Can’t we be more civil?
B
Can’t we be more civil?
In the early 1960s, when we came to Toronto, a well known church leader, the late James R. Mutchmor, once said to me that the beauty of liberal democracy is revealed, simply and basically on the streets. He used an illustration: “When I see a young mother, with her child in a stroller, standing at a crosswalk, and every car and truck stops, so she can cross in full safety, I know what democracy means. One mother and child stopping ten vehicles.” I’m glad Dr. Mutchmor lived then, not now in Toronto, especially downtown, where a green light is no sure assurance you can cross safely. (Drivers turning, increasingly jump green lights, deliberately looking elsewhere to avoid eye contact with pedestrians with the right of way. (The police, in my observation, never intervene or probably can’t, given its split second nature.) All this, and other developments, have created new expressions: “road rage”; “looking out for number one.” And so on.
Scholars who study this matter – one being Prof. Jeff Casello of Waterloo University in Ontario – say we have enormous, often tragic issues to face, given urban developments and attitudes. (An aspect of Dr. Casello’s concern – he’s one of an emerging class of engineering specialists dealing with humanistic issues — will be a future subject of this blog.) For now, I venture an opinion that a major contributor to the issue of public rudeness is the decline of personal manners, the heart of which is consideration of others, which can only happen if we mix with others. I’m not thinking of Emily Post style etiquette: “place a fish knife between the dinner knife and the soup spoon if you have an oyster course…” I mean common courtesy in the office and classroom, on the street and highway, and for sure in the hockey arena. The House of Commons Question Period needs no comment but I’ll make one anyway: years ago, I knew one of the great Speakers of parliament. In his retirement, I commended him for his gifts as Speaker. He was a modest man, a Rhodes Scholar with impeccable manners I will never forget. He looked at me silently and softly replied: “But it was a different house back then.” We know. (Even press scrums were courteous.)
First why, as is widely observed, has courtesy declined? It’s too easy to blame it on assorted scapegoats: (“my workload is unbelievable!”) television: (“children’s TV is so dumb”) or school: (“the teachers don’t set an example”). On and on. These may not be totally irrelevant but, at least to me, aren’t the heart of the issue. If we look seriously we may find that as a society, we don’t truly know each other, meaning even those we relate to regularly: neighbors in the elevator, employees at the plant, students in the hallway, waiters in the café, cab drivers, and so on. Sometimes – certainly where I live — we don’t bother speaking, or when we do it can be the most cursory, almost deliberately chilly. In reply to the taxi driver’s request it’s usually: “Downtown, Jarvis St. 375.” That’s it. A professor in communication at Toronto’s York University, Dalton Kehoe, deals with this in a book called, Communication in Everyday Life. (Available from Amazon.com.) His thesis is in the title of one passage: The Power of Ordinary Talk. “It’s not the content of what one person says,” he writes, “it’s what the other person says next.” He uses a basic example, calling it ‘the connective power of ‘Please pass the ketchup.’ That simple request should obviously be met by polite response. It sometimes isn’t. As he says: “Unrequited bids come in two forms: the ‘turning against’ bid, mean and rude,(‘Get your own ketchup…’), or the even more damaging ‘turning away’ bid where the other ignores the bid and simply doesn’t bother replying.” (The latter, so cold, so haughty, is in my view almost common in today’s culture.)
Manners have long varied, but began to erode more decidedly in the 1960s, the era when many good things happened along with some less good things. One story of the latter must do: in the mid 1960s, my work as a journalist took me to Moscow in the depth of the so-called Cold War. I traveled here and there — to Central Asia, even Siberia. But over about six weeks, Moscow and its beautiful and fabled Metropole Hotel became home far from home. One afternoon, I returned from Bukhara, in Central Asia, (thought by many to be the world’s oldest Jewish community) and walked through the lobby. I saw something I’ve never forgotten: a young visitor — seated in the lobby, wearing cowboy boots -–- had stretched out and rested his booted feet atop a beautifully marbled and probably historic, antique table. Don’t ask what country he was from. My point is that his public manners were demonstrably rude, probably offensive to local people, and may, who knows, have had intangible consequence especially given tensions of the Cold War. They were also but one reflection of the decline of manners that became a broader trend.
In Canada, one example, I’m bound to mention, even with the Leafs in recently sad days: Mr. Cherry of CBC sports fame. To be fair he is, to me, not first of all a deliberately rude commentator. He’s a marketer who knows his market. Years ago, I said a bit hastily, to a legendary NHL player — an intellectual whose father was a good friend: “Why has the CBC got that dimwit on national TV?” He looked at me and said quite quickly: “He is definitely not a dimwit.” Of course I do know. He’s a shrewd marketer who knows exactly what he’s doing. The hockey culture after all no longer celebrates civility. And civility comes from decent manners, which always include moderation, restraint. But what can we expect from today’s NHL when, as one example, a former team general manager said that in looking for potential players he included this criterion: “How he is in the fights?” Can anyone imagine Syl Apps or Milt Schmidt thinking that way? I know, I know, that was then, thereby bearing out my contention that civility on the ice has descended to acceptance, in fact affirmation, of incivility. Don Cherry affirmed it with a pithy observation: “Nobody leaves when the fights begin.” As I write, the papers report that the family of a late “enforcer” New York Ranger Derek Boogaard, is suing the NHL in the wake of his death from the chronic traumatic encephalopathy he developed because of the fights Mr. Cherry affirms. Boogaard was not a player of special stature. “He wanted to be in the NHL,” writes a National Post editorialist today, “and if he could get there only by punching out everyone who stood in his way, he’d do that.” I guess it’s just the cost of the kind of hockey Mr. Cherry cheers for both the NHL and, by implication, players who aspire to get there.
By the way, not to go on, but those of you taking church or synagogue attendance seriously, please remember that Mr. Cherry is with you. He’s a practicing Christian in his place virtually every Sunday. Please! Will the many clergy readers of this blog — including a certain distinguished Rhodes Scholar — please calm down and stop throwing those tomatoes at this screen? After all, the test of civility can be the ability to put up with lack of civility. In some cases.
0000000000000
I regret the incident of early May when my blog was hacked and recipients were beseeched to send a poseur a few thousand dollars to get me home, supposedly from a place I have never been, the Ukraine. I’m grateful to my daughter, Andrea, a radio marketing executive, who knows more than I about computer technology. She spent a fair bit of time on the line with AOL, repairing things, altering others, to assure as much as possible the blog’s security both for the one who writes and the ones who receive. Thanks to each of you for your concern and understanding.
30
May 14, 2013