Megan McCardle writes July 11, 2024 in the Washington Post:
[M]ainstream outlets did report on the president’s age, even if too gently. Why were we so gentle? Well, there’s a broad journalistic norm against picking on physical characteristics (which is why even certified Donald Trump-hating columnists have made remarkably few cracks about his comb-over).
Obviously, it was a mistake to treat age, which affects job performance, like hairstyling, which doesn’t. But that error was bipartisan — over the years, I’ve heard a lot of people talking about Trump’s senior moments without ever putting those thoughts on the page.
We all take note of physical characteristics. The more safe we feel with someone, the more likely we are to confide on physical characteristics. The more spontaneous we are, the more likely we are to note physical characteristics. The less of a filter we have (such as with many old people or delirious people), the more likely we are to note physical characteristics.
One reason for the popularity of live streams is that you can comment on physical characteristics and you can say things like, “Physiognomy is destiny.”
Great writers closely describe physical characteristics. Dabblewriter.com notes: “When writing a character description, begin with their physical appearance, including their height, weight, hair and eye color, and any distinctive features. Make sure you also include information about their age, ethnicity, and any scars or tattoos, or anything else of note.”
When did it become socially unacceptable to remark on physical characteristics? When I Googled this topic, I could find no defense of it. That means, I could find no defense of telling this truth. I recognize the virtues of courtesy, but they often come at the price of truth, and sometimes truth is more important than courtesy.
A spontaneous cutting remark has the power to change your life for the good. The late writer Greg Critser was getting out of his car when a stranger driving by yelled, “Get out of the way, fatso.” That inspired Critser to research fat, to lose weight, and to write a best-selling book, Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World.
I suspect that in the more spontaneous world of the middle ages, people were quicker to comment on physical characteristics.
In his work-in-progress, Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression, philosopher Rony Guldmann writes:
Medievals were distinguished, not by any generalized amorality or egoism, but by a fundamentally different mental and emotional landscape. They lived in a society where individuals gave way to their impulses and drives with an ease, spontaneity, and openness that is foreign to us today. And so they had emotional lives that were comparatively unregulated and liable to oscillate violently and unpredictably between extremes.
“…a moment ago they were joking, now they mock each other, one word leads to another, and suddenly from the midst of laughter they find themselves in the fiercest feud. Much that appears contradictory to us—the intensity of their piety, the violence of their fear of hell, their guilt feelings, their penitence, the immense outbursts of joy and gaiety, the sudden flaring and the uncontrollable force of their hatred and belligerence—all these, like the rapid changes of mood, are in reality symptoms of the same social and personality structure. The instincts, the emotions were vented more freely, more directly, more openly than later. It is only to us, in whom everything is more subdued, moderate, and calculated, and in whom social taboos are built much more deeply into the fabric of instinctual life as self-restraints, that this unveiled intensity of piety, belligerence, or cruelty appears as contradictory.”
One of the decisive developments in the Western civilizing process, writes Elias, was the transformation of warriors into courtiers. This political transition entailed a set of thoroughgoing psychological changes that would eventually spread beyond the monarchic courts and profoundly affect the identity of the modern West, shaping our basic concept of what it means to be “civilized.” Elias writes that the affects of the independent, self-sufficient feudal lord of old had, like those of medievals in general, enjoyed “rather free and unfettered play in all the terrors and joys of life.”
With the feudal lord’s time being “only very slightly subject to the continuous division and regulation imposed by dependence on others,” he did not develop a strict and stable super-ego through which compulsions stemming from others became self-restraints. But all this changes with the rise of the great royal courts of the absolutist period. Now “his value has its real foundation not in the wealth or even the achievements or ability of the individual, but in the favour he enjoys with the king, the influence he has with other mighty ones, his importance in the play of courtly cliques.” Under these new conditions, “He is no longer the relatively free man, the master of his own castle, whose castle is his homeland. He now lives at court. He serves the prince. He waits on him at table. And at court he lives surrounded by people. He must behave toward each of them in exact accordance with their rank and his own. He must learn to adjust his gestures exactly to the different ranks and standing of the people at court, to measure his language exactly, and even to control his eyes exactly. It is a new self-discipline, an incomparably stronger reserve that is imposed on people by this new social space and the new ties of interdependence.”
…Medieval mayhem and wantonness were now suppressed, as power became less and less a matter of brute physical force and was instead exercised through words and surveillance. This left individuals more socially vulnerable than before, and this changed their relationship to themselves. With the radical heightening of the level of the day-to-day coercion people could exert on one another, “the demand for ‘good behavior’ is raised more emphatically,” and that “[a]ll problems concerned with behavior take on new importance.”
