Politeness and dignity

I like my afternoon siesta here because I like my room. The hotel is an old colonial building and the room has what few modern high class hotels have: a high ceiling and a tall window (with shutters). The room also has something difficult to grasp – shape. There is something to these old buildings, something to their proportion, which is so very satisfying. No one knows quite why; when asked, people sometimes mutter “golden section” though when they try to make the calculations, it usually isn’t. We have insufficient intellectual apparatus to understand it, but we do sense it. Modern buildings don’t have that satisfying feel to them. They are indifferent.

And instead of carpet the room has tile.

But my afternoon nap yesterday was interrupted by noise in the courtyard: a Dutch family lunched there, their kids ran around in circles unsupervised and screamed, the adults talked at the top of their voices to work through the noise. The management asked them twice to keep it down, unsuccessfully. I had to close my window and did it rather demonstratively, but my demonstration, though noticed, was ineffective.

When they have finished yelling, they went away, and I reopened the window. Only after some time I noticed the quiet murmur of voices below: five Moroccans, and several small children, sat under my window – eating, drinking, and talking in low voices. Same number of people, kids roughly the same age; yet, they were barely noticeable.

The experience is typical in the entire middle-income third world. Though the Europeans like to talk about that part of the world as less “civilized” – by which they mean that buses belch smoke or land titles are not clear or the plumbing isn’t working – the truth is that when one encounters cases of pure sociopathic rudeness here, they are nearly always – in my experience always – acts of Europeans. Europeans point shoes at people, bare unattractive body parts, speak loudly, throw cigarettes wherever (because “nobody cares”). Thereby they show that they don’t care: a kind of blindness to the existence of others, a lighthearted lack of respect for fellow men. Which the natives perceive as a striking absence of dignity, since lack of respect for others is tantamount to a lack of respect to oneself.

Agatocles claims that the same Westerners would not dare behave in those same ways back home (certainly not throw the cigarette butts), by which he is suggesting, if you think about it, something very dark indeed. I am prepared to be more forgiving in my judgments, even if, in some instances at least – dress code, for example – there certainly is an element of being contrary, or scoring a point (presumably for freedom in dress taken facilely for a matter of women’s rights).

But that’s an aside. My main point was – politeness as subspecies of dignity: “I respect so that I may be respected back”. By giving respect to others one gives himself dignity.

Westerners don’t seem to understand the concept of dignity anymore. I don’t know why. Unlike Hutchinson, I do not want jump to winded (and worthless) explanations. So I say that I don’t know why, even if one explanation at least suggests itself instantly: cutting the head of one’s king is a sin against the divine order of the universe and calls for divine retribution.

Whatever the cause, we have lost dignity – our women don’t know how to be haughty anymore. I can’t help feeling that we have been thereby impoverished and that my years in Asia have helped me recover at least a certain degree of sensitivity for this quality which animates so much of the world outside the West.