On Ostracism
Sometimes I wonder if we realize just how important Ragin'Pagin' is to our University and our community. After Louisiana.edu, this is probably the most significant Internet presence UL has.
Jon built this and moderates it, but all of us who contribute are part of the effort, and the prominence. That is a great thing for supporting our University. But it can also be a bad thing.
If you will look through our conversations, at the bottom of each thread you will see people listed who rarely or never post. You will also see a lot of people who are listed as 'guests'; the guests often outnumber the named members. From what I have heard, some of those anonymous readers include UL faculty, staff, and administrators. Others include people who are considering some aspect of UL, people we would like to recruit to our cause.
There lies the rub.
We can't know much about those who don't post, we don't even know who many of them are. But I know from conversations I've had with people in the community, that some people will not post here, some will not even visit & read here, because of the few controversial, confrontational, and even rude people who do post here.
Mind you, I'm not talking about disagreements over policy, or disparate views on our University. I'm talking about people who are just unnecessarily unpleasant, people who are lacking in— important word for a university— collegiality.
That's a great concern. It means that a few people are not only dominating our conversations, they are influencing membership here, our thoughts and contributions here, and even the fundamental character of this forum. That, precisely because of our visibility, creates a big problem for UL, and for the efforts of so many of us who passionately want to make this place better.
We have a handful of saboteurs.
They sabotage our conversations. They sabotage our camaraderie. They sabotage the morale of this community.
In turn, all of that sabotages the support for our University, because they also sabotage even more important things. They sabotage student recruitment. They sabotage athletic recruitment. They sabotage the UL campus culture, our spectator culture, and the sports culture of our University.
A tiny minority of loud, unfortunate people sabotage everything we are trying to accomplish here.
To be fair, they are simply unhappy people, sharing their own unhappiness. In reading their posts, we can all see their misery.
But misery loves company, and since they don't know how to improve their own lives, they instead work to undermine everybody else's lives. Without realizing it, they work to make us all miserable wrecks like themselves.
Worse, the saboteurs comprise some of the least-informed, and least-introspective people on this forum. They don't play sports, and may not have even played in high school, but they know more than the athletes. They don't coach sports, they've never coached anything beyond Pee-Wee, but they know more than the coaches. They have no experience whatsoever in teaching or research, but they know more than the scientists, engineers, and other scholars at UL. They have no experience in athletic or university administration, but they know more than the UL administrators do.
In fact, they know more than all of the rest of us put together.
They are real problem. In the past, Jon has banned a couple of them, but it didn't work. And I think that's an insight.
The problem may be that Jon banned them by himself.
• • •
My best friend in med school was a philosophy major from Vassar. He told me things about philosophy and history that I still think about. One of the more interesting was that Attica, the city-state of ancient Athens, only contained about 100,000 people. I looked it up, the region comprised only about 700 square miles. So imagine the population of LaFourche Parish, but with only half the land area.
Despite that tiny size, over about one century ancient Athens gave us a phenomenal number of the most important thinkers in the history of the world. They gave us the seminal Western thinkers in philosophy, history, government, science, medicine, theatre, literature, art, and architecture.
Which presents a fascinating puzzle. How is it that this tiny population, tucked into a corner far away from the major powers of the ancient world, produced more first-order thinkers than we have in our world of 8 billion today? I began wondering, What was in the water in ancient Athens?
Then by chance back in the 1990's I stumbled into a lecture by Stanford classicist Josiah Ober. He was describing ostracism in ancient Athens. For those who are interested, I recommend this book on the topic by one of his former graduate students, Sara Forsdyke.
The word 'ostracism' comes from the Greek word for a pottery sherd, (a 'shard' is glass, a 'sherd' is ceramic). It is distantly related to the word 'oyster,' because of the shell.
The ancient Athenians had an odd practice— we have only meager documentation of what actually happened, how often in happened, and what the rules were— but periodically Athenian citizens would gather together, take a pottery sherd, and write on it the name of anyone in Athens that they thought was becoming too powerful or dangerous. The sherds were counted, and if anyone got past a certain number of votes (we don't even know how many were required), they were exiled from Attica for 10 years.
