What Happened to Human Decency?

The lack of decorum and class in modern society

Hi Zan, Hi Pa

Volume #21

July 25th, 2024

HI, PA: I don’t know about you, but to me it seems like society has lost some human decency in recent years. Every time I take the car somewhere I see drivers cutting each other off, my emails go unanswered, friends cancel plans at the last possible second, and some people on social media (and even in real life) can be exceptionally rude. What is going on?!

HI, ZAN: I wish I knew, but I see the same deterioration of decency. I wonder sometimes if we’re in an interim period, a time when people have freed themselves from some of the old strictures but not yet developed new social mores. The old ways could be a little much: when I was a boy, we’d never in a thousand years wear jeans to a doctor’s appointment, for one example. Or miss Mass on Sunday. Or hear curse words on TV. Maybe, in freeing ourselves of those old ways, we’ve thrown out the baby with the bathwater.

ZAN: That’s a beautiful way of thinking about it, that we’re in an “interim period.” I sure hope so!

My sense is that the deterioration started a while ago and then was exacerbated by Covid. For months on end, we were stripped of all “normal” life, and I wonder if we forgot how to act during that time, or decided it didn’t matter anymore when the world was falling apart in front of our eyes. We donned masks and rushed away from each other rather than making small talk, and no longer had to dress up to go to the office when working from home in pajamas was totally fine.

Maybe we just got out of the habit of being decent?

PA: Covid was certainly an accelerator, if nothing else, but, like you, I was noticing the erosion of kindness before that. A writer used to get handwritten notes from the big magazines when they rejected a piece. Now we get silence. You and I have blamed the internet for a lot of troubles in our other newsletters, but its appearance was a sea change, and we haven’t begun to figure out all the ramifications. So much that used to be done face-to-face, or at least voice-to-ear on the phone, is now done electronically.

ZAN: Yes, I’m glad we addressed that in our conversation on the human touch.

PA: I think, too, that it’s hard to argue the middle class hasn’t shrunk over the past forty years. Somehow—tax inequities would be my guess, along with the shipping of jobs overseas, the breaking of unions, greed, government carelessness—tens of millions of people are having a more difficult time paying bills, saving money, buying a home, and so on. And I think that’s resulted in an invisible, society-wide weight. Could that be part of it?

I had a funny/not funny experience today in Northampton. I walked by a man sitting in a wheelchair on the busiest corner in town. He wasn’t asking for money or food,as people on the main street often do, he was just cursing out everyone who walked past. With the foulest language imaginable. He was like a firehose of F-words, barely taking a breath in between. Sad, of course. But for a moment he was the whole society, venting.

ZAN: Oof, what an image!

My sense is that you’re right about more people struggling financially than ever before, but somehow I believe that would make people more decent to each other, not less. We’re in this together!

To be perfectly honest, I’ve always had the nicest interactions with working class people rather than those who have no financial worries. I remember in the ritzy ski town of Telluride where I used to live, I’d see women draped in diamonds or men with fancy wrist watches walking down the sidewalk toward me and they would never nod, smile, or say “hi.” There was no acknowledgment of my existence—they didn’t even move aside as they approached, so I was always the one who would have to step into the road and make room for them. Instead, it was what seemed to be the middle class folks who would show common courtesy.

PA: I’ve often seen the same ugly behavior among the uber-privileged, but if working people get stressed by debt or a slippage in lifestyle, that can make them less considerate, too.

The Internet, Covid, financial pressures—definitely part of the root system. But what could be other causes of what we both see as a diminution of ordinary decency? I’d vote for the tough-guy image that’s everywhere on TV and in films, and has for a while now crossed gender lines into the tough-girl trope. There’s a fascinating book called Killer Woman Blues, published in 2000 by Benjamin DeMott, that documents, with example after example, the increase of violent female characters on the screen. Being able to slay or beat to a pulp people who bother or threaten us has a visceral appeal: no one’s gonna mess with me! There was a piece in Golf Digest recently about the increase in fights on golf courses, of all places, and we’re all aware of crazy road rage incidents. And I recently saw a headline about a big group fight on a cruise ship.

ZAN: And plane rage incidents! I read about those pretty often these days…

PA: Physical violence is the extreme (as we are working on this, someone has just tried to assassinate Donald Trump!), but nastiness in all its forms seems more widely accepted now. Even glorified in some cases. How much of that is just human nature, and how much exacerbated by violence on the screen?