January 10, 2006
You can safely bet on it...
Peter Burnett, writing about an academic study on "rudeness in the workplace:"
...The decline in public civility is a wonderful example of how hopeless modern rationalism can be as a tool for analyzing and regulating human behaviour. Everyone knows viscerally and experientially that public life is becoming increasingly mean and selfish, even threatening, but you can probably safely bet the mortgage a study like this will conclude:Posted by John Weidner at January 10, 2006 07:12 AM
A) there were a lot of rude people in the past and no one can really say for sure it’s getting worse;
B) those people who are rude are being mistreated in some way and are largely unconscious of their offensive behaviours. They will become paragons of politeness when they get their due or are counseled and educated;
C) punishment and sanctions are “inappropriate” because there are no objective standards of what is or isn’t rude, and, besides, there are really no victims, and;
D) Those promoting civility must take great care not to trample on important political freedoms like the right to be menacing and vulgar or socially desirable goals like having every employee express himself with total, unhypocritical honesty.
But not even Las Vegas would offer long odds it will conclude civilized behaviour rests on the sublimation of natural instincts for the good of others and that a society guided by a libertarian, secular ethos will gradually work its way back to inchoate resentments, tribal suspicion and hair-trigger defensiveness....
Very germane and valid. I'm not sure I want to say "thanks", but thanks.
Posted by: j_anne at January 10, 2006 11:20 AMJohn,
I have to take Burnett to task for attributing rudeness to a "libertarian, secular ethos". It has nothing to do with politics or religion and *everything* to do with upbringing. My family isn't particularly religious, and our politics weren't particularly authoritarian, beyond Dad's unquestioned authority as The Boss (in most things, anyway). But we learned early on the need for courtesy amongst ourselves and with others.
It's as Robert Heinlein wrote. (I wish I could remember the quote.) Heinlein likened human society to a machine. Young people, with their tendency to not use little courtesies like "please" and "thank you", throw sand into the gears of a machine that doesn't work very well even in the best of times.
Burnett finds fault (and rightly so) with modern-day political correctness and the consequent failure to blame people for their own bad conduct. But he isn't much better than the people he skewers, because Burnett won't blame people either-- namely, the PARENTS of the rude. Nope, it's all due to a pernicious zeitgeist, fostered by those nasty libertarians (of which I am one) and those godless secularists.
What a cop-out.
Posted by: Hale Adams at January 10, 2006 11:47 AMInteresting post - and well written as always! You should really go and read Lynne Truss' latest book "Talk to the hand". More here:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1592401716/qid=1136935757/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/103-5018023-5560640?s=books&v=glance&n=283155.
Do it NOW and enjoy!
Oh, and please keep up the excellent work with your blog!
Best regards
Hale, Burnett isn't attributing rudeness to anything, he's writing about the haplessness of rationalism when it tries to analyze or define it.
Try it yourself, try to define "rudeness" in some rational objective way that doesn't require subjective judgments. You can't do it, not using those tools. Your parents could not have done it either, but they had no difficulty teaching you to be polite. They just did it.
There are LOTS of thing like that. A famous example is the statement about pornography: "I can't define it, but I know it when I see it."
These things are worth worrying about now, because bureaucratic rationalism is pushing into more and more areas, taking things that people have been "just doing" for millennia, and making them subject to rules, laws and lawsuits. and gumming up life in frightful ways.
On the same subject, If you haven't read it, you might like this essay on hidden law by Jonathan Rauch...
Posted by: John Weidner at January 10, 2006 05:01 PMJD, I'll take a look at Talk to the Hand. Thanks, I loved Eats, Shoots & Leaves...
Posted by: John Weidner at January 11, 2006 07:21 AM
