Mr. Julius Henry Cohen, of New York City (Mr. John J. Bennett. Jr., Atty. Gen., of New York, and Mr. Henry Epstein, Sol Gen. of New York, of Albany, of counsel), argued for the State of New York, as amicus curiae, by special leave of court.
Mr. J. Joseph Lilly, of New York City, for certain employees of the City of New York, amicus curiae.
The question brought here for determination is whether the salary of petitioner as chief engineer of the bureau of water supply of the city of New York is a part of his taxable income for the purposes of the federal income tax law. The answer depends upon whether the water system of the city was created and is conducted in the exercise of the city's governmental functions. If so, its operations are immune from federal taxation and, as a necessary corollary, 'fixed salaries and compensation paid to its officers and employees in their capacity as such are likewise immune.' People of State of New York ex rel. Rogers v. Graves, 299 U.S. 401, 57 S.Ct. 269, 272, 81 L.Ed. 306 (January 4, 1937).
In the early history of the city, water was furnished by private companies; but a century or more ago, the city itself began to take over the development and distribution. In 1831, the board of aldermen declared its dissatisfaction with the private control, and resolved that the powers then vested in private hands should be repealed by the Legislature and vested exclusively in the corporation of the city of New York. This, in effect, was initiated in 1833 (Laws 1833, c. 36); and, soon thereafter, the city constructed municipal waterworks, and, with slight exceptions, private control and operation ceased. The sources of water supply furnished by such companies as remain is approaching exhaustion, and the water furnished is of a quality inferior to that supplied by the municipality. From 1833 to the present time, additions to the water supply and system have been steadily made until the cost has mounted to more than $500,000,000; and it is estimated that additional expenditures of a quarter of a billion dollars will be necessary. The cost of bringing water from the Catskills alone amounted to approximately $200,000,000. The municipal outstanding bonded indebtedness incurred for supplying the city with water amounts to an enormous sum. More than half the entire population of the state is found within the municipal boundaries. The action of the city from the beginning has been taken under legislative authority.
The Commissioner of Internal Revenue having assessed a deficiency tax against petitioner in respect of his salary, petitioner sought a redetermination at the hands of the Board of Tax Appeals. That board sustained the commissioner and decreed a deficiency against petitioner of $256.27 for the year 1931. Upon review, the court below affirmed the decree of the board. (C.C.A.) 85 F.(2d) 32. While the sum involved is small, we granted the writ of certiorari because of the obvious importance of the question involved. 299 U.S. 536, 57 S.Ct. 190, 81 L.Ed. —-.
The phrase 'governmental functions,' as it here is used, has been qualified by this court in a variety of ways. Thus, in South Carolina v. United States, 199 U.S. 437, 461, 26 S.Ct. 110, 50 L.Ed. 261, 4 Ann.Cas. 737, it was suggested that the exemption of state agencies and instrumentalities from federal taxation was limited to those which were of a strictly governmental character, and did not extend to those used by the state in carrying on an ordinary private business. In Flint v. Stone Tracy Co., 220 U.S. 107, 172, 31 S.Ct. 342, 55 L.Ed. 389, Ann.Cas.1912B, 1312, the immunity from taxation was related to the essential governmental functions of the state. In Helvering v. Powers, 293 U.S. 214, 225, 55 S.Ct. 171, 173, 79 L.Ed. 291, we said that the state 'cannot withdraw sources of revenue from the federal taxing power by engaging in businesses which constitute a departure from usual governmental functions and to which, by reason of their nature, the federal taxing power would normally extend.' And immunity is not established because the state has the power to engage in the business for what the state conceives to be the public benefit. Id. In United States v. People of State of California, 297 U.S. 175, 185, 56 S.Ct. 421, 424, 80 L.Ed. 567, the suggested limit of the federal taxing power was in respect of activities in which the states have traditionally engaged.
There probably is no topic of the law in respect of which the decisions of the state courts are in greater conflict and confusion than that which deals with the differentiation between the governmental and corporate powers of municipal corporations. This condition of conflict and confusion is confined in the main to decisions relating to liability in tort for the negligence of officers and agents of the municipality. In that field, no definite rule can be extracted from the decisions. 1 It is true that in most of the state courts, including those in the state of New York, it is held that the operation of waterworks falls within the category of corporate activities; and the city's liability is affirmed in tort actions arising from negligence in such operation. But the rule in respect of such cases, as we pointed out in Trenton v. New Jersey, 262 U.S. 182, 192, 43 S.Ct. 534, 538, 67 L.Ed. 937, 29 A.L.R. 1471, has been 'applied to escape difficulties, in order that injustice may not result from the recognition of technical defenses based upon the governmental character of such corporations'; and the rule is hopelessly indefinite, probably for that very reason.
This is not, however, an action for personal injuries sounding in tort, but a proceeding which seeks in effect to determine whether immunity from federal taxation, in respect of the activity in question, attaches in favor of a state-created municipality—an objective so different in character from that sought in a tort action as to suggest caution in applying as the guide to a decision of the former a local rule of law judicially adopted in order to avoid supposed injustices which would otherwise result in the latter. We have held, for example, that the sale of motorcycles to a municipal corporation for use in its police service is not subject to federal taxation, because the maintenance of such a service is a governmental function. Indian Motorcycle Co. v. United States, 283 U.S. 570, 579, 51 S.Ct. 601, 604, 75 L.Ed. 1277. And while it is true that the weight of authority in tort actions accords with that view, there are state decisions which affirm the liability of a municipality for personal injury resulting from the negligence of its police officials under the circumstances presented in the respective cases dealt with. 2 Nevertheless, our decision in the Indian Motorcycle Case did not rest in the slightest degree upon a consideration of the state rule in respect of tort actions, but upon a broad consideration of the implied constitutional immunity arising from the dual character of our national and state governments.
The rule in respect of municipal liability in tort is a local matter; and whether it shall be strict or liberal or denied altogether is for the state which created the municipality alone to decide (Detroit v. Osborne, 135 U.S. 492, 497, 498, 10 S.Ct. 1012, 34 L.Ed. 260)—provided, of course, the Federal Constitution be not infringed. But a federal tax in respect of the activities of a state or a state agency is an imposition by one government upon the activities of another, and must accord with the implied federal requirement that state and local governmental functions be not burdened thereby. So long as our present dual form of government endures, the states, it must never be forgotten, 'are as independent of the general government as that government within its sphere is independent of the States.' The Collector v. Day, 11 Wall. 113, 124, 20 L.Ed. 122. And, as it was said in Texas v. White, 7 Wall. 700, 725, 19 L.Ed. 227, and often has been repeated, 'the preservation of the States, and the maintenance of their governments, are as much within the design and care of the Constitutions as the preservation of the Union and the maintenance of the National government.' The unimpaired existence of both governments is equally essential. It is to that high end that this court has recognized the rule, which rests upon necessary implication, that neither may tax the governmental means and instrumentalities of the other. The Collector v. Day, supra, 11 Wall. 113, at page 127, 20 L.Ed. 122. In the light of these considerations, it follows that the question here presented is not controlled by local law, but is a question of national scope to be resolved in harmony with implied constitutional prin ciples of general application. Compare Workman v. New York City, Mayor etc., 179 U.S. 552, 557, 21 S.Ct. 212, 45 L.Ed. 314. This indicated dissimilarity constitutes a distinction which is fundamental; and we put aside the state decisions in tort actions as inapposite. Compare Atlantic Cleaners & Dyers v. United States, 286 U.S. 427, 43 et seq., 52 S.Ct. 607, 608, 76 L.Ed. 1204.
We thus come to a situation, which the courts have frequently been called upon to meet, where the issue cannot be decided in accordance with an established formula, but where points along the line 'are fixed by decisions that this or that concrete case falls on the nearer or farther side.' Hudson County Water Co. v. McCarter, 209 U.S. 349, 355, 28 S.Ct. 529, 531, 52 L.Ed. 828, 14 Ann.Cas. 560. We are, of course, quite able to say that certain functions exercised by a city are clearly governmental—that is, lie upon the nearer side of the line—while others are just as clearly private or corporate in character, and lie upon the farther side. But between these two opposite classes, there is a zone of debatable ground within which the cases must be put upon one side or the other of the line by what this court has called the gradual process of historical and judicial 'inclusion and exclusion.' Continental Illinois Nat. Bank & Trust Co. v. Chicago, Rock Island & P. Ry. Co., 294 U.S. 648, 670, 55 S.Ct. 595, 603, 79 L.Ed. 1110, and cases cited.
The public interest in the conservation and distribution of water for a great variety of purposes—ranging from ordinary agricultural, domestic, and sanitary uses, to the preservation of health and of life itself—is obvious and well settled. For the modern city, such conservation and distribution of water in sufficient quantity and in a state of purity is as vital as air. And this vital necessity becomes more and more apparent and pressing as cities increase in population and density of population. It has found, so far, its culminating point in the vast and supreme needs of the city of New York.
One of the most striking illustrations of the public interest in the use of water and the governmental power to deal with it is shown in legislation and judicial pronouncement with respect to the arid-land states of the far west. In some of them, the State Constitution asserts public ownership of all unappropriated nonnavigable waters. In Utah, while it was still a territory, a statute conferred the right upon individual land owners to condemn rights of way across the lands of others in order to convey water to the former for irrigation purposes, and declared that such condemnation was for a 'public use.' This court upheld the statute. Clark v. Nash, 198 U.S. 361, 25 S.Ct. 676, 49 L.Ed. 1085, 4 Ann.Cas. 1171. We said that what is a public use may depend upon the facts surrounding the subject; pointed out the vital need of water for irrigation in the aridland states, a need which did not exist in the states of the east and where, consequently, a different rule obtained; and held that the court must recognize the difference of climate and soil which rendered necessary differing laws in the two groups of states.
