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> Everybody tends to white wash [the Puritan regime] because they had high literacy rates and treated women better than most at the time.

I don't think this squares with The Scarlet Letter being read in just about every high school in the US.

Imo, it's an unalienable right for everybody, but that doesn't mean cancel culture won't #$(% on you for speaking your belief. However, sometimes you have to say what you believe in even if you know you are going to be shamed for it. Perhaps this would be a good time for us all to go re-read The Scarlet Letter, eh?

The point is that society can be confused on what is positive and negative behavior, and end up scapegoating. And it is effective only in a reptilian brain context.

It'd be similarly ignorant to praise murdering your enemies. Sure no doubt about it, it's really effective. Doesn't mean it's legal or ethical.

These things are brute force hammers. If you really think shaming has value, read the Scarlet Letter.

Cf. The Scarlet Letter from 1850:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scarlet_Letter

I had to read the Scarlet Letter in high school. Hester Prynn had to live with the outcome of saying whatever it was. It was literally puritanical to make her wear a red “A.” as the outcome of her speech (v-a-v extramarital sex).

I think the point isn’t that speech should have no impact, but that the response to speech should be proportional and what proportional means. The Puritans in Hawthorne’s novel thought that making someone a pariah was a proportional response. They were wrong, I think.

But the lesson, I think, is not that we should be more precise in meting out moral judgement, but that we should judge less.

Everyone's bedazzled by the numeric grades, but I'd like to take a moment and gawk at the things being graded: "Decoding Skills", "Reading Engagement", "Basic Computer Skills", "Presentation Skills", "Research Skills".

I question the system's ability to grade based on such categorizations. "Reading Engagement" aka "Faking Interest In Boring School-Assigned Books" is particularly distressing of the set I can see.

(Yes, you read some interesting books in school assignments. So did I, but the bulk were pretty dull. I was and am an avid reader and faking an interest in The Scarlet Letter would probably have been beyond me. Fortunately, nobody actually required that of me.)

I am ruminating on the harm to be had here, not the moral culpability for it; it's easy to not be sympathetic here because these are by design people who occupy the moral low ground, but I can think of a few cases off the top of my head where this could cause real unwarranted harm to peoples' lives.

Improperly applied, this could be as damaging as membership on the sex offenders' list for public urination. The fact that the people passing judgment are the ones imputing harm doesn't really change the fact that there are people whose lives will be damaged disproportionate to their crime, and I think that's extremely unfortunate.

Edit: I can't recommend it as a literary work, but the themes and lessons of Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter" are directly and immediately relevant here.

>I don't think this squares with The Scarlet Letter being read in just about every high school in the US.

I guess I should have said "My Massachusetts public school education tends to white wash the Puritan regime".

I've made comments about it before but getting most of my high school education in a different state as well as having my siblings get their education in different states really opened up my eyes to how politically tilted school curriculum are. Anything that's politically inconvenient gets covered at an age to young to think critically about it or covered to fast to have time to think about it. I assume the southern states whitewash everything pre-1865 and the plains states whitewash the Indian wars.

Yeah I’m not sure why it’s supposed to be so bad. It doesn’t stand out as being far worse than lots of other old books. The Scarlet Letter begins like this and goes on to have sentences so euphemistic and littered with commas that they need three re-reads to understand, but that’s a classic:

“A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments, and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.”

>> most social status systems developed organically from networks of trust, common experiences and mutually held values at a micro level like within a family, town, school, religious group

I don't see how size or organicity are useful factors to appraise actions by certain institutions as "unreasonable". If you have ever read the Scarlet Letter or the Crucible, those "smaller" centralized institutions (i.e. families, towns, schools, etc.) have played the part of censorious zealot just as much as the bigger ones.

Seems to be about on-par with the way high-school English is taught, honestly (at least in my area). I remember my English teacher dedicating a full class period to the FIRST TWO WORDS in "The Scarlet Letter" (the words being "A throng"). I found it absolutely nonsensical and told her as much, but even though much of the class agreed, she shut down our complaints and kept teaching this way.

Later in the year she began scrutinizing yet another book at the molecular level, but one of the kids in our class was the son of this book's author. He ran our teacher's analysis by his father, the author, and the guy found our teacher's reasoning hilariously inaccurate.

I'm all for teaching kids literacy, but there's only so much meaning that can be gleaned from any given passage of text. At some point you're assigning meaning where there really is none, and I felt this was prevalent in some SAT questions and other standardized tests I endured during K-12. This was in a very well-regarded school district: CHCCS in North Carolina.