White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders went to have dinner at a local restaurant the other day. The owner, who is adamantly opposed to the policies of the Trump administration, politely asked her to leave, and she did. Now (who says human behavior is hard to predict?) an intense discussion has broken out concerning the role of civility in public discourse and our daily life. The Washington Post editorial board, in particular, called for public officials to be allowed to eat in peace, and people have responded in volume.
I don’t have a tweet-length response to this, as I think the issue is more complex than people want to make it out to be. I am pretty far out to one extreme when it comes to the importance of engaging constructively with people with whom we disagree. We live in a liberal democracy, and we should value the importance of getting along even in the face of fundamentally different values, much less specific political stances. Not everyone is worth talking to, but I prefer to err on the side of trying to listen to and speak with as wide a spectrum of people as I can. Hell, maybe I am even wrong and could learn something.
On the other hand, there is a limit. At some point, people become so odious and morally reprehensible that they are just monsters, not respected opponents. It’s important to keep in our list of available actions the ability to simply oppose those who are irredeemably dangerous/evil/wrong. You don’t have to let Hitler eat in your restaurant.
This raises two issues that are not so easy to adjudicate. First, where do we draw the line? What are the criteria by which we can judge someone to have crossed over from “disagreed with” to “shunned”? I honestly don’t know. I tend to err on the side of not shunning people (in public spaces) until it becomes absolutely necessary, but I’m willing to have my mind changed about this. I also think the worry that this particular administration exhibits authoritarian tendencies that could lead to a catastrophe is not a completely silly one, and is at least worth considering seriously.
More importantly, if the argument is “moral monsters should just be shunned, not reasoned with or dealt with constructively,” we have to be prepared to be shunned ourselves by those who think that we’re moral monsters (and those people are out there). There are those who think, for what they take to be good moral reasons, that abortion and homosexuality are unforgivable sins. If we think it’s okay for restaurant owners who oppose Trump to refuse service to members of his administration, we have to allow staunch opponents of e.g. abortion rights to refuse service to politicians or judges who protect those rights.
The issue becomes especially tricky when the category of “people who are considered to be morally reprehensible” coincides with an entire class of humans who have long been discriminated against, e.g. gays or transgender people. In my view it is bigoted and wrong to discriminate against those groups, but there exist people who find it a moral imperative to do so. A sensible distinction can probably be made between groups that we as a society have decided are worthy of protection and equal treatment regardless of an individual’s moral code, so it’s at least consistent to allow restaurant owners to refuse to serve specific people they think are moral monsters because of some policy they advocate, while still requiring that they serve members of groups whose behaviors they find objectionable.
The only alternative, as I see it, is to give up on the values of liberal toleration, and to simply declare that our personal moral views are unquestionably the right ones, and everyone should be judged by them. That sounds wrong, although we do in fact enshrine certain moral judgments in our legal codes (murder is bad) while leaving others up to individual conscience (whether you want to eat meat is up to you). But it’s probably best to keep that moral core that we codify into law as minimal and widely-agreed-upon as possible, if we want to live in a diverse society.
This would all be simpler if we didn’t have an administration in power that actively works to demonize immigrants and non-straight-white-Americans more generally. Tolerating the intolerant is one of the hardest tasks in a democracy.
The main counterpoint I have here is that this isn’t just a random person who happens to hold odious views. Sarah Sanders is a prominent spokesperson for an openly pro-authoritarian administration who is currently engaging in multiple illegal crimes against humanity, and who is actively hostile to the foundations of a government based on laws.
Private citizens who notice this and strenuously disagree with it should feel free to protest this government in any and every way they can. And refusing to allow prominent members of the administration dine with them is a perfectly reasonable form of protest.
If we were to ever loop around and have restaurant owners kick out press secretaries of future administrations not based upon their odious actions, but instead based upon lies they believe because, say, Fox News spread them, then that would be within their rights. But those restaurant owners would be rightfully castigated as being terrible people. Their actions would still be legal, but it’s unlikely to ever become a widespread problem.
I probably would not have asked her to leave if it was my restaurant. But this incident is not surprising since the words and actions of this administration foster ugliness, divisiveness and discrimination. Better to remember everything that’s happening and go vote in the next election. I do believe in good behavior and proper decorum, something that’s missing in the current environment. Hopefully the atmosphere will improve in the future. Otherwise I will have to sadly and reluctantly accept the fact that I’ve seen the best 70 years this country has to offer.
