Taboos are usually associated with ancient ways, sometimes religious, whereby people are separated with one another because they are so horrified by their physical or social conditions. Women were separated into their huts during their periods because the women were regarded as unclean, possibly because, as has been said, that women have a wound that never heals. Jews and Muslims did not eat pork perhaps because it was diseased but more likely because it separated these groups of people from other groups of people. Taboos are therefore irrational in that they are responses to fear and without the need to explain why these taboos are. Durkheim updated that idea when he said that people ostracized or did worse to people who behaved differently rather than violated rituals when people violated norms as to sexual practices, beliefs and, as Goffman added, personal disfigurement.
I want to suggest a different way to understand the way peoples are separated from other groups of people in the modern way but this time for reasons that are very rational. People are separated by keeping secret to the deviants that they are not pretty or handsome, that they are not very able at their work, or that even if they are just not very nice people. These verbal separations are accomplished so as to provide people with respect, so as not to hurt them, and so become or remain part of the community at large, and so is a progressive rather than a deeply unnecessary set of practices.
There is general agreement that no one is to be considered ugly. Even men who say that about even a stranger, much less a friend, are considered boorish and distasteful because even an ugly woman may be cherished by someone who finds her for some reason attractive or just lies and says she is beautiful because to say otherwise is to diminish her as a person who, aside from her ugliness, is well regarded for something else or because anyone can be granted that designation as attractive even though she is not because women care about whether they are thought to be attractive and men can look past looks because there are many more important things in life than weather or not the woman is regarded as attractive or not. Men may be told that all they care about are looks, but that is clearly an opening appeal rather than the basis of a relationship. Men are not that superficial-- any more than are the women who marry men who are tubs of lard because the characters of those men shine out to the women. So we parade or flatter the attractiveness of our soulmates and perhaps do become sexually as well as emotionally attached, and are careful not to allow themselves to think themselves otherwise and so there is a secret that separates them: the woman (or man) understanding herself or himself as attractive, as indeed she or he may have become. The spouse thinks it careful not to say otherwise but, to the contrary, to flatter a spouse. That secret is a taboo that is not to be transgressed, one that is hardly even a burden, but just a part of the courtesies that make people amenable to deal with one another, this however a particularly crucial one in that the violation of the taboo can strike very hard and so is obeyed so as to keep people from hurting one another.
Everybody, both boys and girls, want to be considered attractive, and parents will find a way to raise their children’s spirits about their looks, however homely the children may be, though there can be the agreement that a person is disfigured and that they are worthwhile people regardless and so they have to manage their lives on their own deeper lights. Attractiveness, moreover, is an issue that may be enhanced by a consumer culture or among people in an elite, whether in French and Russian society or at the end of the Nineteenth Century when women were regarded, some of them, as beauties to be made into portraits by John Singer Sargent. Moreover, there are ungents and beauty routines to enhance attractiveness, but the issue is very deep, explaining, perhaps, why Samson was smitten with Delilah or David with Bathsheba or Helen to Paris. As long as we have history, it is men who find women attractive enough to encourage the men to chase them and for women to find ways to prompt men to chase them. Why was Bathsheba bathing on the roof except to entice David?
Another modern taboo is that people should not be regarded as unable to manage at work because they are just dumb. Aside from people who have biological stigma as subject to Down’s Syndrome, people who are slow in school are understood as having alternative learning styles rather than people who are just slower at cognitive processes. Indeed, as Arnold Birenbaum said many years ago, slow people are only subject to transitory deviance in that when these people get out of school, they are no longer stigmatized but just a bit slow when they take up work at menial or other non-demanding kinds of work, and so can marry and have children, these people just not regarded as one of many characteristics, in this case of being slow or inarticulate. Indeed, brightness is considered a matter of degree rather than people considered to be either bright or slow. Birenbaum pointed out that the relatively high performed children in homes for retardeed people, will regard the slower ones in their group as “dummies''. Birenbaum’s point is applicable to people who are weak students in ordinary schools and as more or less swift or apt at a workplace.
All along, from elementary school through graduate school, where smarts are taken to be a measure of things, there is a reluctance to push people out rather than for them to be either counselled out or allowed to decide for themselves when they have had enough of education or maybe just not given the encouragements which might make students that they might think to pursue their studies. That is very different from work environments where people are constantly tested to perform adequately enough to retain their work, whether as advertising men or assembly line workers. Union regulations, when they are available, reduce the anxiety of workers being let go because termination procedures are so onerous.. In education, however, administrators are loath to hold students back and so reduce standards well enough so that the graduation rate will increase or at least remain stable.
