Codes of conduct are embellishments of the brutality all around us, but I think they are more than that.
Human nature is not good at interacting kindly and effectively with people who are very different from us, so most or all human societies that ever existed -- and a programming language community is a society; it has a membership who interact and a culture that structures those interactions -- most or all human societies, I was saying, have been built by tiny unrepresentative samples of humanity, and have therefore defaulted to being unsafe, often mortally unsafe, for everybody else.
Granted, that does mean that most people could get a break from brutality, by hunkering down and really toeing the line within their own society, whereas now there's nowhere for anybody to hide. The mentality that is re-produced by our economic system is horrific. But ...
We've made progress in learning to build societies that can deal with difference. It sounds underwhelming in retrospect, but in the last few centuries we've been building a consensus against the genocidal way we responded to difference for tens of thousands of years before. We've conceived and started to enact egalitarian ideals.
Most recently, we started to take seriously the prime weakness of majoritarianism -- its susceptibility to a tyranny of the majority, and particularly of an uninvested and uninformed majority -- and begun uncertainly feeling our way toward ethics and habits where the majority who do not face an uncommon difficulty listen to the minority who do, take them as authorities on it, accept it as a problem even though it does not harm them personally, and work to solve it. And all of that started up before the Internet Age really kicked in.
The last 30 years, and especially the last ten, have forced us all to come to grips with the reality of difference like never before. We encounter more, orders of magnitude more, of the variety of human experience than we ever did before. I started writing Perl because I needed to munge various linguistic data. As accidental side effects of that, despite having spent most of my life in bland suburban Washington state and living (at the time) in the blandest part of suburban Utah, I received meaningful, authoritative introductions to both statically typed functional programming and the lives of the transgender, from a turbogenius in Taiwan who thereafter became a cabinet minister. Encounters like that happened as many times in a lifetime as they now happen at a single conference or in a couple months in an online community. We haven't been in these circumstances for very long, and we're still figuring out, as individuals and organizations, how to do society in them. Codes of conduct are a vehicle whereby we share what we (think we) know about that.
In that light, codes of conduct represent the inadequacy of styles of interaction that we took for granted, or at least allowed, in relatively homogeneous societies that easily enforced conformity. But they represent our coming to know about that inadequacy and trying to address it. They imply that we and the world we come from are not safe for everyone, but they imply that we are trying to make them so.
Now, I don't believe that a written standard of conduct can ever encompass everything we owe to each other. The Face of the Other is a living reality with infinite potentials. There's always a gap between that and any codification. But I'm a linguist long since reconciled to the fact that no utterance is unambiguous; codes of conduct have to be interpreted intelligently by an act of will, but so does everything else we say, sign, or write.
I am more concerned about the potential for a written rule not to sublimate into an ethos, but to calcify into useless legalisms. I graduated from BYU twice, yo? That's a failure mode I'm familiar with. But I think the world is becoming less conducive to rigid conformism, so I'm still cautiously optimistic about codes of conduct.
In reply to Re^5: Organizational Culture (Part I): Introduction -- prevarication
by eritain
in thread Organizational Culture (Part I): Introduction
by eyepopslikeamosquito
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