And ain’t they so superiah?

There’s a big point underlying the whole Duck Dynasty controversy that’s slowly basting in the back of my head (something to do with Nietzsche, which makes it a problem that I’ve lost track of my copy of his collected writings). For a smaller tangent, though, there’s an interesting cultural distinction to be found between writers at National Review Online.

Here’s Mark Steyn:

… I’m not interested in living in a world where we have to tiptoe around on ever thinner eggshells. If it’s a choice between [tolerating periodically offensive celebrities] or having all of them banished from public life and thousands upon millions more too cowed and craven to speak lest the same fate befall them, I’ll take the former any day.

Because the latter culture would be too boring for any self-respecting individual to want to live in, even more bloody boring than the current TV landscape …

And here’s Jason Lee Steorts:

… I can’t agree with Mark that anything of value is lost when derogatory epithets go out of bounds in polite society. … By way of criticizing speech, I’ll say that I found the derogatory language in this column, and especially the slur in its borrowed concluding joke, both puerile in their own right and disappointing coming from a writer of such talent.

As a place to start, I’ll suggest that Steyn understates the problem with what Steorts haughtily refers to as a society that has “awoken to a greater civility.” Frankly, it’s a sham, constructed so as to give the promiscuously erudite power to insult and silence those with whom they disagree.

Look below the better-than-you language of Steorts’s post, and what do you have? On the key point of contention, certainly not argumentation or addressing ideas. Rather, you have his statement of disagreement, followed by unsupported assertions about the undesirable effects of a contrary view, followed by a superior tsk-tsk and underhanded insult expressed as disappointment because, really Master Steyn, you’re so much better than that.

Taking a broader view, the “awakening” to which Steorts refers seems largely indistinguishable from the strategy by which the Left flips reality on its head by making it ever more difficult to express undesirable opinions about it. It’s Olde Newspeak, and to my experience, it makes it more difficult for human beings to be human to each other, ultimately papering over a fundamental bigotry shielded behind a wall of semantics.

The most stark example of that experience came while I was splitting my time between the college classroom and the commercial fishing dock. In the former location, a largely homogeneous and privileged class affirmed its superiority by trapping intellectual opponents in a box of Things You Can’t Say. In the latter location, an expansively diverse crew — which was proven implicitly equal by the shared experience of damp labor in the pre-dawn winter air — spurted whatever off-color and potentially insulting jokes came to mind.

I submit that equality is simply not possible in Steorts’s evolved society, because (in adapted Nietzschian terms) the slave must always hesitate before expressing his thoughts before the master, lest they be designated “puerile.” So, like the tortured Theon Greyjoy, he whips himself mentally at the earliest thought against the master.

It’s a tool of totalitarianism, and the most effective inoculation is for self-expression to be encouraged to such an extent that we have the opportunity to correct each other for being offensive, on the one hand, or for taking unjustified offense, on the other.

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