of Independence—most uncivil! The French beheaded thousands—now that's bullying! And so on. The majority weren't complacent; they loved it! But so far as I know, there were no instances of tailgating.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Provocative observation, Allie, about minorities who rise up and fight back having the potential to become bullies in their own right, as though a bullied child who successfully beats up his bully goes on to become a bully in his own right. I think I can see that operating in some of the cases you cite, but I can't agree that it applies to the Americans who rose up by publishing the Declaration of Independence. Did you include them for purposes of polemics?
          Also, good point, I think, about the comfort level of the majority either facilitating or debilitating efforts by a minority to change things radically.
          Please say more, as you seem to have thought productively on this subject.

      Delete
    2. Allie, my question isn't if the majority is complacent, my question is why?

      In many of the cases you cite, the majority of people were far better off before the uprising by the minority than they were after, so why did they allow it to happen? I doubt the 40-50 million people who reportedly starved to death after the Communist overthrow in China loved it. And I don't believe the majority of Germans loved that the Nazis got them into World War II or the Iron Curtain years that followed.

      As for tailgating, surely those Bolshevik oxcart drivers have to be on the list.

      Delete
    3. Motomynd, you've thrown me a softball. The majority is complacent because they are all about living from day to day, raising their families, paying off their mortgages and credit cards, punching the clock at work, and tailgating oxcarts. They don't dare, dream big, or lead. They just follow the minority.

      Delete
    4. Allie, motomynd, and everyone else who is following this discussion, it appears that since most people (the majority by definition) are intent on getting by, it will take some "champions" (a small minority) representing their interests to go out and act in opposition to the minority currently oppressing people and having their predatory way.
          Tom Lowe, I gather from things you have written that you might have said something like this yourself—only more eloquently and with more substance than I have. Please comment if I'm right about that and you feel like injecting yourself here. Thanks.

      Delete
    5. Allie, since the softball seems to have missed its mark, let me try a partially-deflated beach ball. I understand the way things are with the apathetic majority. What I am hoping to prompt in our exchange, and in my original post, is a discussion about why things are.

      We know most people like to stay complacent and comfortable and basically ignore outside forces of change until it is too late, but why do they do that? Especially when ignoring those changes poses a great threat to their comfortable lives? The majority of reasonable people in Germany could see the looming disaster of the minority Nazi movement, why didn't they deal with it before it was too late? Most drivers on I-40 have seen trailer trucks dangerously tailgating cars in front of them, but how often have they bothered to pick up their cell phones and call the phone number on the back of a truck and report it?

      To continually excuse majority apathy by saying "that is the way things have always been" is, to me, just not a reasonable perspective in a supposedly enlightened age. All people all around the world would benefit greatly if they put action to Robert Kennedy's words: "There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why... I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?"

      Delete
    6. Don't know why you're blocking on this, Motomynd. The majority are the herd. They follow because it's safe. Not safe based on reason, but safe because of biology. All social animals are organized to be part of the herd, the pack, or the swarm. Among humans, a breakout occurs only when the majority is unhappy and leadership emerges from a new minority.

      There is nothing about an "enlightened age" that changes a biological imperative. So give yourself a break and stop beating your head against the wall.

      Delete
    7. Maybe the question should be, What does it take, not for the masses, but for some rare individuals among the majority—call them "champions"—to get off their duffs and do something?
          In a comment on "Fish for Friday," Tom Lowe quotes Fredrick Douglass: "Power concedes nothing without a struggle."
          Why aren't we among the champions engaging in an appropriate struggle? What's holding us back? Or are we satisfied to sit here and just talk about it?
          But first, what is our objective? What targets should we attack? What might our plan be? How might we enlist allies?
          Why are we not addressing and trying to answer these questions?
          These seem more profitable questions to ask (and try to answer) than questions about why the masses are complacent.

      Delete
    8. Morris, am I wrong that the tone of your questions is pejorative? (I think the word "duffs" is key.) I'd like to ask another way: "What is your very excellent reason for not actively struggling against the social wrongs you see?" I think you'd get a wide range of excellent answers. Here are some. "The wisest way to live is to tend one's garden, as Voltaire pointed out." "You're talking about time and commitment. I'm not a kid taking time off from college. I've got a wife and a job." "Do I stand on a soapbox and declare my own movement, or do I work for a political party, none of which I really trust?" "What's wrong with writing? Isn't the pen mightier than the sword?" "Why should anyone follow my lead? There's nothing special about me." "Aren't people speaking out all the time? Wouldn't I just add to the cacophony?" "Why shouldn't I be selfish with my time? Convince me that an added push from one person in three hundred million will make a difference." Which of these excellent answers would you like to tackle first?

