Civility and politeness are extremely useful tools in communication with people who are more wrong than right, but of very little use with people who are vastly more right than wrong. This counter-intuitive observation comes directly from the fact that we simply do not need civil and polite ways of telling people that they are right about something. So the people who have most to gain from civility and politeness are people who know they are and intend to /stay/ wrong while they force everybody else hold their tongues. That may have been a very good way of building societies before /anyone/ was usually right about anything. It is only in the twentieth century that a sizable fraction of the population had any means to know whether they were in the right or in the wrong to begin with. Before we invented the concept of the real world, everybody lived their entire lives in their own emotional world. After science and technology invented the concept of the real world and of truth as correspondence between thoughts and reality, the internal, private world turned out to be /untrue/ almost all the time. These days, I keep telling people that you only /really/ grow up and become a human being (as opposed to a mere animal) when you realize that most of what you think and almost all you feel is /wrong/ and every person, however smart or highly esteemed by their peers, is utterly and completely incapable of determining where they are right among all this wrongness on their own. We tend to believe we are mostly right, however, and only notice when the consequences of our actions contradict our best expectations.
Posted June 29, 2009 at 11:17am