This, to my mind, is an insight into the genius of ancient Athens (and it has some overlap with our Cajun and Creole culture, but that will have to await another day). My thinking is that if someone saw their name showing up too often, on too many sherds, they would very likely rethink how they interacted with their fellow citizens. If they were being too assertive, they would back off. If they were meddling in public affairs, they would back off.
And very important here, if they were simply being rude and obnoxious, if they were making too many ugly comments to other people, they would back off.
Apparently it worked, because only a handful of people are known to have ever been ostracized.
Which I slowly began to suspect explains what was what was in the water in ancient Athens:
Nothing.
There is poison in the water everywhere else. They are unpleasant people, influential people, powerful people, who throw their weight around, who run down others, who sabotage, not just other peoples' efforts, but sabotage their confidence, their initiative, their cooperative spirit, and the very character of their communities.
That, I strongly suspect, was the secret of ancient Athens.
After years of wide reading, and observing people, particularly in the ER, I have slowly begun to believe that genius is innate: it appears everywhere.
But it is typically crushed. That was one of the points of my book. That is why, over the 10,000 years of civilizating, progress has been so slow.
Until the Renaissance, and the earliest forms of modern prosperity and independence. Until 1776, and emergence of a freer society. And until post-WWII when we began allowing so many minorities to get an education, and to begin contributing to our Great Experiment.
That last, post-war revolution was certainly transformative for my Lebanese family.
• • •
So this is a possible solution to a large problem on Ragin' Pagin'. For Jon to exile an offending member, by himself, has not proved to be effective. But if we as a group were to do the same thing, ancient Athens suggests it would carry a lot more weight.
It should rapidly clean up this forum. It would change our character, and make this board much more supportive of our University, our students, and our culture.
Jon has banned people before, so there is a precedent. And no one can accuse Jon of suppressing free speech, because this is a group decision. As for the rest of us, we are not muzzling objecting ideas, only obnoxious attitudes. The freedom of expression of the ostracized is still preserved, and even guaranteed by our Constitution: They are still completely free to express their thoughts and feelings.
They are simply free to do it elsewhere.
We all built this platform, we all have a stake in it. We would never allow rude and obnoxious people to hold sway in our homes, in our social clubs, nor in our businesses. We should not allow it here.
Here's my thinking about how it might work. Perhaps once a month Jon would list five people whom he thought— or maybe we would recommend people to him— who are too negative about the Ragin' Pagin' community, about the Ragin' Cajuns, about UL, and about our community.
Jon would allow us to vote 'for' them in a poll. If anyone went past a certain percentage (and with 5 options, it might not need to be 50%; Jon can play with the numbers until he sees a change in the comments here), they would be ostracized: they would be banned from the site for say, 2 weeks. If they were ostracized a second time, they might be exiled for a month.
And if it happened a third time, they would be permanently exiled.
Or, if we want to stick to the classical pattern, they would be exiled for only 10 years.
There are a few things to note. First, there needs to be a 'None of the Above' option. Second, only people who have an identity here, and who are known to Jon, should be able to vote; we don't want anyone stuffing the ballot box. For those of us Jon doesn't already know, we could verify our identities by perhaps sending him a photo of our driver's license, or by using a Louisiana.edu email address. (Granted, that could allow a few people to vote twice, but it would prevent any large scale ballot box stuffing… and besides, Jon can usually identify us by our IP address, by our posting patterns, and by the language we use.)
Finally, the other important thing is that Jon needs to report the final votes for all of the candidates.* As people see their numbers rise and realize that, not only do the rest of us not appreciate their behavior, but that they also risk being suspended from the site, they should rethink how they act here. And if they don't rethink it, we don't need them here.
We don't even want them here.
*'Candidate' is ironic. The Latin word candida means 'white'; children wore a completely white toga, as did the candidates for office, to suggest their purity. In our case, we might need to move from a white toga, to a black hat.
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Originally Posted by JamesTheJeweler
Re: On Ostracism
