Maybe. We can get away with making all sorts of simplifying assumptions when we are younger because our decisions aren’t all that complicated or costly. When we’re wrong, the cost of being wrong is pretty low and the horizons are short. At least for me, that changed as I grew up. Decisions get harder because adults typically have to put more on the line and have to think farther ahead. So many of our nice heuristics that work great as children break down.
I had a relatively easy childhood, so perhaps I am completely wrong.
Meh, you just sound like any other grad student.
I’m in the same boat. My musical instrument is ten feet from me, as is a novel I have been meaning to start. Yet here I am, finally finished with work for the day, arguing with people over the internet. I do it because, quite frankly, I can’t stop my brain from warming over the same crap I study. So instead of trying to work through another article, I can just come here and talk about politics and economics. I get to stay in a world I am comfortable with without having to work all that hard.
We’re not going to chance the world, but we’re almost certainly going to change something. That may be any random person’s mind on the internet. Why pass up the chance?
There are lots of examples of this, though this I believe is the most extreme. Childishness, name calling, and unprofessionalism in the US Capitol building date back to George Washington and even before
Anyone else here old enough to remember that president that time who was impeached for a consentual extramarital sex act and when even though more than 80% of the nation thought it was nonsense and most of the ringleaders of the impeachment, most of whom were known and proven adulterers themselves, said “who cares? We know what’s better for these people?” I don’t recall that president’s name, but seems to me it was the Republicans that time who were stirring the Ragout Excremente. IIRC that was before Michael Moore made his comments on 9/11. Either that or Michael Moore is clairvoyant.
Not that it started there. It was more than 150 years ago that Preston Brooks came down on Charles Sumner with all the power of the southern boys club, an admittedly reactionary response to the fact Sumner had not just denounced Brooks’ cousin/mentor in a speech but had mocked the old man’s stroke-induced speech impediment, and this was long before the 24/7 librul or otherwise media. Sumner and Brooks weren’t old enough to vote when John Quincy Adams was calling Rachel Jackson a whore (which was pretty gutsy considering Jackson had killed men for less), and Adams and Jackson were still young men when Aaron Burr had shot Alexander Hamilton dead for an insult lost to history (Vidal speculates it was an accusation of incest [which Burr was definitely accused of by enemies] but who knows).
I don’t think there’s been so much a breakdown of civility- it’s always been an amazingly un-civil field- so much as now it’s coming at us faster and more furious than Brooks’ cane through the regular news, the 24/7 news, radio news, the Internet, word of mouth, rinse later repeat.
ETA: Re: Markxxx post- great minds think alike, or at least close in time together.
And yeah, I mean, if I really think about it, of course it’s been worse than this. We had a whole war once over political differences. Still can’t help but feel I should be doing my best to keep my corner of the world as civil as possible.
I have said repeatedly I was drunk and high on gas fumes when I wrote that, I never meant any insult to Claudius’s catamite slave (who in fact I happened to like when he sang that song about Ganymede) and I am not apologizing for it again.
olives, a number of years ago I could have written your OP. I used to feel that there was an inherent degree of equality in attitude across the political spectrum.
I actually remember the time when my feeling changed; I was listening to the radio and there was a clip of Bush Jr. commenting on civil unions, or gay marriage, or something like that. It got me so enraged that he had the balls to say what was the right way for people to be in a relationship.
A while later, we passed a gay marriage law here in VT, but the debate in the public forum was hot. And, 99% of the voices against it were mean, spiteful, and based on personal and religious disgust. I saved all the newspapers from the weeks leading up to the vote, and so can reference numerous letters to the editor. There is a large group of people who are self-centered, closed-minded, authoritarian, and want to mandate decorum through law while at the same time declaring they are against “big government”. It is not possible to get civility from them, because they have no willingness to see holes in their reasoning, even though they are plainly and clearly wrong.
How can you compromise with a person who believes that ‘God said so’ is a good reason for enacting policy?
Wow, I had the exact same reaction to possibly the exact same speech. Before that I was pretty dis-interested in politics. After that, I decided I needed to pay more attention so I could help bring about change.
