The Yale Scene Eats Itself: Unscripted!

Thursday, cigarette #2

David Broockman decided to beat up on tradition and the Party of the Right; unsuprisingly, a traditionalist and a member the POR have been hitting him right back in comments.

The position that started it all:

Analyses of all three experiments cite the lack of "cultural scripts" for disobeying authority. In other words, everyday people - and even, I would bet, the elite - don't speak out when they want to not simply because they're intimidated but because there's no way to perform polite or respectful disobedience in our culture.

In absence of cultural scripts to disobey and protest power structures, we observe both good and bad power structures continue unquestioned except in big narrativistic moments of change. Maybe gender roles should be strengthened? There's really no way to have cultural dialogue on this question without the ability for one side to say "no!" And, in this society, with a script only for "make dinner, honey" and none nearly as casually acceptable for "we're equal people, and I drove the kids to soccer practice and everything else which I bet was just as grueling as your job, so you do it," the possibility for dialogue exists almost exclusively with those that hold the power or in the Ivory Tower.

Which he later refines to this:

As you and I both note, the best traditions - intellectual traditions, many religious traditions - do have such scripts. High cultural generally does. But low culture doesn't, and neither does the state.

We have no tools with which to engage in day-to-day conversations about gender roles or, as you note, fascist authority. We do have a mechanism to talk to our priests about why the Church does something the way it does.

It's not about broadly denying people cultural scripts in all areas because such scripts, it's about how to provide such scripts in areas where they are lacking.

I do think much of what the Left at least is trying to do is provide ordinary people with less personal audacity and position than you or I with the means to at least create awareness of or to protest power structures. On the already-beaten-to-death-topic of gender roles, for example, to build a world where an ordinary person can say "that's sexist" and have a real impact without being counter-normative and weird. We're still not there.

I agree with David that it's not enough to have a society where dissent is tolerated; you have to have scripted forms of dissent so that people who disagree know how to disagree out loud. But which of these sounds more likely in the America we have now: someone who says "That's sexist" being reprimanded for being too counter-cultural and radical, or someone who says "It is dumb and negligent for a woman to get drunk at a bar or frat party if she is unaware of the risks" being called a victim-blamer? David's right that counter-cultural-for-its-own-sake and reactionary-for-its-own-sake are both entirely valid attitudes under certain circumstances, but he is mistaken about which of these two "scripts" we need more of.

Also, low-culture doesn't have scripts for dissenting women? What about "Don't Come Home a-Drinking (With Lovin' on Your Mind)," "Rated X," or, Hell, "Harper Valley PTA?" If country music counts as "low culture," then I think Patsy and Loretta have got it covered.