Posted by Mitchell on January 16, 2003, at 12:46:10
In reply to Re: where to draw the line, posted by Dr. Bob on January 16, 2003, at 8:38:18
> What if it had been a country in the Middle East? You can also pick any country and find people who are greedy... I don't mean to be dense, I'm just trying to figure out how to apply this rule. Thanks for your input -- and patience,
>
> BobA line drawn to protect generalized groups will always be arbitrary. Injury to an insulted group is a symptom. The pathology underlying the symptom must be addressed for guidelines to consistently relieve the symptom.
Whatever guidelines govern this site, the opus in question is symptomatic of a more general social problem resulting from defective language skills. Westerm society heavily relies on expressive rhetoric, and often employs representational language expressively rather than as pure representation. Ready availability of publishing tools has further degraded recognition of expressive rhetoric, allowing personal expression to comingle with literary expression, which more usually is governed by collective standards.
In this climate of pathological expression, we can only further complicate matters by designing rules to prohibit statements about groups. Practices or guidelines that require accurate representation, however, might restore capacity to communities' wounded expressive skills.
If we prohibit accurate representation, or flawed good-faith representation, we damage our ability to learn from our expressive efforts.
I believe the writer was trying to say he thought some person's life had become centered around desire for money, and that the flawed desire grew from the person's historic cultural enviornment. Whether the writer was accurate or not, we benefit from understanding and exploring the expressed opinion. We need the opinion expressed in terms we can use. In practical dialogue, "asshole" is about useless as a descriptive term. Vulgar metaphor better illustrates the speaker's thought style than the subject so described.
With useful terms, we can begin to explore the basis of the expressed feeling. Perhaps, in a similar case where a person points out flaws in another, concern over others' flaws might arise from projective identification. If we can't find a safe way to express perceptions, we can scarecely understand the circumstances causing the perceptions.
To ban criticism of others because others might hurt from the criticism impairs our ability to criticize ourselves. Requirements that criticism, whether flawed or accurate, be expressed in reasonably accurate laguage improves our ability to correct our own flaws.
poster:Mitchell
thread:8766
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/admin/20021128/msgs/8842.html