Courtesy Versus Politeness

Rough courtesy is better than politeness.  Of course I should give definitions for such things, but I am trusting my audience to know what I mean immediately.  To desire to treat others as well as possible even under duress is better than knowing cultural rules which are often outdated and artificial. The rules were put in place to teach courtesy, mostly to the young but also as a reminder to adults. This is similar to the law versus the spirit in the Bible. Galatians 3:24-25

²⁴ In fact, the Law was to be our teacher until Christ came. Then we could have faith and be acceptable to God. ²⁵ But once a person has learned to have faith, there is no more need to have the Law as a teacher.

This is echoed two chapters later in Galatians 5:22-23

 ²² But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith,

²³ Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law.

Judith Martin, better known as Miss Manners, said that trying to make it comfortable for your family at your wedding, with all its divorces and enmities and people not speaking to each other, was better than knowing how many forks should be put out with the dinner. This is very obviously true, but sometimes it needs to be stated with such contrast in order to drive the point home. We have all heard people use politeness as a weapon to shame others and look down on them, affecting a tone of politeness which fools no one to show your superiority. We have also, if we are honest, heard that tone of voice escape our lips as well. We try to strangle such things in their cradles.

Don't get me wrong.  That is sometimes the best politeness that can be managed when a woman tries to confront the father who molested her as a child, or a man the ex-wife who intentionally bankrupted him and falsely accused him of abusing the children. We rely on the rules at such times because we have nothing we can bring forth from our own kindness. But for the ordinary offense of the day we run the risk of making things worse with "politeness" rather than courtesy.

Compare this to the recent post about polyamory on the basis of Scott Alexander's comments. The people who have good relationships do not think in terms of rules, they think in terms of making the other person happy, which buries rules. We put rules in place for the emergencies, the strenuous situations, or when we have broken so many things around us that we can only revert to the simplest attempts to learn a little something about how to treat others. On the Ethan Strauss podcast there is a discussion of the recent Emily Gould  essay on divorce from The Cut, which reportedly excited a great deal of impolite argument between readers of that sort of essay. 

I was struck first with where she went for advice: recent writers about marriage and divorce and self-fulfillment and how it all fits in to political questions, all women, I think, who were near her age when they dispensed this wisdom, all quite literary, and all quite concerned with how their feelings about themselves and their roles and their husbands and their lot and well, their feelings about everything. They are all in anguish over the same few questions.  I thought of GK Chesterton's point in Orthodoxy about the paranoid's theories, that it

explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way. I mean that if you or I were dealing with a mind that was growing morbid, we should be chiefly concerned not so much to give it arguments as to give it air, to convince it that there was something cleaner and cooler outside the suffocation of a single argument.

Absent were any voices from the past, male or female. If we are seeking to have a multiculturalist stance, the books she read are not only not from other cultures, they are not even from other American subcultures, or sub-subcultures*. These women are all from the same pajama party. A convention of hairdressers shows more diversity.

Yet there is a deeper problem, and I sincerely don't know if it is one of training, of inborn personality, or of her temporary mental health status.  I have moments of believing any of the three. Yet we don't go into relationships to meet our own needs but to meet the needs of another, and thus, become adult, and grown, and who we were meant to be. This is obviously an ideal even the best of us cannot quite reach even on our best days. We are made of flesh and blood and we cannot carry on without some emotional fuel of encouragement. Still, we know the goal. When you have children their needs become more important than yours. When you are hurting someone else you have to step back and seriously consider whether it is you who are the problem. (It might not be. But the caution flag is up and the race should slow down.) 

Did no one tell her this as a child? Do none of her friends have the courage to take her in line and say "You have to hang on to the honor of this sacrifice as best you can.  I can hold your hand, but I cannot take this burden from you." Has she never seen a book in which the principals suffer much for others, and this is not considered a one-time exception to be paid for in the next quarter, but an acceptance that this is simply Real Life, with its own joys? She seems to still be bound by "I coulda been a contender," but this is somehow lost because of marriage. The people she reads seem to think the same.

Duty and joy can be opposed, but sometimes they are the same thing. To have done what you should at all costs has a joy of its own.  Not always.  Tomorrow you may find resentments creeping in again. Yet there it is.

*Which is one of the reasons why I think the expressions of multiculturalism are just a crock, however lofty the words sound. The people who insist on them the most are those who practice them the least. They don't mean it.