Many years ago, Congress, recognizing this difference, passed the Desert Land Act (chapter 107, 19 Stat. 377), by which, among other things, the waters upon the public domain in the arid-land states and territories were dedicated to the use of the public for irrigation and other purposes. Following this act, if not before, all nonnavigable waters then on and belonging to that part of the national domain became publici juris, subject to the plenary control of the aridland states and territories with the right to determine to what extent the rule of appropriation or the common-law rule in respect of riparian rights should obtain. California Oregon Power Co. v. Cement Co., 295 U.S. 142, 155 et seq., 55 S.Ct. 725, 728, 79 L.Ed. 1356. And in Kansas v. Colorado, 206 U.S. 46, 94, 27 S.Ct. 655, 51 L.Ed. 956, this court entertained and decided a controversy between two states involving the right of private appropriators in Colorado to divert waters for the irrigation of lands in that state from a river naturally and customarily flowing into the state of Kansas. It was held (206 U.S. 46, at page 99, 27 S.Ct. 655, 668, 51 L.Ed. 956) that such a controversy rises 'above a mere question of local private right and involves a matter of state interest, and must be considered from that standpoint.' Cf. Hudson County Water Co. v. McCarter, 209 U.S. 349, 355, 28 S.Ct. 529, 52 L.Ed 828, 14 Ann.Cas. 560; New Orleans Gas Light Co. v. Drainage Comm., 197 U.S. 453, 460, 25 S.Ct. 471, 49 L.Ed. 831; Houck v. Little River Drainage District, 239 U.S. 254, 261, 36 S.Ct. 58, 60 L.Ed. 266.
In New Orleans v. Morris, 105 U.S. 600, 602, 26 L.Ed. 1184, the city had conveyed its waterworks to a corporation formed for the purpose of maintaining and enlarging them. The city received as consideration shares of stock, which a state statute declared should not be liable to seizure for the debts of the city. It was held the statute did not impair the obligation of any contract, since the shares represented the city's ownership in the waterworks which had, before the enactment of the statute, been exempted from seizure and sale. This ruling was put upon the ground that the waterworks were of such public utility and necessity that they were held in trust for the use of the citizens the same as public parks and public buildings.
We recently have held that the bankruptcy statutes could not be extended to municipalities or other political subdivisions of a state. Ashton v. Cameron County Water Imp. Dist., 298 U.S. 513, 56 S.Ct. 892, 895, 80 L.Ed. 1309. The respondent there was a water-improvement district organized by law to furnish water for irrigation and domestic uses. We said (298 U.S. 513, at pages 527, 528, 56 S.Ct. 892, 80 L.Ed. 1309) that respondent was a political subdivision of the state 'created for the local exercise of her sovereign powers. * * * Its fiscal affairs are those of the state, not subject to control or interference by the national government, unless the right so to do is definitely accorded by the Federal Constitution.' In support of that holding, former decisions of this court with respect to the immunity of states and municipalities from federal taxation were relied upon as apposite. The question whether the district exercised governmental or merely corporate functions was distinctly in issue. The petition in bankruptcy alleged that the district was created with power to perform 'the proprietary and/or corporate function of furnishing water for irrigation and domestic uses. * * *' The district judge (In re Cameron County Water Imp. Dist. No. 1, 9 F.Supp. 103) held that the district was created for the local exercise of state sovereign powers; that it was exercising 'a governmental function'; that its property was public property; that it was not carrying on private business, but public business. That court, having denied the petition for want of jurisdiction, the district submitted a motion for a new trial in which it assigned, among other things, that the court erred in holding that petitioner was created for the purpose of performing governmental functions, 'for the reason that the Courts of Texas, as well as the other Courts in the Nation, have uniformly held that the furnishing of water for irrigation was purely a proprietary function. * * *' Substantially the same thing was repeated in other assignments of error. In the petition for rehearing in this court (299 U.S. 619, 57 S.Ct. 5, 81 L.Ed. —-), the district challenged our determination that respondent was a political subdivision of the state 'created for the local exercise of her sovereign powers,' and asserted to the contrary that the facts would demonstrate that 'respondent is a corporation organized for essentially proprietary purposes.' It is not open to dispute that the statements quoted from our opinion in the Ashton Case were made after due consideration, and the case itself of the and the rehearing denied in the light of the issue thus definitely presented. Compare Binghmam v. United States, 296 U.S. 211, 218, 219, 56 S.Ct. 180, 181, 80 L.Ed. 160.
We conclude that the acquisition and distribution of a supply of water for the needs of the modern city involve the exercise of essential governmental functions, and this conclusion is fortified by a consideration of the public uses to which the water is put. Without such a supply, public schools, public sewers so necessary to preserve health, fire departments, street sprinkling and cleaning, public buildings, parks, playgrounds, and public baths could not exist. And this is equivalent, in a very real sense, to saying that the city itself would then disappear. More than one-fourth of the water furnished by the city of New York, we are told by the record, is utilized for these public purposes. Certainly, the maintenance of public schools, a fire department, a system of sewers, parks, and public buildings, to say nothing of other public facilities and uses, calls for the exercise of governmental functions. And so far as these are concerned, the water supply is a necessary auxiliary, and, therefore, partakes of their nature. People of State of New York ex rel. Rogers v. Graves, 299 U.S. 401, 57 S.Ct. 269, 81 L.Ed. 306 (January 4, 1937). Moreover, the health and comfort of the city's population of 7,000,000 souls, and in some degree their very existence, are dependent upon and adequate supply of pure and wholesome water. It may be, as it is suggested, that private corporations would be able and willing to undertake to provide a supply of water for all purposes; but if the state and city of New York be of opinion, as they evidently are, that the service should not be intrusted to private hands, but should be rendered by the city itself as an appropriate means of discharging its duty to protect the health, safety, and lives of its inhabitants, we do not doubt that it may do so in the exercise of its essential governmental functions.
We find nothing that detracts from this view in the fact that in former times the business of furnishing water to urban communities, including New York, in fact was left largely, or even entirely, to private enterprise. The tendency for many years has been in the opposite direction, until now in nearly all the larger cities of the country the duty has been assumed by the municipal authorities. Governmental functions are not to be regarded as nonexistent because they are held in abeyance, or because they lie dormant, for a time. If they be by their nature governmental, they are none the less so because the use of them has had a recent beginning.
The principle finds illustration in our decision in Shoemaker v. United States, 147 U.S. 282, 297, 13 S.Ct. 361, 389, 37 L.Ed. 170, where it was held that land taken by an exercise of the power of eminent domain for the establishment of Rock Creek Park in the District of Columbia was taken for a public use, and that the amount required to be paid was validly assessed upon lands in the district specially benefited thereby. At the beginning of the opinion in that case, this court said: 'In the memory of men now living, a proposition to take private property, without the consent of its owner, for a public park, and to assess a proportionate part of the cost upon real estate benefited thereby, would have been regarded as a novel exercise of legislative power.' It was pointed out that Central Park in New York was the first place provided for the inhabitants of any city or town in the United States as a pleasure ground for rest and exercise in the open air, but that in 1892, when the opinion was written, there was scarcely a city of any considerable size in the country that did not have, or had not projected, such parks.
Respondent contends that the municipality, in supplying water to its inhabitants, is engaged in selling water for profit; and seems to think that this, if true, stamps the operation as private and not governmental in character. We first pause to observe that the overhead due to the enormous cost of the system, and the fact that so large a proportion of the water is diverted for public use, rather plainly suggests that no real profit is likely to result. And to say that, because the city makes a charge for furnishing water to private consumers, it follows that the operation of the water works is corporate and not governmental, is to beg the question. What the city is engaged in doing in that respect is rather rendering a service than selling a commodity. If that service be governmental, it does not become private because a charge is made for it, or a profit realized. A state, for example, constructs and operates a highway. It may, if it choose, exact compensation for its use from those who travel over it (see Bingaman v. Golden Eagle Western Lines, 297 U.S. 626, 628, 56 S.Ct. 624, 80 L.Ed. 928); but this does not destory the claim that the maintenance of the highway is a public and governmental function. The state or the city may exact a tuition charge for instruction in the public schools; but thereby the maintenance of the public schools does not cease to be a function of the government. The state exacts a fee for issuing a license or granting a permit; for recording a deed; for rendering a variety of services in the judicial department. Do these various services thereby lose their character as governmental functions? The federal Post Office Department charges for its services; but no one would question the fact that its operation calls into exercise a governmental function.
The contention is made that our decisions in South Carolina v. United States, 199 U.S. 437, 461, 462, 26 S.Ct. 110, 50 L.Ed. 261, 4 Ann.Cas. 737, and Flint v. Stone Tracy Co., 220 U.S. 107, 172, 31 S.Ct. 342, 55 L.Ed. 389, Ann.Cas.1912B, 1312, are to the effect that the supplying of water is not a governmental function; but in neither case was that question in issue, and what was said by the court was wholly unnecessary to the disposition of the cases and merely by way of illustration. Expressions of that kind may be respected, but do not control in a subsequent case when the precise point is presented for decision. Osaka Shosen Kaisha Line v. United States, 300 U.S. 98, 57 S.Ct. 356, 81 L.Ed. 532 (February 1, 1937), and authorities cited. The prcise point is presented here, has been fully considered, and is decided otherwise. Neither Ohio v. Helvering, 292 U.S. 360, 54 S.Ct. 725, 78 L.Ed. 1307, nor Helvering v. Powers, 293 U.S. 214, 55 S.Ct. 171, 79 L.Ed. 291, relied upon by respondent, is in point. What has already been said distinguishes those cases from the one now under consideration.
We have not failed to give careful consideration to Blair v. Byers (C.C.A.) 35 F.(2d) 326, and Denman v. Com'r Int. Rev. (C.C.A.) 73 F.(2d) 193, both of which take a view contrary to that which we have expressed. To the extent of this conflict, those cases are disapproved. Both rely on South Carolina v. United States and Flint v. Stone Tracy Co., supra, which we have already distinguished.
