Telika: The context of this thread (or of the report itself) does not matter. What matters is that they made a quantitative survey, asking "
Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Political correctness is a problem in our country." to different individuals who,
themselves, have various understanding of the word. And who answered in accordance to their own understanding of it.
While generally your statement would be correct, in the particular case of "political correctness" i cant agree with you.
On one hand im sure very few would be able to define the term (if its even definable given how many things it covers).
On the other hand, im sure almost each and every person in the survey would be able to point out cases of political correctness, which consist mainly of firing people over something they said, followed by character assassination in the general media. Does not surprise me that a large part of the population is fed up with this ongoing practice, that borders on insanity.
Telika: Make such a superficial poll about "incivility" in a community. You'll have a pretty high number of people wishing it was reduced.
Based on it, make practical rules against incivility, and you'll have a whole load of theose people, who seemed to agree, suddenly going "
hey, this is not at all what I meant as incivility" and "
you left this out" or "
you abusively included this". Even if (implicitely or explicitely) the notion has a clear shared meaning amongst the investigators, and a clear shared meaning amongst the decision makers, the issue is with the multiplicity of implicit meanings amongst the investigated people themselves.
And you'd end up using this poll to justify policies that they would not all have supported. Making them say what they didn't mean.
Thats a complex issue, because its composed of several elements.
The definition of incivility is only one of those elements.
As i said before even with a perfect and unanimously accepted definition, the interpretations of said definition could vary wildly, because you can not define everything perfectly.
There is no definition in the world that would help us draw a clear line and select objectively what is "incivility" and separate it from the rest.
The other element is the action taken to reduce "incivility". How far would you go and how rough?
Even if you accepted the unrealistic ideal that proper targeting of incivility would be possible, there would still be tensions over the ways you chose to handle it.
Last but not least, its very easy to make most people hate civility, by going berserk in dealing with incivility, and that is exactly what is going on in modern society, and personally i think its intended, because the ones doing it are the large media corporations, and they are no amateurs, they dont do things "by mistake", they know exactly what they are doing.