What are manners?
Manners are the things that we agree to do, but we are not forced to do. This is the heart of the mask argument: if people don’t do it because it’s “just the right thing,” it’s not really possible to make them do it from on-high. When “no spitting” signs appear, they won’t stop all spitting, because anyone rude enough to spit is probably also too rude to mind the sign.
Want to see over-policing that equally disadvantages the functional communities, as it has the dysfunctional ones? Try to mandate new manners most people don’t agree with.
Which is why I have no position on mandating masks, aside from the practical observation that there is no issue, even on something as basic as the protection accorded by masks, that our goblins in government cannot make a mess of: at one point you could step across the border of a state where masks were forbidden (Arizona) to one where they are mandatory. Americans now live in a “what is not forbidden is mandatory” world, without the courts that churn the contradictions taking notice that there is another evolutionary set of facts that “knows” entirely different facts from what the law settled on. I imagine Bill Nye the “Science Guy” writing his ‘letter from a Birmingham jail’ on droplet experiments, with and without mask mitigation.
Manners have to be evolutionary, but if they are the things we all agree on without being made to, they also must be paradoxically stable. There are cultures in crisis because their manners are changing faster than they can handle. The Islamic world is in a series of civil wars over which modern manners should be adopted and which are unholy.
America might be headed to conflict over the question of whether manners can evolve too fast, even for America, the the most rapidly evolutionary culture the world has ever seen (and, which culture? There are at least a dozen). Large segments of our society are rejecting each other’s assertions on what are basic manners. The Trump phenomenon was “bigly” about this struggle. That’s because manners are no longer “naturally” evolutionary (women not getting hat-tips, because nobody wears hats). Manner changes are also being driven by, and for, politics.
A good way of determining what manners should be “real,” (i.e. accepted and enduring), and which are political (which can be ethically ignored), is that if you are harming someone, or putting them at risk, you are being rude.
Which brings us to “mask refusers.” Mask refusers are unconscionably rude because they flip risk assessment: your risk-taking is forcing your assessment of risk onto a risk-averse person (actually, a correctly risk-adapted one). Refusers will never see, much less pay for, the consequence of giving someone COVID a fortnight later. It’s worse than forcing someone who is food-picky to eat blowfish.
The consequences of manner breaches matters: exposing your genitals to someone is not in the same league of rudeness as exposing them to a life-changing disease.
In another era, if you put my octogenarian ma and dad at risk of a life-changing disease, you would meet the consequences of my fist. Frankly, I’m astonished mask-refusers are not taken physically to account by the families of the older, and the immuno-suppressed (lots of those out there), more often.
That mask-refusers are not taken to task by family-protectors is the benefit of living in a more advanced civilization. Being able to get away with savagery because you live in an advanced culture is an irony that works their way, but they need to call it what it is, and realize they are in the do-what-you-want-because-you-can-get-away-with-it ethic set of their Leftist tribal enemies. Just because everyone else has little power to make you stop offending does not mean it’s OK to be offensive.
An anecdote, for what should be the new manners of the COVID era: a policeman told me the story of how an unmasked homeless man approached someone on the street, panhandling. That someone warned him back, but the panhandler persisted and got properly set-upon. “Who assaulted who” asked the cop. It’s a very good question (the panhandler insisted on assault charges, but the cops slow-walked their hunt).
Which brings us to another good rule for manners to be useful: they must be simple. If they require Kabuki rituals to apply, the new manner is too complex. By Kabuki, I refer to America’s ritualistic, rarified, approachable only by a Priestly class, long-winded, unnecessarily gilded system. We cannot use a rite that takes two years to sort out someone spreading disease.
All of our disputes: manners, criminality, race and sexual relations, would be much fairer if we had an economical way of addressing them (because they would be less risky). A court fight can cost even the winner the value of a house (or the flip side: Kabuki court expenses are weaponized by the powerful against the weak).
Without useful courts, without useful policing (in the “defund the police” era), without useful manners, I fear our conflicts will increasingly have to be settled violently (while we also try to solve over-policing?).