What does civility mean to this physician? https://www.revealnews.org/blog/exclusive-shiloh-doctor-lost-board-certification-to-treat-children-years-ago/
The brutal circumstances of the families we are witnessing being callously separated, along with the abhorrent chilling scenes of caged children should be and is to the society´s credit causing a major moral upheaval and dillema for the country. Were most not reacting with repulsion to this then Trump and his sick sadistic minions would have gotten their way. But encouragingly they aren´t. And ultimately won´t. Anyone being indifferent to or excusing away such a vile minutely calculated policy of what cannot be qualified as anything other than a form of state terror with whatever twisted convoluted “reasoning” or rationalization or with anyone who supports these outrageous policies should receive all the social approbrium and scorn the society can muster. Ms. Sanders only missed a night out, not a night without her kids.
Dear American opponents of the Trump administration, please tell me something: How many immigrants to your country is enough? And, what sort of immigrants do you want?
There are literally billions of people in the world. Hundreds of millions of them could crowd into your country, severely lowering the quality of life, and more would keep coming if they could, because that would still be an improvement over where they live now.
I see no awareness of this among critics of border control or immigration restriction. I see no attempt to say how many is enough, or who exactly should be admitted – just agitation against any kind of restriction or exclusion. It’s much the same here in Australia.
So here’s an opportunity: Show that you have a sense of responsibility. Nominate some limits. Tell the world how many would be enough. If you can’t even do that, then you are not a serious candidate to govern.
@rykart I fail to see how your assertion that “liberals should have seized… the fruits of liberal creativity”, follows from the incident with the bakery. For one, I am uncertain as to what is meant in your second use of the word “liberal”, as it makes little sense to have it mean the same thing as in your first usage of the word. That aside however, it seems to me that the refusal to make something that you would not make anyway (even if you have the ability to make) is wholly different from the selective denial of things already made freely.
The president dictates the mood and tenor of his party. The tribe will always follow the leader. After leaving the Republican Party in 2010 I had hoped the mood would change. It has only gotten worse, much worse.
There is a time when civility is considered a weakness. It seems that time has arrived, especially for those of us who have worked so hard to be the adults in the room.
It’s so refreshing to see thoughtful debate on a topic such as this, particularly from a scientific community who show here that views on morality and ethics must not eminate solely from politicians or the religious.
I am a UK citizen and have tried to engage in useful discussion with the extremists of Brexit, who share much in common with the US so-called president. It is impossible and descends rapidly into anger, trolling and name-calling. I suspect the same is true when trying to engage with morally bankrupt people generally, since logic is rarely on their side. This woman chose her profession as an apologist for the most morally bankrupt leader we have seen in the West in recent history, so I think a private business owner can choose not to offer his services to her, as a peaceful rejection of her values.
Thank you, Sean, for this contribution to rational debate.
You wrote, “If the argument is “moral monsters should just be shunned, not reasoned with or dealt with constructively,” we have to be prepared to be shunned ourselves by those who think that we’re moral monsters (and those people are out there). ”
If only that sort of logic worked. “The other side” doesn’t take our behavior as their model. Especially Trump. He does whatever he wants for whatever reason he wants and then makes up a BS story about why he did it. He does that no matter what we do. So I wouldn’t worry about the issue you raise.
Given all that, though, I normally don’t shun people.
Something absent in this discussion is how we define civility? Sean Carroll is right that it´s a vital aspect of our social interactions we don´t want to lose in the face of the aggressive toxic challenges facing the country under Trump and that are being strained to be redifned because of them.
America is, I have lived in Europe most of my life on and off since childhood, generally a very civil polite place, especially if one is White and middle class , by comparison to Europe overall (minus perhaps some more acerbic areas of the Northeast where it seems “attitude”always reigns )and quite pleasant and refreshing to return to because of it. Americans are or were rather cheerful at least superficially; generally upbeat, and outwardly at least glowed with optimism feigned or not; so unlike the culturally, nationalistcally and historically hidebound Europeans but who however have social systems which generally ( more reactionary Eastern Europe to a much lesser extent) don´t allow half their citizens to live on the fringes in constant fear an illness might throw them into debt and abject poverty.
Perhaps we should be redefining “civilty” in terms such as a living wage, universal health care, low cost or free child care for working families especially single working mothers and much heavier taxation of the upper 10 to 1% as well. But alas, that might cost some even well intentioned groups of the society some real money. One wonders if that would really fly with them despite their espoused liberal values. Where were and are all the high frequency “shamers” when the tax bill was passed or the present effort in Congress to gut Social Security and Medicaid?
And when one goes to almost any restaurant, as habitually most even presently outraged Americans, and I¨m sure many of those contributing here as well are constantly doing, just like Ms. Sanders, Secretary Nielson or Mr. Miller, are they ever inquiring or canvassing , civily of course, these establishments about the working conditions or “legality” of the service staff who¨are doing most of the cooking or cleaning up, or in other professions doing the landscaping or putting the dry wall for the new add on to one´s house? Or where they might be from and how the came to be there in what circumstances? Hispanics and Latins comprise only about 16% of the U.S. population yet make up nearly one half of the service and construction industries combined in two sectors well known for less than “civil” working conditions. So that leaves some 30 plus percent “off the radar” officially. Maybe we should be widening our criteria and definition of just what “civility” really means?
yugoslavia had diversity.
