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- In the first kind of family, a child might ask why she can’t go out to play and be told “Because I said so” or “Because you’re a girl.” In the second, the child will be told, “Because those older boys play rough, and if you get hurt, I’ll be very sad.” As the British sociologist Basil Bernstein observed, one system appeals to roles, the other to feelings: “Daddy will be pleased, hurt, disappointed, angry, ecstatic if you go on doing this.”
This is how we now talk in public. We condemn things not for being ungentlemanly or childish, but for being offensive, hurtful, or outrageous—in short, for being problematic. As Douglas saw, this means we are “freed from a system of rigid positions but made a prisoner of a system of feelings and abstract principles.”
Problematic is only going to become more problematic as more people are unwittingly caught in its net. The only ones who can ultimately avoid it are those who wield it. For them, it is a way to enforce moral norms without seeming moralistic. For everybody else, it is an impossible trap.