      Delete
    9. Ken, if there was anything pejorative about it, it certainly wasn't pejorative of you since you hadn't previously commented and were thus not one of the "we" to whom I referred.
          But I certainly was one of them, so any pejorativeness pertained to me as much as to anybody else. The thought that I myself might be a fairly complacent member of the majority unsettled me, for I wasn't sure that working on a blog that discussed the issue was doing anything to change things for the better, however much mightier some pens might be than swords.
          I identify as mine several of your possible "excellent reasons" for staying out of social struggles. Tending one's garden is mighty comfortable, and even arguably "wise." I'll be seventy soon and need to go to bed early, my memory is going kaput, and do I have a wife! I write but I am certainly not going to stand on a soapbox (by which I mean talk to people about issues), because I am too emotional (or tone deaf?) and am less likely to influence people the way I want to than to influence them an opposite way. I would have no trouble working for the Democrats—if I felt that I could actually help (and had the time and talent to do it; see previous reason why not). Indeed, why should anyone follow my lead? I am not impressive, I am not charismatic, I'm barely articulate in face-to-face confrontation. The "specialness" that I may have is more inward and private. Being but one unremarkable voice, I am indeed a very small one person among the many many American citizens. And, to add a reason why not that you didn't list, it won't make any difference in the long run—the sun is going to burn up all its fuel, etc.
          And yet, even having owned up to all of that, there's still a small voice inside telling me that even with all of those reasons why not (and others I could devise), there may be a reason why that I am overlooking and should pay heed to.
          In a small way, I do heed the voice to help others whom I encounter directly—the "think globally/act locally" philosophy that Tom Lowe implies in his comment below when he says that "the 'champions' are out there...they have been fighting local issues around foreclosures, school closings, homelessness, poverty and starvation." But I'm not sure that administering my residential community's social website, coordinating its community watch program, working with the City Council to try to get a pedestrian bridge built across a creek so that people who live on either side of the creek won't have to walk along a relatively dangerous road to access the communities on the other side of the creek is doing all that I "ought" to be doing. (It did help just there, though, to list most of the things I do do; maybe I just forget for the most part that I actually am doing a few helpful things.)

      Delete
    10. Allie, excellent line that "the majority are the herd." And yes, I am blocking on why the members of the herd perceive following as being safer than charting their own course. It is a concept i have doubted since my youth, questioned scientifically since I was a biology major in college, and gave up on after watching firsthand what happened to individual wildebeest as the herd attempted its famous crossing of the crocodile-filled Mara River in Kenya.

      The theory of following the herd may feel comforting, but the terror and pain that come with the reality of being bitten in half is not. Why a wildebeest would watch that fate befall the animal ahead of it and still plunge into the river is beyond the realm of logic. Why the wildebeest have not found a better away around the crocodiles in the eons of this ritual is an intriguing scientific question - why humans go out of their way to create their own Mara River disaster scenarios is dumbfounding.

      Morris, yes, there are "champions" doing good deeds and important work in our society. The problem is they are vastly outnumbered by people following the logic of the wildebeest.
      Ken, yes, there are countless excuses people can make for not becoming such a champion. but the real problem may be unnatural selection that led to the survival of the less fit.

      Let's apply a little biology to the two different populations: wildebeest and human. The wildebeest are led by the strongest and bravest in their herd, so every time they cross the Mara River it is those leaders that go into the jaws of the crocs. Therefore it is the followers, the less fit, that survive the journey and pass along their genes. Likewise, when humans go into war, it is the strongest and bravest who go first - and die in the greatest numbers. It is the followers, the less fit, who survive and pass along their genes.

      The problem for humankind may be that they killed off so many of their best in epic wars in the first half of the 20th-century, there weren't enough good genetics left to supply the burgeoning population of the 21st century. Water down wildebeest genetics and you get an animal that jumps into the jaws of a crocodile because that is what the animal in front of it did. Water down human genetics and you get similar results. Maybe that is the bottom line.

      Delete
    11. motomynd, very interesting take on selection. One problem with the theory might be that "the best" in terms of going off to fight (and be killed) are the strongest and healthiest, but not necessarily the brightest. The brightest people would have been smart enough to figure out how to avoid going to war.
          If something like that was operating, then you'd think that brighter people might have been selected, and wouldn't that be at odds with what seems to have happened in the second half of the 20th century?
          Or maybe the ones who figured out how to avoid going were more greedy (for getting their own) than intelligent. Now, that would be consistent with some cultural things you've commented on in other places. That is, the "me" generation, greed on Wall Street, etc. What do you think?

      Delete
    12. Morris, since you asked...I think the "Great Wars" that claimed so many of the strongest and healthiest probably also got many of the brightest. There weren't very many ways for people to get around the military draft back then, no matter how smart they were. Yet there were ways for people of privilege to get around the draft, which could very well have influenced the future coming of the selfishness and greed of the "me" generation.

      It is also worth considering the difference between "book smart" and "life smart" intelligence. If you kill off great numbers of the boldest, strongest and healthiest, you lose many of the most daring, adventurous and free thinking. That could explain why we have so few of your "champions" and so many members of Allie's herd

      Delete
    13. Motomynd, thanks for correcting me on the erroneous supposition that intelligence might have played a factor in individuals' avoiding going to war. The "people of privilege" avoidance makes sense. And such people tend to intermarry, don't they? That would weaken their gene pool and render them even less fit.
          And I know first-hand what you mean by "book smart" and "life smart." I was pretty good at aptitude tests, but I'd not have lasted long on the street.
          By the way, I'm not up on the statistics, what percentage of the best and brightest Americans who went away to the war didn't come back, or didn't come back full and able-bodied and ready to use their intelligence productively? Your argument seems to depend on the percentage's being pretty high. Or does it? I'm not sure.
          Thanks.

