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“Insult based around gender, race and class is firmly out”
Unless you’re a middle-class heterosexual white male, that is. Then it’s open season.
Is he saying that we shouldn’t say a mean word ever? The idea in his latest book sounds intriguing but I don’t want to waste my time if he wants to start shaming anyone who says something that someone doesn’t like. This is the entire problem with the CSR crowd. They’re afraid that someone’s feelings will get hurt. That’s why they tear down walls erected in the name of free speech. Nobody likes having their feelings hurt, but when I look back at my life, the most helpful things I’ve been told were some of the most hurtful. Sometimes everyone needs a good slap in the face.
That’s part of the reason we identify with sporting teams, musicians and other entertainment icons. It gives us a piece of our identity that others can put down without it getting too personal. Cheering for a team gives you a membership to a club where you trade barbs good naturedly in a safer zone.
I remember a couple years ago they tried to pass “anti-bullying” legislation in my home state of North Carolina. It wasn’t too far out by the “pass legislation to solve every little problem” standards of the present day but there ended up being a fight because the Democrats included language specifying that people could be bullied for being gay, among other things. I can’t remember if it passed or not, but it was a good example of what de Botton’s tweet illustrates.
I mean, bullying is bullying. Even pretty heterosexual girls can get bullied if they wind up on the wrong side of the powerful school clique, to say nothing of socially inept but otherwise normal young men, and I’m sure they don’t enjoy it either.
“Is he saying that we shouldn’t say a mean word ever?”
I sort of assumed he was demonstrating the fallaciousness of this line of thinking. On the other hand, though, I think some people could benefit from trying to follow this a bit more. A lot of the writers whose stock and trade is identifying insults of protected groups can get mighty personal in their attempted rebuttals of the alleged insulters.
Alain de Botton? A bald Jewish toff.
Ironically, much of that “tribalistic” pride from drunk white college liberals hinges upon the performances of their bands of academically-unqualified negro athletes.
The last single mom I dated had some “Alain de Botton” (if that is indeed his real name) books. She had a two year old by a random artistic sperm donor and a local u-no-versity job that paid more than I could earn slinging pans. I moved in quick, she subsidized my Barnes ‘n’ Noble habit, eventually she moved to Portland– more supportive. My philosophy minor is a consolation unto itself and stuff, and even if Proust didn’t change my life in any deeply meaningful way… the sex I got from talking about it was good enough.
Is that tweet meant to be taken at face value or is it some kind of joke? If the former it’s pretty astonishing that a person can be a grown-up (with pretensions of intellectualism no less) and think that conflict between groups can be eliminated if we all just simultaneously agree to stop being such meanie mean heads.
The irony is that if we didn’t have such fascist rules against criticizing groups, we’d probably have a more harmonious society as people would be able to blow off steam verbally without anyone making a federal case out of it.
I just read Botton’s book about what atheists can gain from religion. I found it amazing that at the end of the book he shines the light on Comte’s “Church of Humanity” as an example of the benefits of secular religion. But as I pondered on it, I realized that the U.S.’s official religion is the “Church of Humanity.” The universities are the cathedrals, the politicians are the priests, and political correctness is the dogma. The new religion has been a century old project.