Laptop Oracles: Forget Me Not

In virtual space, what you smell is yourself in front of your computer. It won’t matter what sort of deplorable habits you bear in your personal space.
However, if the virtual world is your whole world, you are not civilized even if you get the Networked civility perfect. That we are compelled to bring the Networked civilization into our real world does not justify forgetting meat space is not the same as virtual space. Civilization means you are civilized wherever you go.
In ancient times when someone from a high civilization visited a part of the world still clinging to a more primitive lifestyle, they never forgot themselves. It’s one thing to act as Romans do in Rome, because that was a civilization. You adapt yourself to what keep civility alive, but you don’t forget your own. There is a dynamic blending which recognizes you can’t correct everyone’s moral flaws, especially if you have no sense of what is moral. As we build our new civilization, it requires we closely examine the meaning of morality itself, so we can rightly recognize those things we should embrace in their place, and things we cannot. A critical element in the calculation is reducing your social rules to a minimum without throwing them all away.
The West is an inferior civilization, largely because it’s full of hot air. We put up with a lot, and we can’t morally justify wallowing much in it. That Western Civilization is so patently superficial does not excuse bad habits which don’t register over the Net, however. We of the Networked Civilization are trying to escape that fake world, but it requires sufficient thought and intelligence to grasp some issues are not merely a symptom of the disease.
We can afford to trash most of high etiquette as almost purely Western phoniness. A fundamental flaw of the West was pretending things could be perfect, that people could be perfected, and we just should not put up with basic icky human traits. But civility itself is something more fundamental. You are still trying to work out living in close physical proximity in meat space. If you understand careful wording on the Net, you should also understand what constitutes an offensive intrusion in the real world. Some things can’t be helped, but it’s a good idea to make some signal you realize your farts are not sweet.
Anything which affects others obliges you to make amends where possible. It is equally uncivil to pretend you have some God given right to a perfect world. The burping, stinking grouch is no worse than the prissy, whiny grouch. If we fail to understand people are the cause of all the imperfection in this world, that’s a philosophical weakness. If we fail to understand we are no better than anyone else, that’s a moral weakness. Humans are not smooth ball bearings, so we need someway to lubricate our necessary rubbing together in a confined space. On the Net it’s by your careful choice of words, but in meat space it’s by restraining yourself reasonably.
Where Western Civilization has remained hopeless is in the truculent demand for unreasonable restraints. This is not simply a philosophical difference of opinion. The West is coming apart for this primary failure, and we should not simply let it go, but help to kill it. But we do so by proving its failures, by demonstrating something better. A perfect image is from the movie, Matrix, when Neo dove into Agent Smith before bursting out and destroying him. You have to get fully involved before your superiority has any useful effect.
You can abuse yourself; that’s between you and God. But if you abuse others in the same fashion, God encourages them to act. Being invulnerable in the Net, however much a self-deception that may be, does not translate to invulnerability in meat space. God grants various types of strength to some with an attached obligation to protect the weak, and it’s a moral blessing if someone roughs you up in order to contain your bad habits from harming others.
We can discuss across human lifetimes what constitutes a threat and what is simply the necessity of human existence, but the moral compulsion to act right now is pretty strong. It’s an instinct God built into us. People will miscalculate, and you may not ever get justice in the narrow sense. Prepare for that. Prepare by making some effort to recognize where your humanity pokes outward at others, accept it as reality, and do what you can to limit harm to others. When you fail, always be eager to clean up your part of the mess.
Humanity cries out that you not forget there are other people with whom you share this world.