Social Theory

So, one of the lovely things about my tribe (Engineers, as opposed to my adopted tribe. You know who you are) is the willingness to have an opinion and take a stand on topics we know little about. We tend to be highly educated people, and some of us seem to think that having mastered the trick of getting educated, we can thus be masters of any topic in which we take an interest. For some, the interest is benign, and related to our direct skill set. Carpentry, mechanics, rail roads (real and hobby), etc. Others of us range farther afield...

Which brings me to my latest great theory about society and culture. I think that to the extent that something is wrong with our (US> east coast> mid-atlantic) (the previous just emphasizes that I know my sample is limited) culture, the problem is our unwillingness to judge each other. This may seem counter-intuitive, given our general ability to dislike each other for trivial reasons (see previous post), but bear with me. For this forum, here is my first piece of evidence, an article from The Washington Post on June 23: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/22/AR2008062202205.html?hpid=topnews

To summarize, people in the DC region have been stealing public land for private use. These are usually homeowners whose properties abut a public park. Sometimes the theft is unintentional, as when a previous owner sited a fence improperly, but the crime can also be blatant, like the guy who put his invisible dog fence deep into a public park. His justification is that his two dogs keep the deer away, which protects everyone from ticks. To my eye, this guy is just a thief. No shades of gray, no excuses. The reporter who wrote the article, the park service employees, and neighbors interviewed for the article all carefully avoided the "thief" word, instead dancing around with various euphemisms.

I say that we are all at fault when our fellow citizens commit obvious wrongs and we fail to call them out on it. What are we afraid of? How far does tolerance extend, and what harm are we doing to our communities when we don't set limits? Sadly, I see the obvious problem with this call to arms. We humans can be very bad at picking issues of importance, and even worse at moderating the punishment to fit the crime. Used to be that fornication could get you run out of town, and interracial marriage could land you in jail. Those are some community standards that I'm glad have become obsolete. But I still feel that we are in danger of going too far with our laissez-faire attitudes. We should speak up when our neighbors steal public land, or leave their spouse and kids without a dime or a clue, or pull their kids out of school and never let them out of the house again (ref. Bonita Jacks in DC). Some things are so wrong that we shouldn't let them become ok.

The difficult work here is figuring out sets of community standards that work for people of any religion or none, new immigrants or natives, young or old, that don't chafe too much against any particular group. What if some religions and cultural practices can't be accommodated? That might be a pill we have to swallow, but we should start talking about it in a rational way, instead of making rules piecemeal to address individual cases. That's a whole different rant though.

ps. Holy Mackerel, a completely relevant piece of tangential evidence: http://www.slate.com/id/2193872/ . This is one of those topics that never bothers me unless my kid is around, but clearly I haven't thought about it enough.