Obviously, humans have a limit.
see Robert Putnam’s recent works.
This is certainly a subject about which reasonable people can disagree. It would be nice, and much easier for progressives, if there were one uniform rule for every situation, but there isn’t. The courts recognize that there is a difference between a private and a public figure, and, more importantly, between a private citizen and a public official. You can say all kinds of libelous things about a public figure and they pretty much have to just take it, but you can’t do that to a private citizen unless what you say is true. This rule applies to Democrats and Republicans; just consider what people said about Obama. Sarah Sanders is a public official whose salary is paid by the citizens of the United States. She can be treated differently from me and you (although as a somewhat public figure, Sean, you might actually be in a different category from me). She was denied service because the restaurant owner, who helps pay her salary, strongly disagreed with her actions specifically as a public official. That makes it different from denying a private individual service because of some personal quality.
So, even if you disagree with what the owner did, the owner is entirely within their rights to do it, and affirming that right is not a double standard.
“Power. Ambition. Jealousy. According to a new study, the same things that fuel deadly clashes in humans can also tear apart chimpanzees, our closest animal relatives. In the early 1970s, primatologist Jane Goodall and colleagues studying chimpanzees in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, watched as a once-unified chimp community disintegrated into two rival factions. What followed was a period of killings and land grabs, the only civil war ever observed in wild chimpanzees…The exact nature and cause of the split leading to what Goodall called the “Four-Year War” at Gombe from 1974 to 1978 has long been a mystery, said first author and Joseph Feldblum, postdoctoral associate with professor Anne Pusey at Duke. During the war, males within an area of the park known as Kasekela teamed up to raid neighboring territories, brutally beating and killing half a dozen former comrades…Some researchers have suggested the friction was sparked by the banana feeding station Goodall used to lure chimpanzees for observation. They proposed that two distinct chimp communities may have existed all along or were already dissolving when Goodall began her research, and the feeding station merely brought them together in a temporary truce until they parted again. But new results from a team at Duke and Arizona State University suggest something more was going on…Using data extracted from Goodall’s copious hand-written notes and checksheets, which Pusey has spent the last 25 years archiving and digitizing, the researchers analyzed the shifting alliances among 19 male chimpanzees leading up to the split…They mapped the chimps’ social networks at different periods between 1967 and 1972 to pinpoint when relations began to fray. Two males were considered buddies if they were spotted arriving together at the feeding station more often than other pairs…Next, the researchers identified the most tightly knit groups in each network and determined how much their members changed over time…“We used network analysis to quantify the degree to which individuals are cliquish, essentially,” Feldblum said…Their analyses suggest that for the first few years, from 1967 to 1970, males in the original group intermingled…But statistical tests revealed clusters of males that grew more distinct over time. Some males spent more time in the northern part of the range. Another group increasingly withdrew to the south…By 1971, they found the northern and southern males met less and less often. When they did encounter each other, they would hurl branches, hoot, and charge through the forest as a show of strength…Within a year, the cliques began to harden and became increasingly exclusive, results show. Where once the chimps groomed and spent time with other males both inside and outside their subgroup, by 1972 they socialized almost exclusively with males on the inside, with minimal range overlap between northern and southern males. Given the timing, the researchers say the schism was likely triggered by a power struggle between three high-ranking males. The community’s troubles came amid rising tensions between a recently crowned alpha male, Humphrey, and his southern rivals Charlie and Hugh…The resulting hostility was not restricted to these rival males; it affected the whole web of social ties the males were embedded within.
“It’s not possible to say for sure that any one thing was causal since this is the only such event we’ve ever seen in chimpanzees,” Feldblum said. But the results mirror what researchers have documented in other primates, including humans.
A previous analysis of schisms in nearly 50 human societies worldwide found that internal political conflict frequently foreshadows a split in human groups as well, followed closely by competition for scarce resources.”
Jeez…sounds familiar doesn’t it?
https://leakeyfoundation.org/how-infighting-turns-toxic-for-chimpanzees/
Is it a business owners moral decision to not serve a customer OR one primate group intimidating and shunning another as retribution from preturbed group power dynamics in the face of resource scarcities?
“On the other hand, there is a limit. At some point, people become so odious and morally reprehensible that they are just monsters, not respected opponents. It’s important to keep in our list of available actions the ability to simply oppose those who are irredeemably dangerous/evil/wrong.”
Well, short of being a respected opponent, could they still be “humans” instead of “monsters”? As far as keeping a list of available actions, is one of those actions killing them all and taking over their territory?
