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Comment by jbscpa | Hacker News Reader

My spouse is a classroom educator.

Her school participates in Great Expectations program. http://www.greatexpectations.org/

It is a character development program "that provides teachers and administrators with the skills needed to create harmony and excitement within the school atmosphere"

There are 8 Expectations at the elementary level 1. We will value one another as unique special individuals 2. We will not laugh at or make fun of a person's mistakes nor use sarcasm or putdowns. 3. We will use good manners, saying, "please," "thank you" and "excuse me" and allow others to go first. and so forth. http://www.greatexpectations.org/expectations

In my opinion when the U.S. abandoned the judeo/christian ethic in the late twentieth century character and wisdom training was denigrated as "old fashioned" and unnecessary.

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>2. We will not laugh at or make fun of a person's mistakes nor use sarcasm or putdowns.

I would have appreciated this as my public school experience was rife with negativity, sarcasm, snark, jeering, insulting, etc.

I'm not sure what causes such anti-social behavior but I dream of a day where all students can be kind, considerate, polite, and supportive of one another.

My school wasn't rife with it. Maybe only half my teachers used sarcasm, mockery and negativity towards students.

Half of teachers being outright hostile to students is far too many, in my opinion.

How does this behavior positively impact the lives of their students? Do they not understand the psychological damage they can be inflicting? Do they simply not care?

Adolescence is an exercise in accumulating scar tissue. What you call damage, I can argue is growing up. You need a thicker hide and a more independent source of self worth; reliable continual external validation inhibits, imo.

Teachers are just other people too. The sooner teenagers recognise it fully, the better placed they'll be to choose their own way rather than have it chosen for them.

If it's done in a respectful, consensual manner then sure... there's nothing wrong with friendly harmless teasing. The problem is that it often crosses a line into bulling with zero net benefit for the victims.

Saying something like "What you call damage, I can argue is growing up" is a dangerous phrase; the type of dismissiveness that gives me the impression that you may have difficulty with respecting the boundaries of others. Could you please provide a couple of examples of the type of conversations/comments you've made that helped people build a thicker hide? Have you ever been thanked for it?

That said, adolescence is absolutely not an exercise in accumulating scar tissue so much as learning through trial and error how to interact with others, gain an education, and learn life skills to become a functioning member of society.

They don't recognize it.

I'm going to guess merpnderp was indulging in a little sarcasm of their own.

Having been brought up in a positive environment, yet full of sarcasm, I'm not sure I buy this argument.

Yes, there must be a balance. But sarcasm and negativity are part of our everyday life as adults and we should learn how to handle them.

The best way to handle sarcasm and negativity is, in my opinion, to reduce contact and/or interaction. To not reward such behavior and instead choose to associate with positive people.

The problem is that school-kids are forced into repeated, unsupervised interactions where they are often deliberately and persistently targeted by aggressors.

Out of curiosity, what purpose does sarcasm serve you? What do you get out of sarcastic interactions?

It's stops people's egos getting too big, and keeps them grounded. Verbal play, attack and defence is also an education for more subtle interactions later in life. Like it or not, adult life is a sea of competition and words are weapons.

In some domains this is absolutely true. If you're lucky, you have options to explore outside of those domains.

If you handle other people’s sarcasm, cynicism, sardonicism, nihilism, ... by eliminating interaction with them, you’ll miss out on hanging out with some truly hilarious and insightful people throughout your life. YMMV.

>Out of curiosity, what purpose does sarcasm serve you?

"Ha ha, only serious". Gentle mockery can be a non-threatening way of expressing grievances and telling people difficult truths. A joke can be a very useful way of letting someone know that they're annoying us, that their work isn't up to par or that their haircut is unflattering. It's why the British excel at it - we're not very good at blunt truths, so we tend to make a joke of things.

A classic example might be the British way of greeting someone who is late - a gently sarcastic "nice of you to join us". It gets the message across without being a direct admonishment. Most of us would be unwilling to directly criticise a colleague for slacking, but we'd find it far easier to sarcastically remark "you must be rushed off your feet".

Nobody wants to be surrounded by relentlessly negative people, but uncritical cheerleaders can be just as harmful. Sometimes we need to be told things that we don't want to hear, lest we turn into vainglorious prima donnas, drifting through life with a total obliviousness to our obvious shortcomings. Sarcasm, irony and gentle mockery can make that bitter pill a little easier to swallow.

Or you could directly tell them they are annoying or that they work is not sufficient instead of being passive aggressive and hide behind jokes. Bonus will be that even dudes and dudettes with asperger will know what hostility is all about.

Sarcasm turns factual debate about performance into personal attack - and people have full right to respond in kind.

It's communication. If you communicate what you want and not what you don't, it's successful by definition.

The point made above is that sarcasm can be a way of communicating what you want (eg, "you're late") without what you don't want ("you should be ashamed/feel bad/apologize/etc"). This unwanted implicit communication is common in blunt statements of fact and is part of why that communication style is often described using words like blunt or harsh.

In this sense, sarcasm and similar serve the opposite role to the one you describe: a way of jokingly or obliquely raising criticism without demanding a direct response. Of course, those criticisms can be personal-- but that's a property of criticism, not of its style of delivery.

In my early teens, I was the only one who used sarcasm in the classroom, and none of my peers understood it. There needs to be more sarcasm in schools.

Why does there need to be more sarcasm in schools?

I'm willing to hear you out, but would appreciate it if you could clearly explain the benefits of increased sarcasm in schools.

Sarcasm is a great rhetoric tool.

I've always felt overuse of sarcasm to be indication of a juvenile mind that thinks it's more clever than it actually is. Occasional use is fine.

The cause is competition.

In many ways the trend if for the US over the last 200 years to become less ethical the more formally religious it is. (As measured by things like church attendance.)

