Under a City Council proclamation approved Wednesday, those who use profanity or make rude gestures could find themselves shamed into better behavior by the unsettling glances of South Pasedena residents who take their reputation for civility seriously.
"That's one of the purposes of this," Mayor Michael Cacciotti said of his city's proclamation designating the first week of March as No Cussing Week. "It provides us a reminder to be more civil, to elevate the level of discourse."
Notice that there is no official enforcement mechanism, residents should take matters into their own hands by shaming others into compliance.Two questions pop to mind. First will this work--will people respond to shaming? And second, is this in the spirit of Washington's rules? The rules did not state how others should behave, they only spoke about how the individual should behave. It's not about society, but about self control. The later is a precondition for the former. Let;s tie this second observation back to the first. Do we change society by enforcing change or by changing ourselves? And how do we determine whether either works?
Here's a related read: Regulation by Shaming.
There's at least one historical example of shaming causing social change. It was called frown power and it was used in the South by whites to signal subtly to racist whites that casual bigoted comments were not acceptable to them. It was developed by a man named Stetson Kennedy.