This is intolerance of tolerance. Studies consistently show that right-wingers are much more tolerant of others, and more willing to have friends and associates with contrary views. You don’t see people being kicked out of restaurants for being Obama supporters. Only the Left is truly intolerant.
@Roger – that’s privilege. Our policies are not a hazard to your life, while the right’s policies cost us jobs, housing, access to medical treatment, right to marriage, position in society as equals and our very lives. Privilege allows you to be tolerant, and privilege kill us.
@Roger
“Studies consistently show … “? Dude, are you serious? This means nothing w/o backup.
“You don’t see people being kicked out of restaurants for being Obama supporters.”
Actually, you sure do. Check out what happened to Biden a few yrs. ago below:
“The Republican ticket has embraced a new small-business hero. On Wednesday, the owner of a bakery who last week turned away Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. introduced Representative Paul D. Ryan at a rally in this city where President Obama uttered his “You didn’t build that” remark.
Chris McMurray, the owner of Crumb and Get It Cookie Company with his wife, told a crowd at another small business, a hardware store, “We are gathered here today to send a message to the Obama-Biden team that we did build it.’’
Mr. McMurray said the Biden campaign approached him to ask if the vice president could drop by his cookie shop while campaigning, and he replied, “Nothing personal, but I just happened to disagree with the president and the vice president on a few things.” — thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/…”
Not to decimate this dead horse, but that cookie shop guy’s defiant “we did build that” was wrongheaded and the result of GOP propaganda. Obama didn’t say “you didn’t build your businesses.” On the contrary, he said you DID–but you didn’t build the things a civilized society provides to everyone: roads, an electric system, etc. That’s what “you didn’t build.” But Republicans are either too stupid, or racist, or drunk on self-righteousness to listen and get it straight. Or they’re simply misled by Fox News and the other sources of propaganda and hate.
-You can’t have a civil conversation with someone if you are the only one being civil.
-Here are the people who have explicitly argued that merchants have the right to deny service to people for just about any reason. Gay people. Black people. Freedom of contracts. Freedom, Freedom, Freedon. Then complaining when someone does it to them AND getting tons of traction with it!
-The GOP is a mean and spiteful thing, worse than ever in my lifetime, and this little episode shows just how good they’ve gotten at working the refs and making Democrats scared of their shadows. We ought to all face the fact that one of the reasons Democrats don’t seem to be motivated to vote for their candidates is that they’re always getting beaten up and apologizing about everything to people who are playing them like a fiddle. And then the same adversaries make fun of Democrats some more for apologizing for everything and then they steal their lunch money again (does the name Derrick Garland ring a bell?) .
-The press is complicit in the whole thing because they are afraid of the GOP, and not much of the ineffectual Democrats.
-Articles like this, which ask Democrats to continue to play nice with people who have no intention to ever do so is very bad counsel indeed.
@FauxPhysicist: Back in 2012, a cookie shop guy declined to participate in a campaign event for a political cause that he did not support. Is that really your best example?
@Erica: You seem to be suffering from some delusions. Who has Trump killed?
“Part of the problem is no one wants to hurt each other anymore … There used to be consequences. There are none anymore. These people are so bad for our country. You have no idea folks, you have no idea.” – Donald Trump, St. Louis Missouri, March 11, 2016
It was a petty thing to do, and the Republicans will make hay with it. But in the greater scheme of things, it is a triviality.
Perhaps discrimination mechanics is like quantum mechanics. The act of measurement has a causal effect upon the subject. Modern methods for confronting discrimination seem to consistently originate by first carefully discriminating and sorting individuals into subjective groups or “categories of people”, often established through stereo-types.
Attempting to solve discrimination by first discriminating may not be the most efficient way to approach the problem. The closer an issue is to moral-certainty, the more appealing circular, ad hominem logic appears. The most elegant solutions often come from outside the box.
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
How often people who claim that we ought to be tolerant and not rude use intolerant and rude language in making these claims. Interesting.
A great victory in the courts today! The US government has 14 days to reunite tender age, and a month to reunite all separated children.
Now, Sean, can we turn back to modeling the universe consistent with the apparent platykurtic distribution of black hole mass as per e.g. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CtIXTv7VIAA-7Ao.png and the concordant likely proportion of dark matter, no matter how much neutrinos oscillate?
If not, can we please return to digital holography for synthesizing the apertures of heterogeneous telescopes out of formation flight https://www.osapublishing.org/viewmedia.cfm?uri=oe-25-26-33315&seq=0 as we were doing almost ten years ago in Second Life https://arxiv.org/pdf/0802.3334.pdf so that we might have more data to make the decision about e.g. Chandra’s unidentified x-ray sources, and which exoplanets have ozone in their ionospheres?
This is exactly what I was going to say.