      Delete
    14. Morris, the percentage of Americans who went away to the first and second world wars and did not come back is very low, but there is still a huge potential impact on our society.

      In 1914 the United States population was approximately 92 million. American war deaths were 117,465, only .13% of the overall population. In 1939 the U.S. population was an estimated 131 million and war deaths were 418,500, which was .32% of population.

      Even though those percentages were very low, the actual loss of potential future leaders was huge - some 11,000 per state, on average, in a period of only 30 years. It is conjecture of course, but assuming the people who were quick to go to war were the same as those who would have been first in line to be civic leaders, many of the elite of the American future may have been lost. Which would have enabled those who would have been their underlings to rise up and instead assume leadership roles they were incapable of handling.

      If you skim the top off of two generations of leadership, there have to be repercussions. Evidence suggests that if you cut deeper, the results are cataclysmic. In WWI Serbia lost 16% of its population and the Ottoman empire nearly 14%. Looking at what happened to those entities the next 70 to 80 years you have to wonder if their death rate was high enough to reach a critical tipping point that the U.S. partially, if not fully, avoided.

      In WWII, Germany, Poland and the U.S.S.R. lost 10 to 14 percent of their populations. When you look at those countries the next 30-40 years, and even today, you also have to wonder about the impact of that loss of life.

      Getting away from the impact of war deaths, you raise an interesting point about the result of people of privilege intermarrying. Having a huge head start financially might offset the fiscal problems that could come with brain drain, but it would not prevent the inevitable decline in intellect created by what biologists would term as inbreeding.

      Delete
  4. The British colonists in America were an interesting case. They rebelled only because they were abused as British subjects. Even so, it's been said that only a third of the colonists wanted independence, the other two-thirds being loyal or indifferent. I'm sure that quite a few of the Loyalists were bullied by the Sons of Liberty and equally sure that in Parliament and the Court of St. James the Declaration was thought uncivil to the point of treason.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you, Allie!
          After my comment above, I realized that I had both mis-remembered motomynd's point about minorities bullying majorities in the first instance and misconstrued your comment! I was imagining the French revolutionaries, the Russian revolutionaries, and the Nazis to have themselves been bullied [by "society"? by the regimes they opposed?], and further imagined them to have turned the bullying back on their bullies, which I think is likely nonsense. But I believe the French started out with better intentions than their eventual excesses expressed, and that the Bolsheviks might not have been so bad as they became if Lenin had lived and Stalin not ascended. I think that the Nazis were a depraved class unto themselves.
          But, again, I defer to your apparently better-informed views on this. Thanks again.

      Delete
  5. Truth is I’ve been holding comment because I find myself ambivalent about the language of Motomynd’s original piece. The issue for me is that the term “civility” has an elite resonance, as does “politically correct”, both of which were invoked in the culture war of the end of the last century to marginalize critics of the status quo.

    I guess because I’m one of those voices that says that “the emperor has no clothes” on many of the debates of this society, and have gotten marginalized for speaking up, I react with suspicion when majority opinion is invoked. The Civil Rights movement, the Anti-War actions over Viet Nam and Iraq, the Suffragettes were all damned in their time as minorities forcing their views on the sensible opinion of the society.

    Were these “bullies” as the term is being used here? No, the invoking of Joan and Malala makes it clearer what Motomynd intends. Bullies are the bosses who told their workers “vote for Romney or lose you jobs”, and in at least two cases have fired their employees since the election. The specific examples that are cited in the piece I would agree need to be called to account for their actions.

    I recall when Time and Newsweek in the same week in the early ‘90s had cover articles on “Political Correctness”, arguing that administrators at the mentioned colleges or organizations had overreacted in punishing certain individuals for saying or writing words that offended, I found the examples given uncivil and deserving of criticism. And that’s were the grey area starts to expand. And it is those subjective nuances that make me feel I need to watch my back.

    American history is littered with examples of the “tyranny of the majority’, even De Tocqueville noticed the problem. I worry that the various comments make the error of seeing their viewpoint as being “on the side of the angels”. Not that the opposing view, Teabaggers Repugs Paulist etc. aren’t equally assured of their correctness, and their oppression by minority attitudes. I find both wrong and narcissistic and fraught with danger.

    So finally to respond to Morris’ question- the “champions” are out there, they’re just to busy trying to deal with the issues of day to day life to call press conferences. While everybody has been attending to the food fight between Robama and O’romney, Occupy and many allies have been fighting local issues around foreclosures, school closings, homelessness, poverty and starvation. Because that is where change can be made and hope generated for the 99%.

    ReplyDelete