I recently wrote about the tendency of ethical practices to lose their vital functions and degenerate into empty rituals. Why is there such a tendency?
The tendency is not unique to ethics: it is everywhere.
Suddenly, patients and students are to be called “customers” and be treated “as” customers. This can be perceived as an imposed language, as empty rituals that demean all concerned.
Since the edict to treat a variety of relationships “as” customer relationships can be experienced as demeaning, expanding customer normativity has become a problem even where it has its rightful place: in our stores, where we really are customers.
A retail chain – I will not say which – is now instructing their employees to call their customers “guests” and to treat them “as” guests!
The retail chain “solves” the problem of expanding customer normativity by decreeing guest normativity at precisely the place where customer normativity should work authentically.
I don’t know why we so easily go astray in our own forms of normativity, but I have a name for the phenomenon: idling normativity.
Leave a Reply