Re: [Leica] OT: Courtesy (was Oh ... It's COMING SOON! :-)

[Simon Lamb <simon@sclamb.com>]

This seems to be heading in the direction of locale making a difference on
good manners or pleasantness.  You can get good, decent well mannered people
in some run-down inner city areas and some very rude and ill mannered people
in some very exclusive areas.

With three children to battle with on a daily basis, my wife and I are
fundamentally committed to ensuring that they  are always polite and well
mannered.  This is not to say that they should expect a man to rise from a
chair when they leave a table or open doors for them, but that they should
acknowledge such actions with the thanks they deserve.  Moreover, we want
them to interact socially and be pleasant to others, treating people they
know and strangers with equal respect, with the obvious caveat of not
talking to adult strangers unless we have said it is OK.  And that last
statement of course creates another barrier to social pleasantness, but with
the number of abductions and murders of young children in the UK it is the
best advice we can give, albeit is can be socially isolating to a degree.

I remember opening a door for a woman once when I was leaving an office
building.  She immediately rounded on me and implied I was opening the door
because she was a woman and and therefore too feeble to open it for herself.
She said she was fed up with men assuming that doors need to be opened and
wished to be treated the same as I would treat a man (so I hit her with a
baseball bat - not really!)

It is a sad fact of life that many people become insular in large cities, or
as cities grow be large.  You just need to look at the redeveloment of
Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham, and the ensuing change in the
population and you will see that the northern towns are becoming more like
London, less open and less interactive.  It is a sad fact of life that many
courtesies are being forgotten because people's attitudes to each other
change.  Different culture's have different ideas of courtesy, and as more
and more cities become multi-ethnic then this too will have an effect on the
perception of human pleasantness.

Many people believe good manners is related to opening doors for ladies,
giving up your seat on the train/bus for ladies, rising from your chair when
a lady leaves or returns to a table.  Ask 100 modern day women and I bet
most will say they do not expect preferential treatment as it is a form of
segregation and inequality.

I do think over 90% of the UK population is willing to be pleasant to other
human beings - it is just that the social environment and upbringing of many
leads them to be insular rather than open and welcoming.

Simon

On 28/5/03 1:05 am, "Johnny Deadman" <lists@johnbrownlow.com> wrote:

> hm.... 90%? I dunno. Once you are north of Watford it improves but
> there are still some staggeringly easy towns to get beaten up in.
> Gainsborough and Newark to mention but two. Where I did my growing up,
> round there. I stick by what I said about Ontario: the general level of
> human pleasantness is much higher than I experienced in England,
> especially the southeast. There are nice people everywhere and it is
> true that folks respond to how you treat them: that is probably why
> things work around here because there's some form of virtuous circle
> going on.
> 
> I don't buy Steve LeH's idea that people are culturally uniform in
> terms of their person-to-person pleasantness. By 'courtesy' we
> generally mean interpersonal niceness among strangers. That certainly
> differs from place to place. English people in the Southeast don't
> habitually strike up conversations in bus-stops. In Manchester, they
> often do. Londoners, when they get to know you a little, will invite
> you to their home. They do this much more easily than, say, New Yorkers
> or Angelinos who will invite you out to a bar. These are all manifest
> generalizations, but there is truth in there too.
> 
> 
> On Tuesday, May 27, 2003, at 05:52  PM, Simon Lamb wrote:
> 
>> Just as well not all English people live in London, England then!
>> However,
>> 90% of the UK is exactly as you describe Canada.
> --
> John Brownlow

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