There is no occasion now to discuss the dual character of our form of government, and the consequent dual allegiance of a citizen of a state to his state and to the United States, to elaborate the thesis that the integrity of each government is to be maintained against invasions by the other or to reiterate that the implied immunity of the one from taxation by the other springs from the necessity that neither shall, by the exercise of the power to tax, burden, hinder, or destory the operation or existence of the other. There is universal recognition of the truth of these tenets, and of their fundamental relation to the preservation of the constitutional framework of the nation. Our difficulties arise, not in their statement as guiding principles, but, as in this instance, in their application to specific cases.
The frank admissions of counsel at the bar concerning the confusion and apparent inconsistency in administrative rulings as to the taxability of compensation of municipal employees seem to call for an equally candid statement that our decisions in the same field have not furnished the executive a consistent rule of action. The need of equitable and uniform administration of tax laws, national and state, and the just demand of the citizen that the rules governing the enforcement of those laws shall be ascertainable require an attempt at rationalization and restatement.
The petitioner is a citizen of New York. By virtue of that status, he is also a citizen of the United States. He owes allegiance to each government. He derives income from the exercise of his profession. His obligation as a citizen is to contribute to the support of the governments under whose joint protection he lives and pursues his calling. His liability to fulfill that obligation to the national government by payment of income tax upon his salary would be unquestioned were it not for the character of his employer. If the water works of New York City were operated by a private corporation under a public franchise and if the petitioner held a like position with the corporation, there could be no question that the imposition of a federal income tax, measured by his compensation, would be justified. If petitioner, instead of holding a so-called official position under the municipal goverment of New York City, were consulted from time to time with respect to its water problems his compensation would be subject to income tax. Metchlf & Eddy v. Mitchell, 269 U.S. 514, 46 S.Ct. 172, 70 L.Ed. 384. He is put into an untaxable class upon the theory that as an official of the municipality, which in turn is an arm of the state, he is an 'instrumentality' of the state, and to tax him upon his salary is to lay a burden upon the state government which, however trifling, is forbidden by the implied immunity of the state from burdens imposed by the United States. The petitioner seeks to show the reality of the supposed burden by the suggestion that if his salary and the compensation of others employed by the city is subject to federal income tax, the municipality will be compelled to pay higher salaries in order to obtain the services of such persons and the consequent aggregate increase in outlay will entail a heavy financial load. We know, however, that professional services are offered in the industrial and business field; and that while there is no hard and fast standard of compensation, and men bargain for their rewards, salaries do bear some relation to experience and ability. There is a market in which a professional man offers his services and municipalities are bidders in that market. We know further that those in private employment holding positions comparable to that of the petitioner pay a tax equal to that levied upon him. It is clear that any consideration of the petitioner's immunity from federal income tax would be altogether remote, impalpable, and unascertainable in influencing him to accept a position under the municipality rather than under a private employer.
We are here concerned only with the question of the taxation of salaries or compensation received by those rendering to a municipality services of the same kind as are rendered to private employers and need not go be yond the precise issue here presented. We have no concern with the exaction of a sales tax by the federal goverment on sales to a state government or one of its subdivisions, or the reverse; we are not called upon to define the power to levy taxes upon real property owned by a state or by the national government. We have no occasion to discuss the power of either government to impose excise taxes upon transactions of the other or upon the evidence of such transactions. Nor are we called upon here to determine the validity of a nondiscriminatory tax upon the salary of a governmental officer whose duties and functions have no analogue in the conduct of a business or the pursuit of a profession, but are both peculiar to and essential to the operation of government. The sole question here is whether one performing work or rendering service of a type commonly done or rendered in ordinary commercial life for gain is exempt form the normal burden of a tax on that gain for the support of the national government because his compensation is paid by a state agency instead of a private employer. I think the imposition of a tax upon such gain where, as here, the tax falls equally upon all employed in like occupation, and where the supposed burden of the tax upon state government is indicrect, remote, and imponderable, is not inconsistent with the principle of immunity inherent in the constitutional relation of state and nation.
See Herron v. Pittsburg, 204 Pa. 509, 513, 54 A. 311, 93 Am.St.Rep. 798; Jones v. City of Sioux City, 185 Iowa, 1178, 1185, 170 N.W. 445, 10 A.L.R. 474; Twist v. City of Rochester, 37 App.Div. 307; 55 N.Y.S. 850. Compare Kunz v. City of Troy, 104 N.Y. 344, 348, 10 N.E. 442, 58 Am.Rep. 508, with Altvater v. Mayor, etc., of Baltimore, 31 Md. 462.


text:
Língua franca
 Língua geral (Brasil) — língua falada no Brasil do final do século XVII até ao início do século XX e que se dividia em dois ramos
 Língua geral setentrional — também chamada língua geral amazônica e língua geral do norte
 Língua geral paulista — também chamada língua geral paulista e língua geral do sul
 Westron — "Língua Geral" da obra do escritor J. R. R. Tolkien

Desambiguação

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


Whether you want to improve your skills, expertise or career growth, with Certkingdom's training and certification resources help you achieve your goals. Our exams files feature hands-on tasks and real-world scenarios; in just a matter of days, you'll be more productive and embracing new technology standards. Our online resources and events enable you to focus on learning just what you want on your timeframe. You get access to every exams files and there continuously update our study materials; these exam updates are supplied free of charge to our valued customers. Get the best 642-355 exam Training; as you study from our exam-files "Best Materials Great Results"
The 642-355 Cisco Storage Networking Solutions Design Specialist (CSSDS) exam is associated with the Data Center Storage Networking Specialization. Candidates can prepare for this exam by taking the Designing Cisco Storage Network (DCSN) course. This exam tests a candidate's knowledge of selecting and integrating Cisco storage products to design a highly scalable, efficient, high performing storage networking solution based on converged architecture. Cisco Storage Networking Design Specialist professionals understand how to utilize and employ the features and benefits of the Cisco MDS 9000 Series Multilayer Directors and Switches, Cisco MDS 9509 Director Switch, Cisco 9216 Fabric Switch, and Cisco MDS 9120 products to create a high availability storage network design.
* Describe the benefits of implementing a Cisco collapsed core SAN network design.
* Describe the evolution of SAN topology design.
* Evaluate over-subscription ratio for a given design.
* Determine if iSCSI is appropriate for design implementation.
* Determine SAN Extension requirements for customer solution.
* Evaluate deployment opportunities for MDS family.
* Evaluate the customer's applications requirements.
* Evaluate the customer's business continuance requirements.
* Evaluate the customer's backup/replication requirements.
* Evaluate the customer's high availability requirements.
* Evaluate the customer's SAN utilization and propose consolidation options.
* Evaluate the customer's Storage Virtualization implementation strategy.
* Evaluate the customer's Security requirements.
* Identify and document existing customer infrastructure.
* Identify considerations that should be addressed when designing a heterogeneous fabric.
* Describe value added MDS features that address identified customer needs and requirements.
* Determine the appropriate topology for a given implementation.
* Select the appropriate protocols for design implementation.
* Select appropriate collapsed core design given a set of customer requirements.
* Select the appropriate design option given a set of customer requirements including applications such as database, mail-server, backup and replication.
* Identify characteristics of customer's host operating systems that could impact their SAN design.
* Develop a capacity plan for implementing a Cisco SAN solution.
* Identify SAN Extension topology, devices, and features appropriate for a SAN solution.
* Propose alternative protocols, topologies, devices, and features that would improve customer solution (cost, performance, etc).
* Design an appropriate Cisco management infrastructure.
* Determine hardware configurations, power requirements, and environmental considerations to support SAN fabric design.
* Design a backup and recovery solution.
* Describe the importance of using appropriate MTU size.
* Determine requirements for IP routing.
* Design appropriate VLANs for storage solutions.
* Determine ACL requirements for storage solutions.
Make yourself more valuable in today's competitive computer industry Certkingdom's preparation material includes the most excellent features, prepared by the same dedicated experts who have come together to offer an integrated solution. We provide the most excellent and simple method to pass your Cisco CSSDS 642-355 exam on the first attempt "GUARANTEED".
will prepare you for your exam with guaranteed results, 642-355 Study Guide. Your exam will download as a single 642-355 PDF or complete 642-355 testing engine as well as over +4000 other technical exam PDF and exam engine downloads. Forget buying your prep materials separately at three time the price of our unlimited access plan - skip the 642-355 audio exams and select the one package that gives it all to you at your discretion: 642-355 Study Materials featuring the exam engine.
Certkingdom Cisco CSSDS preparation begins and ends with your accomplishing this credential goal. Although you will take each Cisco CSSDS online test one at a time - each one builds upon the previous. Remember that each Cisco CSSDS exam paper is built from a common certification foundation.
Beyond knowing the answer, and actually understanding the 642-355 test questions puts you one step ahead of the test. Completely understanding a concept and reasoning behind how something works, makes your task second nature. Your 642-355 quiz will melt in your hands if you know the logic behind the concepts. Any legitimate Cisco CSSDS prep materials should enforce this style of learning - but you will be hard pressed to find more than a Cisco CSSDS practice test anywhere other than Certkingdom.
This is where your Cisco CSSDS 642-355 exam prep really takes off, in the testing your knowledge and ability to quickly come up with answers in the 642-355 online tests. Using CSSDS 642-355 practice exams is an excellent way to increase response time and queue certain answers to common issues.
All Cisco CSSDS online tests begin somewhere, and that is what the Cisco CSSDS training course will do for you: create a foundation to build on. Study guides are essentially a detailed Cisco CSSDS 642-355 tutorial and are great introductions to new Cisco CSSDS training courses as you advance. The content is always relevant, and compound again to make you pass your 642-355 exams on the first attempt. You will frequently find these 642-355 PDF files downloadable and can then archive or print them for extra reading or studying on-the-go.
For some, this is the best way to get the latest Cisco CSSDS 642-355 training. However you decide to learn 642-355 exam topics is up to you and your learning style. The Certkingdom Cisco CSSDS products and tools are designed to work well with every learning style. Give us a try and sample our work. You'll be glad you did.
* Each guide is composed from industry leading professionals real Cisco CSSDSnotes, certifying 100% brain dump free.
