I am about to utter an unpopular – and to some old-fashioned – word: Boundaries. There, I’ve said it, and now you must puzzle over what it means.
Let me give you a small clue. I am not talking about the fours and sixes Glenn Phillips scored at Hagley Oval against India on Saturday. And the Concise Oxford Dictionary provides you with limited assistance with its definition of “a line marking the limits of an area”.
The old-fashioned concept that I am discussing in this commentary refers to limits, or the rules that societies impose on behaviour and communication in order to stop their members slipping back to a life that Thomas Hobbes described as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”.
Every society has them. Most societies – not only Christian – generally hold at least four of the Ten Commandments as immutable: Thou shalt not murder, steal, bear false witness, or covert your neighbour’s house/wife/animals. Others move, alongside changes in the social fabric and beliefs over time. There would be a lot of dead people, for example, if adultery still saw miscreants stoned.
Each society has expectations of how its members will behave and those presumptions are not limited to what we might generally term criminality. They extend to the ways we interact with our fellow beings.
Some of these social boundaries are defined by law. In a democracy these laws are seen broadly as reflecting the limits that society wishes to see imposed on itself, although increasingly polarised politics may interfere with that notion. In autocracies such laws are used not for a common good but to confine and control populations.
Other boundaries, however, are tied to the presumption that the rights we claim come with responsibilities. The Golden Rule had been around a long time before Jesus proclaimed that we should do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Boundaries are about reciprocity: We observe them in order to also protect ourselves.
The problem with these boundaries, however, lies in how they are defined…or more to the point, not defined. Many of society’s limits are ‘understood’ as the rules we learn as children, as we enter society and interact with other members of it, and which unique circumstances create by forms of common consent. They are open to interpretation, and misinterpretation.
Such boundaries are also open to constant challenge. What is a boundary if not something to push against? There is nothing inherently bad in that. Indeed, the opposite is the case. Limits on freedom should rightly be put to the test.
There is a difference, however, between questioning where a line should be placed by society and simply claiming a right to draw the boundary wherever you wish.
I fear that those who inhabit the digital age fall into that latter category and feel bound not by societal norms but only by their own desires and prejudices.
Boundaries are in my thoughts as I conduct research for a book I am writing on incivility – the periods of social instability when boundaries have been breached throughout history. We sit in such a period now.
I won’t explore those depths today (I hope you’ll be able to read the book) but in the course of my research, yesterday I went back exactly a century to explore some of our newspapers. In the Evening Post of 26 October 1926, I found a report of the annual conference of the Institute of Journalists in London. It quoted the institute president, Glasgow Herald editor Sir Robert Bruce (not joking).
Newspapers should be the mirror of the activities of the nation, be those foolish or wise. It should not, however, be the business of any newspaper to mirror in detail the uncleanliness of modern life, and many of them are unfeignedly glad that an attempt is being made to put a legislative check upon the hitherto unrestricted publication of the unsavoury aspects of certain court cases”
Roll forward 34 years and picture me as a very innocent teenager reading an account of the Hastings Blossom Festival riot as it played out in court. I was shocked seeing the phrase ‘sexual intercourse’ in a newspaper for the first time. Worse, I was told the act had occurred in a public place. In the more than six decades that followed, I was exposed to innumerable details in court reports that made the 1960 coupling of two teenagers rather unremarkable. That’s a sign of moving boundaries but also a sign that media remain challengingly at the forefront of where those boundaries should be set.
Most newspapers and news broadcasters draw the line short of what is heard or seen in the community at large, although print media are proficient at the use of euphemistic abbreviation and use it routinely. Outside the news environment there are no such restraints. Watch an episode of Clarkson’s Farm on TV1 or TVNZ+ and you will hear four-letter words rolled off the tongue as mere punctuation marks. Watch a Netflix movie and the use of denigrating profanities is commonplace.
As a newspaper editor, I always worked on the premise that our paper could be seen by a wide audience and that we needed to be mindful of the sensibilities of the more vulnerable. For that reason, I had a rule that euphemistic abbreviations of obscenities were banned. The meaning was so clear, the full word may as well have been used. If it was newsworthy enough it might be published. In other words, if it was uttered by a prime minister or a pope, odds on it would be published.
It didn’t happen on my watch but, occasionally, New Zealand newspapers have pushed the boundary. The most notable recent example was last year in The Post when columnist Andrea Vance used a barely abbreviated reference to female genitals. She wasn’t the first. Three years previously, then-editor Anna Fifield had allowed the same word in a strongly worded condemnation of online abuse. On both occasions there were complaints, each time rejected by the Media Council as contextually justified. Elsewhere, The Economist has a policy of spelling out profanities if the context justifies their use.
Are these examples of the boundaries having shifted or do they demonstrate that boundaries no longer count? Am I alone in thinking that a pejorative reference to female genitals is denigrating to women and therefore out of bounds? Should I expect to hear Jeremy Clarkson’s verbal punctuation mark used routinely in the group of men and women of my age that meets fortnightly to discuss news & current affairs?
I sincerely hope the answer to these questions is ‘no’ and that there remains a place for the boundaries that help to define the values of the society in which we live.
And for those who dismiss what I say on the basis that I am trying to place ‘mere words’ outside the bounds of acceptability, I would like to quote the German Catholic philosopher Joseph Pieper, who died on the eve of the Internet Age. He spoke of “the degeneration of language into an instrument of rape”.
I recalled that quotation as I looked at our local Facebook community page and saw a photograph of an election poster featuring National’s Christopher Luxon and Nicola Willis. Over it had been spray-painted two words that were blunt and profane ‘instruments of rape’.
Picture a young couple out for an evening stroll with their children. The oldest child, a girl on the threshold of being a teenager, looks at that poster and asks: “What does that mean, Mummy?”.
Or perhaps that picture is naïve and she has already been exposed to such language on the social media feed where she has been bullied. Perhaps her mother, too, has endured such language on her own social media feed or in emails.
Still don’t see the need for boundaries? Then put me down as an old curmudgeon living in the past, although I suspect your lack of boundaries will label me with something far more profane and hurtful.