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Special Report
We Are a Rude Awakening
If rudeness is so pervasively commonplace throughout our society, does it cease to be rudeness?
I’m wrestling with my amateur version of a great philosophical paradox: if rudeness is so pervasively commonplace throughout society, does it cease to be rudeness?
It started when I went to our local bookstore this week to hear the nattily suited Howard Dean talk about his book, Howard Dean’s Prescription for Health Care Reform, and ended up riveted instead by a rich display of rampant rudeness. Knees, backsides and hand-bags took swipes at me as people rushed towards the empty seats in my row with nary an “excuse me” being uttered.
A perfectly healthy middle-aged man refused to offer his seat to a woman well in her 80s. But she, too, cut a wholly unsympathetic figure by repeatedly refusing my offer of a seat because she preferred, I realized later, to stand and glower at him rather than to sit comfortably.
And there were others who obviously felt Dean was interrupting their talking. During question time, a woman politely mentioned that she was supportive of Obama’s health care quest even though she had voted for Nader. Well! Like slings and arrows, loud boos and sibilant jeers shot through the airwaves with flaming disapproval. Dean immediately waved the parentally punitive index finger as he loudly exclaimed, to his great credit, I might add, “No, no, no, there will be none of this behavior”!
These are not spittoon using yahoos, these are not the sans culottes of the third estate.
No, the audience here is a consistently thick slice of Washington, D.C.’s Ward 4, whose fame spiked recently in a profile by the columnist David Brooks. Row after row of quills (quasi-intellectual liberals) in their shabby best, laser-beaming their eager intent to clap whenever the champion of the day verbally reinforces their ideology and to hiss whenever their orthodoxy is challenged.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not wielding a partisan slap. My intellectual curiosity has an open-door policy to many a topic, issue and argument.
Shifting over to the rudeness taking place in town-hall meetings. I felt sorry for Congressman Barney Frank having to stand up for both issue and self as he humbly battled the babbling rabble-rouser who kept belligerently interrupting him. I can’t recall his being treated this way when he faced the personal scandal in the early '90s. On the other side of the coin was Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee’s appallingly rude choice to answer her cell phone in the middle of a constituent’s polite question. No clearer statement of her disdain for those who elected her could possibly have been made if she were to use a megaphone. She should have been upbraided.
And we can’t forget Dick Cheney crassly telling Senator Leahy on the Senate floor to go f—- himself. But now, Cheney’s spirit seems to have found a new home in Obama’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, who stands in full-fledged arrogant armor beating down reporters with sword-sharp condescension so thick you can see the self-righteous contempt dribbling from the corners of his mouth as he blames the heretofore Obamadulating media for the public option losing support.
All this violent visual volley reminds me of the one in the infernal landscape of Hieronymus Bosch’s painting, “Garden of Earthly Delights.” So what the hell is going on? Why aren’t we minding our manners? Have Emily Post and Miss Manners lost their relevance? What is making us humans behave so badly?
You could say it’s gotten too crowded; too many rats in the same maze vying for the same trough or microphone. Or it could be that there is raging fear behind the rudeness. Fear is always behind anger, psychologists say. Fear of losing control, of being dominated by government regulations, suffocated by a multi-trillion dollar deficit. It all sounds plausible.
But these hypotheses fail to probe the masses for an organic etiology.
Humans have an unwritten code of ethics, a moral code, that’s been wired into our brain, as neuroscientists have been discovering, that serve as the underpinnings of rules of social behavior. Even chimps, our primate cousins, abide by rules like reciprocity and fairness, as the great Emory primatologist and psychologist, Frans de Waal, has observed over decades. Chimps trust when they receive generosity, express resentment when others don’t share and swiftly punish those who behave selfishly.
You might say that good behavior is the building erected from the neural scaffolding of morality. From these moral rules both manners and laws evolved. Edmund Burke, the provocatively thinking 18th century British politician, thought laws don’t hold a torch to manners: “The law touches us but here and there, and now and then but manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation.” Manners, he said, either sustain or destroy morals.
There’s no more vivid illustration than the Victorian society depicted in Jane Austen’s novels where day-to-day civility of refined and graceful manners — the curtsies, turned up pinky fingers at tea-time, bowing of the head upon meeting — visually profess an adherence to entrenched moral values that were — in Burkeian fashion — reinforced by the exigencies of royal conduct that, in turn, trickled down to Queen Victoria’s subjects themselves.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (53) | Leave a comment
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how to grow taller | 8.28.09 @ 6:43AM
Chimps trust when they receive generosity, express resentment when others don't share and swiftly punish those who behave selfishly.
