As an example I think people from the American political left to somewhere(?) in the middle see it as what it has been introduced as, that being looking past the status quo and instead looking at your own values, i.e. the morality of homelessness and not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead.
and then on the other side it feels like the people on the American political right see it as what this website describes it as “ A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others.”
I think the divide has originated from taking unlikeable behaviour and labeling that as ‘woke’ (in bad faith of course) and some people have just bonded to that definition so much that they see it as that.
At least that’s what I’ve noticed online over the past few (bonkers) years
[4] The woke sometimes claim that wokeness is simply treating people with respect. But if it were, that would be the only rule you'd have to remember, and this is comically far from being the case. My younger son likes to imitate voices, and at one point when he was about seven I had to explain which accents it was currently safe to imitate publicly and which not. It took about ten minutes, and I still hadn't covered all the cases.
That's empathy which is a different concept than treating someone with respect.
> learning about a lot of kinds of people and their experiences.
Having knowledge of a breadth of different people's life experiences is also a different concept than respect. The author proposed "treating people with respect" as the minimal normative standard. You seem to be rejecting his proposal of "respect" as insufficient and instead are proposing an alternative which includes empathy and a "lifelong process" of gaining broad knowledge of different lived experiences.
While those are valid things to propose, you're suggesting a meaningfully different standard by expanding on what respect "sometimes means." It's worth highlighting because I interpreted the author's central argument on this point as being "treating people with respect" alone should be sufficient as the minimally acceptable standard. Whether I agree with the author's proposal or not, I understood it to explicitly exclude requiring anything beyond how we treat others.
While this may seem like a minor distinction, it strikes me as central because the concepts of feeling empathy and having a lifelong interest in acquiring cultural knowledge go to our internal thoughts and feelings, whereas the author's proposal limits itself to our external behavior - which I take to be his point.
It'd more useful if you'd been explicitly direct in your response, perhaps something like "Just treating people with respect is not sufficient. Instead, the minimal normative standard should be..." It would be clearer that you disagree substantially with the author and what you're proposing instead. It would also enable a more interesting discussion about whether society should limit itself to judging how we behave toward others vs going further to judging how we think and feel about others internally, regardless of our external behavior.
> learn the norms of what will be considered disrespectful in that context.
PG said "treating people with respect" which is not the opposite of disrespecting someone. To me, disrespect evokes a different concept, despite containing the same word root. When I say "treat someone with respect" it's not related to the old ideas out of antiquated honor cultures about formal honor or dishonor, where "disrespecting" someone is taken as an offense and affront to their legitimacy.
The modern concept of 'treating with respect' simply means initially engaging with people you don't know yet with a default neutral posture and general assumption of good will and good faith. To me, the opposite wouldn't be overt disrespect or insult but rather treating one kind of person I don't even know yet, any differently than I treat all the other people I don't even know yet. It's equal default treatment vs unequal default treatment.
Personally, if I'm a visitor to a foreign culture, I'm not overly concerned about the risk of accidentally offending someone over some local cultural norm. I've lived around the world immersed in several cultures different than my own and it's never been a problem. My good will, good faith and sincere best efforts have always been sufficient to form new and lasting friendships, even when I've unknowingly committed some unintentional faux pas.