Increasing Incivility
‘God rest ye merry, gentlemen, let nothing you dismay.” Instead of changing only the word “men,” as new books of carols do, we should question use of the adjective “gentle.” This holiday season, it is hard to find gentlepersons in a culture marred by meanness, cruelty and violence. Human dignity is at issue.
Among the currently dismayed who sing “God rest ye merry” songs, the two best known are Pope John Paul II and Billy Graham. What year-end assessment would we hear from them, and what gift would they impart? The first question is easy to answer. Lifelong, both have assailed the trashing of humanity, the indignity people suffer at the hands of others.
The pope, who has traveled the globe criticizing those who misuse persons and speaking up for human dignity, wrote his masterpiece encyclical on it in 1993: “The cornerstone of my pontificate is to explain the transcendental value of the human person.” You don’t have to agree with the pope’s approaches to it. His biographer says that even once-docile Polish seminarians now raise questions about them. But the cornerstone about human value will be his legacy.
Graham, who, like the pope, has a tremor in his hands, should also be firm of voice as he sings the blessings about “merriness” for one more Christmas. He is dismayed, as is the pope, about the signs of human depravity. Evangelists, of course, specialize in such talk. But Graham’s gift would be to continue qualifying such “down” talk with exalting preachments on the “image of God” in all people. Of late, Graham has been acknowledging the greatness of friends “spanning the religious spectrum from Christianity to Buddhism to Judaism to Islam to atheism.” Promoting human dignity in a culture of trash, he points us to the example of those who try “to live a life that was quite apart from the surrounding community in which they lived.”
Behind the headlines in our national “surrounding community” are the almost inexplicable violent and violating acts and voices of those who treat people as less than sacred, lacking human dignity.
“Let nothing you dismay”? We look and listen: Meanness stands out among the characteristics of sounds and actions. Verbal violence on radio talk shows. Tabloid TV. Paparazzi. “In your face” entertainment styles. Date rape. Binge drinking. Harassment. Athlete violence. Crowd madness. Babies born at proms and ditched in the ladies’ room. You don’t need an evangelist to bewail such obvious evidences.
Riffle through the memory bank of 1997 and you will find yet more images: of partisans in Congress forgetting all rules of decorum and all goals except vanquishing opponents; of citizens telling pollsters that they still care about country and politics, but about politics as now pursued--the demonizing of rivals having become so common. Politicians accuse each other of lying, and too many are correct in their mutual accusations.
Finance and business pages in newspapers carry stories of executives who do not merely want to outperform competitors, but to smash them, by tongue at least, by action if possible. Many advertisers have long left behind the patterns of restraint that once kept them from misrepresenting rivals’ products.
Styles and manners sections of papers include columns on the ways women and children join men in shouting obscenities. People sometimes shout at, and occasionally shoot at, those they clash with in minor traffic disputes. Airline flight crews are frightened by the unruliness of more and more passengers. Athletes choke coaches who, many note, have been verbally violent.
Pundits argue about what is eliciting the current trashing and demeaning, and whether it is worse than in former times. In a land of plenty, do the bored seek excitement by being mean? Do mass media glorify the verbally violent along with all those in other ways violent? Are good manners to be junked in an age of cynicism? Do weak egos gain strength by putting others down?
Behind these are the larger questions about human nature. The pope and Graham would attribute the indignities to “original sin,” a term that theologian Reinhold Niebuhr is said to have called “the only empirically verifiable Christian doctrine.” Others blame “the selfish gene” or hypothesize that humans are descended from a particularly violent simian species. Whatever. The question at this holiday time is: How begin to change things, to minimize dismay? How lift up “the transcendental value of the human person” and act on that valuing?
In early December, conferees at the Penn National Commission were talking about how to bring about change. One case study of incivility had to do with verbal and physical violence in sports--the Latrell Sprewell incident in the National Basketball Assn. was on the table--and how to counter it. Do we do best by harping on the instances in reports and editorializing about them in the sports columns? Or do we do better to stress the press profiles about athletes who transcend their rude backgrounds and the dehumanizing temptations of the celebrity world? Panelists leaned toward the latter approach.
If so, they sided with Walter Savage Landor, a 19th-century English poet who, himself not a nice man, may have been trying to get off the hook by giving advice that helps us: “We must not indulge in unfavorable views of mankind, since by doing it we make bad men believe that they are no worse than others, and we teach the good that they are good in vain.”
The Christmas season and end-of-year roundups allow also for some favorable views of humans with which we could more readily “rest merry.” We see reports of increases in charitable giving. Some citizens open their homes to the homeless and see dignity in the faces of the overlooked and poor. Believers sing, and mall strollers overhear, carol words rejoicing in “God with us” and what that realization does to value humans. “As the candles glow” in Hanukkah songs and Jewish homes, and as billions of outdoor lights signal human impulses to push back the darkness, many neighbors would illumine “the surrounding community.”
The pope, Graham and their fellow believers help counter violence whenever they point to “the transcendental value of the human person” as being rooted in “the image of God,” though both also affirm goodness and value can be present among humanists as well. They and other Christians do part company, as Christians, with other believers, when they affirm that trashed and trashing human beings get a new start because of what they celebrate at Christmas: the “incarnation,” God-with-us at and after Bethlehem and the birth of Jesus. But their merriness of spirit is supposed to be contagious and generous.
The message of image plus incarnation coincides with what one learns upon listening to the religions on one point: Most insistently speak of the sacredness of each human. Yet, so far, believers have not been notably less warlike than others; God is always called on to bless the weaponry on both sides of all wars. The faithful have not won medals for living lives free of the racial prejudice that afflicts “the surrounding community.” They may be as ready as others to ignore the homeless and hungry. Even ugly denominational schisms give reasons for dismay to those who follow church news. One hopes that many a Christmas sermon will include unsentimental notes of judgment on those who recycle verbal trash and promote indignity.
No one profits from avoiding all indulgence in “unfavorable views” of humans, glossing over the flaws in human action. And no one profits from dreams that a gentle utopia will come at last in 1998. But telling the stories of good athletes, celebrities and ordinary citizens is more likely to affirm and reinforce pictures of human dignity that can inspire a change in the people who make up a culture. Thus, they can begin somehow to change “the surrounding community.” And the lights will outlast the holiday season, while God lets citizens “rest merry” once again.