Civility, respect shouldn’t come easily

Published 1:30 am Sunday, August 15, 2021

Nate Nehring made an astute observation about human nature in his essay in the Herald Forum (“If adults don’t always, youths know need for civility,” The Herald, Aug. 7). Normal humans excel at cooperation. And children are at heart instinctually very cooperative. Anthropologists say that working together is far more important to human “success” than intelligence or opposable thumbs.

But inherent in Nehring’s thesis is that the most important glue in cooperation is the ideology found in tribalism. This is actually why we have ideology. It allows us to greatly expand our field of trust. But in a world where our hospitals are bribing nurses to not walk off their jobs out of exhaustion with stupidity brought on by ideology, I would like to say that little in life is as simple as Nehring is suggesting. Respect breeds legitimacy and how much respect can one have for those that are trying to dismantle democracy with ideological lies and utter nonsense that belies common sense? Or that are killing each other with science denying? My question is also: how much respect is even appropriate? It all seems like a lose-lose proposition to me. I would also suggest that in hindsight, who would suggest more mutual understanding as a solution for fascism in the 1930s and ’40s?

Rick Walker

Snohomish