The disappearance of good manners

Our practices of interpersonal dealings have not only suffered greatly during the pandemic. How do you greet each other these days? With a clenched fist or a firm handshake, a hug, even a kiss on the cheek, or would you prefer a brief, respectful bow? After all, it could be that you not only come with good wishes and intentions, but also bring in viruses and other germs.

So it's better to keep the maximum, because digital distance?

Online meetings further complicate etiquette. Camera and microphone on or off, leisure or business look, private or neutral screen ambience? Who knows, anything goes! Where values ​​and social norms lose their collective validity, a wide range of individual behavioral options inevitably arises.

However, these are not perceived as socially compatible in the same way. While some try not to annoy their fellow human beings in public space as little as possible, others talk non-stop and at room volume on their smartphones. The private is the public, and the intimate suddenly concerns us all. Indeed?

Every society faces the challenge of organizing social interaction with as little violence and tension as possible. Codified interpersonal manners are extremely helpful. They channel potential for aggression, minimize misunderstandings, demand ultimate affect control and, precisely because of their rigidity, lead to the dominance of rational discourses on the direct use of violence.

Manners and conventions ensure that even those who are supposedly stronger, smarter or more powerful have to hold back, since a defined catalog of behavior also applies to them. When using serviette, knife and fork, but also when using argument and counter-argument, we are all the same.

But this consensus can be revoked. Where one “feels” rather than thinks, where the purely subjective demands norms, where cultural imprints lose binding power and, generally speaking, the simple and spontaneous triumphs over the indirect, ambivalent and complex, that is where social rituals lose their validity and orientation function.

Then, and this can also be a personal goal in life, everyone is their own queen and everyone is their own king. Dialectically, the question is allowed: Is that still individual freedom or already a loss of civilization? Max Weber and Sigmund Freud already knew that social progress, especially in competitive economic systems, is bought with the willingness to make individual sacrifices. This is an accurate paraphrase of the performance principle. It can erode at any time.

Clumsyness, a lack of differentiation and a lack of consideration are also legitimate forms of interpersonal dealings. This has long since manifested itself in everyday life. Music is generally loud, everyone is on first terms with everyone, in road traffic everyone is the only road user, whether pedestrian, cyclist or car driver. A considerate approach, however, presupposes being able to relativize one's own values, beliefs and behavior and, wherever this seems opportune, to withdraw.

For example, just keep your mouth shut when you have nothing to say. Or: to let someone go first. Or: to take the trouble to accept a point of view other than one's own. Talk shows here demonstrate the complete opposite.

As the sociologist Norbert Elias recognized, politeness is an atavism of aristocratic societies, but to this day it means the opposite of ignorance. Being able to behave simply means recognizing and acknowledging what is different and deviant, but at the same time looking for a connecting level.

Especially in a globalized world, in which contradictory views are the rule rather than the exception, this is not least a political virtue. Without cultural empathy, you can't get any further in times of globalization.

So politeness does not mean a lack of assertiveness, aversion to conflict or self-abandonment, but interested attention, intellectual imagination and, above all, self-control. It's exhausting, nerve-wracking and sometimes frustrating. But it is simply necessary unless one is striving for completely leveled conditions.

Especially the control of affect and drives does not seem very popular at the moment. Is there a higher authority than one's own ego and its feelings, preferences and forms of expression? Yes, there are, they are the internalized values ​​of a traditional form of civilization that calls itself European and enlightened.

The concept of politeness—in short, politeness—is itself a Renaissance legacy. Baldassare Castiglione describes the polite people as "pleasant and amiable", and this can be linked. They are noble traits that few people are sure to possess. Instead, we all know plenty of loudmouths, pukeheads and dislikes. It cannot be ruled out that we ourselves will be perceived in the same way!

However, manners and courtesy rituals are intended to prevent socially destructive characteristics from dominating public space. Only those who find and maintain the right balance between closeness and distance will be able to assume a position that is recognized by all sides in social interaction.

Confidentiality is just as misplaced as aloofness. The basic attitude of the polite person is always the same: "It is possible that you are right. That's why I listen to you carefully and try to understand you.” So it's not about love, friendship or open-heartedness, but quite explicitly about a distance that can be eliminated in principle. Partnership is the equivalent of politeness.

Rational manners always run the risk of being perceived as sober, cold and calculating. Eye contact, welcoming gestures and sometimes even a smile can help. In interpersonal dealings, politeness also has a protective function, serving mimicry and social camouflage. Politeness hides our deeper intentions, beliefs and thoughts. In that sense, she is – quite right! – the opposite of authenticity, this neo-primitivism that has become fashionable.

Who seriously believes that a society would exist in which human appetites, "authentic" desires, envy and greed were openly named and acted out? Politeness saves us from the mistake of drawing a wrong image of man. It is the opposite of naive, namely conscious, measured and critical.

Having no manners, wrote Nietzsche in Human, All Too Human, ultimately shows a “lack of spirit and grace”. It is up to us to meet this lack and develop manners that justify ourselves. Only courtesy gives grace to people. This also applies to the present.

The author is a professor for media management and public relations at the Macromedia University in Hamburg and Berlin.