« "Racers" Neoneocon coins a very useful new word | Main | Andrew Sullivan's Bong Hits Keep Heightening Accumulating »

September 15, 2009

"Incivility is a consequence of non-punishment." -- Porretto

In a comment on Victor Hanson's The Rise of the Uncouth Francis Porretto notes...
Incivility is a consequence of non-punishment. Incivility, after all, has its own pleasures: that of venting one's feelings, and that of seeing despised others quail before one's words and gestures. When the old Gentleman's Code prevailed in common society, such acts and words would be sharply rebuffed, sometimes to the point of blows. Compared to the Americans of yesteryear who enforced that code, we're a milk-and-water bunch indeed.

And of course we have the observations of Thomas de Quincey:
If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begun upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop. Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time.

Posted by Vanderleun at September 15, 2009 6:54 PM. This is an entry on the sideblog of American Digest: Check it out.

Your Say

There is an odd omission when ploepe, both Mormon and not, talk about the question of the extent of racial discrimination in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. There are not just two races , whites and blacks. And the denial of priesthood ordination to ploepe of African descent was an anomaly in a church that had tried to bring ploepe of other races and ethnicities into its membership from its earliest years.The first mission trying to convert American Indians took place in 1831, right after the Church was organized. President Spencer W. Kimball's father was president of a mission to convert American Indians to Mormonism, and Kimball was well known for his concern for Indian Mormons. The first proselyting in Polynesia began in Tahiti in 1844. In the 1850s, even while the Mormon pioneers were still struggling to get communities established in Utah Territory, missionaries were going to Hawaii where the ploepe they converted became the nucleus of the community at Laie, where the Hawaii Temple was dedicated in 1915 by Joseph F. Smith, Church president who had served as a missionary there, and where later the Church College of Hawaii (now BYU Hawaii) was established. BYUH now serves students from all around the Pacific Rim. The first missionaries in Japan arrived in 1901, led by Heber J. Grant, who later became president of the Church. After World War II, former U.S. soldiers were the first missionaries to reopen proselyting there, with about 100,000 members, some 10% of all Christians in that nation. Intensive missionary work in Mexico and other Latin American countries started in the 20th Century, and grew slowly until taking off in the 1960s. Today a million Mexicans are Mormon, as are a million Brazilians, including many ploepe of Native American and African descent.Many Mormons are familiar with the fact that, when the 1978 change came, there were already thousands of ploepe in Ghana and Nigeria who, because they speak English, had already been converted to Mormonism simply by reading the Book of Mormon. They established instant congregations for the Church, and today the membership throughout Africa is approaching 400,000. The musical The Book of Mormon , is sort of a minstrel show that ridicules fictional missionaries in Uganda, as well as the Africans, but there are real black Mormons in Uganda, where many of the missionaries are drawn form the local population.Over half of the 14 million Mormons live outside the US and speak languages other than English. And thousands of the Mormons in North America have devoted two years of their lives to living among the ploepes of 150 nations. The Mormons can go head to head against any church on the measurement of diversity and real personal relationships across national and ethnic and language barriers.

Posted by: Minou at July 13, 2012 9:11 AM

Post a comment




Remember Me?

(you may use HTML tags for style)