Missed Manners--in Praise of Inhibition

I have a theory about all the unpleasant behavior taking place in public these days, but first let me tell you about the last time I saw my good friend Carly Simon. It was also the first time I saw her, but I’m following the standards for friendship laid down by Mickey Rooney when he recently was quoted as saying, “John F. Kennedy was one of my best friends. We first met in the elevator at the Waldorf Astoria, and we spoke again later at the White House.” I never shared the intimacy of an elevator with Carly Simon, so I wouldn’t go so far as to call her one of my best friends, but I did come within 12 feet of her once at a record store in New York City.

My good friend was sitting on a platform signing her new album for a line of people that stretched half a block. That celebrity buzz was in the air, and Carly looked properly glamorous, except for one disconcerting detail. She was eating a Milky Way bar. There was a chewing-tobacco-size wad bulging in her cheek, which she was cheerfully masticating as she chatted with fans, occasionally opening her mouth--and remember, this is no small mouth we’re talking about--to say “Really?” and providing a glimpse of caramel stalactites dripping from her teeth. This was not my image of how a star should behave, unless the star is Mr. Ed. I wanted to run up and tell my good friend, “Carly, there is a reason your mother told you not to talk with your mouth full.”

Actually, there are two reasons for inhibitions like this. One is societal well-being: The world would be a more pleasant place if no one ever had to look at another person’s half-eaten Milky Way. The other reason is personal shame: You might be classified as a slob. But, unfortunately, neither reason seems to carry much weight anymore, not even among people outside the music industry.

A recent book title sums up the attitude I keep seeing on the street: “What Do You Care What Other People Think?” I’m talking about the woman on the bus who showered me in a cloud of debris brushed from her hair and filed from her nails. The man behind me at the movie who plopped his old Nikes six inches from my nose. The strangers in the elevator doing a graphic post-game analysis of last night’s date. The teen-ager who made that extra effort to make sure everyone heard him using the sidewalk as a spittoon. The man who, at the start of an all-night flight to Europe, emerged from the plane’s bathroom and walked up the aisle in a pajama shirt, black knee-high socks and boxer shorts.

I’m not trying to argue that people are inherently ruder than they used to be. I’ve always been suspicious of trend-watchers who announce the discovery of something like “The New Obnoxiousness”--and then, five years later, upon noticing that there are still a few polite souls left, trumpet “The Return to Gentility.” I suspect that the percentage of utter boors in any society remains fairly constant over time.

But certain environments bring out the boor in everyone, a fact long known to sociologists and Morton Downey Jr., and what has changed recently is the public environment in which most of us operate. We spend much more time among strangers. This trend has been going on for decades as people leave small towns for the anonymous big cities, but it has accelerated because of the recent boom in air travel. The traffic on American carriers has risen 65% in the past decade, to 455 million passengers last year, which means that on any day any city is crawling with out-of-towners.

And what happens to those millions of conventioneers and tourists and sales reps when they go on the road? They quickly realize that they are not likely to enter into any lasting relationship with anyone they run into. (Unless, of course, they are Mickey Rooney, but that’s another problem.) This changes the equation for inhibitions. You might refrain from depositing your nail filings on a fellow passenger if you knew tomorrow she might be depositing her nail filings on you. But you know you won’t be seeing her tomorrow.

Of course, your victim may well be inspired to go off tomorrow and deposit her nail filings on someone else’s lap, who will then retaliate against someone else the next day, who will then--well, you can see that the world would be a more pleasant place if you would just put away the nail file now before this senseless cycle begins. But there’s no personal incentive for you to be inhibited. The situation is the same sort of public-policy problem as the greenhouse effect (although I believe I’m the first to explicitly link global warming and nail filings). You see, the world would probably be a more pleasant place if everyone cut back on driving cars that emit gases that warm up the atmosphere, but this is not going to happen because every person realizes that his or her little car makes no difference in the global scheme of things. Why be the only one to make the sacrifice? So people go on driving--and clipping their nails and putting their smelly sneakers on the seat.

The only solution, I think, is to rely on the second reason for inhibitions: personal shame. This, too, tends to be forgotten nowadays--if you’re surrounded by strangers, who cares if they think you’re a slob? But it may be possible to reinstitute a sense of shame by reminding people of another consequence of today’s travel: You never know whom you’re going to run into.

I can offer one cautionary tale: A man, frustrated at being stuck for several blocks behind a woman driving slowly, pulled up next to her at a traffic light and shouted an obscenity while flashing her the finger. Then he realized, as she looked back in shock, that it was his wife’s aunt.

Try to keep this story in mind the next time you feel like dispensing with an inhibition. There is a moral, and it’s the same moral I hereby offer Carly Simon: No matter where you are, a good friend may be watching.