294. Defending Civilization in the Baseball Dugout

Do you have convictions about what language is acceptable and what not?  Take them into a major league baseball dugout.  The other team's catcher is about to settle under a pop foul near you and you, a rookie, yell, "I got it," impersonating an oncoming teammate of the catcher.  He, fearing a collision, swerves away, the ball drops to the ground, and your manager comes over to you shaking his head.  "That's bush," he says.  Right in front of everybody.

"Bush" is a derogatory reference to the minor leagues, pictured as out in the country — "the sticks."  The players are stereotyped as "hicks" or "rubes."  The manager hurts your feelings when he uses the word. 

According to one model of behavior, the traditional one, the manager is doing what every parent and teacher has to do.  When lectures and example don't work you scold, and embarrass,  and shame — anything to get the immature to be more mature, the juvenile to be more adult, the barbarian to be more civilized.  It's all an effort to turn minor leaguers into major leaguers, and its importance justifies the hurt it causes.

Prominent now is the model for behavior and language in multicultural settings, visible in college-orientation booklets and guides to style in public discourse.  "Avoid using any biased language including language with a racial, ethnic, group, or gender bias or language that is stereotypical" (Purdue).  We look to this model for the same reason we look to the other: to become more civilized.

Most of the time we can follow both models, since they fit together pretty well.  But sometimes they don't and then we civilizers have a problem.  How do we adjust for a misfit?

Maybe English teachers will see the problem first, maybe in tailor's terms.  There's just not enough cloth in the new pattern to cover authors like Samuel Butler (making fun of Puritans) or Oliver Wendell Holmes (making fun of passionate New England evangelicals) or Mark Twain (ditto for Midwestern evangelicals) or Molière (making fun of parvenu vulgarians).  There's bias against a group if you ever saw one.  By the time you get to Aristophanes, making fun of those hicks from Sparta, you see that the material in the orientation guide will never stretch to these and a host of other satirists, all covered nicely by the old cloth. 

It would be easier if the satirists were modeling in a different show, say a gotcha show, but most tailors will tell you that they are not.  The good ones are in the big one, the civilization show.  Who's a greater civilizer than Molière, holding the clueless up to ridicule?  And then his followers, hauling rube after rube up to the stage for a dressing down — and then, hopefully, a dressing up.  It's all a turning of barbarians into people the cultured can live with.

Older teachers will, I think, easily see themselves dressing down a student as the manager dressed down the rookie.  A pretty good model, that fellow.  He speaks in front of the whole team so they all see the standards and know what won't do.  (In the known case, the manager of the Astros let it be known that he had called the manager of the Angels to apologize — enlarging their picture of the civilized world, broadening the lesson.)

It's when feelings come into play that the misfit pinches.  The rookie could be crushed after being called a rube in front of the whole team.  "Well, he ought to be crushed," say the major-leaguers looking to the older model.  "That's the only way you can get the bush out of some guys."  They don't want to go out on the field with any player who did what this rookie did.

"What that language — that indifference to offense, that stereotyping, that bias against a group —does to the rookie is not worth the change you're trying make," say those looking to the newer model.

Since most of the time we find, through imagination and tact, another way to accomplish the change, the misfit doesn't matter much and we can, at ease, think about what's behind each model.  Aren't those people constructing the first model looking at a lower civilization, with barbarians closer to the gates?  And aren't those constructing the second looking at a higher civilization, with (thanks to the older people) the barbarians further off?  With one group attention to feelings is a luxury, with the other it's an expression of a higher, more refined civilization.

It looks to me as if our day-to-day attachment to each model is going to vary with the distance of barbarism and the size of its threat, according to our perceptions.  With Aunt Sarah coming in an hour we say to the obscenity-prone child, "The name for you right now is 'dirty mouth' and dirty-mouths can't sit at the table with Aunt Sarah."  If the visit were a month off our imagination would no doubt come up with something less hurtful.

That's a big threat there from the obscenity spouter, but it's only a local one.  How about a big national one, where the barbarians are in your midst?  I considered Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman dangerous barbarians, a threat to rational debate, the peace movement, and the Democratic Party.  They and the Yippies were as bush league as you could get and I hated going out on the field with them.  OK, I had to speak about them at a university.   I called them "barbarians," as you might predict.  This was before the new model became prominent. 

I see in my performance material for a thought experiment.  In it you bring somebody like me into a similar situation to speak before a university audience now.  Then you work out the dynamics and the possible results.

You'll know that "like me" means an English teacher, one likely to be familiar with the views of important characters in great novels, like those of Willard Carroll in Philip Roth's When She Was Good.  Willard has left behind his upbringing in the backwoods of the North "not to be rich, not to be famous, not to be mighty, not even to be happy, but to be civilized."  It's going to be hard for an English teacher, or maybe any teacher in the humanities, not to approve of Willard's ordering: civilization first, feelings second.  Don't leave this out of your experiment.