Are you decent?

To retain some semblance of sanity in times like these when I have no control over the horrible things going on in our country (and around the world), my brain now and again suddenly notices language curiosities previously transparent to me. The latest is the seemingly casual yet imagination-stirring expression “Are you decent?”*

This judgmental interpretation of what is morally “decent” (or “indecent”) seems to me a by-product of Christian dogma about Original Sin, driven by the moment in the Adam-and-Eve myth when, right after “apple” consumption, our progenitors are immediately conscious of nakedness and embarrassed by it.

Most of us, of course, are conditioned to be embarrassed if unclothed in front of (most) others (or if we’re in the presence of someone unclothed, for that matter).** That’s exactly the point: I’m suggesting that by being clothed in front of others, we are implicitly pushing back against sin—indeed, the primal sin.

That notion, in turn, has been one key theme in the evolution of Western thought during the past two millennia, one strain of which has been to validate what we have come to call a puritan approach to life and morality, which in turn has been a basis of one powerful American political perspective that to greater and lesser extents continues to threaten the well-being of large numbers of humans here and abroad.

The common colloquial usage of decent=clothed that I experienced as a child was from New York area Jewish relatives who had emigrated from Eastern Europe. Though Judaism itself does not have a notion of Original Sin, the so-called Protestant ethic (not, of course, embraced by every Christian or even Protestant) can penetrate our thinking as we mimic the English vernacular from elders (and often peers) steeped in older usage.

Never underestimate the power of language usage to affect even the best of us. We may think we’re liberated from narrow thinking embedded in connotations, but somewhere in us our consciously desired beliefs may not be quite as morally unambiguous as we’d like to think.

*For one interesting account of its history, see http://www.word-detective.com/2013/02/are-you-decent/?wpmp_tp=1

**A large subset of us presumably gives a pass to intimate partners, though perhaps only during intimate moments. This aspect of the issue gets very complicated and includes issues of embarrassment about whether one’s body will be appealing to others. I have no idea of how common it is to turn lights out before one gets naked—not too common, I would guess. To the degree one takes the Garden of Eden story seriously and even literally, I would imagine that Adam’s and Eve’s embarrassment should be a model for one’s own treatment of nudity even with an intimate partner—or at least during times when we’re not being intimate. (Reproduction is, after all, prescribed as part of our “punishment.”) I don’t know the history of dealing with physicians’ seeing one’s nakedness—and I would guess it’s especially relevant for women giving birth—but it’s probably revealing.