Which is why I agree with the cop: a mask-refuser getting his wagon fixed is not a crime I’d put a high priority on solving. All learning is costly in time, money or skin. If mask-refusers won’t learn, and it’s their skin, so be it.
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#1 it’s not that masks are forbidden in Arizona, just that they are not mandated at the state level. Most cities have mandated masks.
#2 equating refusing to wear a mask with rudeness and savagery is ironically, rude.
I don’t often disagree with you, but on this I do.
There are two informed sides of the issue. To declare the side you don’t agree with as rude and savage is an attempt to shame or coerce those that don’t agree with you to comply.
(For the record, I do comply with wearing a mask when required, or it makes sense even though I think it’s a bunch of bull shit and the fact that I feel I have to qualify that pisses me off.)
Hey,
Thank you for your comments on agreeing with my past writing. I am almost scared to hear of it, as my positions tend to be …unconventional. I do appreciate the good word.
A few things: Ducey did forbid masks ordinances on the local level:
https://www.courthousenews.com/arizona-governor-retracts-ban-on-city-face-mask-orders/amp/
For clarity sake: I don’t want to coerce anyone into mask wearing. That’s kind of the point: what must be coerced is not civil, what is not civil is not civilized.
Shame is a different thing. Yes, I do call down shame on mask refusers. Shame is a function of conscience, and it is to the conscience I am making my appeal. If you feel shame, check your conscience. It is not in my power to give or take away shame on someone with a clear conscience.
Why do you think mask wearing is bullshit? I am a clinician who applies medical science, at risk to myself, and to my patients for getting the science wrong. There is not a clinical environment you you will find on planet earth where those applying medical science to the best of their abilities are not masked, goggled and gowned. I wear a mask around my wife. I wear a mask around my parents, I wash my hands over fifty time a a day.
Why? The mortifying shame I would feel if I sickened any of the people I love (well, anyone, but especially my loved-ones). Nobody could punish me worse than I’d punish myself (which is why I support no law on it). Self government, the cornerstone of civilization. Without it, we would have savagery.
Thanks again!
Thanks Eugene! I’d expand ‘manners’ to include comity and civility as well. I’d also argue that these societal norms manifest as ‘natural’ extensions of one’s ethics and morality; and that these are inculcated first by one’s Family, then by Society and ultimately as one’s Political stance at large in that order.
And despite the Smithsonian declaring Western, European, Judeo/Christian values – as being ‘White’ societal norms (despite the folks from Biblical times certainly being non-White); how then to account, for example, say Confucianism reaching very similar core ethical and moral values – across a world of separation? Muslims, too, share theses same core values (even while wanting for their Reformation for more than a few centuries now).
The Hegel/Marx/Freud hat trick spawned and incubated a century of academics indulging in ‘critical theory’ – leading generations into bankrupt moral relativism and subordination of critical thinking in service of its own Particular Institutions – a 20th century religion that’s categorically left a tragic wake behind its proponents, adherents and societal bystanders alike wherever it’s spread. An existential threat to the very concept of the United States not seen since the Civil War.
I agree, and love your “hat trick” point.
This is where there is an interesting paradox: in America we have at least a dozen cultures, most simply, these are variants of traditional religious ones, vs the more secular. Yet the mask-refusers seem more likely to be “Republican” “traditional” and religious cultures.
I have trouble getting a handle on this. More traditional, and more religious, would seem to be more individually responsible, and more polite (generally speaking). The Asian cultures are almost completely masked, taking manners with dead seriousness (pun intended). My (maybe oversimplified) explanation is that the “hat trick” cultural mandates of the last generation has simply used up all the nerves of the traditional ones. They are simply not hearing it. They care nothing for whatever the “HT” has to say, right or wrong. They are pushing back because of who is doing the pushing.
It’s easier to believe than those cultures simply giving up on individual responsibility and religion (“what would Jesus do?” An incredible question, as the healer would never be the diseaser).