The other day, as I was driving down the four-lane highway that is our town's version of the Great White Way, a car ahead of me had nudged its nose out far enough into my lane to present me two options: either stop on the highway or pull into the other lane, thereby slightly inconveniencing myself. This is a normally busy stretch of road. Several plazas line it, in addition to innumerable gas stations, banks, fast food joints, and car dealerships, and it's always hard to break into the conga line of cars. I understood that, more than once having appreciated the vehicular courtesy of someone stopping to let me out.
But the day was hot and I was sweating and this driver had, to my feverish calculation, overextended his claim on the good graces of the drivers who, after all, had the sense not to be caught pulling out of the parking lot into the flow of traffic. I could have simply pulled over into the other lane (my rearview mirror was free of cars), but instead I stopped and leaned on my horn, shrilling out my protest of his ignorance and rudeness. He, for his part, squealed into the opening I'd created, giving me a vigorous gesture with his middle finger, and left a small viscous cloud of dust and stones in his wake. Fuming, irrationally ticked off both by his making use of the opportunity I'd given him and the (admittedly self-imposed) inconvenience he'd caused me endure, I cursed in a fine spray of curses the impoliteness of drivers and wished, for an instant, that I'd had a 20-millimeter howitzer cannon strapped to the hood of my car so that I could have blown him to bits.
Later, under the more beatific influence of an air-conditioned room and a glass of cold water, I felt thoroughly ashamed. I felt ashamed that I had acted so meanly, and that I had caused him in return to be so rude. Neither of us had advanced the cause of charity one iota; instead, we'd only confirmed the usual observation about American society that its essence of democracy, it lack of classes and thus class discipline, creates a petty-spirited bravado, a simian posturing that was all bluff and no grace.
And as I thought more I recalled scores of times I and others had been impolite: not giving up readily a subway seat to an elderly person; not quite holding a door for someone, unseen, coming behind; rushing like a frenzied lemming to a just-opened check-out counter, just barely not elbowing others out of the way. Memories like these could be multiplied a hundred-fold among all of us, and would tell us just how ethically sloppy and unthinking we supposedly more conscientious and moral creations are. Surely impoliteness, even if it doesn't rank up there with nuclear devastation and toxic waste, contributes just as much if not more to the lack of comfort and security we urban creatures continually feel. The small acts, like the rodents at the dinosaurs' eggs, eat away at the vital yolk of the simple giving of graciousness from one human to another.
What is politeness, then, that we should take such notice of it? Let me first define it by what it is not. Last year United Technologies, for reasons only their corporate executives understood, ran little adverts in the pages of The Wall Street Journal. One, entitled "Whatever Happened to 'Yes, Please'?", decided that the phrase died slowly because "all of us...did not use [it] enough." The ad went on to lament the semantic decline of polite speech, ending with the chestnut from William of Wykeham (b. 1324) that "Manners maketh the man," and advised that we hand this eulogy to the next child who says "Huh?"
The insipidity of this analysis, a cranky lecture from a cranky adult, was immediately picked up on by my students, who circulated a parody saying that "Yes, Please" had "died / a well-deserved death....We decided that it was time / to stop hiding / behind the cowardly, hypocritical / mask of politeness / and actually show some of the / humanity contained in us all." And they were right on the money. United Technologies missed the mark altogether. They saw politeness as something due from an inferior (a child) to a superior (supposedly a UT exec). UT's kind of politeness, as the students brought out, was "a justification for / ignoring the problem's of today's / world as too many executives, / politicians, and copywriters do." Politeness can not be a hypocritical act, an act of brigandage whose purpose is to establish a domination. It should come from a genuine graciousness. The Woodstock generation tried to show this to the world, to show that politeness, i.e., people getting their living together, need not be an instrument of division but of unification, of equality. UT wants a different world, and it's a world most of us should reject for its banality and casual violence. Politeness is charity; politeness is empathy. True politeness comes from the cache of an imperturbable self that is not knocked off-kilter by the humanness of others, by their sometimes forgetful and egotistic behavior. It comes from a self that does not need to jockey with others like a greyhound in the pack to feel some sense (ultimately churlish) of superiority and victory. Yet it is also something we must work at, since politeness goes against our self-aggrandizing nature. It is not a natural fluency but is the accumulated habit of successive conscious acts to make life better for others. It comes from the conscious decision to be in another's shoes, to accept their reality as one's own and as something worth preserving against harm and denial.
We ought to be polite, then, for very commonsensical reasons, which are what ethical decisions usually come down to. We should be polite, first, because it makes life better for others, and, second, because the residual sense of goodness and self-satisfaction will make life better for us. Or, to attach cause and effect even more strongly, we should be polite because making life better for others inevitably returns to make our lives better since the quo for the quid is equally given and received with equal gracefulness.
One time when I was hitchhiking home from college, it began to rain. Car after car passed without an offer of oasis. Finally one stopped, driven by a salesman. He began immediately to talk about his business and he let slip that he was getting off one exit before mine. When he asked me where I was going and I told him, without hesitation he said he'd drive me there. I protested but he stuck to his promise and drove a good fifty miles out of his way to get me home. The next time I see a car nosing into the street, I should, and we all should, remember that salesman.