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.