Dignity, decency, moral suasion vs. vulgarity

Bookworm brings us a 1940s movie entitled The Negro Soldier.

The blacks in this movie are dignified, striving people, yearning for education and success. Yes, I know it’s propaganda. But the fact that’s it propaganda actually makes my point. Propaganda’s goal is to reach out to people in the most effective way possible to affect their thinking. In 1944, those who made The Negro Soldier looked at black culture and concluded that the best way to reach out to blacks was to present them, not as hip or cool, not as victims, not as rage-filled revolutionaries, but as people of intellectual and moral substance. Moreover, as I noted above, that approach worked for both blacks and whites who saw the movie.

I find it hard to imagine a filmmaker today using dignity as a means to convey propaganda to American blacks. Madison Avenue, Hollywood, and those blacks who create their own images (Beyonce springs to mind), rely upon entirely different approaches to using media — movies, television, music, newsfotainment — in order to affect their black audiences. Whether these propaganda purveyors are selling products, themselves, or some ideology, the modern approach to blacks runs the gamut all the way from selling sex to foul language to perpetual victimhood to raw anger and race hatred.

Bookworm then brings us a sampling of videos black stars today.

Please note that I’m not challenging the messages, whatever the heck they are, in the above videos. I’m challenging the presentation. These fabulously successful black people have concluded that the way to sell their message downstream is not through dignity, decency, moral suasion, facts, or anything else appealing to the higher mind. Instead, they channel their products and messages through a lowest common denominator vulgarity.

...I think it’s a great loss to America generally and to American blacks specifically that dignity is a forgotten virtue. Dignity lifts people up. It means that, when people treat you badly, this bad conduct reflects solely on them. You are not humiliated because your own dignity raises you above their bad behavior. As Martin Luther King, Jr., showed, dignity is both a sword and a shield.

Read and view more here.

Competing for status as victims or as defenders of victims.

Jonathan Haidt writes at righteousmind.com,

I just read the most extraordinary paper by two sociologists — Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning — explaining why concerns about microaggressions have erupted on many American college campuses in just the past few years. In brief: We’re beginning a second transition of moral cultures. The first major transition happened in the 18th and 19th centuries when most Western societies moved away from cultures of honor (where people must earn honor and must therefore avenge insults on their own) to cultures of dignity in which people are assumed to have dignity and don’t need to earn it. They foreswear violence, turn to courts or administrative bodies to respond to major transgressions, and for minor transgressions they either ignore them or attempt to resolve them by social means. There’s no more dueling.

Campbell and Manning describe how this culture of dignity is now giving way to a new culture of victimhood in which people are encouraged to respond to even the slightest unintentional offense, as in an honor culture. But they must not obtain redress on their own; they must appeal for help to powerful others or administrative bodies, to whom they must make the case that they have been victimized. It is the very presence of such administrative bodies, within a culture that is highly egalitarian and diverse (i.e., many college campuses) that gives rise to intense efforts to identify oneself as a fragile and aggrieved victim.

...as progress is made toward a more equal and humane society, it takes a smaller and smaller offense to trigger a high level of outrage. The goalposts shift, allowing participants to maintain a constant level of anger and constant level of perceived victimization.

...Some colleges have lowered the bar so far that an innocent question, motivated by curiosity, such as “where are you from” is now branded as an act of aggression.

...[This is the great tragedy: the culture of victimization rewards people for taking on a personal identity as one who is damaged, weak, and aggrieved. This is a recipe for failure — and constant litigation — after students graduate from college and attempt to enter the workforce]

...Because of their belief in the value of personal bravery and capability, people socialized into a culture of honor will often shun reliance on law or any other authority even when it is available, refusing to lower their standing by depending on another to handle their affairs (Cooney 1998:122–129). But historically, as state authority has expanded and reliance on the law has increased, honor culture has given way to something else: a culture of dignity. [p. 712-713]

...The prevailing culture in the modern West is one whose moral code is nearly the exact opposite of that of an honor culture. Rather than honor, a status based primarily on public opinion, people are said to have dignity, a kind of inherent worth that cannot be alienated by others (Berger 1970; see also Leung and Cohen 2011).

...We can expect political polarization to get steadily worse in the coming decades as this moral culture of victimhood spreads.

Read more here.

Standing apart

Dan McLaughlin writes in The Weekly Standard about the stellar record of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

...This is the second time in three years that Thomas has written the most opinions, and they are not filled with breezy rhetoric, but thick with citation to the roots of our constitutional system, from the Magna Carta to John Locke to Blackstone’s Commentaries.

But mere volume is not the measure of Thomas’s jurisprudence. For that, one must take a closer look at the many times he has stood against the prevailing winds, warning his colleagues that the Court should consider its own errors and limitations. The cases in which he has split from Scalia — his closest colleague philosophically — are telling.

...Clarence Thomas is an affable man, if one who does not forget his scars, and by all accounts he gets on well enough with his colleagues. But given that few of them other than Scalia bother responding to his lone opinions, one wonders if some of them look at him a little funny—“that guy who keeps going on about the Constitution.” He is known to prefer the company of almost anyone to the company of his fellow judges and lawyers; he meets more often than any other justice with groups of visitors to the Court and travels the country in his RV during the Court’s recesses. But that distance makes him uniquely suited among the justices to look at this country not from the perspective of a member of the judicial high priesthood, but as a citizen ruled by it. Some critics suggest that he may be biased by the fact that his wife is active in Tea Party groups, but after his nearly quarter of a century on the Court, suggesting that Thomas’s view of the Constitution is influenced by the Tea Party is rather like suggesting that Newton’s physics were influenced by Einstein.

...Thomas’s opinions this term form a coherent whole, one that places no trust in institutions—in the wisdom of judges, the expertise of bureaucrats, or the evenhandedness of either—but depends instead on clear, written rules and structural checks and balances. And his philosophy, while grounded in the same principles as our Constitution itself, should not surprise us. Thomas is not so far removed from his upbringing in segregated Georgia that he cannot remember what it was like to live in a place and time in which the government was staffed and run by people who had no intention of treating you fairly.

Two strategies are available to a citizen confronted by such a government. One is to keep for himself as large a space as possible free of the government, in which to exercise true liberty. The other is to insist on the punctilious observance of the letter of the law. The whims of administrative agencies and the discretion of judges to fashion new rights and rules according to their own policy preferences threaten both of these strategies, to the detriment of whomever the people in power regard as beneath their concern. It is perhaps a supreme irony, but a fitting one, that the man most concerned with keeping alight the flame of these old concepts of liberty and dignity is the justice of the Supreme Court who grew up under a government that wished to accord him neither liberty nor dignity.

Read more here.

Helping each other cross the finish line with dignity

BuzzFeed has the story of the Russian Olympian whose ski broke during the finals of the Men's Cross-Country Skiing Sprint. A Canadian coach brought him a replacement ski so he could finish the race.