I think in many places it has. Think of it like over regulation or a really unhealthy bureaucracy. You can never make enough rules to prevent people who are acting in bad faith from being destructive or regulate them into being productive. That is not to say all rules are bad, only that after a certain point they can be counter productive and energies are better spent trying to align incentives and encentives (emotional incentives/what people feel like doing).
Words that are hurtful in some contexts and between certain people are fine in others. If someone hates you there are always going to be a million ways they can express it with their tracks covered.
Making people liable for micro-aggressions is NOT the answer. The more rules you make the more jobs you make for lawyers. These days if someone hates you they can, in bad faith, try to pin you to some stigmatized group. And let me stop you right there, the answer is not to try and regulate this new problem (created by over-regulation) away.
People need to spend less time listing things that are hurtful. They need to spend more time thinking about why people do things that are hurtful, more time thinking about why people hold beliefs that are destructive. After we figure these things out we can work on trying to solve the problem not play wack a mole with the symptoms.
Who is being made liable for micro-aggressions again? Not letting people who are allowed to get married get married is not a micro-aggression, it is a major aggression.
We know why hold bad beliefs. Some of it is from self-interest, some of it is from being taught that way by parents, some is from religion. I know from having grown up in a time when racism was more or less permitted (even in the north) that when we as a society make expressions or racism something that all consider shameful, people stop doing it, and the next generation, never hearing it, tends to not even think in those terms.
If you don’t believe me consider that anti-Irish and anti-Italian sentiments common 150 years ago are so rare today that if anyone uses such an insult they are considered deranged.
See it is this whole mindset that I am arguing against. I want to get out of these status games. Yes, you’re not racist, good for you. And you can signal it so well by shaming all the racists around you. It feels so good to feel morally superior doesn’t it. (I can just see the gears turning in your head as you try to think of clever ways to imply that i’m a racist.) Being racist is low status. Racism is largely cultural and you most likely came from a culture that made it easy for you to be non-racist. Maybe you need to check your privilege. Here i’m giving an example of the game I don’t want to play, the conversation I don’t want to have.
Here is the conversation I do want to have:
Racism is harmful and wrong so let’s think about how we can convert racists. Telling them they are evil won’t change their views. I have never seen someone shamed out of a belief. I have seen them shamed out of temporarily expressing it in certain explicit ways, but it always comes out in a hundred others.
I think people like to have an out-group that is lower status than them. If you look at history (for example the Irish vs. Blacks at the turn of the last century) people groups that are second to lowest status don’t want the lowest status group moving up. I think the Social Psychology concept of Downward Social Comparison is helpful. People get an ego boost from comparing themselves to people lower in status. I think for a lot of racists their identity is threatened by a group they still view as being below them being granted more status. Shaming them will only threaten their status more and, in their insecurity, harden their racism as their ego desperately tries to defend itself. I think to start to solve this problem we need to think about alternate identities we can present them that leave them some dignity, different status latters that don’t leave them on the bottom rung.
I think the first step is to separate their identity from their racist views. If you know someone who is racist you will have to use your own social skills to do this but I can try to paint a picture of what it might look like. (You will have much more influence if you are higher status than them and they perceive you as a friend.) First you could notice times that they are empathetic and complement them on it. Try to have empathy become part of their identity. Then define a new status latter. Talk about the possibility that morality should be based on empathy not legalistic rules. That it is easy to convince people you are a good person and much harder to actually be a good person. Next try and get them to empathize with black people. Many racist people I have known have struggled severely financially and have a strong work ethic. Pursuit of Happiness is a great movie to try and rent for a person like this. Next try to separate their identity from racism. Their not racist they are empathetic. They try to help people no matter the color of their skin. The racist thoughts they have are a product of their culture and they are the kind of person who is willing to work to overcome them.
But this all sounds so hard. Maybe you are right we should all just make fun of them.
P.S. I don’t want to limit this discussion to racism but I just responded to that since it is what you brought up.
You know, oversensitivity and butthurt goes both ways. If I respond unfavorably to a casual remark that has a racist, sexist, or homophobic tinge, there’s nothing stopping the speaker from shrugging his or her shoulders and accepting my criticism good-naturedly. But instead, people are act like pointing out the offensiveness of a remark is just as bad as being offensive. That’s crazy.
I can agree that people are primed to take offense nowdays, while simultaneously believing this is a vast improvement over the “bad ole days” when everyone was an Archie Bunker.
Personally, I’m straining to see how people are becoming more afraid of expressing their opinions. We live in a day and age when everyone’s constantly opinionating on message boards, news article comment sections, Facebook, and Twitter. People parade their opinions on their t-shirts and bumper stickers. Yes, being too opinionated nowadays can earn you a pink-slip. But being fired over stupid behavior isn’t new. What’s new is everyone and their mama feeling compelled to speak their minds through a virtual bullhorn.
I think I agree with almost everything you said. I don’t think openly advocating against gay marriage is a micro aggression. I thinknot allowing gay people to marry is clearly an macro aggression and a place where we should have a law. Fortunately now we do. Like I said I am not arguing that all rules are bad.
I half agree with your second part. I think shaming people out of expressing their beliefs did help prevent their spread and helped them die out with their holders. I think this is less effective today as people can find the ideas online. I still think even if people are more exposed to bigoted beliefs they will be less likely to adopt them if they are stigmatized and am not arguing against complete lack of stigmatized beliefs although I think it can go to far. I am arguing against a culture that is too PC sometimes stigmatizing people that don’t even hold harmful beliefs because they were targeted by some Social Justice activist who looked as someone actions without context or without knowing the person.
Not if they are online and anonymous but in the real world there can be serious consequences to the kind of stigma you are associating them with.
You seem like a reasonable person so my guess is you haven’t come across the kind of toxic cultures I am talking about where people play politics with micro aggressive like actions and instead of worrying about being good people everyone has to worry if they happen to be doing or saying something that could be twisted around to hurt them.
My guess is people are overly defensive because they have been the victim of these kind of games in their real lives.
The moment I see that someone talks like if it was a game is the moment when I do think that it is more likely that in reality the “victims” were shamed into doing the right thing towards others.
I agree that people should do the right thing towards others. Like I have said a couple times now I don’t agree we can make a set of rules that completely defines this. I also think any set of rules that goes to far in trying often is used as much for politics as it is to actually help people. I am all for helping people but shaming aggressors to harshly can backfire.
This is the disconnect, I think. Shame is a very powerful tool of social change. What possible evidence do you have that it doesn’t work?
What you usually see is that someone, on being confronted bluntly with their poor behavior, gets defensive in the moment and argues that they’re in the right. But that’s not the only effect. If they hear it enough times, they’re likely to stop engaging in the poor behavior, because the social cost is too high.
Now, I may be wrong that this is how it works. But your say-so does is not persuasive. If you’ve got evidence that blunt criticism for antisocial behavior is ineffective at curtailing that antisocial behavior, let’s see it.