* CSSDS 642-355 prep files are frequently updated to maintain accuracy. Your courses will always be up to date.
Get CSSDS ebooks from Certkingdom which contain real 642-355 exam questions and answers. You WILL pass your CSSDS exam on the first attempt using only Certkingdom's CSSDS excellent preparation tools and tutorials.
Thank You! I would just like to thank CertKingdom.com for the Cisco CSSDS 642-355 test guide that I bought a couple months ago and I took my test and pass overwhelmingly. I completed the test of 60 questions in about 90 minutes I must say that their Q & A with Explanation are very amazing and easy to learn.
I passed the Cisco CSSDS 642-355 exam yesterday, and now it's on to security exam. Couldn't have done it with out you. Thanks very much.


text:
In Defence of Civility
Alexander Zubatov
Few states are ruined by any Defect in their Institution, but generally by the Corruption of Manners; against which, the best Institution is no long Security, and without which, a very ill one may subsist and flourish.—Jonathan Swift
Liberty cannot be preserved, if the manners of the People are corrupted.—Algernon Sidney
There is a common perception that politeness is only a means to an end, that some more substantive goal, some broad vision of justice or the good society, is what we are really after, and being either polite or rude about it is just a matter of tactics—we should do whatever works. A number of commentators have responded to calls for civility with the contention that, when injustice is afoot, civility will not get the job done. Civility is racist. Civility preserves the status quo. The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and every other significant quest for social justice, this argument goes, were built on assertiveness and steadfast resistance, not servile civility. The contemporary anti-Trump resistance fighters, for example, believe that fascism is on the march and that minorities and immigrants are in mortal danger. For them, we are in the throes of a moral crisis of the sort that requires harsh words and bold acts. When deep kindness is lacking, superficial kindness should take a back seat.
But they are making a serious mistake.
Some might view democracy, like politeness, as just one means to an end, such that when a democratic process yields an incorrect or unjust outcome—the election of Donald Trump, for example—we are justified in overthrowing the system and installing something (or someone) else. Or some might argue that free speech is fine and dandy when our side is winning the war of ideas, but if the other side begins to gain too much of a foothold, we need a good, old-fashioned crackdown on dangerous ideas. (This is an only slightly exaggerated version of Herbert Marcuse's argument in his infamous 1965 essay, "Repressive Tolerance," which provides a blueprint for modern day political correctness and opposition to free speech.)
But Marcuse and others like him are mistaken to assume that they already know what a correct or acceptable substantive outcome entails and can therefore judge the results of a process by that predetermined metric and, if those results fail to measure up, assume that the process isn't working and must be rejigged or even discarded altogether. Democracy and freedom of speech are needed precisely because there is no predeterminable correct answer to such questions. We cannot guarantee that any subset of us can be trusted to distinguish truth from lies and so, unless their speech puts others at immediate risk, we grant people the freedom to speak their minds. If we notice flaws in the process—certain legitimate votes are systematically excluded or certain views unjustly silenced—we may attempt to fix the process—but not abolish it.
Unlike democracy or freedom of speech, politeness is not often seen as a virtue to which we should adhere, irrespective of circumstances. This is because our conception of politeness and its significance to our political well-being is impoverished. But a far more robust understanding of politeness was articulated by Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, in his 1711 Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. While some—sociologist Norbert Elias, for example—may view the imposition of elegant manners as wedded to the exercise of power, authority and repression, for Shaftesbury, politeness is a progressive force, increasing human liberty.
Centuries of domination by the Church and the Crown, Shaftesbury explains, had set the vectors of human action. Pervasive social hierarchies, courtly manners and theology all ensured that the most meaningful aspects of our lives were determined from above, leaving us with not many important choices to make. But, as the influence of these erstwhile sources of unquestioned authority began to decline in Shaftesbury's England, humans could enjoy new liberties, which meant new opportunities and responsibilities. People were now increasingly free to make their own rules and regulate their lives as they saw fit and this produced an entirely new domain of unsupervised, underdetermined interactions. A new type of creature—the gentleman—emerged and created new habitats—theaters, cafes, clubs, gardens and the like—in which to mingle with his equals.
Politeness, for Shaftesbury, governed the terms of such interactions. Freedom compelled the exercise of judgment and taste. People now had to make consequential decisions about how to act morally and elegantly towards others. Such virtues do not come naturally to us, Shaftesbury argues. For this reason, gentlemen had to become learned in philosophy and the arts: philosophy taught morality, while the arts inculcated an appreciation of beauty and a standard of taste. Taste itself was a faculty that could only develop in a free society. Under regimes that impose monarchical and theological strictures on their citizens, the opportunities for taste to manifest are inherently limited. But, with liberty, taste becomes indispensable. It fills the empty canvas with gridlines. It fashions public culture. It forestalls anomie.
Politeness, for Shaftesbury, serves a role similar to that of religion for Alexis de Tocqueville who writes, a century later: "Despotism may be able to do without faith, but freedom cannot. How could a society escape destruction if, when political ties are relaxed, moral ties are not tightened? And what can be done with a people master of itself if it is not subject to God?" Shaftesbury is already one step ahead of Tocqueville. For him, both the Crown and the Church have lost their moral authority. When religious norms no longer govern conduct, what can furnish moral boundaries and standards of deportment? A shared public culture, fashioned by politeness.
Shaftesbury's politeness was not just a matter of please, thank you and the occasional curtsey. Every possible interaction and aspect of self-presentation provided an occasion to demonstrate politeness. Politeness reveals its presence or absence, he writes, "in that wch every minute offers & gives opportunity. Eating. Talk. Story, Argument, the common Entertainment, Mirth & Laughing, Voice, Gest, Action, Countenance." We display politeness in how we speak, what we say, our tone of voice, our accent, our grammar, how we stand, sit, dress, walk and dance, our facial expressions, gestures, sportsmanship, table manners, and behavior at the theater and the concert hall and at parties both as hosts and as guests. These little details matter. Fail to attend to them, and our whole social edifice begins to unravel.
To conclude that Shaftesbury's vision of politeness is that of a finicky fuddy-duddy from a superseded epoch is to ignore our own deepest intuitions in those moments when they remain uncorrupted by our affected apathy, anti-elitist posturing and other contemporary ideological blinders. Imagine a modern version of the kinds of faults Shaftesbury abhors. Picture a man—but no gentleman—who saunters onto a bus or subway, slouches down in his seat, puts his feet up onto an adjoining seat, blasts his music out at a deafening volume instead of using headphones or engages in loud, profanity-laced conversations. Or imagine an athlete who struts, taunts others and showboats. Or a trashy, nouveau riche reality TV queen, flaunting her gaudy material possessions. Or the scantily clad woman on the dance floor, simulating sex and/or thrusting her butt out with every beat. Some people will argue that such overtly sexualized displays are no big deal, but in our hearts, I contend, many of us feel deeply uncomfortable with it. And, if we don't, we should follow Shaftesbury's prescription—steep ourselves in philosophy and the arts in order to cultivate judgment and taste.
Shaftesbury's gentleman might also seem like a relic of a time when class determined social standing. But Shaftesbury's gentleman was made, not born. Shaftesbury contrasted the comparative equality of his England with contemporary France, which was still inordinately attached to the kinds of courtliness and hierarchy that stood in the way of his ideal republic. Shaftesbury's ideal was not the stratified class societies of Old Europe, but ancient Athens, where freedom and self-rule gave citizens the impetus to develop the skills of rhetoric and oratory necessary to the kinds of free-flowing interactions and exercises in dialogical persuasion that might have taken place in the Athenian agora. Indeed, without such skills—the ability to meet, confer, agree and clash in a civil fashion—democracy itself would be impossible. Though, just as in classical Athens, not all the groups we would recognize today were given equal status within Shaftesbury's paradigm—women, for example, were not—his vision is fundamentally democratic and progressive.
Politeness is not a superficial affectation we can turn on or off, as occasion demands. Politeness is not just a way of doing things; it is the thing we do. It is what we must do for a democracy to function, for all viewpoints to be respected, all voices to be heard. It is what we must do to transform ourselves from mere cohabitants of the same geographical space to citizens of a single republic with a shared culture. As Hegel argues, if individuals do not first come together organically in a civil society, which, in turn, forges the institutions of state, they will find themselves looking at the state as if it were a foreign entity, an imposition, an alien presence. This is the kind of political alienation so many of us feel today. Our politics will never feel like our own, if we do not first undertake the difficult labor of becoming, once again, a civil society, a culture, a people. And we will never become a people again if we do not embrace the shared set of expectations and ritualized norms of behavior that we call politeness. The failure to do that will bring about, to quote José Ortega y Gasset, "the absence of norms and of any possible appeal based on them"—that is, barbarism.
But are we to be polite in the face of racism, fascism, etc.? Are we to stand by and smile politely, while neo-Nazis parade along our thoroughfares? Politeness should not be mistaken for meekness, servility or acquiescence in evil. Jesus may have advocated turning the other cheek, but, importantly, he believed that the meek will—and should—inherit the earth. More importantly, the problem with allowing people to bend the rules in the presence of injustice is exactly the same as that produced by suspending free speech when too many falsehoods are being disseminated: there is no one we can trust to draw such distinctions. If speech or conduct is beyond the pale or outside the Overton window, democracy will take care of it: polite disregard will accomplish much more than the kinds of protests, callouts and freak-outs that only fuel the fire, alienating potential allies. Even when it comes to just causes, few will be more amenable to screaming, screeching, hectoring, browbeating and bullying than to skillful oratory, sharp wit and noble acts and deeds. It is ultimately the latter—not the former—that won hearts and minds during the Civil Rights era. Martin Luther King Jr.'s I have a dream speech won and continues to win more converts to his cause than any boycott, sit-in or protest ever could. Conversely, bullying, demonization, physical and online mobbing, name-calling and profanity has led to the rollback of some of the victories of the Civil Rights Movement, alienating some of those who voted for our nation's first black president in 2008 but, in 2016, cast their votes for Trump or even—in extreme cases—began to support white supremacy groups that had been dying a slow, natural death over the preceding decades. As multiple studies have shown (see here, here and here), pressurizing people to fight racism routinely backfires. Just as dropping bombs on foreign nations creates lifelong enemies rather than converts to democracy, dropping F-bombs on fellow citizens spreads hatred rather than makes converts to anti-racism. Lecturing, demonizing and lashing out at people have never convinced anyone of anything. Politeness is not only nobler but also far more effective, and—like rudeness and vulgarity—politeness is contagious.
