Comment by commandlinefan
6 days ago
> not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead
[4] The woke sometimes claim that wokeness is simply treating people with respect. But if it were, that would be the only rule you'd have to remember, and this is comically far from being the case. My younger son likes to imitate voices, and at one point when he was about seven I had to explain which accents it was currently safe to imitate publicly and which not. It took about ten minutes, and I still hadn't covered all the cases.
Treating people with respect can sometimes mean learning enough about them to understand a little about what life is like in their shoes. There are a lot of different kinds of people wearing a lot of shoes. Learning about them is a lifelong process. It’s not about learning “a long list of rules” but more “learning about a lot of kinds of people and their experiences.”
> understand a little about what life is like in their shoes.
That's empathy which is a different concept than treating someone with respect.
> learning about a lot of kinds of people and their experiences.
Having knowledge of a breadth of different people's life experiences is also a different concept than respect. The author proposed "treating people with respect" as the minimal normative standard. You seem to be rejecting his proposal of "respect" as insufficient and instead are proposing an alternative which includes empathy and a "lifelong process" of gaining broad knowledge of different lived experiences.
While those are valid things to propose, you're suggesting a meaningfully different standard by expanding on what respect "sometimes means." It's worth highlighting because I interpreted the author's central argument on this point as being "treating people with respect" alone should be sufficient as the minimally acceptable standard. Whether I agree with the author's proposal or not, I understood it to explicitly exclude requiring anything beyond how we treat others.
While this may seem like a minor distinction, it strikes me as central because the concepts of feeling empathy and having a lifelong interest in acquiring cultural knowledge go to our internal thoughts and feelings, whereas the author's proposal limits itself to our external behavior - which I take to be his point.
It'd more useful if you'd been explicitly direct in your response, perhaps something like "Just treating people with respect is not sufficient. Instead, the minimal normative standard should be..." It would be clearer that you disagree substantially with the author and what you're proposing instead. It would also enable a more interesting discussion about whether society should limit itself to judging how we behave toward others vs going further to judging how we think and feel about others internally, regardless of our external behavior.
Knowledge can inform external behavior. When you go to another country, you have to learn the norms of what will be considered disrespectful in that context. In America, for example, somebody waving their middle finger at you will be seen as them intentionally disrespecting you. Not because they necessarily are (maybe they just arrived from Japan and don’t know better yet), but because for people socialized here that is perceived to go along with the intent to disrespect. National borders are not the only cultural borders.
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I think something a lot of people don't understand is that nobody is entitled to respect. Respect is something that is earned. If someone behaves in ways that you disagree with, you are not obligated to respect that behavior, or the person engaging in that behavior. I think one of the greatest disservices we have done to our young people, for a couple of generations now, is to teach them that everyone is entitled to respect no matter what they do. Just as it is your right to behave however you want in society (within legal limits), it is everyone else's right to judge you for that behavior. The younger generations act as if "judgement" is a dirty word, and that people are committing some sort of grave transgression if they judge you.
Are you suggesting that you think that disrespect is a better default behavior towards others than respect? For example, would you prefer that people respond to your comments disrespectfully until they have seen enough of them to believe you “deserve their respect?”
Edit: if you are saying that it is reasonable that some actions can induce a loss of respect, I agree. Though I firmly believe respect is the default behavior and also that there is a base level of respect that should be accorded to even our worst enemies.
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A common performative-progressive talking point during the rise of Trump was that we should not try to figure out what's motivating rural white people to support him. Instead, those people need to quiet down, step aside, and make room for lesbian women of color, etc.
So yeah, your philosophy sounds nice. Aggressive performative-progressives sometimes claim to subscribe to it, but their actions tend to differ in practice. See this article for details on this phenomenon: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/social-justice-and-wor...