social guardrails

This post follows on from my previous one, as another response to the Freddie DeBoer-Parker Milloy back-and-forth. Today, I want to respond to this section from Parker’s Letter #3:

If you go to see a movie, there are some general expectations you probably have going into it. You expect there to be a seat for you to sit, the screen to play the specific movie you paid to see, and for others to remain quiet as the movie plays. Understandably, there will be moments where the audience isn’t perfectly quiet, and I think we can all understand that. People laugh, they gasp, and there may even be a few people who break the cardinal sin of the theater and exchange a few words here and there. All-in-all, that’s fine, even if the people who talked were mildly disruptive. Overall, that’s a fine experience. People who bend the rules beyond a reasonable amount will likely be shushed or glared at by others in the theater, and if necessary, asked to leave by someone who works there. Why? Because we all agreed to these rules, both written and implied, when we bought our tickets.

Social guardrails (shushes and glares) serve as mild corrections with actions by authority (theater employees asking someone to leave) serving to handle the more serious violations. Without those things, without any way to nudge people to follow the rules they agreed to abide by — if, for instance, people who shushed or judged others for talking were accused of trying to “cancel” the talkers; if theater employees wouldn’t intervene even in the most severe instances — then this leaves the people who just want to enjoy a movie in a pretty difficult position, doesn’t it? And what would happen if, for some reason, the people who spoke throughout the movie as if it were their own personal Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode, actually benefitted from their rule-breaking, financially or socially? Well, that would likely encourage others to do the same. Pretty soon, you’ve got a theater full of people talking, and suddenly you’d find yourself wanting your money back and never planning to make a return trip.

I am really intrigued by this concept of social guardrails, and the role they play in our culture that right now so seems to value extremism and being the loudest/craziest/most shocking voice. Parker is absolutely right that, by and large, we have long had a series of social guardrails that operate in our shared spaces. Whether that is a movie theater like this illustration, or in Congressional norms, or in the way we interact with the grocery clerk, there is just generally a way that things have been expected to be done. Its kind of a necessary element of being a social being; we have to navigate so many interactions on a daily basis, these kinds of norms and guardrails have been socially constructed as a way to streamline and optimize our interactions in ways that benefit those involved. Now, obviously, a lot of these norms were culturally contingent, and at times benefitted certain groups and consequently, penalized others. This is true in terms of race, gender, and class.

It feels like that in the present, a lot of these norms and guardrails are being dismantled, in a way that isn’t healthy and isn’t strategic. I think folks on both sides of the political divide are doing, especially those out at the extremes. On the left, a concern for social justice has paved a way for some of this dismantling in the name of a better world. But there is also an element that takes a gleeful and almost perverse pleasure in taking apart our social norms, in seeing those that they identify as problematic or toxic squirm as they come up against a more free wheeling way of interacting.

On the right, however, I think there is much more a destructive and nihilistic glee about taking apart social guardrails. I don’t really identify a positive or good intentioned strain on the right like I do the left, because inherently, serious conservatives are inclined to preserve (or conserve) social structures like these. But, as I have been writing about more and more recently, there is a large portion of the right that is not “conservative” in any meaningful way, but it instead quite extreme and radical in its pursuit of remaking the world. The contempt for and destruction of social guardrails is just another example of this tendency. We see it embodied most visibly, of course, in the Trump movement and those associated with much of the modern Republican Party at the national level. There is very little interest in maintaining some form of a status quo; rather, modern political conservatives are more interested in tearing things down – the social safety net, public education, democratic norms, and most frighteningly, institutional norms associated with the presidency, Congress, and the Supreme Court.

I keep harping on this point, but we are really in a moment of time in which extremism and radicalism are the most common political ideologies at work, across the classic left-right divide. I may be a leftist and a liberal politically, but I am temperamentally pretty conservative, in that I’m not really a fan of wholesale, rapid change. So watching the glee with which so many in our national conversation seem to derive from taking a hammer to our shared way of life is very concerning to me, and I think it is to most regular people too. Again, I stand by David French’s observation: our politics seem destined to become less a battle between left and right, and more of a clash between two extremisms as the rest of us figure out how to shove them all in a cage somewhere. I’m pessimistic about the ability of our democratic institutions to facilitate such a scenario.