…The moderation of spontaneous emotion, the extension of mental space beyond the moment into the past and future, and the habit of connecting events in terms of cause and effect are not timeless human faculties, but specific transformations in the human make-up made possible by the monopolization of physical violence in the state and the social interdependencies this fostered. Only with these did ever-broader segments of society develop the “strict, continuous, and uniform” modes of drive-control that were once exclusive to monks and courtiers.126The development of modernity can thus be viewed as the democratization of courtly civility and secularization of monkish asceticism.
Behavioral norms that were originally used to tame an unruly military aristocracy through court service or estate management were over later centuries deployed to tame the general population—to which end religion became conscripted, offering as it did a theological justification for disciplining wide swaths of the population away from the wantonness and license of an earlier period. Thus, explains Taylor, did the ethic of “active state intervention,” promoted by absolutistic governments combine with Calvinism so as to “introduce a rationalized, disciplined, professionalized mode of life” into the populace as a whole. These “ordering impulses” sought to “create a stable order in society by training people into ‘settled courses,’ through dedication to some profession, whose goals were defined in terms of service to our fellow human beings: in the private sector, through productive labor.”
…Occupying his social position with relative security, the independent knight of old felt no need to banish coarseness and vulgarity from his life. But with the court having become a kind of “stock exchange” in which the his value was being continually assessed and reassessed, he could no longer afford this former freedom. Gone were the days in which joking could lead to mockery and from there to violent disagreement and violence itself in the span of a few minutes. Gone were the days in which one could leap from the most exuberant pleasure to the deepest despondency on the basis of slight impressions. What mattered now was others’ impressions, not one’s own, and the foremost task became impression-management, which also meant self-management. A new self-consciousness emerged on the scene, not because essential human nature had been liberated from the confining horizons of a benighted past, but because a new social milieu created inner depths out of outer necessity. Whereas political standing was formerly decided by the sword, it is now “[c]ontinuous reflection, foresight, and calculation, self-control, precise and articulate regulation of one’s own affects, knowledge of the whole terrain, human and non-human, in which one acts, [that] become more and more indispensable preconditions of social success.”102People now “mold themselves more deliberately than in the Middle Ages” and increasingly “observe themselves and others.” Directly or indirectly, the “intertwining of all activities with which everyone at court is inevitably confronted, compels…[the courtier] to observe constant vigilance, and to subject everything he says and does to minute scrutiny.”
…The courtiers had to become more calculating and less wholehearted—less “sincere” and “authentic,” we might say. Such was necessitated by the new social interdependence.
…The lengthier and more intricate the chains of social interdependency became, the stronger the need to impose self-discipline…
The development of modernity can thus be viewed as the democratization of courtly civility and secularization of monkish asceticism.
To be on the right means to be more medieval than liberals. Perhaps right-wing instinctual spontaneity allowed conservative to more quickly note that Joe Biden appeared senile while more civilized people would hold back on those comments for fears of sounding ageist and ableist.
How many courtiers would have felt comfortable stating publicly that the king is senile? Not many. When there were two competitors for the throne, how many courtiers would have felt comfortable stating publicly that the competitor favored by most courtiers is senile? Not many.
On the other hand, a lord of the manor would have felt more comfortable saying publicly what he believed to be true. Once he was forced to live at court to retain his status, his willingness to state unpopular truths would go down.
Courtier morality discourages saying unpopular truths. The more that power is “exercised through words and surveillance,” “[w]ith the radical heightening of the level of the day-to-day coercion people could exert on one another,” the more care people will take with what they say.
The more vulnerable members of the press feel, the more they will take care not to say risky things.
In his 1988 essay, A Secure Base, psychiatrist Dr. John Bowlby wrote that “life is best organized as a series of daring ventures from a secure base.” The less secure your base, the less likely you are to launch into daring ventures. Journalism is more financially insecure now than at any time in the past century.
In a video published July 10, 2024, Charles Murray said: “The press is staffed now by members of the cognitive elite. Journalism in the 1940s, 1950s, was a working class profession. A lot of journalists hadn’t even gone to college. Now if you look at the staffs of the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, you go through all of the big magazines, the people who run the television networks, they come out of the same elite schools [as the ruling class]. They are full participants in a semi-conspiracy. If you follow what has happened in the United States for the last week or so, after Joe Biden’s debate appearance, you have observed the exposure of the extent to which journalists covered up what they knew to be true of Joe Biden’s mental frailty. Only now after the debate exposed it are they rushing to expose it. None of them are willing to say we covered it up. The same thing happens with intelligence, genetics, racial difference. They will not report. Social pressure to be part of your in-group is extremely strong. Complaints about the fake news are all true.”
