Civility and order

Peggy Noonan argues that faith will hold the United States together during the recession:

Tuesday I talked to people who support a Catholic college. I said a great stress is here and coming, and people are going to be reminded of what’s important, and the greatest of these will be our faith, it’s what is going to hold us together as a country.

Here are some of the behaviors that I’d nominate to help us through this economic crisis: saying ‘excuse me’ when you bump into someone in the store, patiently waiting your turn in line, waving thank-you when a driver lets you into his lane.  In other words, the daily gestures of courtesy and self-restraint that make up civility. 

We take for granted that parents will teach children manners, or assume that if they don’t, schools will act as a back-stop.  But what if  neither the family nor schools perform that duty?  I see no connection between belief in a supernatural being and public etiquette.  Rather, the cultivation of manners rests on an understanding of how fragile social order is and how it needs to be constantly buttressed by instruction and correction.  

I live with a constant apprehension that the thin veneer of civilized manners will erode.  At the present bleak moment, I monitor litter with the greatest anxiety.  A person who drops his hamburger wrapper on the sidewalk is a threat to society, in my view.  So far, the New York streets and subways seem no dirtier than before—the population of plastic-bag tumbleweeds seems to be holding fairly steady. But if trash starts swirling around our streets and plazas, we will know that the time to despair has arrived.

As for what will get us out of the economic crisis, believers will work out for themselves why, if God is assurance of a brighter future, he didn’t do something before hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs.  I’ll bank on the powerful drive to trade, build enterprises, and enjoy the fruits of human ingenuity.

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19 Responses to Civility and order

  1. MAP says:

    Interesting comment about litter. I remember how, on visiting Norway in the late 1980s, the first thing I noticed about Bergen was how clean it was. A city that size in the U.S. would have had trash everywhere. The people were courteous; one felt *safe*.

    I hope it’s still like that. I wish I knew of one large U.S. city that was even close to that standard.

  2. Michael Tumilty says:

    First of all, faith is not a ‘behavior’. It is “the substance of things hoped for” (Hebrews 11:1) It’s what some people carry in place of “a constant sense of apprehension” as you put it.

    I would agree that behavior can stem from whatever one’s ‘substance of things hoped for’ happens to be. If it happens to be hope in a benevolent higher power, I’d say one’s substance would consist of happiness.

    But, if in place of that hope, there is instead “a constant sense of apprehension”, then one’s substance would consist of of an irrational fear of litter. This is a perfect example of the utter weakness and failure of even a brilliant rational mind without faith in something good. You sound like a basket case. You should get out of the city.

  3. For Michael Tumilty: You are too hard on Heather. You are totally wrong re faith corresponding to happiness even if it often provides emotional comfort.Faith is essentially belief in a spiritual dimension taken on authority.Most of us here have worked our way out of the religious beliefs of our youth. Civility and civic order are foundations of all advanced societies to some degree and probably have a symbiotic relationship with elements of faith in believers. For instance, many Christians try to be responsible citizens as part of their committment to be good people.Surely the Protestant ethic of hard work, thrift, and dedication to family greatly reinforced the civic order. That is why I fear the erosion of Christianity even as I cannot support its metaphysics.

    Is litter related to disorder? We used to say publically that blacks destroy neighborhoods very quickly because of dysfunctional habits.We still see such messy neighborhoods but fear the thought police if we express concern.How do we criticize minorities whose habits are irresponsible in a PC society? England, without a Constitution, can prosecute “hate speech” so its minorities now run rampant.Diversity is a sacred value even as it increases depravity and disorder in many cases.

    Heather is right to see litter as a valid indicator of civic order.That order is a function of cultural values, the law, and family authority.As we become ever more “diverse” we face new threats that families once suppressed in a more religious, conservative, top-down society with high respect for authority.Meritocracy ruled and responsibility was valued.Religion reinforced the Family that reinforced the school, schools which taught love of nation and respect for its values and traditions.That is rapidly disappearing.

    The litterer is deviant for various reasons but some groups sadly display dysfunction daily.Handouts from the government will come much easier now, but the mountain that was climbed to civility in yesterday’s America is now lost in clouds of diverse habits and traditions that have elements of self-destruction.Middle-class whites already live an energetically hedonistic life full of drugs and alcohol and college life reflects that same chaos. I only note that our diverse minorities add much to that disorder.

    Florida has immense diversity and immense crime.I marvel at the weekly “crime report” that plainly advertises prolific crime and disorder.Police are challenged severely by this tidal wave of mostly low key domestic violence, car theft, fights, and small business robberies.The Sunshine State still attracts an army of retirees but the underbelly is dark indeed.The MSM protect the vast Hispanic invasion that includes very many criminals.Bad manners, public drinking, vulger behavior is ubiquitous here.Where are we heading?