Whatever we may think of Trump's politics, if we respond to his schoolyard provocations with outrage, we not only give him the attention he craves but contribute to lowering the tone of our political discourse. We are doing damage that may take decades to repair. Against opponents such as Trump, silent supercilious smiles and polite disdain can achieve political victories, without robbing us of our dignity. Ignoring a troll requires patience, but so does waiting to dig in to one's food until everyone else has been served. Politeness and our long-term collective interests require patience in both cases—a patience in short supply in this age of instantaneous communication and instant gratification.
Let us, then, make a habit of saying please and thank you. Let's be gallant. Let's anticipate others' needs and take them into consideration. Offer seats to those who might be more in need. Hold doors open. Sit up straight. Take our feet off the seats. Clean up after ourselves. Pay attention to the way we walk. Move decorously. Dance in a dignified manner. Dress in clothes in which we wouldn't be embarrassed to be seen by our bosses or our grandmothers. Make an effort to appear well-groomed. Cut out the street talk, slang and profanity. Employ the best grammar we know how to employ. Enunciate. Use a tone of voice appropriate to the context. Avoid broadcasting private conversations. Keep our music to ourselves. Listen to others when it is their turn to speak. Interrupt, if at all, politely. Disagree thoughtfully and respectfully. Abide by the golden rule. Be humble. Be kind. Be courteous. Be considerate. Be generous. Be good. Be better.
Alexander Zubatov is a practicing attorney specializing in general commercial litigation. He is also a practicing writer specializing in general non-commercial poetry, fiction, essays and polemics. Start a conversation with Alexander: https://letter.wiki/AlexanderZubatov.
Pingback: I Voted for Trump, and I'm Not a Racist | Merion West
T. Peter Park says:
The relationship between science, technology, and left-wing politics may actually be rather more complicated and ambiguous than was suggested by Heike in his February 13 comment on Alexander Zubatov's essay, or by the excerpt from Ted Kazinsky's "Unabomber Manifesto" quoted by Heike.
The late C.P. Snow's celebrated 1959 Cambridge lecture on "The Two Cultures" popularized the view, at least in English-speaking countries, that science was somehow inherently, intrinsically liberal, progressive, or leftist–that, in Snow's words, scientists had "the future in their bones," even when they personally happened to be conservative in their politics, while literary intellectuals, by contrast, "wished the future did not exist." Snow himself cautiously tried to qualify the universal generality of his dichotomy by insisting that he was thinking mainly of the mid 20th century British educational situation. However, his generalization seemed historically plausible in view of the Western Enlightenment tradition's twin embrace both of science and of social/political liberalism or progressivism. After all, the 18th century Enlightenment and its 19th and 20th century heirs and successors both embraced the scientific rational/empirical outlook and advocated liberal and egalitarian social and political reform (or even revolution)–while the 18th century *ancien régime* and its reactionary heirs both supported religious (or blood-and-soil) anti-rationalism and opposed the politics of *Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité*.
However, the actual historical relationship of science and politics is not nearly so simple or unambiguous as might be suggested by a naïve universalization of Snow's "two cultures" thesis. A friend of mine used to observe that there have been frequent historical reversals, flip-flops, and "enantiodromias" (from the Greek for "running backward") in the relationship of political and philosophical (Materialism vs. Idealism, Empiricism vs. Rationalism, Science vs. Faith, scientism vs. anti-scientism) positions. Already in the 19th century, scientific positivism was invoked by some conservative or reactionary thinkers to justify existing social hierarchies and oppose demands for democratic reform or socialist revolution–a conservative use of science that combined with the influence of Darwinian evolutionism to inspire the fashionable late 19th and early 20th century ideologies of Social Darwinism, racism, and eugenics, all of them versions of what H. Stuart Hughes in *Consciousness and Society* (1958) called "scientific fatalism." In late 19th and early 20th century Germany, nationalist-minded engineers and reactionary social & cultural thinkers together developed what Jeffrey Herf called an ideology of *Reactionary Modernism* (1985) blending an enthusiasm for applied science and industrial & military technology with racism, anti-Semitism, German nationalism, and violent opposition to Enlightenment rationalism and to a politics of *Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité*, that eventually led to Nazism.
In the United States in recent years, Frankfurt School, "cultural Marxist," and postmodernist hostility to technology and scientific "instrumental rationality" has been echoed and perhaps even outweighed by a "politically correct" suspicion of biological interpretations of human nature and human behavior. Feminists, multiculturalists, and anti-racists have vociferously denounced scientific theories ot findings suggesting biological or genetic influences on human behavior, personality, or ability as supposedly "racist," "sexist," "eugenicist," or "Social Darwinist," insisting for social and political reasons on a *tabula rasa* ("blank slate") view of the human mind. Sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson in *Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge* (1998), followed by cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker in *The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature* (2002), have SSSM ("Standard Social Science Model") of most recent and current anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists as basically a mass of unscientific "PC" political ideology based on a dogmatic adherence to the "blank slate" concept and refuted, in their view, by a lot of empirical scientific research.
The recommendations in the final paragraph of Alexander Zubatov's essay, on how people should look and carry themselves, that Boaz (Feb. 15 at 5:40 PM) thought maybe a bit trivial, shallow, or distracting compared to the rest of his essay, reminded me a lot of Jordan Peterson's advice in "12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos." Which brings me to my own personal pet sociological theory about the reasons for Peterson's great popularity among college-age young Americans these last dew years. It's that the economic changes in American society in recent decades (the 2008 crash being only the most dramatic illustration), the increasingly crushing burden of student debt, etc., have made college-age young Americans increasingly skeptical and pessimistic about their chances of ever leaving the struggling lower-middle and middle-middle class and entering the ranks of the so-called "cultural elites," "effete snobs," "limousine liberals," or "Brie and Chablis set" who have traditionally felt free to safely be a bit cavalier or skeptical about the so-called "square" virtues and courtesies extolled by both Zubatov and Peterson, to be a bit irreverent about them and still safely "get away with it," as seemed much easier and much more realistically possible in, say, the 1950's, 1960's, and 1970's! It just plain FEELS far less realistically possible these days than it maybe did 4 or 5 decades ago for a plumber's, electrician's, or truck driver's son (or daughter) to rise someday to become Chairperson of the Yale or Harvard English department or assiciatre editor od "Harper's" or "The Atlantic"! :=) :=)
When I wrote a little earlier today that the so-called "cultural elites" feel more free than the ordinary lower-middle or middle-middle classes to be a bit cavalier, offhand, or irreverent about the "square" virtues, civilities, and courtesies celebrated by Alexander Zubatov and Jordan Peterson, I was referring to a manifestation of the so-called "countersignaling," or "showing off by not showing off," that I discussed a few says ago in an earlier comment on Zubatov's essay. "Countersinaling," as defined by various economists and sociologists in the last few years, means that high-status people secure in the knowledge that their social position, talents, abilities, and good qualities are recognized by everybody will tend to feel that no great harm is done if they occasionally stray a bit from strict propriety in their behavior, manners, appearance, or attitudes, that they will still be accepted and respected as elite no matter what–while at the same time other, somewhat less high-status people will be more likely to fear disgrace, ostracism, or even trouble with the law if they depart in any way from the "straight and narrow." Jordan Peterson's great popularity in recent years suggests, I think, that college-age young Americans no longer feel nearly as optimistic or confident these days as they would have felt a couple of decades ago about their chances of rising into the social and economic strata who can safely, securely "countersignal" with no real ill consequences–as I facetiously put it in my earlier comment today, of maybe someday becoming Chairperson of the Yale or Harvard English department or associate editor of "Harper's" or "The Atlantic." In the past, I'd more generally add, I think that there was more of a widespread general feeling that rising into the ranks of the "cultural elites," "effete snobs," "limousine liberals," or "Brie and Chablis set" was a kind of natural, normal climax of upward social mobility, that if you worked hard and showed talent you would naturally wind up amongst the "cultural elites," that someday eventually ending up a "cultural elite" type more or less naturally "came with the territory" of "bettering yourself"!
Boaz says:
This was a potently written article, but I think some of the things in the list on the final paragraph distracted from the message a bit. While I generally try to follow most of those decorums listed, by the end I figured the author would agree that the ways people look and carry themselves are rather trivial compared to the other items. Otherwise your engagement with them and their ideas is tainted by your shallow judgement about their appearance.
Alexander Zubatov's plea for a return to civility, politeness, and gentlemanliness [and ladylikeness!] in American politics, society, and culture suggests a need to explore neglected dimensions of political attitude and behavior largely ignored in our current near-exclusive over-emphasis on power relations and on two-sided oppressor/oppressed, exploiter/exploited, elite/"subaltern," especially in liberal, ledtist, and progressivist "discourses." I'd thus like to introduce here the concept of "countersignaling," or "showing off by not showing off." Countersignaling is the strategy of people so confident of their valuable qualities that they feel no need to flaunt them. It contrasts with the often exaggerated displays felt as urgently necessary by people with only a moderate amount of the desirable qualities in question–whether of wealth, social status, intelligence, education, competence, pgusical strength, or social position.
