Our New Age of Contempt (activist, regular, revolution, solutions)

[Phil75230]

FIRST THINGS FIRST

Ideology is not the issue here. Neither is the direction contempt flows in. It doesn’t matter if it’s “Only Rosie O’Donnell” or “Basket of Deplorables”. The issue is our very nasty current climate of dehumanizing others of different political persuasion, backgrounds, and as the article directly touched slightly on, even who’s “in” or “out” of our own personal day social circles. With that said, here's my summary of the article.


FROM https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/23/o...?src=recg&_r=1

Originally Posted by Karen Stohr, Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University

From THE STONE (New York Times Philosophy Section)
JAN. 23, 2017

*2016 seems to mark only the beginning of this “Age of Contempt”. Even though contempt for the other side has always been present throughout history, it now reached new levels as a part of the regularly expressed public discourse. Both sides in US Presidential elections were guilty of this and continue to be. No doubt the same goes for Brexit in the UK (last sentence my own addition, not Stohr’s; although I doubt she’d object to my addition on substantive grounds).

*Immanuel Kant recognized that dignity and respect even toward political rivals is a bedrock of stability and progress, and even the basis of the human community itself

*Contempt is a deliberate devaluation of the entire person for his or her disagreement or personal shortcoming, effectively trivializing any other positive quality that person has. Anger means engaging a person, contempt means blatant dismissal of a person. The distinction is crucial.

*Normal disagreement regards others as moral agents. Contempt sees people as objects to be managed or overcome. It marks the person as unworthy of engagement and not a full member of the human community. This is particularly true when contempt is expressed as mockery. We can’t define contempt with STEM standards of precision, yet we know it when we see it.

*Yet, not all contempt is equally bad because it happens when differences in social power exist. Contempt from a leader toward the less powerful is less forgiving than that same level of contempt expressed in the opposite direction; for bad tones toward the powerless encourage serious attacks on the powerless, thereby threaten democratic values.

*Contempt and colorful criticism differ in that contempt dismisses a person’s worth as a human being, including insults about their appearance, alleged lack of intelligence, and level of life success. Though tempting to show counter-contempt for one’s opponents, the leaders who falsely legitimize such contempt have status that insulates them from contempt’s worst effects. The socially vulnerable cannot wield it effectively precisely because of their social vulnerability.

*The better strategy is to reject contempt, for counter-contempt legitimizes the very thing it strikes out against. The only beneficiaries of it are those powerful enough to draw social boundaries demarking “in” and “out” groups as they see fit. Vulnerable people are unable to win respect with hurling contempt toward the powerful, for they will lose more by being its targets.

*Privately expressed contempt may make you feel good but in public it’s dangerous. Kant saw that it denies that everyone has a right to at least the basics of dignity and respect. When widespread, this sentiment threatens the foundations of our political community. Thus, contempt in discourse should never have become mainstream, and therefore we must make an effort to push back against it.

[Phil75230]

Other than the part about power dynamics, I strongly agree with Stohr. Contempt for others (or any other strong social punishment of a particularly personalized nature) does not encourage work toward constructive solutions. It is a verbal signifier that the target does not deserve even the basics of dignity and respect - namely that the target deserves whatever devaluing of his or her personhood comes their way. Even worse, contempt is an implicit invitation to others to treat that person in the same dehumanizing way. This kind of behavior doesn't do anything but make the situation worse.

Now, on to what I disagree about Stohr about, specifically how personal power affects whether contempt is appropriate. In other words it's not ok for the powerful to heap contempt on the powerless, yet it's ok for the powerless to heap contempt on the powerful.

I disagree strongly. This confuses power itself with how it is used. It also confuses lack of ability to use power with moral goodness (and vice versa, too). Many tremendously powerful people do not use it to hurt, harm, or degrade others’ dignity. That is the crux of the matter. Not powerful itself. It also ignores the fact that not-so-long-before powerless people can be every bit as sadistic as their former masters (see French and Russian Revolutions for details).

By contrast the British elite (at least at home) over the past 2 to 3 centuries, while hardly hosting frequent seven-course banquets for their lower classes, proved open and concerned enough about the well-being of their lower classes to make necessary reforms throughout the centuries so that they kept the lower classes from hating them enough to dehumanize them.

If you dehumanize another person, you dehumanize another person, no matter what social-class direction it’s aimed at. Yes, that even calls for respecting the dignity and agency of the upper class members. Using contempt to deny their humanity isn’t justice, it’s simply saying two wrongs make a right. If a particular powerful person did commit an injustice, the proper response is to bring them to trial in either a national court, the International Court of Justice, or a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The last thing to do is to send them to the guillotine or firing squad.

Isn’t that what King and Mandela did?

[War Beagle]

We have been in the Age of Contempt for a while. Some people noticed it for the first time in 2016, but it started years or decades earlier.

[Phil75230]

Originally Posted by War Beagle

We have been in the Age of Contempt for a while. Some people noticed it for the first time in 2016, but it started years or decades earlier.

I gotta agree here. Trump's the product of a long line of tit-for-tat among the left and right going back at least to the 60s (Saul Alinsky's book, what snippets i read of it, encouraging ridicule and dehumanizing of opponents, certainly didn't help things; and in fact I consider him my least favorite activist of at least the past half-century). In fact, I'd argue going all the way back to the ferocious 1930s debates about the New Deal, and perhaps to 100 yrs ago to H.L. Mencken, the Scopes Monkey Trial, the violent police vs labor riots of the late 19th century, and slavery debates of early to mid century.

Still, a long pedigree of such isn't an excuse, especially not today. At least in much earlier times we could argue that our democracy (and democracy in general) was relatively young, and thus the nation's citizens and leaders were still feeling their way around about how best to achieve and maintain stability in social discourse. Today, with at least 60 years of mass communication background, there is no excuse. As stated in the OP, we know contempt when we see it, even if we can't define it with the precision that a STEM worker or philosopher of logic would demand.