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IS MY CLASH WITH THEMOTTE POSTERS PURELY VALUE BASED
17 upvotes!
Now, the fascinating thing about this post is it takes my position far further than I could ever imagine doing so and then confronts me with a person who claims it would be irrelevant if this extreme position were fully true. That "unfeeling automata" might, if representing a substantial portion of your elite, convert your somewhat free country into a nightmare where you never saw an unmasked face again, seems not to bother him in the slightest.
Now I'd be tempted to ignore this as a one-off but then there's this response to my comment on foot-binding.
Now this is fascinating to me, because while I can intuitively understand the conditions leading to things like genocide, or more to the point physical child abuse, footbinding falls within the entirely alien moral universe world to me. Given the choice between an otherwise loving family who bound my feet, and an otherwise violent one that didn't I cannot possibly imagine choosing the latter. I'm pretty sure this isn't just my gender speaking for another gender, and I'm more than willing to entertain what might be considered misogynistic thinking. Yet @DaseIndustries hits me with this.
Now, I don't doubt that someone of Dase's intellectual caliber understands why the testimony of a person, victimized irreperably by loved ones, in a cultural context where this was normal; might be less than reliable. So I'm left, once again with the feeling that our underlying basic instincts must just be different in some way. How would we go about figuring out whether this is the case?
As others say, this and your previous post seem to be lacking context. It looks like maybe you're worried about masking in the West? But it really didn't seem to be a bunch of East Asian officials forcing that on Westerners, but the Westerners' own leaders, of different ethnicities, largely European ancestry, and the people themselves.
There is a certain repetition of theme through some of these veiling and binding practices of various cultures, which is often tightly bound up with class and leisure. Well off people who can have food delivered and work from home mandating masks, dressing their daughters in burkas, binding their daughters' feet, loading them up with 20 lbs of neck rings, tight lacing their corsets. What's the big deal, surely you don't have to walk and work outside like peasants? Castrate your son and he'll never have to do any physical labor, he can just sing full time and be paid well for it. As others mentioned, this shows up sometimes in various times and places. Now that Western culture has become unusually permissive about (lack of) veiling, people's anxiety is coming out in things like anorexia, bulimia, cutting, dysphoria, and whatever else. Apparently humans get really neurotic and destructive when stressed about mate choice and social standing.
The best solution I've heard of is to have smaller social units that are explicitly told to be kind and understanding to each other like church communities, and have as many different small hierarchies as possible, so that everyone isn't competing for the same couple of attractive husbands/wives or the same slot at the Ivies or the same job at the New York Times or whatever, there are plenty of ways to succeed. My impression is that middle upper class Americans have been feeling the squeeze lately, writing stressed out articles about not being able to get into an elite university, wearing masks in public, and finding new and interesting gender expressions to enforce with zeal. Perhaps next year's fashion trend will be tight laced corsets.
I'm not saying that some ethnic groups don't do more stressed out status competitions than others, but calling it a foreign moral universe seems a bit much.
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