Countersignaling seems to be a uniquely human trait, while positive signaling of one's attractive or dangerous characteristics is widespread throughout the animal kingdom–as in mating displays (e.g., the peacock's tail) and in the signaling of being poisonous or venomous to potential predators. Signaling among animals has long been studied by biologists and ethologists, but human countersignaling has attracted the special attention of economists in recent decades. The concept was most notably developed by economists Nick Feltovich, Rick Harbaugh, and Ted To in their 2002 paper "Too Cool for School? Signalling and Countersignalling," published in the *RAND Journal of Economics*, Vol. 33, Winter 2002, pp. 630-649. It was first popularized with that term in a brief unsigned article on "Signal failure? The economics of understatement" in *The Economist*, May 2003, largely a summary of the Feltovich, Harbaugh, and To paper. It has also been discussed by UC Berkeley economist Robin Hanson in "Countersignaling" at Polymathmbox: polymath/polyart/1028.html on December 11, 1998, and by blog participant "Alicorn" in "Things You Can't Countersignal" on Hanson and artificial intelligence theorist Eliezer Yudkowski's *Less Wrong* blog for 19 February 2009.
Countersignaling, showing off by playing humble, modest, or unpretentious, has long been familiar to us in the way that the *nouveaux riches* notoriously flash their cash, flaunting champagne. fast cars, and palatial mansions, while folk with old money are more understated. Countersignaling, however, not only explains why the *nouveaux riches* flaunt their wealth, while the old rich scorn such gauche displays. It likewise explains, researchers have shown, why mediocre students often outperform more talented students, also eagerly answering a teacher's easy questions, while the best students are embarrassed to prove their knowledge of trivial points. It is similarly illustrated also by people of average education showing off the studied regularity of their handwriting, while the well-educated often scribble illegibly. It explains, too, why moderate-quality merchandise is advertised heavily while high-quality goods rely on their word-of-mouth reputation, and why minor officials try to prove their status through petty displays of authority, while the truly powerful prove their strength by avoiding such displays, preferring gestures of magnanimity.
The contrast of anxiously diligent signaling of one's desirable qualities versus confidently casual countersignaling also helps explain why immigrants and the children of immigrants so often display a flamboyantly fervent patriotism or even chauvinism, or why new converts to a religion are often fervently pious and fanatically orthodox ("more Papal than the Pope") in contrast to the more easy-going religiosity of "cradle believers." It is likewise the main reason why women in business, academia, and the professions feel they have to be "twice as good" as their male colleagues to be accepted or taken seriously, to diligently, zealously "lean in" to prove their competence, dedication, and professionalism. Another very familiar example of countersignaling at work is the way the middle class (especially the lower-middle class, anxious to distinguish themselves from blue-collar workers and from "underclass" slum-dwellers) have long been bastions of ultra-respectable mainstream culture, while privileged youth often scorn "up-tight" *petit bourgeois* propriety to embrace Bohemian or counter-cultural lifestyles.
In American politics, Joseph McCarthy's demagogic "anti-Communist" subversive-hunting in the 1950's appealed especially to many second- and third-generation immigrant "ethnics," especially Irish Catholics, anxious to prove their 100% "Americanism," inspiring Daniel Patrick Moynihan's witticism about the Fordham men in the FBI checking on the loyalty of the Harvard men in the State Department. It likewise appealed to *nouveau riche* businessmen, such as Texas oil millionaires, unsure of their social acceptance by "old money." On the other hand, higher-status old-family WASP's largely despised "Tailgunner Joe" and condemned his reckless charges of disloyalty and pro-Communism, feeling less compulsion to flaunt a frenetic super-patriotism. They also often noted that McCarthy very largely focused his disloyalty accusations on representatives of high-status "Establishment" WASP privilege like Harvard, Yale, the Army, the State Department, and the diplomatic corps.
In the 1960's, conservative politicians like Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, and George Wallace exploited white working-class and lower-middle-class fears and resentments of Black militants, "welfare chiselers," inner-city rioters, hippies, student radicals, and draft-dodgers, appealing to their dislike and suspicion of people both above and below them in social status. Their attacks on "effete snobs," "limousine liberals," and "pointy-headed pseudo-intellectuals" explicitly addressed resentments of upper-status nonconformity as well as of lower-class criminality and welfare dependency, of affluent as well as of poverty-level refusals or failures to observe petty-bourgeois ultra-respectability. More recently, lower-middle-class white voters resentful both of racial minorities (especially Blacks, Hispanics, and Muslims) and of college-educated upper-middle-class "cultural elites" formed an important part of Donald Trump's political base, along with the less sophisticated sectors of the formally college-educated business, managerial, and professional upper-middle class. Neither group of Trump supporters had yet learned the fine art and *savoir-faire* of countersignaling.
To understand how people can "show off by not showing off," economists in recent decades have returned to Thorstein Veblen's classic analysis of conspicuous consumption in *The Theory of the Leisure Class* (1899), largely based on the over-the-top antics of the post-Civil War newly-rich "Robber Barons" with glances also at the much more restrained consumption of the established old rich. Veblen argued that the newly-rich proved their wealth by lavishly, ostentatiously spending their money on luxury goods and other wasteful activities–while the old rich, confident in their wealth and social position, showed their disdain for the *arrivistes* by deliberately cultivating a more modest consumption style. American economist Andrew Michael Spence's model of signaling (A.M. Spence, "Job Market Signaling," *Quarterly Journal of Economics*, Vol. 87, 1974, pp. 355-374) formalized Veblen's argument by showing that wasteful actions (including an expensive education with little or no real direct practical relevance to their actual work) can separate higher "quality" types from lower quality types if the action is less burdensome to the higher quality types–i.e., if they feel they can easily and painlessly afford to waste time and money on prestigious activities of little actual direct practical usefulness.
In 2001, economist Damon J. Phillips (University of Chicago) and sociologist Ezra W. Zuckerman (Stanford University) published research supporting the long-familiar idea that conformity is high at the middle but low at both the top and the bottom of a status hierarchy, that conformity increases as actors value their membership in a group but feel insecure in their membership, in "Middle-Class Status Conformity: Theoretical Restatement and Empirical Demonstration in Two Markets" (*American Journal of Sociology*, Vol. 107, No. 2, September 2001, pp. 379-429). Phillips and Zuckerman argued that while medium-status members of a group feel insecure in their membership and therefore struggle to prove their worthiness, in contrast to the more insouciant attitudes of both high-status and low-status group members. Since high-status members feel confident in their social acceptance, they feel free to deviate from conventional behavior. At the same time, low-status members feel free to defy accepted practice because they are excluded regardless of their actions. Finally, in contrast to the relative freedom experienced by both high- and low-status people, Phillips and Zuckerman concluded, middle-status conservatism reflects the anxiety felt by people aspiring to a social station who fear exclusion or rejection. Such insecurity fuels conformity as middle-status individuals labor to prove their *bona fides* as well-behaved, productive, trustworthy group members.
Of course, the basic idea of countersignaling, if not the word itself or its analysis in economic terms, has been familiar long, long before Veblen, to say nothing of Feltovich, Harbaugh, To, Spence, Phillips, and Zuckerman. Harvard social historian Barrington Moore, for instance, noted its historical antiquity in his *Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy* (1966). The landed aristocracy, Moore observed, "has in many countries furnished a congenial climate in which the ideal of the amateur has grown and flourished," but that ideal also "has of course roots that ramify much further." In "one form or another," the amateur ideal is "probably characteristic of most preindustrial civilizations." Because aristocratic or gentlemanly status, whether or not strictly hereditary, was "supposed to indicate a qualitatively superior form of being" not arising from "individually acquired merits," the "aristocrat was not expected to put forth too prolonged or too earnest effort in any single direction." He "might excel, but not just in one activity as a consequence of prolonged training," which "would be plebeian." The aristocrat, whether or not strictly hereditary, was "expected to do all things very well, but none of them, not even making love, *too* well." [Barrington Moore. *Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World* (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), p. 488]. Doing "all things well, but none of them… *too* well" is a good description of countersignaling! In the Western European Renaissance, we might add, this ideal of doing "all things very well, but none of them…*too* well," with no appearance of "put[ting] forth too prolonged or too earnest an effort in any single direction," was called *sprezzatura*, from the Italian word for "negligence, disdain," in this case suggesting "effortless ease" or "easy, casual skill," a term popularized by the Italian courtier and diplomat Baldassare Castiglione (1488-1529) in *Il Cortegiano* ("The Courtier," written 1513-1518, published 1528), the book that made him the chief arbiter of aristocratic manners during the Renaissance.
While the countersignaling concept, under that name, has largely been analyzed and popularized in our time by economists using economic frames of reference, I believe it points to a subjective, psychological dimension of human behavior not fully reducible to strictly economic or material factors. It suggests that some social tensions and political cannot be explained simply by objective differences of access to material resources or to the means of coercion, but rather also involve subjective perceptions of social or cultural status differences. Such perceived, psychologically salient status distinctions may exist even within "the same social class" in strictly economic, material, or institutional terms–e.g., between "old money" and *nouveau riche* segments of the wealthy, or between WASP, Jewish, Italian-American, and African-American neighbors in the same tax bracket in the same suburb. Such groups of people might be hard or impossible to distinguish in strictly structural terms, but may yet be very different in their political attitudes and behavior–and might devote much of their politics to attacking each other rather than people or groups clearly above or below them in structural economic level. Here, I think, we have a serious weakness of "vulgar Marxist" political analyses!
More broadly, I think, this also suggests that social, political, or cultural activists and analysts who consider themselves "liberal," "progressive," "leftist," or "socialist," including feminists and advocates for people of color, should perhaps reconsider a simplistically binary two-sided "us versus them," "oppressors and oppressed," "elite and subalyern," or "top-dogs and underdogs" perspective. They should seriously consider at least partly adopting certain perspectives traditionally associated with more conservative analyses–a suggestion, by the way, that I think could be considered impeccably "postmodernist"! Feminist, queer, transgender, Black, Hispanic, Asian-American, and anti-colonialist theorists and advocates, often invoking postmodernist concepts, have in recent years increasingly embraced a starkly dualist, quasi-Manichean "us versus them" outlook enshrining a binary antithesis of white male straight bourgeois cis-gender "privilege" versus all the various oppressed non-white, non-male, non-straight, non-bourgeois, and trans-gender "Others," with no interest in exploring (and possibly exploiting) differences, fissures, or internal conflicts among the all-too-hastily demonized straight bourgeois white males! This strikes me as clearly a falling back into *Vulgarmarxismus*!
