Ah, June, you raise an interesting conundrum.

Who decides what constitutes "respecting the dignity" of another person? I am inclined to think that it is presumptuous as well as potentially sexist, classist, and racist, as well as intellectually dishonest, to assume that one knows when another person's dignity will be disrespected.

Perhaps the easiest way to approach this is with the Type I and Type II errors. If one presumes to know what the line is (s)he will curtail argument either too early or too late - rarely I am inclined to think, will the presumptuous party nail precisely the right moment.

If you let someone off the hook too early you deprive them of the opportunity for a transformative experience. If you dally too long, you (well at least presumably according to you) cross the line and commit the unpardonable, i suppose, sin of disrespecting someone who "might", as a result of your error, 'feel' that their dignity has been disrespected, diminished, or obliterated.

But, as I suggested to John, offlist, the other day, some of my most powerful, transformative, meaningful, and lasting lessons in life have come about as a result of precisely those situations where people have either knowingly and willingly, or unknowingly and perhaps unwillingly, "disrespected my dignity". I am a far, far better person today for having had the rich opportunity their only potential malevolence afforded me. Did those experiences hurt? Yes. So what!

The emergence of the butterfly, from the chrysalis, is torturously painful. If you haven't watched it I encourage you to do so. But if you assist the butterfly in the process you will doom it. There is no way the butterfly will ever fly without the struggle. So too, I would suggest, when we spare each other the opportunity to do battle with our 'old mind' and to shed our a priori beliefs, because they have proven, in battle, monumentally ill-conceived enough to threaten our sense of identity, we denigrate and diminish rather than elevate and enrich each other.

So, quite the contrary, I would suggest that those whose dignity hangs by a sliver of a thread and who require that others err far on the side of caution, have far greater problems to attend to than maintaining their dignity or compelling others to respect their dignity. I serve neither you nor anyone else, a good turn, by presuming to exercise control over your dignity and depriving you of the transformative experience of shedding your thin skin of most fragile dignity. I choose to think that anyone capable of penning an email is made of better stuff.

I'd add that I personally suspect that one of the reasons nursing has such an image problem in academia, is that this obsession with respecting each other's ideas has produced a distinctly anti-intellectual paradigm compared with other disciplines where internecine warfare has been the crucible for the saliency of ideas that deviate from the mainstream.

Another example to illustrate my point.

A dear friend, an internationally reknown sex researcher and educator, Mickey Diamond, and if memory serves correctly, John Money, actually did come to fisticuffs at one or more conferences over Mickey's exposure of Money's botched sex-reassignment research - the famous John-Joan case. Now I met Mickey back in 1976, before he published - but it was immediately obvious to me that Money's premise - essentially that a boy, traumatically castrated during circumcision, would best be raised as a little girl.

Money did not himself, recognize or accept this, even when his most well known victim, recanted, decades later. During the period during which Money wanted his dignity respected, he continued to victimize many other children with his absurd ideas about gender identity and sex reassignment.

Me? I say if someone is stupid, misguided, corrupt, intellectually dishonest, and contemptuous of truth (t or T) - then whatever it takes to disrupt their world may well be appropriate. I think a good punch in the nose, 1 - 2 decades earlier, might have saved a lot of grief. Certainly, those who spent a couple of decades respecting Money's 'dignity' did no good for anyone, not even Money because he wasted decades of his life hiding from the truth. Truth trumps dignity any day.

I am sure you can come up with some excellent counter-example, where someone as misguided and malicious as Money, was deterred from further harm by the mere power of gentle, dignity-preserving, persuasion - have at it. I'd be interested to hear your example.

:-)

bear

--- On Thu, 11/13/08, June Kikuchi <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
From: June Kikuchi <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: argument = war?
To: [log in to unmask]
Date: Thursday, November 13, 2008, 1:47 PM

Bear,
 
I agree that too much politeness gets in the way of getting at the heart of an argument and detecting flaws in thinking but surely you are not advocating "bare fist" fighting where personal criticism or not respecting the dignity of another is not out of bounds? In answer to your question: "How much fun is too much fun?", I would say, "When it comes at the expense of another's dignity."
 
June