Once upon a time I wanted to be a mathematician. However, as I quickly proved, as I had with music and chemistry, that I didn’t really have talent in that field. However, these many years later I have defined what I think is a law that spans a host of specific areas of the world we live in:

The decline in civility is inversely proportionate to the increase in stupidity.

This will be henceforth known as Holmes’ Law of the Death of Rational Debate.

It’s been going on for a while, ever since people discovered that it was easier simply to call somebody a pejorative name than to actually bring facts to an argument. But, like Typhoid Mary’s typhoid, it lived beneath the surface. It was there but not so obvious to really disturb the host. It wasn’t until recently we seemed to become proud of it.

There are, for instance, a lot of comments on the web about political correctness. In fact, some people seem to think that political correctness will be the death of civilization as we know it. We have a gubernatorial candidate that seems to pride himself on being politically incorrect.

Because of what I’ve done for a living for so many years, I’m something of an expert on the uses and abuses of political correctness. During the seventies and eighties, you needed a five-foot bookshelf of PC rules and regulations. And some of those rules and regulations were just silly:

He or she should immediately make an appointment with his or her OB/GYN.

Or the fact that in a script a woman should never be shown as a housewife. (That one caused me to rewrite several scripts of instructional television after some militant PC folks got hold of them.)

But behind each of these nonsensical rules, there was a real and important consideration.

The stories that we told were not always about a “he.” For hundreds of years, the generic pronoun for the population was the masculine one. I can see how, if I were of the feminine persuasion, that would bother me. So we ended up with tortured sentence constructions while we tried to figure out what grammatical gender equality looked like.

And the woman should not always be shown as a housewife. In those years we went from Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver to Mary Tyler Moore and Murphey Brown. None of those models were wrong, but neither were any of them always right.

However, that’s not what the anti-PC folks seem to be about. They want to be able to call all Muslims terrorists, all immigrants rapists, and all people who think differently from them by names such as snowflakes, libtards, or (gasp) liberals. In my opinion, that has nothing to do with political correctness. It’s just being a jerk, and worse, it’s being stupid.

It’s a matter of fact that all Muslims aren’t terrorists; they’ve been living among us for generations without stirring up fear. And it’s a matter of fact that the crime rate among those not born here is actually lower than among those born here. However, it doesn’t serve the needs of those who need their constituency to be afraid to deal with that. It’s easier to characterize whole populations as law breakers.

And the same sort of thing is already showing up in the Georgia governor’s race. We’re being treated to a steady diet of PAC-sponsored commercials that characterize the Democratic candidate as “radical, fiscally irresponsible, and unqualified.”

Never do the commercials attempt to show which of her policies could be considered radical. They do, however, make much of the fact that she has a payment plan to pay some back taxes, about $54,000 worth according to the commercial. If she filed her taxes on time (and she says she did), Stacey Abrams took perfectly legal steps to deal with a cash shortage. We should all be so honorable.

As has been reported, the Republican candidate has refused to honor about $500,000 in personally guaranteed loans made to a company in which he was involved. The loans are past due, and Rick Phillips, the guy who loaned Hart AgStrong the money, says he would like to get paid. Kemp says that he will not speak to that.

Which brings us back to civility and stupidity.

It takes a couple of minutes to get beneath the charges to the facts of the matter

But, we don’t want to or feel the need to get beneath the charges. We like the charges. We’re comfortable with them. We’re addicted to confirmation bias.

You can almost see the brain cells popping and deflating.

And it will only get worse.

Those of us who are old enough will remember a time when being called a liar was a serious insult. Now, when caught in a lie, people tell another to cover it up.

We remember when we prided ourselves in being courteous. It was the sign of a civilized person. But now we not only sit on our horns at stoplights, measuring the smallest unit of time between the light change and the honk, but we feel free to call names, impugn motives, and spread lies. And we do it in increasing volume.

I am a liberal, consequently most of the examples cited here show the shallowness of some conservatives. However, a thoughtful conservative could well match me example for example.

And that’s a part of the tragedy of the situation.