  4. Donna B. says:

    Mr. Troost, I have your book but have not yet read it. It is stacked with other worthwhile books I haven’t yet read either. I’m considering taking a week off from the internet and catching up… but, frankly I’m not sure how to do that beyond going to a place without internet. I’m not disciplined enough to stay away from my always on connection here.

    However, I still can’t quite comprehend (accept?) the overall idea that the races are so different in their desires and actions.

    This is likely due to my having grown up in areas where Hispanics and Native Americans were more numerous than whites. I have lived for the past 35 years in an area where whites are seldom more than 50% of the population. There are neighborhoods where obviously the deviant litterers dominate. They get far too much attention, as there are larger neighborhoods where the neat and landscaped lawn is the norm. These are determined less by race than class and education.

    I also think that rural vs. urban is a factor. In the rural areas of this very integrated area where I live, the most cluttered and run-down properties are more likely than not to be inhabited by whites.

    You are most likely correct in the big scheme of things, yet I am not completely convinced that given the same nutrition, upbringing, education, and opportunities that there is a vast difference in the races. It boils down to a cultural more than a biological difference.

  5. Michael Tumilty says:

    Hi Cornelius. A very compelling post. The picture you paint is quite bleak. Yours is a worldview that many people who have ‘worked their way out of the religious beliefs of their youth’ find themselves holding to, and fearing.

    I posted elsewhere on this blog about ‘the foolishness of God being wiser than men’. Look around at the failure of the pinnacle of western thought to stave off the onslaught of barbaric thought and an idiotic wandering back down the path of socialism and tyranny. You ask where are we heading? I think you know where we are heading, you just don’t know why we are heading in that direction.

    You mentioned above that faith doesn’t correspond to happiness even if it often provides emotional comfort. Actually, it corresponds 100%. What do you think happiness is? It is the ultimate emotional comfort. Happiness is what everybody yearns for after they have everything else in life. The happiness that comes from faith in God reconciles the shattered confusion that we end up with when all we have is a naked rationalization of the world. When intellectual comfort fails (i.e., rationalization) what are you left with? Just more questions and confusion.

    You speak and write about civility and civilization. Look at all the civilizations that have come and gone. Look at how they all start as a glittering jewel of purity and clarity, understood by all. Look at how each one becomes sullied, confused, corrupted and destroyed.

    Man is powerless to prop himself up with his intellect alone. His reasoning cannot account for the totality of the real world, including all that has come, and all that is to come. You mention a simpler time when there seemed to be more order, or civility, within the family, school and government with a sort of top-down understanding. You can see the role that faith played in that civility. And, you can also see the effect of the erosion of Christianity.

    You don’t need to understand or support the metaphysics of Christianity. None of us do, and it would be ridiculous for someone to presume to understand them. All you need to understand is the physics of it. Understand its effect here in the real world.

    Christ told Nicodemus in John chapter 3, ‘If I have told you earthly things and you believe not, how shall ye believe if I tell you of heavenly things?’ In other words, if you don’t see any value in faith and how it relates to human happiness in the here and now, of course you’re going to dismiss the bigger questions. Of course your going to dismiss ‘The big picture’ as it relates to a Christian worldview.

    I would say think about simplifying your worldview, whether or not it’s faith-based. Or at least come to a conclusion. Isn’t that the whole point of rationalization? To come to a better and more secure understanding? Would you say you have arrived at more answered questions or more unanswered ones?

    “But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise…” Faith is foolish, my friend. That’s why 99% of intellectuals dismiss it outright. Yet wisdom alone will not answer the ultimate questions. It usually just leaves you with more questions.

  6. Donna B. says:

    Michael Tumilty — how is your definition of happiness any different from that gained from experimenting with drugs?

    Happy is a fleeting emotion in humans, I think. Contentment is what we yearn for. With contentment, we enjoy flashes of happiness and therefore define contentment with happiness erroneously.

  7. Ploni Almoni says:

    Ms. Mac Donald puts too much faith confidence in the connection between what she calls manners and social order. The country I live in, Israel, is considered the rudest country on the planet, and justifiably so. There’s nothing charming about Israeli rudeness, and I think it’s an indicator of various other Bad Things, but social disorder does not seem to be one of them. Any of Israel’s beaches at the end of a summer day might be mistaken for a garbage dump, but Israelis show at least as much solidarity in the face of crisis, or just day to day in hard times, as do Americans. Israel also has a relatively strong “civil society” compared to neighboring Middle Eastern countries which (I’m told) have cleaner streets.

