An article in the New York Times stuck with me since I read it in April. The headline is “Inside the Crisis at NPR” and it reports on a Zoom call for National Public Radio employees with John Lansing, NPR’s CEO at the time:
Later on the call, after Mr. Lansing urged employees to be more mindful of “civility” in their questions, an NPR employee wrote in an instant-messaging chat accompanying the conversation that the word “civility” is often used as a cudgel against people of color, calling the language choice “racist.”
In the months since I read the article, I’ve pondered whether the name I chose for my consulting business might be racist.
There’s an amazing podcast called the Fall of Civilizations in which Paul M. M. Cooper researches an ancient civilization and publishes an episode about how it arose and why it fell. The most recent episode about the Mongol Empire comes in two parts because it’s 6 hours and 45 minutes. Did I already call this “amazing”? I should have said “monumental”.
A tidbit from that episode: Genghis Khan only entered a city only once in his life. Just before sacking Bukhara he visited the central mosque and is recorded to have said:
O People, know that you have committed great sins, and that the great ones among you have committed these sins. If you ask me what proof I have for these words, I say it is because I am the punishment of God. If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.—reported by Ata-Malik Juvayni, Tarikh-i Jahangushay
There’s something romantic about barbarian hordes coming down from the steppe to destroy a wicked society. George R. R. Martin based his invented Dothraki culture on the Mongols including (spoilers, I suppose) the idea of execution by molten metal. We can’t help but take visceral pleasure from this sort of frontier justice.
I’ve had an account on Bluesky for a year or so. I don’t post, don’t follow anyone and I try not to interact with anything (expanding profiles, clicking links, etc.). So I have a relatively default “Discover” tab. Yesterday I flipped over there in a periodic check to see if that site is worth my time. I was confronted with this image:
Readers in the future might remember the assassination of a health insurance CEO which (at the time of writing) seems to have been motivated by a hatred of health insurance companies.[1] My vanilla view of Bluesky consists of page after page of posts treating the murderer as a hero, insurance companies as centers of pure evil and a dead CEO as the cause of celebration. It’s all stomach turning.
We normally have a bias against murder if for no other reason than we don’t want to be killed ourselves. But sometimes we become so biased against some other group or tribe, we justify violence. “If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.”
Of course we only want bad people murdered in cold blood, a hypothetical defendant of Bluesky behavior might counter. Ah, but who defines “bad”? According to frontier justice. whoever comes with a gun decides. Civility disagrees. In order for cities to function, there must be laws that govern behavior and those laws must apply to all citizens. Murder is murder no matter what the victim looks like. That includes his smile.
A vigilante might have a code, but he cannot fix the problems of the world alone. Quite the opposite:
After contemplation, I conclude that this award which I receive on behalf of that movement is a profound recognition that nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral question of our time––the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression. Civilization and violence are antithetical concepts. Negroes of the United States, following the people of India, have demonstrated that nonviolence is not sterile passivity, but a powerful moral force which makes for social transformation. Sooner or later all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Oslo, Norway, 1964.
We may never know the real truth of the matter, but the point is this is what people, especially Bluesky people, believe. ↩︎