Bill has made a strong if somewhat begrudging case for the virtues of being tough ("The ‘Oh, Grow Up!’ Election," November 16), some of which I buy and most of which I don’t. It’s hard agreeing with a contrarian if you’re a contrarian yourself—which makes BJOL into a barrel full of starving alley-cats. You make one mild, sensible comment around here, and you get a hundred guys angrily jumping down your throat. So let’s begin mild and sensible with the points Bill made that I endorse:

1)      The world into which Bill and I were born valued toughness much more than the world we’ve lived our adult lives in.

2)      Our dads were tough cusses. Mine endured more hardship than I can imagine before I was born, the least of which was serving as an Army infantryman in combat all through World War Two. I never heard a syllable of complaint out of him.

3)      "You cannot be successful in sports if you are not tough." That’s a quote—Bill has that 100% right.

4)      Today we’ve turned "sensitivity," particularly to others’ suffering and perceived suffering, into the highest of virtues.

Look, I’ve probably put up with more of # 4)’s nonsense than most people here: I’ve worked as a college professor for the past 30-odd years, and I enjoy making cruel jokes, and teasing people, and arguing until the veins in my neck pop, as much as anyone. Probably a little bit more. That’s a sure-fire formula for getting in trouble on a college campus these days.  I write and teach fiction that contains heaps of foul language, so you can imagine my students’ reactions to that in 2016, plus as a bonus, my hobby is painting full-frontal nudes. Just imagine what feminist students who Googled my painting website made of that little hobby. Now double that, and you’ll be close. Oh frabjous joy and heavenly delight!

So adhering to standards of "politically correct" speech and thought has been an irritant to me, personally, more than you can probably conceive. I put up with this, actively or passively, every working day of my life. Every conversation I’ve had with a student for the past few decades, I’ve had to remind myself, "Shut up, don’t say that, nor that either, don’t take the bait, don’t go there, don’t even THINK that…." and on and on. It’s a nuisance that I’ve learned to live with.

Bur you know something? I’ve also come to think of "political correctness" as having real virtues I hadn’t realized before. I won’t even use that term any more outside of scare quotes, not because it’s a pejorative, but because it’s mocking of a genuine social good.

One quick (?) example before we move on to broader applications of "P.C." thinking: my younger daughter graduated from a Seven Sisters all-female college a few years back, but before she did she told me about a crisis on her campus involving a male nude sculpture that the college had installed (I won’t say "erected") in front of the campus art museum. The undergraduates, my daughter among them, were insisting that this statue be torn down, offending as it did their tender sensibilities.

I really respect my daughter’s points of view. Don’t always agree with her, but she’s a smart and thoughtful young woman whom I cherish. Nonetheless, I told her what I felt about this feminist cause, and while I tempered my language considerably for her benefit, you can bet it was far from supportive. Mostly I conveyed the kneejerk antipathy of an artist in a free society to censorship of any kind. She told me why I was wrong, and in the end (it took a while) she had me convinced:

The sculpture was actually not quite nude: it was of a flesh-colored man wearing white underpants. (I didn’t ask which brand or which style.)  There had been some recent incidents of men (obviously, not students at the all-female college) sneaking onto campus in the evening and, popping out of the bushes, exposing themselves to unsuspecting students—and sometimes more than that. It was an ongoing and recurring problem that the college had difficulties combatting. (The campus is private property, but it’s pretty accessible to anyone in town.)  Some of the students who’d been exposed to this flashing (and worse) felt pretty nervous about walking through their nice, safe college campus now, my daughter explained to me, and a life-sized statue of a man in underpants seemed unnecessary at best in the middle of the campus, and at worst downright provocative.   

My original argument had been that art is supposed to be provocative. But now I saw that there were limits on provocation that don’t need widening. Rape victims, for example, don’t need to watch films with explicit rape scenes in them. Holocaust victims don’t need to be exposed to mandatory three-hour documentaries on Hitler’s final solution. Finding ways to spare these people such traumas isn’t political correctness. It isn’t "trigger-warnings" gone wild. It’s just human decency.

It’s just politeness. Nowadays, whenever I hear, let’s say, a demagogue running for political office oppose loudly the stupidity of political correctness, I substitute mentally "politeness" for "political correctness," and see if that doesn’t put the issue into a clearer perspective. Usually it does.

"We can’t afford to be polite any more, folks" just doesn’t have the same ring of persuasion, does it? It doesn’t quite get your ass out of its seat and get you chanting "USA! USA!" quite as readily.

