Should people’s worlds be connected or rather slightly disconnected?
Let’s look at an old etching. Allegory of Tolerance by Daniel Chodowiecki from 1792. Straight out of an epidemic of religious conflicts. Can you see this long lance by Minerva’s side (a personification of Wisdom and Reason)? Presumably it was a tool for determining the minimum safe distance.
Is it time to get used to walking around with a hussar copy?
No, it’s time to take tolerance seriously as the only sufficiently productive medium of any kind. This can be much more difficult than the martial art with a copy. An online tutorial by, let’s say, Don Quixote would be a great help.
Body exercises can be extremely useful.
Racial prejudice may lie in corporality, for example. Then “such unconscious affective intersomatic memory will help to clarify why ethnic and racial prejudices appear extremely resistant to rational arguments for tolerance. Since such prejudices are based on unconscious visceral sensations and muscle memory of discomfort of which we are not fully aware, we may be as unaware of them as we are of the prejudices they generate, although others can recognize them in our behavior. Parents may unknowingly instill such sense in their children without uttering a single word and without any overt display of prejudice, but simply through subtle expressions of discomfort painted on their faces or visible in their body posture, which every sensitive child assimilates and reacts to” (Richard Shusterman, Muscle Memory and the Somaesthetic Pathologies of Everyday Life, lecture given on 18th of May, 2013 at Jerzy Grotowski Institute in Wrocław, transl. W. Małecki).
Stay away from me today!
And what about tomorrow?
In a world of post-pandemic pragmatism and a desire to catch up on ‘delays’, it is time to get used to the fact that we need to exercise our bodies harder and that Fitts’s law is going to be a universal law after all. It will determine differences also recognized heretofore as moral choices.
Fitts’s law
An essential ingredient in the selection process of a graphic object (button, icon, person) is a targeted traffic. A model that has been repeatedly used to describe the timing of this movement is Fitts’s law. In its original form, this law takes the form
MT = a + b ( ID )
Index of Difficulty
The Index of Difficulty (ID) originally conceived as
ID = log2 (2A/W)
where A is the amplitude of the motion and W is the width of the target (tolerance).
The inverse of ID is interpreted as the index of performance (IP). It measures the efficiency (information capacity) of the eye-hand unit in performing a given activity, expressed in bits per second (bps).
Looking at what intolerance does to us is not the point anymore. It is better to have a look at what we are driven by while taking decisions. And the path is getting narrower, bumpier and bumpier. We have always been told to walk the vivid path of people not yet died. However, even those who are alive are no longer that intriguing. We are merely curious about the motives behind our behavior. Frequently no one shows ourselves. A description must suffice.
The school of tolerance under permanent competition amongst Descriptions. The length of the copy matters.