Manners

Recently I've been contemplating basic human relations and communicating. And so while reading Contact by Sagan, a line where Ellie and Ken are walking along the Vietnam memorial caught my attention. It goes, "It's hard to kill a creature once it lets you see its consciousness." This statement really helps me to elucidate an idea that's been broiling just below explication in my mind. In 'seeing' the consciousness of another individual one is directly confronted with the reality of this entities humanity.

We experience in a very immediate way our own emotions, thoughts, fears, wonders, desires, heartaches, and joys. And, even though it is obvious that other humans experience this too as humans, it isn't immediately obvious in the sense that we necessarily experience it (you might experience it in speaking with a great friend, but not with the face in the crowd).

This is the basic principle behind manners. One is conscientiously recognizing that another human is in fact human. That, regardless of your feelings toward them, they are a self-contained entity, directing their thoughts and actions as you do. This principle may manifest itself in various forms, official standards [the difference between American and European styles of utensil holding come to mind], but the principle still holds. One is to behave as a human and treat others as such.

To put this concretely, the young man behind the cash register at Wendy's isn't a robot who is automatically programmed to take your money and produce for you food. It's his job, for whatever reason he's chosen to trade his services for money. He may not be good at it or even really know what he's doing, but he is the one who is doing it. Or the lady walking in front of you on the sidewalk. She's not a moving roadblock, an impediment in your way; you shouldn't treat her as such. She's going somewhere and is thinking about it, maybe anxiously, maybe expectantly. The polite thing to do would be to ask her to move aside, look her in the eye and see that she's a person.

Manners are respecting that someone is human, no more, no less. Respect encompasses more than that. I'm not yet certain how to define respect, but merely being human does not qualify one for it; being rightly human does. This brings up the issue of morality and what is right, but I don't want to get into that here. I just want to differentiate between manners and respect, in which manners are granted by virtue of being and respect/admiration/love is earned.