Delphic Maxim 97: Be courteous
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.
97. Be courteous
There have been a lot of maxims in which we’ve reflected on politeness, including having respect for suppliants, restraining the tongue, and down-looking no one. Each of these seems to refer to situations where we put ourselves in a position of superiority — these maxims are humbling and aim to flatten social hierarchies to some degree. And restraining the tongue is about holding back from our more impulsive, rude impulses. Today’s maxim is a little more active I suppose: it isn’t about keeping rude behaviour under control, and more about how we relate to people around us in a productive way.
I’ve never been able to understand rudeness (or discourteousness). Politeness and courtesy are deeply ingrained into my character — and I don’t think that’s unique to me. Most cultures have a code of courtesy that helps to structure social relations. In Australia it seems to be heavily inflected with our Britishness — we tend to hold back from taking the last item of food from a shared plate, checking if anybody else wants it. We say please and thank you, we apologise when we inconvenience someone. We ask people how their day is, and we generally make an effort to be polite to the people serving us in retail stores.
Courtesy is a kind of oil that lubricates our interactions with people. It makes life run smoother, rather than being purely transactional and jarring. When we don’t display courtesy, people tend to feel alienated and hostile — engaging in idle chit chat and saying thank you helps relax people, it smooths over the unnatural dynamics that underpin our social interactions.
My friends and I can be incredibly rude and vulgar to each other, and that’s because we understand through our friendship that there’s a base-level of respect and love that allows us to drop the pretences of courtesy. That doesn’t necessarily exist for most of us as we go about our communities. Human life today is marked by the sheer volume of people we are in contact with, far more than our biology has evolved to process. So we use culture to evolve a little further, and one of the mechanisms culture has created is politeness.
This is why it’s frustrating to see courtesy break down in online forums like Facebook and Twitter. Social media has restructured, for some people, the rules around social relations: the fact that our relationships with people are no longer mediated by physical presence — that people become abstract and remote on the web — leads to more easy rudeness. Sometimes we need to attend more firmly to our courtesy in online spaces, because it doesn’t come as easily as in person.
And courtesy is crucial in the space of work. Work is an alienating experience. Most of the time it is something that we are doing to make a living, not because it speaks to our souls (not for most people, anyway: there are a few lucky ones). Because so many hours of a person’s day are given over to activities that aren’t as affirming and liberating as our leisure time, it is super important to treat people during those hours with courtesy. I think of the many years I spent working in retail, which is one of the most dehumanising and degrading experiences you can imagine. The system is structured to turn sales people into robots, and customers into sources of money — it is a cycle of deep alienation. At least with courtesy in the mix, there’s an acknowledgement that underneath that worker-customer dynamic, we are both human beings with rich social lives and private interests.
Courtesy and politeness are important: they smooth our social interactions, and they make the day just a tiny bit nicer for everyone around us.
