Thoughts on Politeness #1

Well, I already broke my promise to myself. I vowed that I would post daily, but life throws you a bunch of curve balls it seems. However, I'd rather not get too down on myself. Perhaps #nodaysoff is a bit too unrealistic, I'll take James Clear's (author of Atomic Habits, a fantastic book) advice and be the guy who 'never misses 2 days in a row' (although he was referring to going to the gym).

After giving my initial thoughts on compassion in my last post, it makes logical sense to give my initial thoughts on the other side of the agreeableness coin. That other side of the coin, which is definitely more difficult to understand, is politeness. I find that politeness is extremely misunderstood by most people (including me, probably) and I often find myself disagreeing with others on how it should be defined. From a young age, we are told not be impolite. To be impolite is to be disrespectful, and you should always do your best to be respectful to everyone no matter how you feel about them. While I may agree with the respectfulness thing, I don't equate politeness to respectfulness. If politeness is to be treated as an aspect of agreeableness, then being impolite should simply correlate to being disagreeable, not necessarily disrespectful.

This must mean that it is possible to be both respectful and disagreeable at the same time! Imagine that. If this were not the case, then it would be impossible for us to have civil dialogue with each other, take constructive criticism and all other instances where we don't simply praise or bend the knee to someone else. Disagreement is vital to a functioning social circle and society at large, a society without them seems pretty 'Zeig Heil' to me. A society devoid of disagreement implies that at least one of its members is infallible or even omnipotent, this type of thinking gets toxic really fast. Impoliteness is the key driver to shattering the charade of human infallibility. So how should one define politeness? I defer (ironically) to the personality psychologists..

Politeness: the tendency to defer to authority or social norms

That's it! I think this is the best way to describe politeness because it nicely rounds out how we can manifest agreeableness (in conjunction with compassion). In order for anyone to agree with anybody, they generally have 2 paths they can take: 1. consider the emotions of others and then act accordingly (compassion) or 2. consider the social dynamics and then act accordingly (politeness). By defining politeness this way, it casts impoliteness in a much more forgiving light. I'm rationalizing pretty hard here for sure. I score moderately low in politeness so naturally I need a way to justify how it is ok to be impolite. Although, I think if we did not view politeness in this way, it would be extremely tough to understand how agreeableness works. I find it unhelpful to think of being uncompassionate or impolite as 'bad' things as doing so would suggest that disagreement is also a bad thing. Me no likey this :(

I also think that people conflate the word 'impolite' and 'rude' far too much. Given my definitions of both compassion and politeness, rudeness must be viewed through both aspects at the same time. To be rude is to be uncompassionate, since you are not considering the feelings of those you are being rude to, as well as impolite, as you are not deferring to their authority or the agreed upon social norms. It is perfectly acceptable to think of rudeness as a bad thing, I find that it is never really necessary as you can always be impolite while being considerate of one's feelings at the same time. As a rule of thumb, I try to uphold compassion in disagreements so I can feel morally forthright in my impoliteness. Considering the feelings of others in contentious situations is also a great way to practice empathy and humility. It is very difficult to do as others often won't play by the same rules as me as I get straw-manned to death in arguments, but I like the challenge. I also need to accept the fact the some people don't like looking into their abyss, and I'm often the one to make them glance over to it.

I've thought a lot about both aspects of agreeableness, and what I've realized is something pretty neat. In all of the Big 5 Personality traits, it seems as if one of its aspects is more innate and the other one is more adaptive. Compassion seems to be more of an innate aspect of agreeableness which is organized in advance of experience (This is Jonathan Haidt's preferred definition of innate, its amazing) while politeness seems to be more adaptive and reliant on experience. I find as if polite people must have had a lot of bad experiences with going against the grain or challenging the authority of others, such as parents and teachers, at young ages. This constant negative reinforcement is a pretty good driver for being polite. I know a lot of people like this and while they are compliant, you can tell there is sometimes an underlying insincerity in how they conduct themselves. Agreeableness manifests externally, but on the inside we may not agree with what we are about to do for someone. This is where the resentment can come in for the overly agreeable.

So I've shit talked politeness pretty hard, but I promise I will steel-man it at some point. But I don't want to do right now, screw y'all :)