Melvin| 8.28.09 @ 7:50AM
My parents raised me in a atmosphere of civility, that men took their hats of when stepping inside a structure or even when addressing a woman or an elder.
It was expected that men opened doors for women and the woman replied with a thank you. But times have changed haven't they.
Women openly assail unsuspecting individuals with a foul mouth vulgarity that would make Satan himself blush.
Men and Women walk the streets half undressed with undergarments in open display as well as their charms for all those to see whether they want to or not.
The feminist moved beat it into our heads that men are evil, and vile and if a man should be stupid enough to open a door for a female he should glared at with mocking contempt.
How many times have any one of us walked into a convenience store and stood their for an inordinate amount of time while the person beyond the counter didn't even acknowledge our existence. How many times have we went to the post office and were totally ignored until the bureaucrat behind the counter decide he or she was damn good and ready to help us.
We used to be called the, "Ugly Americans" abroad when we traveled, now we are just ugly to each other here.
In response to "How to grow taller" Why don't you just shut up and give me my damn banana.
My apologies to "How to grow taller" I was just using his post as an example of the human aspect of sharing.
Campy| 8.28.09 @ 9:59AM
"Did the show satisfy the cravings of society or did cravings lead to the shows?"
Methinks another question to be asked is: Or do the shows lead to cravings?
When trash is standard fare and not only accepted, but glorified, what other result is expected? GIGO.
Robert Rosencrans| 8.28.09 @ 10:34AM
Manners require judgment and desire and motivation. Public schools and colleges are churning out masses of citizens who can not be told they are wrong or have failed. Therefore, failure is objectified, perhaps glorified.
Public gatherings or shopping excursions become adventures of maneuvering around rude unfocused drivers for the pleasure of going into a store to deal with unfocused people there brushing by you with a cell phone glued to their ears. It is they who are important, not you. In essence, they buy into elitism. Who are you to get in their way? Their out of control brats bump into you in the check out line and there will be no chastisement.
Fifty years of the pursuit of faux equality has bought us to this point and one can only wonder what lies ahead.
L. Ross| 8.28.09 @ 12:00PM
"I felt sorry for Congressman Barney Frank having to stand up for both issue and self as he humbly battled the babbling rabble-rouser who kept belligerently interrupting him."
Sorry, but after seeing Barney Frank's smug, self satisfied performance on 60 minutes and learning of his central role in the mortgage meltdown, I think belligerently interrupting him is the most mild interaction that Frank has earned.
TLM| 8.28.09 @ 12:31PM
Why are people rude? Easy. They never learned boundaries. Parents for the last few generations did not parent. They became "friends" to their children. Doing everything they could to make sure they were liked by their kids. The children have control and any bad behavior is not modified. They end up not receiving any sort of education about personal responsibility or social acceptability. They are wild animals that educate themselves with knowledge from their friends (equally as clueless and wild) or television (moral-free and filled with negative reinforcement). Boundaries are extremely important for a society to function well. They keep your junk in and other people's junk out. They keep you aware of how you are influencing your environment and how it is influencing you. Sadly, this key feature to healthy interaction has been lost in this society. You can only teach what you know. And what our society now knows is rudeness.
Dave Williams| 8.28.09 @ 12:58PM
Thank you for a well-written, thought-provoking article. However, please permit me a point of pedantry -- and I don't mean to be rude -- but Jane Austen died in 1817, a full twenty years before Victoria became queen.
PolishKnight| 8.28.09 @ 1:07PM
Perhaps some of the answer to the question of where politeness went has to do with it's arbitrary nature: pinky-fingers extended when drinking tea became equal to holding open a door for a struggling elder. I know many people like this who are the rudest jerks imaginable... when they think they can get away with it under The Rules. It's the distinction between manners and etiquette.
Consider the tradition of taking one's hat off when entering a building or addressing a lady. For one thing, most men don't wear hats nowadays and, if they do, they are these cheap flip-ups that don't denote any class. And women's liberation eliminated the concept of women falling behind men in certain ways to maintain their virtues including not wearing pants, earning more money in laeu of staying-at-home with the kids, etc.
