Decency Needs a Comeback

In the movie Fargo, a police officer visits a citizen who has phoned in a tip in a homicide case. The cop finds the man shoveling his driveway in what appears to be a bitter Minnesota cold, his thick hood zipped up around his face. The man tells his story; he met a suspicious character at a bar and gives the officer his location. The conversation is not long, it’s not particularly friendly, but it is polite. The man tones down his language, he uses euphemisms, he is direct but not rude. The officer, for his part, refers to the man as “Mr. Mohra,” thanks him for the tip and his pleasant throughout. Because they’re midwesterners, they complete the conversation by briefly discussing the weather which stands in for “goodbye.” It’s a perfectly civil exchange. 

Fargo is about a lot of things but one of its themes is the hypocrisy of polite language. The people in the movie are terrible; they are murderers and kidnappers, cowards and reprobates, just the worst sort of people. However, they are very polite. They sound kind, they say please and thank you and sometimes they stick each other into wood chippers. At first blush, the movie is arguing that “Midwest Nice” is a sham, a meaningless concept invented so that bad people can feel better about themselves as they cheat on their spouses and business partners like the rest of us. There’s truth in that, I don’t think the region of the country that leads the nation in serial killers can make a truthful claim to having substantively nicer people than the coasts. But a deeper viewing shows a deep respect for politeness and civility in the person of Marge Gunderson, the good police officer that is the moral center of the movie (and of humanity, really). For her, kind words and civil decorum are not platitudes, they are absolutely essential and she ultimately triumphs over the cheats and the criminals by committing to those manners in a way they never could. It is her very decency that leads us to her goal (she is also very smart), and protects her while the crooks, by cutting corners, have done nothing but cornered themselves in.

I can understand why it’s easy to be rude, but I don’t understand why it is so goddamn difficult to be nice. We have become a society of emotional infants in which knee-jerk outbursts are the only responses to virtually any slight. Our identities, our privileges, our safety are under continual assault and not only must we stand up for them, we must crush or shame all opposition to them. Diplomacy is for the weak. Apologies are for the cucks. Manners are for the naive. The stakes are simply too high now. 

Keep in mind, according to nearly every single metric, things have never been better. Yes, environmental collapse is a distinct possibility. True, gun violence constantly stalks our safety. And yes, the specter of nuclear annihilation isn’t going anywhere but existential threats are a fixture of life on this earth and listing those three (to say nothing of an apocalyptic meteor or, I don’t know, Godzilla) doesn’t mention the panoply of threats that have been effectively removed from modern living. We live in a time of historical lows in crime, disease, discrimination and even pollution. Extreme poverty and malnutrition are terrible but shrinking in the modern world and there has never been a time on earth that we are less likely to die violently or in a war. To a citizen of the majority of human history, the fact that you’re reading this on a phone that takes pictures while using a porcelain toilet that isn’t a hole in the ground would be a luxury not even the most powerful king could afford. And if you are concerned about bringing children into this world, I understand, and support you wanting to hold off. A child born next week will live an hour longer than one born today. That’s how quickly things are improving. 

Except in how we behave. Instead of celebrating our good fortune of being alive in this wonderful time when our biggest concern isn’t malaria, we are increasingly bitter towards each other, totally slobbish in our interactions and petulantly selfish. 

This has to stop. 

I am not naive, I don’t believe that saying “please” and “thank you” are a panacea for the world but you have to wonder about manners’ effectiveness when so many of fiction’s greatest villains are frequently trying to do away with them. “Come on now, Harry, the niceties must be observed,” Voldemort mocks Harry. “Dumbledore would not want you to forget your manners, would he?” Maybe it’s just me but I don’t want to be on the side of society approved by Voldemort. 

Nor am I an expert in etiquette. I do not know where all the forks belong, I do not know the proper way to address people in letters, I do not know the proper time to replace my divot on a golf course. But I’m not strictly talking about etiquette, I’m talking about decency. You don’t need finishing school to be grateful for a compliment or to avoid asking a woman if she’s pregnant or to know to keep your fucking shoes on when you’re in a public place. 

And I am not perfect. I get angry, I get tired and selfish just like we all do. I don’t even particularly care for people and their whiney problems. I have been described as prickly, surly, a snob, an asshole and insufferable, all without being libelled. But even as hell is other people, I recognize that the guy next to me on the bus is still a person and as long as I would like to be treated a certain way, I will do my best to give up my seat to him should it seem like he needs it. I don’t bat 1.000 in this area but if Aristotle said “You are what you do repeatedly,” I think I would qualify as a decent person. I’ve certainly lived meaningfully in a way I can be proud of—and so can you because I know it’s not that hard. 

All it takes is empathy and a little selflessness, both of which are learnable skills and together we’re going to expand both. I want to interact with people, talk to them about the challenges of being decent in a world that gets more antagonistic by the day, I want to help each other learn how to cut through the noise and get back to applying the lessons we learned in kindergarten—sharing, listening and keeping our fucking shoes on in public places. I saw a poll recently that asked whether respondents would rather be stupid and happy or smart and miserable. Why not both? There’s a way to get there.

If Marge Gunderson is Fargo’s moral center, her ursine counterpart must be Paddington Bear, a bear so nice that, over two movies, he transforms a suspicious street of strangers into a community of neighbors and even a rough and tumble prison into a house of kindness. In Paddington 2, which is so delightful as to defy description, Paddington, a fugitive of justice for complicated reasons, must hide himself in a trash can in a busy train station. A police officer walks by the can and throws a bit of garbage in. Paddington, whose freedom depends on his surreptitiousness, remember, says “thank you.” He cannot help himself. What would it feel like to have decency like that so second nature? How much happier would we be if that was our default state? I want to find out. Let’s do so together.