I don’t see the harm in being polite, though it’s the furthest mode from most of my conscious behavior I can imagine.  I am impolite by my nature, and by my training, and by my culture. Another example for you: I was brought up (I won’t say "I grew up" because that’s still in dispute) in a roughish neighborhood of Brooklyn in the 1950s and 1960s, at a time when my neighborhood was about 50/50 Jews and Italian Catholics. (I pitied the rare Protestant kid in my grammar school as a member of a tiny minority group.) Referring to each other by ethnic slurs was absolutely routine: "Heeb" and "Dago" were merely identifying tags, often affectionate or friendly, so when I got to college after living for 18 years in this slur-crazy culture that was my norm, I met a fellow of Italian descent from Colorado, whom I liked a lot. To show him how much I accepted him, one evening freshman year I referred to him as "Frank the Wop."

Now it’s a very good thing that I was standing about five feet from Frank, and a better thing that there were other freshmen in the room with us, because otherwise I don’t know if I’d be here to tell the tale. Frank wanted to beat the hell out of me, while I wanted to know, "What? What’d I say? Did I say something?" Lesson one in politeness: other people may be accustomed to different standards of comportment than you are, and your standards might not be the best ones.

I tried to assure Frank that I meant nothing offensive by my reference to his heritage, quite the contrary, but it took a good long while for that point to sink through his skull, and even longer for it to sink through mine that Frank wasn’t extraordinarily sensitive. Rather, I was extraordinarily boorish and rude. It’s very much to his credit that we became good friends, going to each other’s weddings and such, and Frank eventually coached me through the most grueling and stressful of periods when I was taking my comprehensive doctoral exams about fifteen years after I called him "Frank the Wop."

It used to make my blood boil when my dad would tell me that something I wanted to do, or be, or say, "isn’t proper." I couldn’t have cared less what was "proper." If I wanted to do it, or be it, or say it, then to hell with what society demanded. But some time around my "Frank the Wop" episode, I encountered Manny the Kraut’s "categorical imperative," which in my dad’s terms translated to something like "If everybody behaved like you want to, Stevie, would this be a better world or a worser world?" And that’s the winning argument in favor of politeness, whether you or I feel like being polite at that moment.

Bill argues that it’s virtuous to be tough in the face of personal insults, and I agree with that. If everyone took umbrage at everything they felt could be interpreted negatively all the time, well, I can’t say what the world would be like, but does the term "Non-stop lawsuits" mean anything to you? Making impoliteness illegal would be living in hell.  You’d be pulled over by a cop for giving a dirty look to the guy who cut you off in traffic, and you’d spend half your life in court in the defendant’s seat, and the other half in the plaintiff’s seat, and who wants that, except lawyers?

My cousin David is a lawyer, by the way, who used to work for the federal gummint in Washington D.C.; around age 20 I wrote my first book, a novel in large part about baseball but in small part a tirade against the legal profession, which I considered at that time to be a boil on the backside of suffering humanity. After finishing the book, I visited David, who was still employed in the FCC’s legal department, and described my animosity against lawyers. Rather than bawl me out for my ignorance and obstinance, David merely held his fire and had a conversation on the subject with his younger, hot-headed cousin.  Looking back, he could have pulled all sorts of rank on me, his age and maturity levels, his advanced education, his actual experience with applied legal ethics, etc. but he chose to tolerate my offensive opinions and hear me out rather than act offended and ride off on his high horse.

I’m grateful to David for putting up with my remarks denigrating his chosen profession, and giving me a respect that my position didn’t deserve. His forbearance under my insulting (and frankly stupid) remarks made for an exchange of ideas rather than an exchange of barbs, and eventually to a general agreement between us. It’s virtuous that people often choose to endure verbal abuse, and extend this sort of patience and tolerance to their tormentors. I get that.

But extending that tolerance shouldn’t be required. Sometimes, especially when they’re not being stupid and stubborn as I was, those giving offense must tolerate being told that they’re being offensive. Offenders can’t claim a blanket privilege of "I can say what I want and you have to shut up and take it."  If David had told me instead, "Hey, Steve, you’re being a jerk. Calm down, and let’s talk about this again in a few decades when you’ve grown up a little," could you blame him? I can’t. He was entitled to be offended, and I’m certainly in no position to tell him that his tolerance was mandatory, or that he isn’t allowed to have gotten offended by my insulting argument.

Just because tolerance is virtuous, in other words, we can’t mandate it or make it the only appropriate response to feeling insulted or abused. A more appropriate response, if also a more volatile response, is to display anger with the offender.