Here is a third modern taboo. There is a general sense that mental health requires that people should not feel filled with self loathing and that, contrary to that, people should have a sense of self respect. That means that people think of themselves, as deep down, moral or appreciable people, to be basically nice, so as to survive. In fact, a person who believes himself to be evil, someone who does something very different from accomplishing the minor virtue of being nice, is so startling a notion that people who say they are deliberately not nice are fascinating. Shakespeare’s Richard III presents himself as mean so as, presumably, to compensate for his hunchback, but it is clear that his malevolence is deeper than that.. He is not sorry about it, not a victim of his infirmities, but feels liberated so as to take advantage of people by accomplishing political power and so his evil can become even a kind of attractiveness, Lady Anne fascinated by a bad boy, all of them corrupted by his corruption.
Consider the more mundane activity whereby people just work to consider themselves nice, of the sort that are nice to their dogs, are affectionate to their spouses, or considerate and respectful towards strangers. The fact that people generally do treat one another as nice is made evident by the fact that people will run to defend people who really are nice if some others might think them to be otherwise. One spouse would say to a friend that her husband might seem like a manipulative or domineering person but she knows that he really is nice. Wives will also say that husbands might seem on the surface seem rough or crudely stated but are in private tender and understanding if they let their guard down. What seems a counter example actually attests to just about everyone thinking themselves nice. A young woman says she is known by others as a bitch, and she ascribes to that. What she means is that she is aggressive, demanding, self-directed and outspoken, not willing to remain quiet. The distinction is that she is nice to friends and family, solicitous and indeed dedicated to strangers, and so is a person whose manner is gruff or pointed rather than without niceness. I have met people who are opinionated or passive or shy or even think themselves on the dumb side without being dysfunctional, but I have never mt a person who doesn’t think of his or her self s nice.
Ancient taboos are punitive and exclusionary in their rituals perhaps because many of them, as Mary Douglas said, are concerned with bodily detritus. There is menstruation and there are rituals to deal with shards of finger nails. A foreskin can be eliminated because it is unnecessary while also intimate. But even ancient taboos or the emergence out of an even more ancient regime of taboos, can also be humane and likely assist human social organization. Abraham separates his flocks from those of Lot and is momentous in that it harkens to peaceful cooperation rather than plundering the sheep of another. Abraham has a goat replace his son as a child sacrifice. Even women are recognized in having pleasure about sex because Sarah refers to whether that can still happen even at her old age when she will have a child, though it is tasteless for her to refer to it, especially when she is meeting God.
Modern taboos, that consist of adages or principles about political and international life rather than ones about the three matters of personal life that were discussed are also done to improve the efficacy and practicality of their usages rather than document or explain why we live in a furtive dog eat dog world. The philosophy of “realpolitik” is taken as a way to be cruel and exclusive in the modern world by following the adage that only self interest, however harsh it may be, guides international relations. But the rules of the road whereby full nation states operate has an alternative interpretation. Yesone nation has no obligation to look after the people of another nation, but the states in northern Central America are part of the United States sphere of influence and so can pursue their own interests to provide aid to them so that their peoples will not travel to America as undocumented aliens because a trivial amount of money is needed to make their security forces reliable rather than exploitive and to create jobs there that make their citizens better able to manage and so there is less pressure for Hondurans and the like to leave home. Self interest on the cheap is a perfectly reasonable thing to do even if it seems harsh to refuse to do very much about major nation states when they engage in human rights abuses. So the Biden Administration will chide China about the genocide the Uighars are experiencing in western China, but will not do very much about them because there are bigger fish to fry with Chinese taking of intellectual property and because of Chinese expansion on the South China Sea. You go after the little nations, not the big ones. Noone wants to have a war on the Assian mainland again. Remember that Jimmy Carter’s call for a human rights policy meant only that the United states would give more foreign aid to Latin American dictators who sounded a bit more friendly to human rights instead of just being anti-Communist, which was the only standard previously and so Carter provided a bit more flexibility than just the American-Soviet impasse. In short, policies and adages are more reasonable as well as reasoned and therefore more humane in that they are ways to accommodate what is accommodatable and so we are not forever dogged in our perception of human nature that it is mired in superstition and hate, which is the way the anthropologists of ancient taboos would think is inevitable, however many of them thought themselves enlightened about human nature.