Recently, Al Gore was permitted an opportunity to indulge his obsession with \u201cglobal warming\u201d at the Aspen Institute.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The former Vice President had some rather choice words for critics of his anthropocentric conception of \u201cclimate change.\u201d\u00a0 They are the same people, he declared, who continue \u201cwashing back at you the same crap over and over and over again.\u201d\u00a0 Yet they have become so successful at dissembling, we have reached a point where it is now \u201cunacceptable\u201d in \u201cmixed\u201d or \u201cbi-partisan company\u201d to use the goddamned word \u2018climate.\u2019\u201d\u00a0 On three consecutive occasions during his speech, Gore referred to his opponents\u2019 alternative accounts of climate change as \u201cbull—!\u201d<\/p>\n
Gore isn\u2019t the first high profile politician to curse in public.\u00a0 Back in 2004, when he was campaigning for the presidency, John Kerry provided an interview with Rolling Stone <\/em>magazine in which he said he never thought President Bush would \u201cf— up\u201d the Iraq War as badly as he did.\u00a0 And the other night, while on Bill Maher\u2019s Real Time, <\/em>President Obama\u2019s former economic adviser, Christine Romer, described the United States as \u201cpretty darned fu\u2014ed\u201d when speaking to the credit downgrade that it received courtesy of Standard and Poor\u2019s.\u00a0<\/p>\n Public cursing has become common in our time.\u00a0 It isn\u2019t only politicians who partake of it; celebrities of various sorts do as well.\u00a0 Judging from the relative lack of commentary on this phenomenon, few people are particularly bothered by it.\u00a0 But it is at our peril as a culture, as a civilization, that we trivialize the ease and frequency with which \u201cpublic figures\u201d resort to profanity.<\/p>\n It would also be a mistake to either dismiss this concern of mine as hysteria or to mistake it for prudery.\u00a0 It is the function of neither.\u00a0<\/p>\n Cursing itself is not the issue here; it is public <\/em>cursing, the cursing of \u201cpublic figures\u201d especially, to which I allude.\u00a0 Furthermore, it isn\u2019t even this<\/em> by itself that promises calamity for our world, but the host of other culturally corrosive trends by which it is accompanied.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n The casualness with which untold numbers of people sport tattoos that they have burned into their flesh, piercings that have been drilled into every conceivable body part, and exceedingly revealing attire\u2014whether males wearing pants that hang down to their knees or females with shirts that are open to their stomachs\u2014is an ominous sign of the cultural rot from which we suffer.<\/p>\n But there are other, more subtle, indicators of the immodesty into which we have lapsed.<\/p>\n The explosion of \u201creality\u201d television, and its internet counterpart\u2014such \u201csocial media\u201d as facebook\u2014at once disclose and exacerbate this malaise. Although I have never taken an interest in it, it is true that not all \u201creality\u201d television is devoid of redeemable qualities.\u00a0 Shows like American Idol <\/em>and So You Think You Can Dance <\/em>encourage excellence.\u00a0 And the internet is invaluable for a variety of reasons.\u00a0 Be this as it may, though, there can be no denying that there is much in these venues that is complete trash.\u00a0<\/p>\n Shows like The Real Desperate Housewives of New Jersey, The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, <\/em>and many others supply an opportunity for cognitively challenged and morally impoverished nobodies to achieve their proverbial fifteen minutes of fame while carving away ever further at some of our most time honored and sacred of institutions (like marriage and the family).\u00a0 As for the internet, it is not <\/em>necessarily the effortlessness with which anyone<\/em> can submit their views that is the problem.\u00a0 It is, instead, the anonymity <\/em>that the internet affords us that scatters our inhibitions to the winds and renders the internet a bastion of incivility and even cruelty.<\/p>\n All of these phenomena, from public cursing to tattoos to \u201creality\u201d television and more, reveal a substantial deterioration of manners.\u00a0 <\/em>The glaring lack of self-discipline and humility that we witness in our politics are just as easily seen in our culture, both in its \u201clower\u201d and \u201chigher\u201d aspects.\u00a0 Perhaps from a misguided\u2014actually, destructive\u2014idea of liberty, we have abandoned what our ancestors knew all too well, that, as Burke said, \u201cliberty without wisdom, and without virtue\u2026is the greatest of all possible evils,\u201d for liberty unhindered by \u201ctradition and restraint\u201d is \u201cfolly, vice, and madness[.]\u201d<\/p>\n It is appropriate to enlist Burke in the service of this discussion, for \u201cthe conservatism\u201d of which he was among the most eloquent and impassioned advocates he helped to develop in response to an assault against traditional manners that in both its intensity and scope is not unlike that occurring in our own day.\u00a0<\/p>\n In one his many replies to the French Revolution, Burke too noted the relationship between vice or a loss of manners in politics and the same throughout the culture.\u00a0 The political radicalism against which he railed was and could only be attended by a \u201ccorrespondent system of manners<\/em>\u201d that no \u201cthinking man\u201d could seriously doubt reflected a \u201cdetermined hostility to the human race.\u201d\u00a0 This is beyond tragic, for not only are manners essential to civilization; they constitute the cornerstone upon which civilization depends.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n Burke writes: \u201cManners are of more importance than laws.\u00a0 Upon them, in a great measure, the laws depend.\u201d\u00a0 Unlike the political rationalists of his generation and ours, Burke was keenly aware of the limits of laws to inform human conduct.\u00a0 It was \u201cmanners,\u201d he knew, that make us who we are.\u00a0 \u201cThe law touches us but here and there, now and then.\u00a0 Manners,\u201d on the other hand, \u201care what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in.\u201d\u00a0 Manners \u201cgive their whole form and colour to our lives.\u201d While they are not to be confused with \u201cmorals\u201d proper, manners, if they are sound, \u201caid morals\u201d and even \u201csupply them[.]\u201d\u00a0 If, however, manners are bad, then they promise to \u201ctotally destroy\u201d morality.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n It is high time that we once again revisit the importance of \u201cmanners\u201d to our way of life. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Jack Kerwick, Ph.D.<\/p>\n originally published at The\u00a0New American<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Recently, Al Gore was permitted an opportunity to indulge his obsession with \u201cglobal warming\u201d at the Aspen Institute.\u00a0 The former Vice President had some rather choice words for critics of his anthropocentric conception of \u201cclimate change.\u201d\u00a0 They are the same people, he declared, who continue \u201cwashing back at you the same crap over and over…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n