Are people ruder than they used to be?
Or are we just meeting more rude people?
As a young westerner visiting Hong Kong for the first time I was forewarned that the quaint British art of queuing a respectful distance from the punter in front of you was a sure way of never getting what you were after. Leave more than a few inches in front of you and, in the blink of an eye, some four-foot tall octogenarian oriental would be filling it.
Returning to a daily rail commute in freezing England this week, a somewhat older PPW was stricken with a sudden sense of déjà vu while waiting to board his train home. The foot or so of space between me and the guy in front was suddenly occupied. No octogenarian oriental this, but a smartly dressed middle-aged businesswoman who seemed to regard simply pushing her way in as entirely de rigueur.
I always find public transport an excellent barometer of public manners and moods. It’s probably due to my frequent breaks and location changes; shifting standards you wouldn’t necessarily notice from day to day are far more obvious after a year or two apart.
Downwardly mobile
You hear it everywhere and said in every possible way – people are so much ruder than they used to be, no one has any manners anymore, society is going to hell in a hand-basket.
I think the truth is a little more involved.
Geographically mobile
When I was growing up, my life and that of my family and friends extended little more than a few miles from home. We shopped on the corner or in the local town centre, I went to school less than a mile away, both my Mum and Dad worked less than 10 minutes walk from home, and when I started my first job I did too. Apart from day trips and holidays few of us had cause to venture further.
Not so for me today, nor indeed for many of us. Shopping has become an event that draws us to mega-malls dozens of miles away. Our daily commute can often be measured in hours rather than minutes as good jobs become more centralised and good homes move further and further away. I probably cover more miles in a typical week than my father covered in a typical year.
Our behaviour has a symbiotic relationship with our communities. We tend to choose communities to live in where we feel at home and we ourselves fit in, and the mores of our communities change our behaviour as we endeavour to fit in and be at home in them. The amount of time we spend in that little microcosm of the like-minded is evaporating in modern society.
And as aspects of our social and professional lives centralise around farther flung locations so do the lives of others. Those city-centre jobs and out-of-town mega-malls draw people from all walks of life, not just our own.
Antisocially mobile
Not only are more of us are travelling the same roads, we’re increasingly heading for the same destinations too.
Gently descending
Arguments to support there being a breakdown of manners in society are stacked a mile high; the breakdown of communities, the breakdown of families, the evaporation of religion and the expansion of selfism and self-absorption.
It’s hard to argue that standards of behaviour in society aren’t disappearing down the drain, but while there are many influences on how each of us behaves surely the biggest remains our upbringing? And surely it takes generations for that to significantly change?
The truth is that I meet plenty of respectful and polite people on my travels who are surely raising their families to behave in just same way. And I remember plenty of rude ones from my childhood too.
Society may look like it’s dropping down the shit-pan. Personally I think it’s only gliding there.