Now, as a college professor (and occasionally a college administrator), I’ve been exposed to more than my share of students and colleagues feigning being offended just to get their way. I’m familiar, believe me, with acting offended as a tactic in winning an argument, and, yes, it annoys me. While the whole (ridiculous, IMO) concept of "trigger warnings," for example, may originate in good intentions, it is mostly employed (again IMO) in the service of students enjoying the power to tell their professors what may and may not be taught.

And I get that, too. When I was an undergraduate, it would have been cool to have that power, but now as a professor my instinctive response to many undergraduate complaints is something like, "Oh, go piss up a rope, would ya? Grow up, and recognize that the world will not always do exactly what pleases you," which is roughly Bill’s position on toughness and tenderness. ("Grow up" is actually part of his title, remember?)  It’s certainly true that the question of whose ox is being gored determines one’s position on specific acts of "offensive" behavior. As an undergraduate, I might have sympathized with the "trigger warnings" movement much more than I do as a professor.

Which is why it’s good to look at such issues from your antagonist’s position. Bill’s essay complains that "We had to learn to look at every word we wrote as a black person would look at it, as a gay person might look at it, as a woman might look at it, as a gay black woman might look at it, to make certain it was not offensive from any angle." I agree, it’s a pain in the ass to have to look at everything from the positions of many others, especially when one’s own position (in Bill’s and my case, that of middle-aged white men) isn’t viewed by others as automatically deserving of that same empathy. Where I differ from Bill, as I read him, is that it may be a pain in the keester, especially for us, but it’s also worth doing.

The world has no need to care about our keesters’ pain, not in comparison to such concepts as gay black women being able to live their lives without being told every day that they’re unimportant marginalized freaks who need to tolerate the world telling them so. That’s important, too, and I think Bill and I need to make a little room for it, as inconvenient or painful to our hindquarters as it may sometimes be.

Take the whole idea of people being called what they want to be called. On a personal level, I went through this one twice: I was called "Stevie" until about the age of eight or ten, when I decided I wanted to be called by my full name. I informed family and friends of this choice, and was only slightly annoyed when most of them compromised on "Steve" and gradually the people I would meet and introduce myself to would call me "Steven." It was no big deal, probably mostly asserting a little control over what I was called, but I can tell you how annoyed I’d feel if someone would flat-out refuse to accede to my request. Their right to call me what they wanted, it seemed to me they were saying, was more important than my right to be called what I wanted, and asserting that "right" just seemed, and seems, utterly wrong to me.

The second time I went through this almost self-same event was when my older daughter, whom her mother and I called "Lizzy" from birth, decided (again around age eight or ten) that henceforth she would answer to "Elizabeth." This time around, as sympathetic as I felt to her, the switch wasn’t so simple: I felt very affectionate towards "Lizzy," had a warm emotional response to her name and wonderful memories of everything I’d done with "Lizzy," and occasionally for a year or three a "Lizzy" would escape my lips, earning me a glare from my daughter, who was frustrated by enduring this repeated insult from her clueless and insensitive dad.

Doing what others want, and we don’t want, requires us to downplay our own importance, and to acknowledge theirs. That’s not how most people roll. We justify rolling the way we do by complaining that THEY are making OUR lives difficult, and sometimes they are. If THEY are the jerks, not we, then we don’t have to accede to their unreasonable wishes.

A notoriously jerky ballplayer, in many people’s view (although I understand he happens to be a big favorite of certain BJOL regulars, and to an extent of mine), once devoted a few paragraphs in his autobiography to complaining about people who misconstrued his name. I’m talking about Barry Bonds, of course. No, no, no, I’m talking about Graig Nettles, who as I remember from his memoir Balls (or was it Bats? Should have been Gloves), held forth on those stupid idiots who called him "Greg" or "Craig," and who persisted in mangling his first name, even after he’d corrected them once or twice. I didn’t have a lot of sympathy for this argument, or at least for the anger he put behind it, because, well, "Graig" is a pretty unusual name, and people with unusual names would do well to suck it up for longer than the rest of us in waiting for the world to come around to remembering the peculiarities of the spelling or pronunciation of their oddball names. Nettles seemed to have a particularly short fuse in this regard, and not much empathy for those who misconstrued his name.

The funny part, to me, was that that same autobiography had numerous misspellings of various teammates’ and opponents’ names. I wrote about this in my unpublished early 1990s manuscript Myths of Baseball, of which I’ve printed a few excerpts here, so this is all from memory, but I’m pretty it’s right, and it reinforced my opinion of Nettles as a comically insensitive jerk. It’s entirely possible, in other words, for someone to take his own sensitivity to such an extreme that he becomes the jerk, not the person giving him offense. That’s probably the larger area in which I agree with Bill on toughness and tenderness: it’s possible to be a jerk while proclaiming how offended you are.