A focus on relative prestige and status, on differences in life-style, taste, outlook, individual psychology, and subjective likes and dislikes rather than on "real" differences in wealth and power, has often been considered frivolous by radical social critics concerned with "serious,""substantial" issues of wealth, power, and social structure, who see such a preoccupation with "mere" prestige and snobbery as fundamentally conservative. Thus, the German-born British socialist scholar and historian of Marxism George Lichtheim (1912-1973) once dismissed David Riesman and Nathan Glazer's *The Lonely Crowd* (1950) as "not sociology, but market research," for what he saw as its excessive, misplaced focus on life-styles, tastes, and consumer preferences rather than on substantial questions of social and economic structure. Traditional conservative social, political, and cultural thought has indeed often been more attentive to subtle differences in attitude, opinion, and sensibility between different sectors of the "privileged" class(es) than liberal, radical, or leftist thought.
By traditional conservative social and cultural thought, by the way, I definitely don't mean the populist-reactionary or sometimes even racist grousing, punditry, or propaganda of the Rush Limbaughs, Steve Bannons, Sean Hannitys, Bill O'Leary's, and Ann Coulters, of so many of Donald Trump's (or the late Margaret Thatcher's) ardent admirers, of the Alt-Right and the white supremacists, of the followers of Joe McCarthy in the 1950's or George Wallace in the 1960's and 1970's, or of fervent believers in "Pizzagate" and "Clinton White House Murder Plot" conspiracy theories. I likewise definitely don't mean what the subtle, brilliant poet, historian, and conservative social thinker Peter Viereck (1916-2006) once called the "indiscriminate anti-liberalism of hothouse Bourbons and czarist serf-floggers" bent on "suppressing individual liberties in the Continental fashion of czardom, Junkerdom, Maistrean ultra-royalism." I'm thinking rather of the thoughtful, often quite subtle and sophisticated social and cultural observations and analyses of thinkers in the Burkean tradition like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, Benjamin Disraeli, Alexis de Tocqueville, José Ortega y Gasset, Irving Babbitt, Russell Kirk, Peter Viereck himself, John Lukács, and August Heckscher, as well as of Friedrich Nietszche's brilliant insights. Such thinkers, I feel, practiced and encouraged a careful attention to seemingly superficial questions of style and nuance with yet potential practical effects on political behavior, to which "progressive" thinkers and activists should also pay more attention. A greater attention to such subtleties, I think, would greatly enrich and deepen liberal and progressive thought–as well as rescue conservatism from Trumpite vulgarity!
As I just noted. Conservatives, traditionalists, and moderate liberals are often fascinated or even obsessed with distinctions such as those between "old money" and *nouveau riche* subgroups of the wealthy, or first-, second-, and third-generation immigrants within an ethnic group, minutely exploring differences in intangibles like taste, style, "class," manners, cultivation, sophistication, "couth," "cool," and "hip" vs. "square" among people or groups of the same gender and skin color who may be similar or identical in "objective" terms of money, formal education, organizational position, or political office. As I said, this fascination is generally scorned by dogmatic Marxists and by today's "politically correct" postmodern militant feminist, anti-racist, queer, and "intersectionalist" theorists and activists, who don't want to be bothered with trivial fine distinctions among the straight white male cis-gender bourgeoisie.
The conservative and moderate liberal interest in subjective, psychological, and stylistic intangibles naturally makes them attentive to the countersignaling of "showing off by not showing off." Conservatives and moderate liberals, far more than radical leftists, are thus sensitive to the disdain of long-established higher-status folk for their more recently-arrived or only middling-status relatives, neighbors, classmates, or co-workers who "try too hard" to be respectable, proper, and well-bred, who "put forth too prolonged or too earnest effort" and lack the *sprezzatura* (as Castiglione called it in Renaissance Italy) of knowing how to "do all things very well, but none of them, not even making love, *too* well." Those conservatives and moderate liberals are likewise more attentive and sensitive than many zealous "social justice warriors" to the resentment of the recently-arrived and the middling-status for what they feel to be the arrogant, decadent, frivolous over-civilization of the "effete snobs" looking snootily down on their own drably earnest meat-and-potatoes lace-curtain decency, hard work, propriety, piety, and patriotism. Centrist liberals and conservatives can understand, without necessarily accepting or approving, the willingness of themselves very respectable, proper, and moral "Middle Americans" and "Silent Majority" types (or their Canadian, British, etc. counterparts) to cheer seeming blatant rogues, bullies, slobs, or vulgarians with coarse manners and sometimes dubious personal morals who yet "have the guts" to "give the finger" to the "effete snobs," "Brie and Chablis set," "pointy-headed pseudo-intellectuals," "limousine liberals," "striped-pants diplomats dripping with degrees," and "Washington Insiders"–hence the popular appeal of figures like Joseph McCarthy in the 1950's, George Wallace and Spiro Agnew in the 1960's and 1970's, and now Donald Trump–an appeal the "SJW" types however simply attribute to "racism," "sexism," or "bigotry" by "deplorables."
Another way of putting all this is that centrist liberals and conservatives are Pluralists in their vision of society and politics, while extreme leftists and right-wingers are Dualists. Moderate liberals and conservatives see both society and politics as a spectrum of many distinct, competing groups and shades of opinion, some pretty similar to one's own group and viewpoint with a few slight differences and others quite different. Radical leftists and extreme right-wingers, on the other hand, have a starkly black-and-white vision of themselves (and maybe a few close allies) versus a homogeneous (despite meaningless superficial internal differences) bloc of unredeemable, irreconciliable enemies. Centrist liberals and conservatives see numerous significant differences among their opponents, some of whom can be reasoned with or even persuaded to be allies or benevolent neutrals while others can only be seen as adversaries. Extreme leftists and rightists alike, however, see no significant or meaningful distinctions between different subsets of their opponents–no real difference (for the Left) between liberal and conservative, "hip" and "square," or educated and uneducated straight white cis-gender males, no real difference (for the far Right) between moderate liberals and outright Communist sympathizers (though a century ago, before the Russian Revolution, communists were preceded by anarchists as ultra-conservatives' usual radical-left bogey-men). In any case, radical Leftists and radical Rightists alike tend to suffer from a similar foreshortened perspective on their opponents, ignoring or dismissing distinctions that centrist liberals and moderate conservatives are more willing to recognize and exploit.
First of all, it was refreshing to see references to sages and thinkers of past generations, as in Alexander Zubatov's quotes from Jonathan Swift, Algernon Sidney, Shaftesbury, Ortega y Gasset, and Alexis de Tocqueville and not just from Foucault, Derrida, Franz Fanon, or current "critical race," feminist, intersectionalist, "white privilege," and "white fragility" theorists. It's good to see someone putting current political controversies and kerfuffles in some sort of longer-range historical and cultural context, as Zubatov attempted to do.
I'd also just add here myself that some of that longer-range cultural and historical perspective may be found, as well, in reading some of our last generation's pre-"woke," pre-"PC," pre-"SJW," pre-"intersectional' liberal historians, sociologists, and commentators, like Richard Hofstadter, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, etc., who also illuminated yesteryear's social, political, and cultural conflicts and tensions in ways that may perhaps still be found enlightening today. They also show us that it's not really necessary to become a right-wing Republican in order to oppose the "call-out culture" of today's intolerant, authoritarian "regressive left." Likewise, what they observed about the political conflicts of earlier generations might prompt us to wonder, for example, whether some of the political and cultural clashes of the 1950's Joe McCarthy era were really all that fundamentally different, for instance, from that of our own current Trump era? Or whether George Wallace's 1960's third-party "white backlash" supporters were all that different from Trump's supporters 50 years later?
Zubatov very perceptively observes that "pressurizing people to fight racism routinely backfires," that "dropping F-bombs on fellow citizens spreads hatred rather than makes converts to anti-racism," and that "[l]ecturing, demonizing and lashing out at people have never convinced anyone of anything." Politeness, he quite correctly notes, is "not only nobler but also far more effective." That is EXACTLY what I myself have been saying. While I'm generally not exactly an avid fan myself of popular self-help books, I really think our liberal and leftist political activists would do well to recall Dale Carnegie's reminder over 80 years ago that "you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar." Lecturing, demonizing, dropping F-bombs, and lashing out at so-called "deplorables" is definitely NOT a good way to "win friends and influence people."
Zubatov is quite correct in criticizing the "common perception that politeness is only a means to an end, that some more substantive goal, some broad vision of justice or the good society, is what we are really after, and being either polite or rude about it is just a matter of tactics—we should do whatever works." Civility is not just "whatever works"–it is the ONLY thing that works, unless of course one seriously contemplates a Leninist-style coup d'état.
Zubatov's encomium of politeness and gentlemanliness, with his extended quote from Shaftesbury on politeness "in that wch every minute offers & gives opportunity. Eating. Talk. Story, Argument, the common Entertainment, Mirth & Laughing, Voice, Gest, Action, Countenance," also suggests that something perhaps might actually even be said in favor of snobbery, as unedifying an emotion as it's usually considered–or perhaps snobbery is not quite the right word for what I have in mind. However, be that as it may, I've often felt that liberals and progressives perhaps should not always be so down on snobbery as they generally profess to be.
