A Nation of Assholes

Old fuddy-duddy conservatives (the fussy, boring kind, rather than the racist, authoritarian kind) have long harped on the necessity for members of a free society to govern their own passions.  Either free people do this for themselves or somebody has to step in and do it for them.  Allowing everybody simply to indulge whatever anti-social whim that pops into their heads simply doesn't work.

That governing, self-guided or otherwise imposed, is called civilization, and it's a genuinely good thing.  This should not be in dispute by either side, even in this horrific period of national life.

But a whole bunch of people seem to need a quick refresher on a few points of public etiquette that collectively produce this "civilization" thing:

Physical confrontation is for life-or-death situations.  If you're living your life by the credo, "Punch back twice as hard," you're not being heroic; you're being an asshole.

If you think that destroying other people's property is justified because you feel aggrieved, you're mistaken.  You're also an asshole.

Bullying people you've never met in real life is barbaric.  Barbarians are assholes.

If you don't really care about ideas in public life but you care passionately about power, you're not engaged in a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger justification of your ends over your means, because you don't have ends.  You're just being a thug, and thugs are assholes.

Modesty is a virtue most of the time.  If you insist on constantly jumping up and down, shouting, "Lookit me! Lookit me!" you're not promoting your brand; you're being an asshole.

On the rare occasions when you thrust your opinions upon others, it really helps if they're well informed, concisely delivered, and part of a dialogue where you listen to your interlocutor's response, rather than just steamrolling the other person with nonsense.  If you don't do this, you're not only a poor debater but also a poor conversationalist;  in short; you're an asshole.

And above all:  Rejoicing in others' pain and discomfort is a fleeting joy, and it's notoriously bad karma, because others will be happy to rejoice in your pain and discomfort in short order.  That's because nobody roots for the success of an asshole.

This all used to be stuff that your mother would teach you.  It was reinforced by your teachers, and your friends' parents, and pretty much every adult who influenced you.  The vast majority of kids emulated the adults--as they still do--and grew up to be decent.  It didn't work for everybody, but the decent-people-to-assholes ratio was high.

Sometimes kids had absent parents or grew up within a poor social network, and they had serious disadvantages.  A larger-than-average number of them grew up to be assholes.  But by and large, civilization mattered.  Culture mattered. It didn't have to be the culture of a particular race or identity; all that was necessary was that each culture acknowledged that we owed each other a modicum of respect, and if we couldn't muster the respect, we could fake it.

I don't wish to whitewash the past.  A lot of bad stuff occurred in the past, and much of it was baked into the culture.  It produced vast inequities and pain.  In some cases, the cover of good manners and civilized behavior in the most visible parts of the public allowed people to perpetrate truly barbaric acts just off the public stage.  That stuff needed--needs--to be eliminated.  But you don't tear everything down because it isn't perfect.  You recognize the good stuff and cultivate it, and you work on identifying the bad stuff and fixing it.  If you think that everything about your society is evil, you probably live a fairly miserable existence.  That kind of misery can turn you into an asshole.

We have become a nation of assholes.

This has been a long time coming.  Maybe it's an inevitable consequence of growing up in a society where things are easy, and easiness breeds decadence.  Maybe it's because, while the bedrock civilizational parts of a culture are essential, there's a lot of other ugly stuff around the edges.  If you're uncomfortable with the ugly stuff, it's easy to forget about the essential stuff.  But if you stop paying attention to it, it's a perishable skill if you don't practice it.

As usual, I'm not sure how we restore the essential parts of the formula.  Fuddy-duddy conservatism doesn't help any more, because we failed to conserve the important stuff.  It's gone.  What we need is some very selective restoration.  Normally, restoration and reaction are kissin' cousins, but that presupposes that conservation has done its job and prevented the civilizational baby from being thrown out with the antiquated bathwater during the march of progress.  Progress without conservation leads to disaster.  Conservation without progress leads to stagnation.  We seem to have had both of these pathologies, simultaneously.  

Finding our way back may require more skill and patience than we know how to muster.  But we have to try, and we have to do it pretty soon or we'll find out that civilization may be annoying but it sure beats the alternative.  In the alternative, everbody's an asshole.