Those months and years of forced human separation—networks shattered and communities split along lines of compliance—seem to have run roughshod on basic rules of human engagement. Courtesies that were once offered as routine ways to lubricate the social order can no longer be taken for granted.
I’m daily rattled by rude and inconsiderate behavior, and I don’t just mean from drivers. I mean from servers, patrons, people out in the community, colleagues, workers, visitors, or just shoppers or passersby.
It’s all strange and alarming, and I hoped for a time that I was imagining the whole thing, that maybe as one gets older, one takes greater note of the petty offenses that befall us. Maybe it’s nothing out of the ordinary what people are doing. The more I think about it, however, the more it seems obvious that basic rules of engagement have taken a huge dive in recent years.
And no, I don’t think it’s because we have a president who can be brusque and blunt. Indeed, I think adopting some of his ways might be the answer to our cultural problem. We all need to get better about speaking up and saying what is true to others. If we don’t, we are going to suffer from this problem forever.
What is that problem? It’s how we’ve divided ourselves between two groups:
1) those who have decided that courtesy, gratitude, deference, respect, kindness, decency, generosity, and congeniality no longer matter because life is hell so we have no real obligations to others and might as well contribute to making matters worse and
2) those of us who are too shy to say anything about it.
There has to be a meeting of the minds. That’s not going to be easy because people in the second group have retained the pre-lockdown sensibility of kindness and courtesy to others, which often means communicating with subtle cues and culturally rich hints embedded in euphemism and verbal inflections. They retain the manners of the past, which seem to preclude them from dealing with people in the first group.
If we don’t act, we’ll leave only the woke ideologues to determine this generation’s conception of manners, e.g., the people who loudly decry misgendering or some such nonsense.
How do we overcome this? The genteel among us need to become a bit more forthright with our fellows. We have to learn to call out rudeness, presumption, ingratitude, disloyalty, duplicity, and manipulative deception. We have to learn to flat-out say, “I see what you did there, and I disapprove because it is disrespectful of me and others.” I see no other way to improve the world and close the gap.
Let’s consider an old-world tactic for dealing with misbehavior. It was made most famous by the books and movies of Paddington Bear. He was well trained in his manners (except table manners). He was also long suffering of the diversity of experience, trying to see the good in all people. But there comes a point in every Paddington story when some bad guy goes too far. Then Paddington Bear brings out the ultimate solution.
Paddington deploys a “hard stare.” That rattles the offending party and he changes his behavior.
To be sure, this tactic seems more drawn from Victorian England than from the more messy and varied history of communication in the United States. I’m not even sure it would work. Maybe it is worth a try.
But wait a minute. The hard stare only works if people are looking at you. This is the real core of the problem today. Most people are staring at their absurd phones, seeing how many people liked their latest pose or post, rather than paying much attention to the world around them. You can give all the hard stares you want and not penetrate anyone’s space today.
That means we must come up with other methods of social correction. We have to learn to speak our minds.
This is not easy for many of us. Many people from good families who have not forgotten their manners even in these hard times are afflicted with what the Germans call “guilt.”
Blumesprechen means literally speaking through the flower. It means that our words are pretty, tactful, gentle, soft, and consist mainly of hints and nudges.
Famously, Germans are not generally guilty of this, which is precisely why saying that someone is guilty of Blumesprechen in German culture is considered an insult of sorts. It is to be accused of not saying what you mean.
It’s like saying, “Bloody heck, stop speaking through the flower!”
Famously in the South, saying “Bless his heart” is not really a blessing at all but the opposite.
American English is filled with these sorts of linguistic evasions.
This is why it might be good to commit a few phrases to memory, repeating them often before deploying them so that they will be on the tip of your tongue.
Here are my proposals:
“That was not kind. Could you say (or do) that differently?”
That remark could stop someone quickly. It suggests strong disapproval and offers a path for improvement.
To harden it up a bit, consider this:
“I don’t appreciate being treated that way. Let’s be more respectful of one another.”
The trick here is to offer disapproval and correction without making yourself guilty of the same kind of thing. Don’t jump into the mud; disapprove of it.
More recently I’ve been working at getting better at simply saying no. It’s a tiny word but very powerful. Or just plainly laying out the facts: “Decency dictates X, but you did Y. That does not reflect well on you.”
When it comes to driving—that’s a huge problem these days because people are using their machines to take out their inner anger—there really is only one solution. Slow down, pull over, and let the madman go. That’s because of the larger context: safety first. There is no winning a battle over road space, and one should never try to under any conditions. If that makes you a sap, so be it.
In social and professional situations, it is a different matter. You really do have the opportunity to speak your mind. And you should. If enough of group two does this to group one, we could go a long way toward restoring some of the old world courtesy and decency that made life beautiful and workable for everyone.
We’ve waited at least two years for this problem to fix itself, but it is not happening. It is incumbent on all of us to take matters into our hands and voices. It’s time to speak up and plainly call out misbehavior and rudeness whenever possible. There’s no need for crassness, but there is a grave need for honesty and forthright speaking today.