But it’s not probable. Sure, there are people who assert how they spell or pronounce their names in order to make themselves the center of attention. If I had a friend who changed his name every six months (Now I’m "Jim"! Now I’m "Jamey"! Now I’m "J.T."! Now I’m "James"! Now I’m "Jim" again!), I like to think that I’d go along with each request, although around the third name-change I’d cross the street to avoid him. But most people who make requests that you address them in a certain way are NOT doing it just to get attention, they’re well-motivated (if annoying), and it’s wrong to judge everyone who corrects your form of address as mere contemptible attention-whores.

This applies, most significantly, to groups rather than individuals, and it can feel irritating to be told that you’re addressing a group in way that is no longer acceptable to them. I do feel that the nomenclature issues, for example needing to replace "Blacks" with "African-Americans" (or the other way around), can feel oppressive, especially to white people who feel that any word choice of theirs will be used to make them wrong.  Though I know that I don’t mean anything by using the "wrong" term, and though I may suspect the person correcting my usage of having ulterior motives in making that correction, isn’t it wise to suppress my argumentative side and accept whatever new name the group is demanding in order to progress with the larger, more meaningful discussion? Whether it’s Latinos demanding you call them "Hispanics," or women demanding you call them "womyn," or American Indians demanding you call them by their tribal name, or your pal Jimmy announcing that now he wants to be called "Jamesy," why not ascribe the highest, purest motivations to them, and go along? It’s only being polite.

But (at last) to my main point here: is it better to be polite, as I’m contending, or (as Bill contended) is it the higher virtue to be tough? My answer is: sometimes one, sometimes the other, but it’s vital to understand the context in which we’re choosing to be either. The dominant protocol, as Bill argued, was toughness, up through at least the middle of the past century, and since then we’ve moved forward into making the dominant protocol one of politeness. In Bill’s chosen example, that I agreed with 100%, "You cannot be successful in sports if you are not tough." But "sports" is a construct whose dominant protocol is toughness. You don’t ask your opponent for permission to score a touchdown against them—you shove them out of your goddamned way and you score the touchdown.

Within the rules of football, of course. It’s not considered "tough" to bring a firearm onto the field and kill a defensive player or two blocking your path to the end zone—it’s considered murder, and quite rude besides. But within the agreed-upon rules, there is very little politeness and a lot of toughness in a football game. We’ve carved out an area in which toughness is lionized and politeness is minimized, and we call that "sports."

Also "the military." Also "business." Maybe one or two more.  There are these few remaining areas that, as long as your behavior is within the bounds of the rules or the laws, "toughness" is dominant, and pretty much anything goes. I think we all acknowledge that. The problem, from Bill’s perspective, is that other areas of life, areas in which "toughness" was the dominant protocol, or at least an acceptable one, have shifted over to a "politeness" protocol.

Take high-school sports, Bill’s example of an area where a little slapping-around, or verbal abuse, was Standard Operating Procedure when he and I were young, but where it’s now illegal, or at least mightily discouraged.  High-school sports, of course, are not only "sports." They’re also a part of "high school," in which some people (and some high-school football players) think kids should participate, not in order to learn how to be tough, but in order to learn teamwork, and cooperation, or to get exercise, or a load of other motivations, with "’acquiring toughness" being way down on their list. The protocol of "politeness" has been introduced on a larger scale in high-school sports because football players are also high-school students, who might need some more consistency between what they’re learning as members of the football team and what they’re learning in school, where a "toughness" protocol is deemed (correctly in my view) as being totally out of place.

This actually applies on higher levels. I was just reading an article last month in Sports Illustrated (October 24-31 issue, pp. 19-20) about the NFL banning the use of the N-word between players on the field, even when the exchange is between black players exclusively and even when they’re otherwise spewing verbal abuse at each other faster than the "pops" in a fireworks-factory on fire—say the N-word, and you’re in BIG TROUBLE, mister.  This is silly stuff, on one level, but on another, how can society outlaw the word (which I have my own feelings about, like being required to use the baby-talk of "N-word," especially when I’m teaching Huckleberry Finn, which I’ve chosen not to do for the past few decades to avoid this tedious digression) but allow it on the NFL football field, where you can get an unsportsmanlike-conduct penalty for celebrating a touchdown too vigorously?

