I’ve watched in trepidation as our sense of shared public decency has tanked over the years. From what was once proper behavior we’ve fallen off the cliff of decency that seems to have no end. NYT columnist David Brooks writes quite eloquently about the political effect of this tendency.
As a political liberal, when it comes to decency I am a staunch conservative! There is real value in a society that maintains a modicum of decency in public discourse. It not only implies a shared understanding that although we may disagree, we respect each other’s basic dignity. It also upholds a sense that the other is worthy of their humanity. Drop that and we become little more than a gang of brawling baboons.
We chuckle at our good fortune that we don’t live in the Edwardian era when decorum was so tightly corseted it drowned individual expression. Since then swearing, for example, which was once only heard in all-male environs–– like war–– has leaked into living rooms, into radical art and finally now floods public media. The f-word that I had my mouth washed out with soap for using in the house when I was a kid, is now used by my school-age niece daily among her friends without thought. The word not only thus lost its power, but when it’s used around me I feel the whole of humanity is slightly degraded, as if we really don’t deserve a more refined culture, let alone being capable of recognising or valuing it.
I worry about the implications of the loss of shared respect that politeness implies. It took centuries to develop a sense of refinement, separating high culture from mere savage jungle life; but any idiot can demolish a cathedral! When that distinction no longer applies, what separates us from savagery? More worrying still, without the uplift of a common culture that urges each of us toward our higher nature, previously provided by religious and moral education, what force can replace that? And without such a force where is the ‘bottom’ Brooks speaks of? Are we not then just reduced to fighting like baboons?
