In a post about Pete Langr I make an observation about civility. Having just written a post which is anything but kind and may be unfair if it turns out I’m wrong I thought this observation in Andrew Sullivan’s blog explains me pretty well:
Kindness isn’t a public or intellectual virtue, but a personal one. It is a form of love. Kindness seeks, above all, to avoid hurt. Criticism — even objective, impersonal, well- intended, constructive criticism — isn’t kind. Criticism hurts people’s feelings, and it hurts most when the recipient realizes it’s accurate. Treating “kindness” as the way to civil discourse doesn’t show students how to argue with accuracy and respect. It teaches them instead to neither give criticism nor tolerate it. …
I’ve latched onto a teaching of Jesus, despite my agnosticism, that I cling to tenaciously. “Be as wise as the serpent and innocent as the dove.”
The fact of the matter is that a great many people prey upon the kind and count on them to be too nice to question their motives. The possible collapse of the world economy which the US. Congress seems oblivious to came about in large part because tens of thousands of people who should have known better bought and sold houses to people who had no business buying them. It was an epidemic of delusion that no one was mean enough to expose. To have done so would have been to question people’s motives. How unkind.
In my opinion the Red Plan was just the same only on a much smaller scale.