    What holds Israeli society together is certainly not religious faith à la Noonan, nor manners à la Mac Donald, but ethno-national loyalty (à la Derbyshire, I guess). Which once again takes us away from the Secular and back to the Right. Oh well, the good news is that Ms. Mac Donald doesn’t need to worry too much about litter on the sidewalks of New York. Lotsa luck, America.

  8. @Cornelius J. Troost I used to live in a mostly Mexican neighborhood in Chicago and can attest that litter and graffiti were worse there. You know what else they didn’t have? Stay-at-home moms. Things for teenagers to do after school. Jobs.

    I’m not excusing them. I do believe that culture matters and that some minority cultures have dysfunctional characteristics. But the discussion doesn’t end there. I grew up in the rural south and let me tell you, the poor white sections of town were just as disheveled as the poor black. Where do you think the term “white trash” came from?

  9. For Michael tumilty: You seem to be a special pleader for Christianity.Faith has great power to mold personalities but some personalities acquire faith far more easily than others.Women, in fact, become true believers more readily than do men.Faith has to be comforting in a world so full of disorder and unpredictability.Ironclad leaders never doubt themselves in part because of faith-look at George Bush and Peter the Great! Faith, no matter how strong, cannot overcome other elements of personality such as depression, addiction, narcissism, etc. Many with strong faith are still not happy for other, often objective, reasons.Faith is also challenged when one faces catastrophies.It is also quite easily replaced by other”gods” such as money.Happiness is a state of mind that cannot be sought methodically but which is a natural product of good living and intelligent decision-making.Luck is a large factor in all our lives and happiness may often arise from fortuitous events. Faith surely contributes to happiness but those without faith(Christian faith) have no problem experiencing a normal amount of happiness unless they have neurosis.Insecure Christians often ascribe to atheists their own ambivalence because they wish to know that theirs is the only TRUE BELIEF.This is likely a form of neurosis.

    Iam an atheist because I saw no other possibility and lived a long life with no need for faith. Give me a good book and good woman and Iam happy.However, I see the transformation of America into a scraggly garbage scow crawling with tatooed semi-literates and worry for our future.Liberalism champions Darwin and decries religion but its excessive tolerance of deviance and PC truculence will scare whites into an underground retreat.

    For Ploni Almoni: Jews have been rude for centuries before Israel existed. Collect five million Jews from assorted cultures and you get a certain amount of radical indivualism wrapped in ethno-national solidarity, as you observed.I discuss Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century in my own book because Jewish aggression and rudeness led most major events of the twentieth century.Being smarter due to Ashkanazi IQ helps quite a lot! Yes, littering alone hardly foredooms society, but Heather’s concern is well-taken.A loss of civility in a broken,overly diverse Babel like Obama’s America, strewn with the refuse of the Third World, could well descend into a fortress Brazil with immense shanty towns and TOTAL economic dependence on China.The Dems who perpetuate Bush’s madness will be the first to build their elaborate security systems in Fortress America.

    For Donna B.:My book will be an introduction to the hidden world of anthropology that must exist underground because our liberal establishment has brainwashed the masses with a false message.When you watch basketball between, say, Georgetown and Connecticut, do you notice 10 black players? Why? Is athletic ability distributed equally? We accept inequality without a peep but refuse to discuss human genetics out of fear of reality.Why do great scientists support my book? They agree with Darwin and me that the races differ in a great variety of ways and throwing billions on athletic training for whites will not overcome reality.(bad joke) Billions spent on remediation of blacks will not conquer the notorious “gap.” Never has and never will.Look up Darwin Censored at YouTube and see my discussion of these matters. No autographs permitted!

  10. kurt9 says:

    Peggy Noonan’s argument is testable. Apparently the European banks are even more leveraged than ours (60 to 1, rather than 28 to 1 as our banks are). So, it is likely that Europe’s economy is going to suffer as much, if not more, than ours. Since the Europeans view and present themselves as “secular humanist” types, it will be interesting to see whose society unravels more, us or them.

    The correlation of religious belief and civility is, of course, dependent upon factors such as race and culture. For example, the Japanese are certainly not anything a christian would define as a religious people, yet their cities are clean and they are very civil (way more than us). The Chinese, on the other hand, tend to be civil as well, but they tend to be messy, which is the reason why Lee Kuan Yew created the laws he did for Singapore. The Chinese tend to be somewhat more emotional than the Japanese, despite being of the same race. The Koreans are often described as the “Irish of East Asia”. They can be emotional as well.

  11. Anthony says:

    @MAP

    Bergen is Norway’s second largest city, but it’s only 250,000. It in no way compares in size to a large American city, such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, (each of these has a population > Norway) or even Seattle.