Liberalism itself, of course, has long been about throwing manners to the wind in the goal of personal gratification and empowerment or spreading the word of their supreme, greater beliefs. Yes, it's shocking and even depressing to see conservatives screaming during town halls but, then again, hasn't this rudeness worked for the left for decades? Don't many of them secretly regard conservatives as polite suckers, required to fight with both hands tied behind their backs? Don't we have an MLK day (and no GW or AL day)precisely because of the rabble rousing tactics of passive resistance?
Nick| 8.28.09 @ 1:32PM
Miss Duffles,
With all due respect, you need to stop being so nostalgic about the manners of our ancestors.
While they may have been polite in their writtings, I'm sure even Emily Post could be rude if her pique were aroused.
The common folk could be just as rude in Victorian times as they can be today. Do you think Mary Kelly (a prostitute killed by Jack the Ripper) drank her beer with her pinky extended?
We must remember that while customs, circumstances, and technology may change over the course of history, PEOPLE do not.
And if you are going to buy into the canard that manners are "hard-wired" into our brains, you are on the road to believing murderers, like Ted Bundy, are not responsible for their actions because they are "born that way".
Padoux| 8.28.09 @ 1:52PM
Reared in the south I was taught to yes mam & yes sir, which I still use today often when dealing with strangers even though I am 63. At table we were admonished not to "speak over" or interrupt our elders. The vulgarity & lack of manners today is appalling. I try to be polite to all but I get very angry when others are rude & completely indifferent to others, whether in a crowd, driving, in a store or movies theater. Many people if they bump into you offer no "pardon me." They block aisles in markets indifferent to others. I also do it by accident but apologize & move, or if I bump into some one say pardon me. These are small things but go a long way to making life a little more pleasant.
Al Adab| 8.28.09 @ 3:06PM
"Does it cease to be rudness?"
Perhaps. I might remind you that "Treason doth never prosper, for when it prospers none dare call it Treason".
Ken (Old Texican)| 8.28.09 @ 4:01PM
Who the heck cares what anyone named "DUFFLES" has to say?
Stupid choice of articles, spectator!
From now on, I am being polite to communist murderors when I don't stick my 12 guage shotgun up their left nostril! (grin)
Dixie Pixie| 8.28.09 @ 4:31PM
To: (Old Texican) New and Improved with “Chemical X”
and now called (Ken)
Before you use any weapon remember the following wise words.
Lee Marvin Do you know what your only mistake was?
Charles Bronson No, What?
Lee Marvin You let someone see you.
“The Dirty Dozen 1967”
Dixie Pixie| 8.28.09 @ 4:37PM
To: (Old Texican) New and Improved with “Chemical X” and now called (Ken).
Before you use any weapon remember the following wise words.
Lee Marvin---------Do you know what your only mistake was?
Charles Bronson---No, What?
Lee Marvin---------You let someone see you.
------“The Dirty Dozen 1967”------
Sorry about the mucked up spacing.
I forgot the TAS word editor changes the usage of spaces.
Ken (Old Texican| 8.28.09 @ 4:58PM
(Sigh!) Okay, Pixie...how about "when I stick my 12 guage up his/her sundon'tshine"? (grin)
Alan Brooks| 8.28.09 @ 9:35PM
America's rudeness is as nothing compared to its tastelessness. But even the Baltimore Sage couldn't have known that no one will ever go broke underestimating taste.
So you can all rest assured that our economy WILL recover.
chen| 8.29.09 @ 1:35AM
America's rudeness is as nothing compared to its tastelessness. But even the Baltimore Sage couldn't have known that no one will ever go broke underestimating taste.
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So you can all rest assured that our economy WILL recover.
Kevin, Meath| 8.29.09 @ 7:01AM
Since the 1960's it has been pushed not to conform, to push against any boundaries society places and that in many ways has been a very good thing. However it can be a negative thing and poor manners and foul language in society is one of those negatives. The media/society encourages it. The rebel is always the hero, the 'maverick' cop the central character of many a film, those who take 'direct action' ,especially if its violent, for the 'cause' become lionised, to quietly and politely work at something is considered 'weak'.
James Wilson | 8.29.09 @ 11:04AM
I think the reasons for the decay of manners is reciprocity and the death of the arts. The first is essentially reactionary; it's very hard to remain polite when the other guy is breaking all the rules. Take lawyers as an example. Once upon a time lawyers were honorable and considered among the MOST honorable people in society. Now they are the epitome of dishonor. That was brought about by (purportedly) good intentions. Clarence Darrow and his 'progressive' buddies decided it was okay to do anything at all to win because of their higher purpose: to end the death penalty. When one side is willing to go to any length, it almost forces the other side to go further or else lose. History is full of honorable losers and winning scoundrels. When polite manners become a symbol for weakness in a culture, two things are certain: that culture is moribund, and the first to go will be those with good manners.
