Manners
Rudeness always involves a loss of dignity
I got to thinking about manners on a recent and very hot summer walk in Manhattan. I was sneezed on, coughed on, harassed by a guy riding a Citi Bike (courageous), and had my arm grabbed by a woman I’d never met who apparently needed to tell me Go Bears. (This last one was possibly my fault, as I was wearing a Cal hat. I wear it nearly every day of the summer, because I am, unfortunately, Irish. Did I invent wearing a baseball hat as a girl? Yes.)
I observed people cutting in front of the elderly in line and on the street, order coffee with their AirPods still in their ears, scream into their cell phones, scream at each other, treat a waiter with such appalling disrespect that my face turned hot, along with everyone else within earshot. You get it. You’ve probably experienced worse. If you think that’s just New York, it’s not. It’s everywhere. Go to San Francisco if you want to see people abandon all infrastructure and go Joker Mode.
Manners are important because they concern all people and their relations to one another. They are essential to a civilized life: they have practical value in terms of establishing a basic standard with which to treat one another, aesthetic value in that they make life altogether more pleasant and pleasurable, and great civic value in that good manners impose a certain consideration for others. Manners demand we discipline ourselves for others and put their needs first. “The manners make the man.” Your behavior is, after all, you.
I don’t know where manners went, but I don’t think they are valued highly in society anymore. We care more about popularity, appearance, and relatability. One could argue that a lack of manners is what’s valued now: “You don’t owe anyone anything!” No, we do.
If I had to guess, I think the general disappearance of good manners has something to do with how we’ve been conditioned to view each other: as things, not people. We see other people as things that can get us things. Maybe we have such little respect for one another because we have such little respect for ourselves. The commodification of the self, yada-yada-yada… Whenever an Osprey-backpacked finance bro loudly takes a phone call while in line at a coffee shop—or even better, while ordering—there’s a stunning cognitive dissonance on display: a total self-interest and an utter lack of self-awareness. How do people who think solely of themselves have no idea how they come off? The mind reels.
I leave you with this advice, written in 1948 by Millicent Fenwick, in which she explains the number one rule of etiquette:
“In all one’s relationships with those who are employed to give personal service, one must be more polite, more considerate, and more careful than in any others. This applies not only to one’s own employees, to waiters in restaurants and hotels, to stewards in clubs, but also to saleswomen and salesmen, to workers in beauty parlors, to telephone operators, elevator men, doormen, etc. All these people are employed to give service, and politeness toward them is the very essence of good manners. Rudeness always involves a loss of dignity, but rudeness to an employee is vulgar in the extreme. It implies that one is taking advantage of an economically superior position, counting on the fact that the employee may endanger his livelihood if he answers back.”
Put differently: the customer is not always right.