Or lower levels. Maybe you could argue that high-school football players need toughening, but how about six-year-olds? I’ve played football starting around the age of six, and I think it was sufficiently bracing to have rough physical contact on the field without being required to curse and trash-talk. If my mother overheard my language on the football field as I was trying to grow up, I would have had my mouth washed out with Ivory soap, which did happen on one occasion.  (Thanks, Mom—brilliant move. You really kept me from turning into a potty-mouth with that one.) We adopt a different protocol for very young kids than we do for high-school kids, stressing respect for others, cooperation, and politeness to young kids who need to have their more impulsive, id-driven urges for immediate selfish gratification tamed. I don’t think anyone wants his Pee-Wee Football player to be taught toughness exclusive of the other virtues I named above.

Sometimes being sensitive to others’ feeling IS being tough, a different kind of tough. If I were an Oregonian, for example, I like to think that I’d never get offended by someone pronouncing my state incorrectly. One of my housemates in grad school came from Oregon, and he corrected people all the time who said it "Or-a-gone" rather than "Or-a-gun." What I was starting back then to learn, purely as a pedagogical technique, was to correct my students’ pronunciations not by interrupting them to correct their pronunciation, but just by saying the word correctly if it came up naturally later in the conversation. Eventually, they might grasp the idea, and if they didn’t it was no big whoop.

A tough Oregonian would demand that the mispronouncer change his ways, right now. "You can’t insult us by pronouncing the name of my home state that way!" Of course you could also view that same behavior as being the opposite of what a really tough Oregonian would do, which is to absorb the "insult" in silence, and also whatever other insults to your state, masculinity, humanity the other person wanted to dish out, and then to expect him to tolerate whatever insults you would then heap freely on him.

In general, the protocol of polite tolerance seems preferable to me to a protocol of belligerent toughness, especially since we still have those areas where toughness is still valued. Even in sports, as rules get codified increasingly to tone down the more extreme forms of toughness (no hitting a defenseless receiver, for example,) or in the military (no brutalizing a Marine recruit in time-honored ways), my question is: Do these changes make for less tough football players or less tough Marines? I’d have to say that NFL players and Navy Seals still seem plenty tough to me. I salute them both for putting their bodies on the line for my entertainment or my safety. It also seems to me that these are more rounded, more thoughtful NFL players and military dudes, who must not only stand up under incredible physical rigors but also must now think about applying some standards of acceptable conduct while doing so.

I’ll share just one more notion of toughness and sensitivity that appalls me, though I suspect there are those of you whom it will not appall: the idea of cops shooting unarmed (often minority) civilians out of what they call "fear for their lives." Say what? They’ve chosen a line of work that is inherently dangerous, so for police officers to justify shooting people out of fear is just crazy to me. They should (in my view) be held to a much higher standard than an ordinary civilian is held to, not a much lower standard. They are trained in recognizing various levels of danger, in coping with it in appropriate ways, and in suppressing feelings of panic when danger presents itself, unlike civilians who often are experiencing danger without any systematic preparation for it whatsoever. How cops use a defense of "Hey, I was scared, so you should feel sympathetic to me" baffles me, though apparently juries throughout the country disagree.

Policing is tough work, and it requires tough people to do it. I hope my views on this issue don’t give the impression that I don’t respect the police, or that I’m categorically unsympathetic to their placing themselves in danger as a required part of their job.

But if you’re going into a tough line of work, aren’t you then required to be tough? Toughness, in this example, means saying "He took out his gun and aimed it at me, and I tried my best to wound or disable him while trying to protect myself as best I could, despite the fact that I was scared as hell, and the bullet I was aiming at his gun hand accidentally went through his heart" rather than "I shot him in the back as he ran away unarmed because I was scared as hell and thought that maybe he was running away to get a gun or a bomb or something." Extending sympathy to a cop because he was scared is devaluing toughness in one of the few places that toughness is needed. If we extended the same sympathy to everyone that juries extend to cops who shoot unarmed civilians because they were scared, I’d estimate that our prison population would be cut in half, if not by more, much more.

Toughness is definitely a virtue. Bill is right about that. But it’s virtuous in an increasingly narrow set of fields, and even in those fields is correctly being tempered with sensitivity, and tolerance, and intelligence, as it should be. Over centuries and millennia, humans are gradually, in fits and starts, growing more polite and less tough all the time, and in the main that’s a very good thing for humankind. To feel nostalgic for vanished types of toughness is understandable—I feel that way myself, though not necessarily nostalgic for the types of toughness you or Bill or anyone feels nostalgic for, but in the long run, all sorts of behavior that was acceptably "tough" have been vastly diminished over the last few centuries, or even eradicated, and that’s mostly a good thing. You know who some of the toughest people in American history have been? Slaves. And slaveowners. I don’t miss having either around these days.