DRESS LIKE A HUTTERITE DAY

Today, December 30, is Dress Like a Hutterite Day. The debate over this has been raging for a few years now, and it’s put the SJW in a difficult position. Mocking members of the dominant culture has always been more than acceptable. And Hutterites are, after all, white. Moreover, every group of people, regardless of colour, has at one time or another been oppressed. But Hutterites, not unlike Mormons, no longer are.

One could argue that they remain marginalised, except that they’re self-marginalised. But then neither do the point zero zero one percent like to mix with the rest of us. So the most that can be said against mocking Hutterites is that it’s unseemly, in a way that mocking non-Hutterite white Canadians is not, though why it’s unseemly the SJW would be hard-pressed to say.

What this shows, I think, is what Jonathan Haidt wrote about in The Righteous Mind. There’s always an evolutionary story to be told about how we acquired the distinction between the sacred and the profane. But what matters is that it’s a distinction pretty much immune from critical analysis. In other words, we don’t decide what’s unseemly. It’s decided for us. 

Most of my friends celebrate Dress Like a Hutterite Day precisely because it’s counter-indicated by our discomfort with unseemliness. It’s the same reason we laugh at dead baby jokes. Dead babies don’t mind. Neither, we suspect, do Hutterites. Though to be honest, I for one have never asked.  



Categories: Humour, Social and Political Philosophy

Tags: , , , , , , ,

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