The second reason is the death of the arts. It doesn't matter whether it was a plot by the Frankfurt school or just an unhappy accident, the central organizing principle of art today is to shock, and as it gets harder and harder to shock people, 'art' has to go further and further into forbidden or taboo realms. The fact that those areas were taboo for a reason doesn't worry an individual who after all is trying to win a place for himself, after all, everybody else is doing it.
Though I agree that Victorian manners were far too stultified and grimly rigid, it doesn't follow that all the areas they considered taboo shouldn't be. In the end that is what the 'left' is all about--fighting against the non-existent Victorian world. Liberals in America have apparently never met any conservatives because they're still attacking stereotypes that vanished long ago, which is one reason they're so surprised at the rude behavior of many conservatives in the Town Hall meetings recently. They keep looking for mustachioed men in beaver hats, but they persistently refuse to appear--no doubt they're secretly sending out orders from Chatsworth House where they maintain their little slice of Victoriana. Beware, someday you too may receive your orders on pretty hot-pressed paper well-covered in beautifully flowing script.
Etiquette Man| 8.29.09 @ 12:01PM
The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter. . . . Children . . . no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs and tyrannize their teachers.
--(Attributed to) Socrates
james j wilson| 8.29.09 @ 12:22PM
It is unfortunate that Ruffles, in generating these questions, in herself provokes no answers .
Sick cultures show a complex of symptoms., but a dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters.
A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant that a riot--Heinlein
The evils produced by extreme equality become apparent only gradually; little by little they creep into the heart of society; they are noticed every now and again so that, when they are at their most disturbing, habit has already nullified their effect-Tocqueville
Polemicscat | 8.29.09 @ 5:31PM
Rallies and demonstrations are not places for reasoned discussion of governmental policy. It wasn't in 1968 when it was the main tactic of the left. It was encouraged then by the always-left- leaning media. Today, the right has learned that having public demonstrations is the only way to make objections heard when the left still controls the media.
The Founding Fathers could be more literate and reasonable when they disagreed with each other because, for one thing, there were fewer people (and a smaller percentage of the population) involved in politics.
If anyone wants to get away from rudeness, the only place to find good manners is in the nation's South. But there it is disappearing as rude people from the north settle there.
Alan Brooks| 8.29.09 @ 11:34PM
no, you're romaticizing the South. I spent a dozen suumers there (near Asheville, NC, which is a choice city), and though many dignified Robert E. Lee- types live in the South, they have always been in the minority. You don't think the South is heaven on earth, do you?
Romanticization is just fine for rightwingers-- but not for solid conservatives. Nothing wrong with being rightwing, but I grew up in a squishylib family and am exclusively interested in solid conservatism.
BTW, Rudeness IS acceptable in small doses-- cruel to be kind in the right measure.
A. Brooks| 8.29.09 @ 11:36PM
wait, that is summers, not 'suumers'-- this isn't Finland.
and to hell with chen and his footwaer blurbs.
Johnny Knuckles| 8.30.09 @ 8:05AM
"Knees, backsides and hand-bags took swipes at me as people rushed towards the empty seats in my row with nary an "excuse me" being uttered."
What are you doing sitting at the aisle end of the row with empty seats in the middle? Maybe all those bumpity folks thought you were terribly rude for blocking the row of empty seats. For shame!
Michael L. Hauswchild| 8.30.09 @ 8:29AM
"thought laws don't hold a torch to manners:"
An armed society is a polite society. (See Old Texan.)
Grzmlyk| 8.30.09 @ 2:44PM
I believe the entitlement mentality has had a corrosive effect on civility. It bred our lovely gangsta' culture and the whole concept that the point of life is simply to "get paid" - gratification of the self above and at the expense of other human beings, detached from outdated concepts like mutual benefit and rightfully-earned desserts (and reflected as well in the credit-card culture that continues to erode our financial well-being).
The welfare state has fostered a zero-sum mentality to things both material and spiritual. Not coincidentally, this is the opposite of what the great "social justice" movement (i.e., "from each according to his needs. . .") pretends to facilitate.
While rudeness has certainly existed from time immemorial, we have now institutionalized it and, through white guilt, political correctness and the diminution of the expectation of civlity, we actively encourage it - in no small measure thanks to the entitelement mentality.
