The Loss of Good Manners

- and good sense

(For my podcast of my essay, click on the embedded file below):

The other day I quite literally ran into a teenager (or rather the teenager ran into me) at our local grocery store.

Predictably, the teenager was looking down on her phone and using a combination of short, skipping, hopping steps and a fast walk to charge down the aisle, weaving between shopping carts and human beings, oblivious of the living, breathing world immediately beyond her phone. Her fingers were moving furiously across the phone which seemed to survive the very hard thrust of her fingers - and she was grimacing to herself.

I have only myself to blame, perhaps, since on that day (of all days), I decided to forgo the ubiquitous luxury of a shopping cart and walk into the grocery store at a brisk pace, to pick up just the bananas we needed. Never again will I venture forth into any grocery store without the protective shield of a shopping cart!

I did see the teenager dodging multiple carts, her curls bouncing into her eyes whilst she expertly held the curls back with intermittent swipes of one of her busy hands. For a brief moment however, no longer than the proverbial blinking of the eye, my gaze was averted from this charging bull (or cow). And BAM! Her phone and then her shoulder rammed into my right side.

“I’m sorry” I said through the pain, as she whizzed past. She did a half turn (as if in a waltz), barely looked up - and whirled past me, silent as a post, to the waiting gaggle of her friends (who seemed to welcome her by saying “no way,” “no way” “no way” again and again).  I marvelled at her multitasking skills - not only was she able to dodge multiple objects on her way to me, she could text, hold back her curls and ram into me, all within a few seconds!

I try never to say things like - “when I was your age;” or, “you have no idea what it was like when I was young;” or, “your generation needs everything handed to them;” etc. etc. I am willing to admit that this generation is in fact better than my own, in such things as their willingness to accept the disabled into their inner circles, to be colour blind in their acceptance of other human beings (and to display these magnificent virtues without fanfare and with a certain agnostic nonchalance).

But the loss of good manners is surely something I am entitled to comment on - since every day, I see the deleterious and decaying influence of the collective loss of one of our Christian civilization’s greatest gifts to the world.

It is not that other great civilizations are not good mannered. No doubt they would argue that manners like beauty lives in the eyes of the beholder. But the teaching of good manners as an institution of good upbringing in our homes was a well drilled exercise that started when we could barely walk and continued (with many corrections) until we were beyond the influence of our parents and elders. The institution of good manners in turn was built upon the values and ideas conveyed across the generations and centuries, in the pages of the New Testament.

I remember quite clearly when I was twelve or thirteen years old and my father and I hailed an elderly neighbour who was shuffling by slowly, in front of our home. “Hello Tom,” I said cheerfully - and immediately regretted it, as my father jerked my arm sharply down and hissed, “that is not Tom for you. That is Mr. Robertson!” Instinctively, I shouted out again, “Hello Mr. Robertson!” Mr. Robertson slowly turned and waved his hand - as if to acknowledge that he knew my father’s discipline and correction had been applied! What would my father have thought if he heard my sons refer my wife and I as “you guys!”

Even in the lawless North American wilderness which has been accurately portrayed in the Western motion pictures of the 1940s and 1950s, gentlemen routinely stood up when a lady entered the room; some even doffed their hats and hastily removed the pipes from their mouths and pointed them downward. As recently as when I was growing up (there I go again!), we would (unthinkingly) offer our seat on a full bus to a lady (young or old); the lady would smile, say “thank you,” and sit down on the seat we had vacated.

If women can do everything a man can do (as the feminists claim), they can stand in a crammed bus and jostle their way into a crowded train - or so the argument goes. It is not a good argument. Women undoubtedly do a great many things much better than we men do - but only a charlatan would insist that she can do such things as stand and hold her balance on a moving, swerving bus or train as well as men (and especially young men) can! The old novelists used the now unfashionable phrase, “the weaker sex” to portray difference, not weakness - they knew that without a certain chivalry displayed by men toward women, the world would be a much harsher place with fierce competition taking the place of graceful gentleness and consideration.

The young men amongst my readers should try good manners and chivalry the next time they have a chance - most women find these irresistible and are drawn toward the man who will defer to their womanhood and treat them with distinctive good manners, civility and respect. The feminists can continue to live in their make believe world of “equality” as the world (and the ability to conceive) marches past them.

Perhaps the fault lies in my own generation and its insistence that the “self” must be put first (i.e. before God and before other people). After all, it was the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s that preached the modern anthem of selfishness, “what about me?”

The great American missionary to India, E. Stanley Jones once illustrated the terrible consequences of putting the “self” in the centre of our lives, by pointing out that the middle letter of the world “sin” - is “I.”

The basis of the good manners that characterized our Christian civilization for hundreds of years was the insistence that we must put others ahead of ourselves. And that salvation for mankind lay in surrendering the self to a merciful God who gave Himself for us upon the Cross. If we do not rediscover this glorious heritage, we will continue the spiralling descent to savagery that has now seized the West.

After instructing us, “in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves. Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others,” St. Paul concludes this section of the epistle to the Phillipians by the example of Christ Himself, Who “being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross.”

Good manners and good sense go together, since we are conditioned to embrace kindness, gentleness, consideration and chivalry - and to recoil from rudeness, crassness, uncouthness and selfishness. The rediscovery of good manners must now be a civilizational enterprise that has urgent implications for the very survival of the Christian civilization we have long called our own.