If you can site some counter evidence I would be interested in reading it.

That's not all that surprising: outward religious formality is a sign of religion being tribal identity rather than substantive ideology.

There's a degree to which some degree of tribalism sis useful for promoting continuity of community and preservation of ideas, but there's also a persistent danger of degeneration into empty tribalism preoccupied with outward form.

Sounds like you have an axe to grind, especially since you cite no evidence yourself... How would you measure "less ethical," anyway? Are we more ethical now than 200 years ago or less, in your view?

According to Gallup, 91% of Americans in 1948 claimed to be Christian, compared to 69% in 2016. [0] I would assume "formally religious" is tracks similarly. Personally, I think we are less ethical, but since I wasn't around in 1948, hard to say.

I think ethics is related to your value of what is right and wrong. In 1948 people by and large had a "Christian" outlook on what is right and wrong and why. In 2016, the more popular claim is moral relativism, namely that there is no absolute right or wrong. Given that I can make up right and wrong and they only apply to me and not you, that seems to be a recipe for unethical behavior. In fact, I'm not sure "ethics" is a meaningful word if you subscribe to moral relativism.

Say what you like about "formally religious," but I think it offers a much better framework for ethics than the moral relativism we have now.

[0] http://www.gallup.com/poll/1690/religion.aspx

> Personally, I think we are less ethical

What does this mean to you?

When I wrote it I was thinking of the lack of statesmen. I can think of a number of politicians from 1800 - 1960 who were Statesmen. I'm thinking someone who is wise and who is willing to make sacrifices to bring about a better future for people he may not even know. I can't think of any major politician since then that really stands out as a Statesman.

Can you give a couple specific examples?

> According to Gallup, 91% of Americans in 1948 claimed to be Christian, compared to 69% in 2016. [0] I would assume "formally religious" is tracks similarly.

This is kinda tangential, but according to a very interesting panel discussion a few weeks ago "formally religious" (as measured by church attendance) as actually been more or less constant over this period. The 22% drop includes few who regularly attended religious services. The relation to the panel discussion, and somewhat to this one, is that the drop in nominal adherents has been part of what has fuelled the moralist resurgence on the right since the 90s.

USA Murder rate 1948 : 5.9 vs 4.9 (2015 aka now) I don't know about you but I would call Murder a rather extreme unethical behavior. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

Now, compare with say France a very secular and minimally religious country and their murder rate is 1.31 (Though not 100% apples to apples this extends across many other similar statistics.) : http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/France/Unit...

Surprisingly China and Japan perhaps the most atheist countries out there with significantly different economic situations also have lower murder rates than France. (Though again not apples to apples statistics.)

PS: I often hear about morality religion links but only see a few meaningless connections like church attendance and divorce rates.

> In 2016, the more popular claim is moral relativism, namely that there is no absolute right or wrong.

No, it's not.

Conservatives love to pretend that disagreement with their values is rejection of all values, but that is simply not the case.

I've never heard conservatives say that rejecting their values is a rejection of all values. I don't think that a conservative would say that liberals have no values; liberals have very clear values. I can't speak for the ones you've interacted with, but I've never heard that.

Regarding moral relativism, the argument, as I understand it, is that post-modernism rejects any meta-narrative; you decide for yourself what the narrative is. Moral absolutism requires a meta-narrative of some form. This is right because God told us it is, or because this is the core value our nation is founded on, etc. So without a meta-narrative, you have to define your own, and so you are left with moral relativism.

It's possible that post-modernism is no longer widely held. I'd probably be the last to know about it. If that's the case, then maybe there is moral absolutism. Certainly there seems to be an idea in some circles that protecting the environment, and/or everyone has a right to express their sexuality however they want to are absolutes. But a truly moral absolutism provides an absolute basis, and I'm not aware of any absolutes for these. Environmentalism is a pragmatic source: if we don't do it, we might die off, but perhaps dying off is actually best. (I don't agree, but philosophically speaking) And what basis is there for everyone having a right to doing things? There are things we decided we don't have the right to do (kill people, for example). Why, exactly, does everyone have the right to express their sexuality however they want? Moral absolutism requires some fundamental, unalterable reason. Moral relativism simply requires "I think this way."

I'm not very sure what most people's world views are, but everything I am aware of points to a moral relativistic view, rather than a moral absolutist view.

> I've never heard conservatives say that rejecting their values is a rejection of all values.

Neither have I, but I've frequently heard them characterize groups that explicitly adhered to different values from theirs as rejecting all values.

> Regarding moral relativism, the argument, as I understand it, is that post-modernism rejects any meta-narrative; you decide for yourself what the narrative is.

This might distantly approach relevance (leaving aside questions of it's accuracy) if the left, either in the general sense or in the peculiar American sense that includes much of the center-right, was generally post-modernist. But that is not, and has never been, the case.

> Moral absolutism requires a meta-narrative of some form.

No, it doesn't. In fact, because you can't actually logically derive an ought from an is, a meta-narrative doesn't even add support to moral absolutism (or any other moral position.)

Any morality requires taking certain moral beliefs as unsupported axioms, and absolutism just requires that the those axioms don't include that the morality of an act is dependent on the actors view of the morality of the act.

I can assure that liberals regularly believe that conservatism is wrong independent of conservatives belief in its rectitude, which absolutely is moral absolutism.

In what way was USA 1948 more ethical than USA 2016?

When I think of USA 1948, I think of things like Jim Crow, women requiring their husband's permission to open a bank account, interracial marriage being forbidden, homosexuals staying in the closet for fear of their lives, young men being forced into military service against their will, and lobotomy as standard psychiatric treatment.

But, you know, there's occasional swearing on TV now, so maybe it balances out.

I'd love to understand what you base that last sentence on.

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