Manners

Sarah Hoyt’s got a “blast from the past” post up about manners, and I really do think it’s worth talking about manners and social signaling. Recently there’s been some chortling over how one of the SJW crowd has gotten in hot water with their little tribe for using their offensive “manners of destruction” on the “wrong” targets – emotional abuse and internet harassment is only for people outside the SJW tribe, doncha know. For those inside the tribe, a constant stream of sympathy and affirmation is required. (Which is why honest folk despise SJWs.)

It reminds me a little of the song “Rude” – in which, to all appearances, “rude” just means “not giving me what I want.” But when people aren’t taught manners, what else can “rude” mean but that?

I ran into a circumstance when I was running a guild in a fairly intense cell phone game, where one of the players reliably offended others; but he was a decent player otherwise, so he got a lot of leniency from me. After several months I noticed a pattern – he’d get really aggressive and combative whenever new people showed up. With those of us who’d been around a while, he’d be fairly “normal” – for gamers, that is. Eventually I had to have a bit of a talk (text chat session) with him over it – and I got the distinct impression that he had no idea why he was offending people. Nobody’d taught him manners. He was trolling by accident, and permanently damaging his relationships with guildmates because he didn’t realize that his behavior was crossing a line.

I’ve said before that My Fair Lady ought to be required viewing for every student in school, to illustrate why using manners is so important. Our classes aren’t as rigid as England’s, but they definitely still exist! The culture that prizes “authenticity” in ghetto youth is doing those kids irreparable harm by not teaching them to behave with all the social cues of the “privileged.” Poll any public school you like – “fitting in” is going to be a HUGE concern for the children and young adults above kindergarten (and probably in kindergarten, too). Peer pressure can lead to poor decisions, but inculcating good manners in children goes a long way towards helping people get along better with each other.

World peace is a pipe dream, and “understanding” is not the cure for every conflict, but some conflict really is just misunderstanding manners. Increase the prevalence of good manners, and I’d bet that at least half the complaints of “sexism” and “racism” would simply vanish. Because a lot of the complaints that people today make about “bigotry” boil down to “somebody was rude to me!” And that’s not sexism or racism or microaggression – that’s just bad manners. The solution isn’t more sensitivity training or crusades to change society – it’s to speak to people one-on-one, using good manners to smooth over ruffled feathers.

And let me tell you, if we had better “road manners” around here, I bet the hideous traffic would be a bit more bearable!