Civility

People here talk about the weather a lot.

You hear it everywhere—amongst the people gathered for coffee at the Dairy Queen, at the hardware store, at church, in the average phone conversation. The other day, as my wife and I were taking our son for a stroller ride around town, we passed a powerwalking middle-aged lady who, after the customary and sufficient exchange of “Hi”s, for some reason felt it necessary to call back to us over her shoulder from a significant distance back down the sidewalk to give her opinion of the fine weather.

It used to annoy me to no end, how people would comment on the weather that we could all see clearly enough without the play-by-play commentary. Then one day I realized that this is a farming-dependent region, and nearly everyone, no matter their current residence or means of making a living, was separated from an agrarian lifestyle by only a generation or two at most; therefore, the weather was indeed an issue of concern socially, and as such was certainly worth talking about. These days, I don’t mind a discussion of the weather, unless its purpose is solely to have something safe to say to someone with whom we have little relationship. I guess I’ve always been a little contrary.

Talking about the weather is just one example of those social conventions which we variably call courtesy, etiquette, or politeness. I’ve heard many anthropologists and sociologists explain social politeness as the way we interact with strangers to keep from killing them (although my murderous tendencies are aroused more by the banal application of the superficialities of politeness than by its complete absence). These conventions are intended to create or, at the least, mimic civility.

We used to have civility, in the deepest sense of the word (citizenship, belonging, a sense of being a part of a place and a people, from the Latin civis, “citizen”), simply by needing one another and living in community. This was generally the way of things since the dawn of band-level societies until mass-migration, mass-production, and mass-media converged during the Industrial Age, culminating in the mid-twentieth century in creating a truly mass culture. The dominant modi of “culture” have moved from the local and specific to the widespread and general. We now experience the social necessity of politeness, since we lack so much in familiarity.

It was due to and during this convergence of mass influences that we began our shift from being members of functioning communities to being members of the general public. The meta-shifts of the late Industrial Age—from agrarian to industrial, from rural to urban, from agriculture to agribusiness, from competent self-sufficiency to wage-earning dependency, from multi-generationalism to the “nuclear family”—brought about a situation in which hundreds of millions of people globally changed their living situations to such an extent, separating themselves from others to such a degree, that individualism has become our basic social principle. And a society of individuals can be said to experience communion in little else than jointly consuming “public goods”—air, water, place, information.

In our individuality, and without the strictures of interdependent community, we have gradually absconded from our personal responsibilities and interests, relinquishing them to ever-distant political bodies and impersonal purveyors of goods. Disenchanted and dispossessed, we became targets—individuality and dependency are profitable concepts. Consumer culture was born, and savvy profit-seekers have supplied us with automobiles, personal computers and DVD players, MP3 players, earbuds and cell phones, all those things which so clearly illustrate our isolation from all those other individuals surrounding us.

Now, as a society, we live individually or as nuclear families, needing 1) only those companies which provide us goods or services to consume—those that grow, transport, process, package, and sell us our food; those that saw and mill or synthetically produce the materials from which we build and furnish our homes; those that produce our energy sources (at tremendously high cost monetarily, environmentally, and socially), transport them directly to our homes (by way of an ubiquitous, monstrously ugly, dangerous and bothersome web of power and gas lines), and sell them to us (at unbelievably low cost for what they help us achieve); those that grow and mill or synthetically produce the fabrics from which other companies fashion the products with which we clothe ourselves; those that sell us the ability to “communicate” with those other individuals with whom we still share some modicum of relationship; those that produce and/or provide our means of transportation in our exceedingly travel-dependent systems of land use and municipal zoning; those that pay us wages for doing often demeaning work so that we can hopefully afford to buy the services and products of all these other companies—and 2) the paternalistic, multifarious, often duplicitous and unquestionably inefficient and wasteful government programs and legislation intended to “help” us achieve our goals or “protect” us in achieving them.

Thankfully, many people live outside of this paradigm, and I am grateful for them, and I hope they are appropriately grateful for their good fortune. However, this situation is the common social and economic paradigm of our time in the “developed” world, and this paradigm is so structurally engrained that except in local neighborhoods, VERY small towns, and institutional and religious communes, we no longer need the people we pass on the streets every day, and so we must create social conventions which keep us from doing them harm for the purpose of self-advancement.

I see dissatisfaction with and a backlash against this condition brewing in North American culture today. These have been brewing since the “Back to the Land” movement of nearly four decades ago. Unfortunately, that movement (along with the Hippie counterculture that partially gave birth to it) was a reactionary one, and its influence was significant but small. I fear reactionary “movements”, for a reaction cannot exist except in reference to another thing; move away from that thing and the ideals which brought about the reaction can be ambiguated, forgotten, or preyed upon. What I hope to come of this dissatisfaction is not some new movement fashioned out of the philosophies of self which dominate our current social situation but a thoroughgoing rediscovery of the necessity and pleasure of life in meaningful relationship with others.

When we belong with and to one another, perhaps we will be able and willing to trade our pleasantries and politeness for civility and consideration.

Maybe even talking about the weather will become a truly worthwhile activity.