Usually the newer an idea is the easier it is to get
smart with it. When the idea that
environment rather than heredity might make people what they are was new the
jokes ("So if a cat has kittens in an oven they'll come out biscuits, ha,
ha") just burst out.
Everybody had known for a long time what readers of the Bible well knew,
that a man "sowed his seed" in a woman, and the offspring, the crop,
came out like him. Abraham's seed
would be like him, obedient to one God.
When the idea of environmental influence became familiar the jokes came
harder.
The idea that we should be
understanding and tolerant of people quite unlike us hasn't followed that
pattern. The longer it stays and the more extensively it gets elaborated
the easier this idea is to get smart with. Few could get smart
with a relatively simple identity designated LGB (Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals);
now, with an identity designated LGBTQIA, recognized soberly in church
bulletins, everybody is getting smart. And, with the prospect of
LGBTQIAPK (adding Polyamory and Kinky) recognized soberly in the
contemporary culture magazine Role Reboot — sort of a church
bulletin — smartness will be kicking in before the day is out ("Why the
K?" For men who have it for knotholes. A splinter group.)
We've got to be careful with
smartness, though. The men in my town in the thirties were smart as whips
about the Jews, and made jokes about their suspected habits that doubled you
over. (Mama, suspicious about the silence, with a Yiddish accent:
"Abie, Rosie, what are you doing?" "Fucking,
Mama." "That's nice, don't fight.") Then Hitler rose
to power, and you know what some of them said? I heard them. "Well,
Hitler's a monster but I admire him for one thing, the way he's handled the
Jews." Only accidents of history differentiated them from Holocaust
accommodators.
Times change so thoroughly you
need a long life-span, maybe, to be able to recognize the threat in what looks
normal. If you lived before my time you'd be able to report on the normality of
anti-Semitism in the decades before the thirties.
But this is how atrocities and
accommodation to them begin, in tribal or cultural normality, with casual slurs
and easy jokes. Demean people long enough and unthinkingly enough and
it's easier, when the time of fear and crisis comes, to do the
unthinkable. Originally unthinkable. Distantly unthinkable.
Changing cultural normality is
what LGBTQIA people are trying to do, and it's a slow and painful
business. They're part of a generation, maybe three generations, in this
business. And we need a reminder about such generations: they get
silly. They wave the banner of change too wildly. Some people, when they're not
wanting to hang the last king in the entrails of the last priest, are always
wanting to change the names of the months, or do away with collars.
A professor I studied under long
ago, Herbert Feigl (eulogized in the preceding post), shows how to take these
people, usually young people, who go too far. He's talking about changers
of philosophy, but he might as well be talking changers of culture.
"A young and aggressive movement," he says,
in its zeal to purge thought of
confusions and superfluous entities naturally brandishes more destructive weapons
than it requires for its genuinely constructive endeavor.
The lesson is, "Don't be
distracted by the inevitable extremism or (in the case of culture) silliness,
in a new movement. Keep your eyes on the sane advancement."
In philosophy departments in the
middle of the last century the reward was to be in on, early, the construction
of the philosophy, analytical philosophy, that nearly every American and
British department eventually found most fruitful. A finding made by the
undistracted.
The equivalent in culture, the
building of a fruitful tolerance, offers a similar reward. Only further
in the future.
Note: The post on Herbert Feigl, 381,
expanded, will appear in the Fall, 2017, issue of The Philosophical
Forum.
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