compassion, respect and manners

Be warned.  I am hopping onto my soap box.

I have seen two interviews in the past couple of weeks with people who were able to put in more eloquent language the very things which have stirred me most in recent months.  They are things that can quite easily get my blood to boiling.

One of them is how people have such little respect for other people these days.  Boy, do I sound old?  Alexander McCall Smith was recently in Australia to speak at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas.  His idea was, manners.  Jennifer Byrne interviewed him (can be watched here) and this is part of what he had to say - I would have given a standng ovation if I was present!

"...I have for a long time made that particular point in the books, particularly I suppose in the Isabel Dalhousie books where I talk about the nature of community and obligation. Isabel is a philosopher and she goes into these issues - obligation to one's fellow citizens. I have witnessed, I think, as probably most of us have, a curious development in society of, I suppose, the sort of casual rudeness and lack of concern for the feelings of others - a certain selfishness and greed, etc. You can come up with various descriptions of it - which worried me. Also, I was worried by the increasing fascination with violence. .. Then came the London riots, which really, really brought this home dramatically, in that there had been political discussion in the UK prior to that. People were talking about the broken society. They tended to be mocked by others when they talked about the broken society. Others said, 'Well, here you go again and moaning about how things were going to the dogs.' Then, of course, this extraordinary manifestation of extreme social dysfunction became apparent - manifested itself. I think the point about my talk at the Opera House really was how we need ask ourselves certain questions about that and say, 'What has gone wrong? Why have we got people who seem to be willing to behave in this way, many thousands of them?'

... [Manners] can be a shibboleth for entry into particular classes of society or a group. I agree with you on that in that respect, but many other manners are really directed towards the feelings of others and showing basic respect for other people, so something as simple as asking the other person to go through the door before you go through is quite nice, or helping somebody to get their bag down from the overhead storage bin in an aeroplane, or as simple as not looking irritated while they do that. Have you noticed that... ..how people can look so cross and irritated with other people when they're doing simple things? So manners are actually a really very important form of social lubricant. We're almost in the area of the zero-tolerance argument here. Remember, with zero-tolerance in relation to crime they said we'll stop people committing small street crimes and then you'll stop the major stuff. That does appear to have worked. There's a lot of evidence of the success of that. in those American cities where they've actually applied it. There's hard evidence that you actually reduce the risk to people in walking about the streets in safety if you adopt that particular approach. Manners are the small things - the small building blocks for a general attitude of respect and consideration for other people. So if you don't teach children these rather formal automatic manners, then I think it may be more difficult for them to grasp the bigger issues later on - the bigger issues about respect for others. And I remember as we all do when bringing up children, right at the beginning you sound like a long-playing record going on. 'What do you say? What's the magic word? Where's the thank you?' That sort of thing. We have to do that. And it's a form of fundamental socialisation. The problem seems to me that a lot of that has been somewhat pushed to the side because of pressure on parents, perhaps. They've got less time. Everybody's having to work harder, and therefore they have less time. The fact that people aren't having meals with their children - that's a rather disappointing development that if you look at the figures for the number of families that ever eat together, in a formal way, it's rather sad. Now, that again is a... Eating with the other person is a very fundamental form of social communication. It's a recognition of the humanity of the other. It's a fundamental social ritual which we're allowing to be eroded by the pressures of modern life. Is that making us lonelier as people? I suspect it is. I suspect we're becoming far more isolated and we sit there with our computers and iPhones, our electronic gizmos and we're losing the ability to talk to people. Look at what's happening to conversation. How many good conversations do you get on an aeroplane these days?

...I remember talking to people on aeroplanes. You don't want to talk the whole way. but you certainly want to say a few things, after all, you're sitting next to another human being for eight hours or nine hours or whatever it is. If it's a long flight, you sit next to another human being and you aren't acknowledging the humanity of that other person. You know nothing about them. Now, I think that is impoverishing us. I think that's really sad."

I am tired of materialism, keeping up with the Joneses, the attitude of  walking over people to get what you want first...

Then last week on Compass Geraldine Dogue spoke to another author, Christos Tsiolkas and in a closing comment when asked what he thought an ideal Australia would look like, he said:

"It would certainly be an Australia that would be much more thankful. I'm going to speak really plainly: You know what I would say, I would say, "Stop bloody whinging. Stop complaining. Stop wanting more. Stop thinking it's all about the ... plasma screen and stop thinking that a few thousand boat people is going to do anything to change what you have." I will say that's what I would want for Australia.

I think we have become, as I said really at the beginning, we have lost kindness. You know, that's [my] ultimate verdict..."

To me, these two people hit the nail on the head regarding all that infuriates me about our society.  I just had to get it down here.  For the record.