> These are good values. But the way progressive culture enforces those values socially is pretty intense.
I hadn't drawn this delineation before, but I find it apt. I grew up Asian in the Midwest and while I like progressive values here, I do miss how people there tried to be _neighborly_, even if they held opposing values. I was a kid in the suburbs, so maybe I only saw the softer side, but that doesn't stop me from admiring it and hoping to emulate that particular virtue.
> I do miss how people there tried to be _neighborly_
Yes, there's a certain presumption of goodwill that seems to be lacking. I think of it as "tolerance" in the engineering sense — the idea that we each need to give a little more than 50% in an interaction to account for some slippage and human error.
I do believe that micro-aggressions are a real thing, that small-magnitude interactions that are consistently in a negative direction can add up to a large negative effect. But focusing on those makes it hard to gracefully accommodate the normal noise and random error in humanity. If we aren't also tracking the "micro-benefiencies", then it paints everyone who ever makes a mistake (which is all of us) as deliberately malicious.
I hadn't drawn this delineation before, but I find it apt. I grew up Asian in the Midwest and while I like progressive values here, I do miss how people there tried to be _neighborly_, even if they held opposing values. I was a kid in the suburbs, so maybe I only saw the softer side, but that doesn't stop me from admiring it and hoping to emulate that particular virtue.