  12. Anthony says:

    One of the differences in city cleanliness is the efficiency of street cleaners. In many places, the observed difference might simply be a difference of government facilities that clean up litter more efficiently.

  13. mnuez says:

    I’m all for etiquette, courtesy and caring about fellow human beings in our environments but none of that works very well with your American Capitalism. The truth about Capitalism is that not everyone is equally able to succeed. There’s evolutionary cut-throat competition going on here and the quest to get higher on the social ladder (particularly for males) is severe. That being the case, why should I care about you when deciding that its easier to throw a wrapper on the street than to hold on to it for a twenty minutes until I come across a garbage can? We sure as hell believe that we oughtn’t care about the other in our business environments, why then in other environments?

    Look, this subject is bigger than can be contained in a comment on a transitory blog post but the way I see it, it’s only the myth of human equality that keeps people even slightly civilized in our anarcho-libertarian culture. When that myth is finally blown, one of three things will have to go: freedom for untermenschen, pervasive sense of social responsibility or the “survival of the fittest” capitalism that is responsible for so much of the innovation and wealth that we’ve come to take for granted and which has kept us ahead of China these past fifty years.

  14. Caledonian says:

    “We sure as hell believe that we oughtn’t care about the other in our business environments, why then in other environments?”

    What nonsense. That’s like the old chestnut of saying that altruism and cooperation are incompatible with Darwinian competition. It’s the competition that makes those strategies viable in the first place!

    All social responsibility, all social cooperation, ultimately springs from a sense of self-interest. If people would just give up their foolish and outmoded concepts of what “the self” is, this would be much clearer to them.

    People litter because they do not perceive that doing so harms them, and they have no reason to restrain the impulse to just discard their garbage. They do not perceive that the interests of the property owners, or the other people passing by, dovetail with their own.

  15. Jeeves says:

    @mnuez
    the way I see it, it’s only the myth of human equality that keeps people even slightly civilized in our anarcho-libertarian culture.

    I don’t litter (in fact, pick up others’) and don’t buy the myth of human equality. Please explain.

    As for litter-filled Israeli beaches, on another thread here, the myth of Ashkenazi dominance was thoroughly discredited. Care to estimate what proportion of the littering Israelis aren’t Ashkenazi? Are “African Jews?” Or even Arabs?

  16. mnuez says:

    Caledonian, if you mean to toss a few disjointed facts my way that (in a more organized fashion) would do nothing but support my precise point then you’ve succeeded. If you meant anything else, I’m afraid that I’m too dense to see how that was accomplished.

    Jeeves, your latter serial question marks were directed at Ploni so I’ll leave those for him to respond to should he choose to. As to the your earlier query: What?

    Did you think that I was addressing you or even the specific subject of littering on its own? What I’m saying is simply that when people feel that they’re loosing in a majorly important competition (and modern capitalism is social darwinism* is a “majorly important competition) then they tend to get angry with others and tend to care about them less. Their revenge occasionally manifests itself in a school or mall shooting but more commonly manifests itself by petty crimes, being rude and being inconsiderate.

    As for feeling a need to claim that anarcho-capitalism is all sugar and spice simply because you like it, take a lesson from Heather’s recent post where she notes that the false belief known as Christianity is likely a somewhat slight inhibitor of crime (the evidence for religion’ benefits have actually been quite well documented for some time and go far beyond her tentative speculation but she’s definitely got the right idea).

    You may or may not have noted that the general thrust of my aboriginal comment didn’t make much of a judgment call regarding capitalism and simply offered that one of three possible outcomes would have to be arrived at – and furthermore I noted the likely fact that we owe a great deal of our wealth and innovation to capitalism and are likely to lose our edge were we to move toward European Socialism. I think that’s a bit more nuanced than the drive-by “he hates capitalism, he’s an idiot” knee-jerk responses that this lonely comment (among a majority of capitalism lovers) received.

    mnuez

    * minus the kids strangely. See Idiocracy.

  17. Thrasymachus says:

    No, Obama will hold society together, because he’s sooooooooooo dreamy!

  18. Caledonian says:

    “I’m afraid that I’m too dense to see how that was accomplished.”

    I’m glad we agree about that.

    To return to the thread’s topic: a lot of the problem is that we’ve gone to great lengths trying to induce a feeling of shared interests in people, without ever stopping to think about whether those people actually DO have shared interests.

    Trying to generate the feeling, without considering the reality the feeling is supposed to related to, is self-defeating.

  19. Eman says:

    Re: Michael Tumility – “And, you can also see the effect of the erosion of Christianity.”

    Funny, because the erosion of paganism and the rise of Christianity is what lead to the decline of the Roman Empire.

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