As just one of myriad examples, look at the way we sexualize women today (thanks, women's lib!). We - and, too often they - glory in their utter, crass objectification. We sexualize kids at an ever-younger age, and the raunchy pornification of mainstream society is accepted with nary a wimper (I have no doubt that we are about to witness the erstwhile squeaky-clean Miley Cyrus go the "Skank" route as she embarks on the next phase of her career - because that's where the money is for young female pop stars).
A glance at some of the Internet's never-ending supply of porn sites is monumentally disturbing - not just because porn is now so prevalent and easy to access, unsettling as that is, nor because porn has, despite its assimilation into middle-class mores, always been about exploitation and the basest of human instincts.
No, there is something even more upsetting on display. In its neverending quest to push the sensationalist envelope, porn has become about something entirely removed from the old fashioned voyeristic thrill of watching two (or more) people "do it."
Indeed, the content can hardly be classified as sexual at all anymore. It's more akin to what it must have been like to watch circus geeks of old: Insensitive, dehumanized, non-descript people abusing themselves and each other in anonymous and ever-escalating ways that have nothing whatsoever to do with even the pretense of mutual pleasure. They are in fact lone (and ultimately lonely) acts of simulated self-gratification through the abuse of other random bodies or body parts - preferably strangers'.
What comes through most is a disturbing brutality that is painful to watch - along with the depressing awareness that so many performers are so willing to subject themselves and others to increasingly horrifying acts that are the exact opposite of what true sex is.
And there seems to be no end to the supply of these human beings willing and even proud to abase themselves in this way.
Likewise, there seems to be no bottom to the pit of human degradation into which so many are now so willing to plunge - or at least watch others plunge.
Ironic as it sounds, you know a culture's really gone to when its pornography glorifies sadism above all else.
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Dave Lincoln| 8.30.09 @ 11:11PM
"America's rudeness is as nothing compared to its tastelessness. "
Yeah, Chen, the kind of tastelessness that makes someone spam a political opinion web site with shoe ads every damn day? I'll show you rudeness, Chen; sell me just one of your knock-off shoes for 5 RMB, and I'll stick it up your Chink ass!
Now that's rudeness!
BTW, Mirilia, you may think the Oriental people are not rude (and in many ways they are indeed more polite), but try waiting in line to get on a bus in China or onto a subway in Tokyo. You can explain to all the people in front of you that they are not supposed to cut ;-) I wish you all the lucky in the world, as they might say.
Your experience is from a $2,000 ticket in coach or a $6,000 ticket in business class on an Asian-owned airline. Do you call that enough experience to make you an expert on politeness of peoples of the world? Of course, they're going to be real nice to you at 2 or 6 K. I would too. Bidness is bidness.
Larry Disney| 8.31.09 @ 12:16AM
There are no consequences for bad or rude behavior. Not so many years ago rudeness would elicit a rebuke at the least, a poke in the nose was not unheard of. A few centuries ago a duel was not out of the question. People are polite when the alternative might get them killed, smacked or humiliated. Now we just hunker down and tolerate what would previously have been intolerable.
pmcronin| 8.31.09 @ 5:21PM
I haven't been on an airplane in several years, and I don't remember ever flying JAL, but I've flown on Asian and American owned air lines. I've got to say that the mob scenes of non-westerners at Narita to board the bus at the gate to get to the aircraft to the 3rd World is anything but polite, and more closely resembles a "Survival of the Fittest" mentality. I've generally observed much more order and courtesy at American airports; Tokyo always reminded me of an early a.m. crowd outside a Walmart awaiting the opening for the Black Friday Super Sale.
Firelite | 8.31.09 @ 5:31PM
I listen to a talk show host in Houston who clowns Queen Sheila almost daily. He creates these hilarious parodies about her that he plays on his show. Everybody I know listens to them and forwards the link for others to hear. They are friggin awesome.
I don’t know how long he will keep them up, but you can hear them by going to: http://www.ktrh.com/pages/michaelberry.html
Funny stuff. We here in Houston have been watching Sheila and her silliness for years. You’re only now finding out how bad she can be.
Jimmy Carter| 8.31.09 @ 8:07PM
I'm surprised noone has mentioned breeding children with overinflated egos by telling them to have self-esteem when they have accomplished absolutely nothing to earn it; creating all these people that think they are the most important person in the world.
Larry Disney| 9.1.09 @ 12:48AM
Hey Jimmy, It seems to have worked for Obama.
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