DrumsandWhistles has a great post on rudeness
Mommy and Daddy are missing a teaching opportunity to help their kids learn to dislike the choice a person makes without extending to the person making the choice. Instead they’re teaching Junior that it’s okay to be rude if the choice is something rejected by the majority. Manners aren’t a democracy. They’re what we do to make people feel more like people– people who matter.
There's a rising sense of rudeness (or the death of civility). I think it is linked to the idea that manners are somehow inauthentic.
On conversations in cyberspace, perhaps it is the facelessness that engenders rudeness. Suzette Haden Elgin maintains it is possible to disagree without being disagreeable.
Joan Ryan wrote:
We have become a nation of cranks and scolds, of people who leap at every opportunity to wag a finger, or flip one. Just below the surface of our pretty-normal selves burbles the soul of an old lady with a shotgun across her lap.
Maybe we need to learn how to deal with people we can't stand.
Dr. P. M Forni writes:
It is largely through having good manners that we put into everyday practice the Principle of Respect for Persons—the principle upon which ethical systems are built. It is through them that we become ethical agents. Civility and manners are kinds of goodness. As we act ethically, we transcend our Selves, but we also nurture our Selves. The quality of our own lives improves together with the quality of the lives we improve. Self-interest and altruism find a way to converge in the practice of civility. Kindness makes life better for those who give it and those who receive it.
We are not born civil. Civility is a code of behavior acquired by learning it from others and by constant practicing. For the sake of our communities and ourselves, let us teach, let us learn, and let us practice.
The Chronicle of Higher Education had an online colloquy on incivility in the classroom in 1998.
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