Liberals rather should regard it as maybe a "Good Thing" if it leads the upward-mobile sons and daughters of the "lower orders" to despise racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia as vulgar, tacky, low-class habits, as signs of a regrettable lack of good taste and good breeding! One should leave such prejudices behind when one enters (or aspires to enter) the ranks of educated, cultured, well-bred ladies and gentlemen, just as one leaves cellophane-wrapped Krafft or Velveeta processed cheese slices, McDonaldsburgers, Diet Coke, Coors beer, and hunting 'n' fishing behind after one has discovered Brie and Camembert, quiche, Perrier water, Chardonnay, and art-show openings! :=) :=) Surely, for example, the upward-mobile, if they are at all socially perceptive, should notice that in the college-educated upper-middle-class to which they aspire groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and the League of Women voters definitely have more social prestige, more of a "Brahmin" and "civic-minded leading citizen" aura, than the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Elks Club, Rotary, or the Knights of Columbus! Being a racist, on the other hand, is just SO Moose Lodge! :=) :=)
This sort of thing, I suspect, is part of what David Riesman and Nathan Glazer may have had in mind in their 1955 article on "Intellectuals and the Discontented Classes" on the social roots of 1950's "McCarthyism," when they noted that while many of the "newly prosperous" mid-20th century American working and lower-middle classes rejected the "traditional cultural and educational leadership of the enlightened upper and upper-middle classes,"some of their college-educated children had "become eager strivers for cosmopolitanism and culture, rejecting the values now held by the discontented classes." Not only did many of those "eager strivers for cosmopolitanism and culture" accept liberal values and attitudes for their own sake, out of temperamental affinity or rational conviction, but also, I suspect, they noticed early on that there was something a bit "déclassé" or "downmarket" about some of their parents' or families' attitudes and prejudices, that in the educated, sophisticated upper-bourgeois circles to which they aspired it just wasn't "done" to display a certain sort of super-patriotic Joe McCarthyite or John Birchite Cold War anti-Communism, to express certain prejudices against Jews or "Negroes," or to crack certain sorts of "little woman" jokes or make certain sorts of "woman driver!" remarks. If you exhibited such opinions and prejudices, perhaps it might be just as well if you stuck to your bowling alley or "Royal Order of Raccoons" lodge and forgot about the art museum, the faculty lounge, and the tennis court! :=) :=)
Tobin says:
I love that Mr. Zubitov is unafraid to tackle not just the run-of-the-mill kinds of political antics that are discussed in most of these articles on "civility" but also the more general decline in public behaviour that's really part of the same issue but that doesn't get enough airtime. Political incivility is indeed just the tip of a much larger iceberg, which consists of all these manky wankers taking a piss or worse on streets or in transport or making a spectacle of themselves with their obstreperous noise, street language, offensive dress and other vulgarity and buffoonery. If we don't fix that problem, we'll never fix the more superficial issues that are afflicting our politics.
gfwt says:
I certainly agree with the author (who happens to be a friend) that politeness is an essential element of a democratic republic such as our own, the absence of which is a sign of its possible demise.
However the author appears to skip over an entire category of political action, which underlay the success of Gandhi and much of the civil rights movement: non-violent protest. The author writes that "polite disregard will accomplish much more than the kinds of protests, callouts and freak-outs that only fuel the fire, alienating potential allies." Yes, "freaks-outs" will just fuel the fire, but the author seems to move from "screaming, screeching, hectoring, browbeating and bullying" (bad) directly to "skillful oratory, sharp wit and noble acts and deeds," citing MLK's famous speech. By doing so, he seems to suggest that protest of any kind is ill-advised. I think we should rather say: protest, but peacefully, with politeness.
This raises however several other points:
1. To what extent should "politeness" or civility also be required of the media? Rupert Murdoch, Rush Limbaugh and their many colleagues have found that appeals to fear, and outrage, "sell" very, very well, and reap big political rewards as well. Incitements to hatred are common: Alexander Vindman and Mitt Romney, labeled as "traitors" by certain persons in the media, each must now have at least some fear for their security. What now can stop this particular form of "impoliteness"? Former media constraints on one-sided political discourse have been eliminated (partly in the misguided belief that individuals are fully capable of separating rational discourse from irrational, but just as significantly, because "money talks" when it comes to legislation).
2. How bad is the "screaming, screeching, hectoring, browbeating and bullying" the author mentions; What extent is it real, to what extent is it imaginary? Many of my conservative friends seem truly to believe that the "anti-fa" (in which they seem to include supporters of "Black Lives Matter", most immigrants, militant lesbians, etc.) are ready to start a civil war at any time — though as my conservative friends calmly inform me, they will be "ready" if so, since they keep their weapons close at hand.
3. Who can set examples for us to follow? The following headline has just appeared in my news feed: "Trump's rhetoric has changed the way hundreds of kids are bullied in classrooms". This is rhetoric straight from the top.
I am completely in favor of politeness, for the reasons the author identifies.
We have, however, at the same time, other grave problems that suggest that a "return to politeness" will not be enough to restore civility in our democratic process. The rot in our republic runs much deeper.
Alexander Zubatov says:
Hi, Greg (and thanks for reading the article!). Completely agree with you that maybe I wasn't as clear as I should've been that some peaceful protests are NOT "the kinds of protests, callouts and freak-outs that only fuel the fire." My view, however, is that protesters, peaceful or otherwise, are not exempt from the general norm of politeness; they should be conducting themselves in a dignified manner, and many of our modern-day protest movements are not doing that at all. Antifa bullies and intimidates people, often going to the point of violent attacks against conservatives and conservative journalists, the women's marches with the obscene pink hats are … well … obscene, as are so many of these "F*ck Trump!" celebrities and protesters, the recent New York subway "protests" were really just a bunch of pathetic hoodlums sowing chaos and trying to return the subway to the graffitied-up crime-ridden days of the 1970s/80s, and so much of the rhetoric of BlackLivesMatter, despite the noble intentions of some, has been full of profanity and virulent anti-white hatred and racism. Those kinds of protests aren't constructive. They are repulsive — and I mean "repulsive" in the sense not only of being aesthetically repulsive to me and many others personally but also in the sense of repelling potential allies. For example, my view of BlackLivesMatter is that it's overheated, aggressive and racist rhetoric turned an issue that should've been an all-concerned-citizens-of-every-race-against-police-brutality issue into a blacks+liberal white elites vs. working-class whites+cops issue. The statistics I've seen show that when you compare apples to apples (for which you have to take into account crime rates by race to track the disproportionate rate at which people of different races interact with cops in a law-enforcement scenario in the first place), the rate of police killings of unarmed whites is actually equal to or even a bit higher than the right of police killings of unarmed blacks, and certainly in absolute numbers, the number of police killings of unarmed whites is significantly higher. This shouldn't have been a race issue AT ALL. It should've been an issue about how we as a society ensure that laws are enforced while, at the same time, also ensuring that people engaged in adversarial interactions with cops don't get unjustifiably brutalized in one fashion or another. Instead of bringing us together as a nation, the BlackLivesMatter movement tore us apart.
So many of the current protest movements and the sensation-peddling media's overheated, inflammatory rhetoric on race and other identity issues have, in my view, only hastened the exile of the white working class from the Democratic Party and have directly fueled Trump's election and continued support. In no way do I condone or justify Trump's own boorish conduct, but he represents a reaction, a tit-for-tat, the white working class (supported by the Republican corporate class for their own reasons) saying, in effect, "We've had enough of these endless attacks by media elites and celebrities and others demonizing everything we are, viz., our race, our gender norms, our religion, our national traditions, etc." The result has been, as I described in the article, the total demolition of the cross-racial, race-blind consensus (an ideal towards which we had been steadily progressing) that had been the triumph of the Civil Rights Era after so much progress had been made, with renewed balkanization, increasing membership in hate groups on all sides and working-class whites being sent into the waiting arms of the guy who was wiling to stand up to the attacks on them and tell them, brashly, clearly and unapologetically, "I am your voice!"
That is what happens, in my view, when politeness falls by the wayside. The worst, loudest, most vulgar voices come to the fore, driving division and social unrest, and then you get this inevitable game of one-upmanship on both sides, Trump, as another commenter pointed out below, refusing to shake Pelosi's hand and Pelosi ripping up his speech, unproductive bottom-feeding investigations into Hillary's e-mails, Trump's Russia ties, Trump's Ukraine shenanigans, Biden's son etc. Instead of coming together to address actual pressing issues, we get mired in the muck, cross-accusations of impropriety, digging into the past, trying to dredge up some allegedly thing someone may have said or done when they were 17 years old in 1982 or whenever, etc.
So I agree with you that there's a larger picture here, but my view of that larger picture is probably a bit different from yours, and I think the decline in civility (driven in many ways by social media as well as by other forces) is, if not the core of the issue, certainly one of its primal components.
Ravin S. says:
Agree entirely with this author's point. The way I'd put it is that children throw tantrums, while adults have conversations, and a nation is a kind of ongoing conversation intended to adjust and refine our collective conception of the good life. If you want to take part in that conversation, however, you have to abide by certain conventional rules of conversational etiquette and decorum. If you can't do that, you deserve to be treated like a child, given a "time out," put in the corner and, if all else fails, grounded. We shouldn't tolerate politicians refusing to shake hands or ripping up speeches.
Heike says:
(This is an only slightly exaggerated version of Herbert Marcuse's argument in his infamous 1965 essay, "Repressive Tolerance," which provides a blueprint for modern day political correctness and opposition to free speech.)
It's not exaggerated at all. A lot of people saw this coming.
Some leftists may seem to oppose technology, but they will oppose it only so long as they are outsiders and the technological system is controlled by non-leftists. If leftism ever becomes dominant in society, so that the technological system becomes a tool in the hands of leftists, they will enthusiastically use it and promote its growth. In doing this they will be repeating a pattern that leftism has shown again and again in the past. When the Bolsheviks in Russia were outsiders, they vigorously opposed censorship and the secret police, they advocated self-determination for ethnic minorities, and so forth; but as soon as they came into power themselves, they imposed a tighter censorship and created a more ruthless secret police than any that had existed under the tsars, and they oppressed ethnic minorities at least as much as the tsars had done. In the United States, a couple of decades ago when leftists were a minority in our universities, leftist professors were vigorous proponents of academic freedom, but today, in those of our universities where leftists have become dominant, they have shown themselves ready to take away from everyone else's academic freedom. (This is "political correctness.") The same will happen with leftists and technology: They will use it to oppress everyone else if they ever get it under their own control.
— Ted Kazinsky, "The Unabomber Manifesto"

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl