Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

Much of the drive and effective purpose of our modern industrial civilization has been the sometimes admirable egalitarian function of making those aspects previously associated with the rich available to nearly all citizens. The vast array of factories and farms that make up the industrial foundation of our modern world churn out a volume of goods and services that daily dwarfs the productivity of the entire ancient world.

Thanks to science, a market driven economy, and especially mass production, our society has been able to deliver a quality of life to nearly all of its citizens that rivals the most privileged of the past. Because of modern machines and technology, most of us enjoy greater access to communications, entertainment, high quality food, effective medical care, and transportation than those privileged of the past with a household full of slaves at their beck and call.

Spurred on by the largely positive results of making those material aspects of life formerly associated with the rich available to a broader spectrum of the population, there has been a concerted effort to apply the same artificial redistribution to the abstract aspects of life. But while industry has made it possible to supply the material aspects of life to nearly all by increasing the productivity of workers, the effort to force the redistribution of the abstract aspects of life has unexpected costs and side effects far beyond the emotionally appealing intended goal.

The process started with the reasonably defensible idea of discouraging gratuitous disrespect based on sex, race, or religion. Finding general acceptance for their initial attack on the racial insult considered most offensive to blacks, the advocates of the new political correctness expanded their campaign to include nearly any derogatory term that doesn't refer to white men. But in the process of demonizing what has come to be called hate speech, the advocates of political correctness didn't stop at just eliminating disrespect. Somehow the concept was distorted to equate a lack of positive respect with disrespect. Like medieval mathematicians trying to deny the concept of the number zero, the overzealous advocates of political correctness have sought to deny that a neutral position showing no disrespect nor unearned positive respect is entirely valid. But in mandating positive respect as a basic entitlement, we've compromised the core meaning and purpose of conditional respect as a tool of society.

Consider how political correctness has artificially distorted our concept of conditional respect. In the past, at least in theory an individual earned the respect of his peers by his principles and accomplishments. Of course we don't live in a perfect world and there have always been distortions in society's implementation of respect. Too often the concept of respect has been twisted into a function of hereditary titles, improperly acquired wealth, skin color, or other invalid criteria. On a superficial level that primarily highlights the aberrations of conditional respect, it's an almost unavoidable step to wanting to force society to show respect for those it has previously unfairly denied that respect. What is overlooked in the emotionally attractive desire to share society's "wealth" of respect in the same manner as we attempt to share material wealth, is that respect plays a far more complex role in society.

Gaining the respect and positive regard of those around us appears to be the natural desire of most people. We start out life seeking the approval of our parents. This need for approval is so strong that some schools of thought in child rearing hold that when properly managed it is a sufficient to provide all needed control and motivation. While there is dissension on this point, it is generally agreed that the need for parental approval is a powerful influence in early life. As we grow up, the desire for the respect of our peers becomes for many an even more powerful influence on their views and behaviors. Much of the wasteful mortality of the teenage years results from misguided attempts to gain the respect of peers by pushing the limits of the rebellion that is such a hallmark of that period of life.

Man's obsession with respect has always been a primary component of our exceptionally unhealthy attraction to warfare. The demand for respect at a national level is well documented as a primary cause of nations going to war. However, while patriotic slogans and nationalistic pride may be effective in convincing otherwise rational individuals to put on a uniform and take up arms, these abstract concepts lose some of their focus in the terrible immediacy of combat. At the point where warm flesh meets cold steel, men fight more for the respect of their fellow soldiers than for their ideals. While it may have been belief in ideals that got them into the trenches in the first place, it is the fear of losing the respect of their fellow soldiers that provides the powerful motivation needed to convince those otherwise rational men to climb out of their relatively safe trenches, and charge headlong into the terrible carnage of the enemy's machine-guns.

The desire for respect can be so powerful that those who have been denied the respect of mainstream society often turn to fear as a means of forcing at least the illusion of respect. One of the major attractions to gang culture is its promise to provide the appearance of respect to those unable or unwilling to earn real respect. Real or imagined offenses involving the arcane rituals of respect in the violent world of gangsterism are more often the cause for murder among gang members than financial issues. To gang members, even the shallow contrived illusion of respect that results from fear is preferable to the disrespect their failures earn them from society at large.

Since our desire for respect is such a powerful influence, it's hardly surprising that it has become both an integral factor in society and a focus of attention by those attempting to implement ever broader egalitarianism. Human societies tend to involve individuals interacting across a broad range of levels and purposes. We attempt to address the inappropriate aberrations at the extremes of the range through the sanctions offered by the criminal justice system. But a functional society also involves interactions at levels where individual events fall below the threshold for involvement of enforcement agencies, but which in large measure define the quality of life of the citizens.

It would hardly be appropriate use of society's resources to attempt to address such issues as minor rudeness or neglected hygiene with the criminal justice system, and yet society needs some way to encourage preferred patterns of behavior. Conditional respect has always supplied that function. While it is entirely possible to live without the respect of one's peers, the natural desire for respect does provide a potentially powerful noncoercive, nonviolent influence on most of us. Societies have always granted or withheld respect from individuals for real or perceived minor deviations as a way of encouraging compliance with mainstream society's expectations.

Society also needs a means by which citizens can indicate the values they place on the goods and services being offered independent of the marketplace. In a free society the marketplace and the laws of supply and demand largely determine the financial rewards earned by producers. But this mechanism isn't sufficient. The market alone often doesn't reflect the intangible values offered by different goods and services. Some of the goods and services most critical to the functioning of a modern society are those least able to justify an attractive level of return solely on the basis of their direct market value.

Misguided artificial interventions in the marketplace like our previous efforts at prohibiting alcohol and our current efforts toward prohibiting some drugs can also cause massive distortions, causing the marketplace to deliver the greatest financial rewards to the producers of those goods and services claimed to be of the least real value to society. While artificial market distortions provide the most obvious and egregious examples, even an entirely free market fails to comprehensively reflect the collective values of society.

Throughout most of history the earnings of prostitutes have exceeded those of teachers. While both professions can be argued to be providing valuable services to their customers - and in the minds of some the differential rewards provided by the market are entirely valid - most societies have made some attempt to encourage one over the other. The granting or withholding of respect has historically provided this very useful mechanism. Poor teachers were respected citizens while rich prostitutes were not. Even before the current futile attempts to criminalize the world's oldest profession, the desire to be respectable citizens provided sufficient encouragement for many individuals to choose teaching over prostitution.

In our current obsession with political correctness we have disturbed this most valuable function of society. Where respect previously was something of value that an individual had to earn through their principles, abilities and deeds, we're now told that respect has been decreed to be yet another entitlement. Where respect previously served as a badge of honor and measure of the regard of one's peers, we're now instructed that the rituals of respect must be most carefully observed when interacting with those we might privately consider least worthy.

Society as a whole is suffering significant side effects from the forced distortion of our natural inclinations toward conditional respect. By degrading the value of respect, we've also effectively degraded the value of those related socially useful concepts that respect formerly rewarded - concepts like honor and personal integrity. Why bother with such inconvenient restraints when society is prohibited from showing its displeasure by withholding its respect?

Having compromised society's more subtle means of encouraging reasonable accommodation of the accepted norms of behavior in our day to day affairs, we're obliged to resort to more overtly invasive means of accomplishing this necessary function. Where the practice of conditional respect once provided a significant and relatively automatic moderating influence, we as a society must now increasingly turn to heavy handed legislative "solutions" to deal with ever more minor aspects of every day life.

Just as our concept of respect itself is multidimensional, the side effects of eliminating conditional respect are similarly not limited to the single dimension of moderating person to person interactions. The "respectable" professions formerly drew adequate numbers of high quality individuals who were motivated more by their dedication and desire for the respect of society than by the limited salaries. Now that conditional respect has been removed from the equation, society must pay ever larger piles of hard cash to convince ever lower quality individuals to perform these most necessary jobs.

As an example consider the well documented decline of our educational system. In the past our highly respected but underpaid teachers provided America with the finest educational system in the world. However, in order to avoid offending those undeserving of our respect, we've greatly cheapened those extremely valuable intangible aspects of the job that had formerly attracted the best applicants. As a result we must now attempt to compensate for this lost value with financial rewards and other concessions such as shorter hours and longer holidays that compromise the educations of the students.

While admittedly there remain a few exceptional teachers who continue to struggle to educate their charges in spite of the ever increasing obstacles, the general failure of the education system indicates that they have become the minority. The teachers we fail to properly respect today put in ever fewer hours failing to teach ever smaller classes of ever more violent and out of control students. In order to convince ever less qualified individuals to occupy this ever less attractive position solely for the money and perks, we now pay teachers average salaries double the national average earned by the parents of those functionally illiterate children that graduate, unprepared for any meaningful role in life, from our now politically correct but functionally crippled schools.

Is the feel good effort to expand the distribution of the abstract aspects of life in the way we have so successfully expanded access to material goods worth the huge costs and side effects? Is the ever increasing intrusive regulation of the most minute details of society by government worth the illusionary benefits of forcing society to show respect for those most worthy of our disrespect? Allowing those with only a superficial understanding of how society really works to dismantle its mechanisms based solely on uninformed and misguided emotional reactions to perceived inequities invites disaster. The principles and functions that have proven effective in the past sometimes remain the best alternative after all.