Dr. Forni on Civility

I just received Pier Massimo Forni's new book: The Civility Solution: What to Do When People Are Rude. It is a must read. I recommend it highly.

Forni has written clearly and cogently about a vital issue. In the great cosmopolitan metropolis I call home, rudeness is an everyday fact of life. A goodly portion of my work as a life coach involves helping people to learn how to deal with it effectively.

Deal with rudeness badly or ineffectively and you will suffer psychological and physical stress. Deal with it well, as Forni argues, and your self-respect, character, and relationships will improve.

If this is true, then you have to wonder why the psycho-professions have not flooded the world with similar manuals. Why has the topic drawn the attention only of sociologists and etiquette experts. Knowing how to deal with rudeness is surely more important than rummaging through your memories, developing your spiritual side or getting in touch with your inner child.

Perhaps the psycho-professions cannot bear to lower themselves to teach people social skills. Or else, they might be so enamored of the myth of the asocial individual that they are blind to the complexities of human life in community. Their one-size-fits-all solution-- express your feelings-- almost guarantees that people will become socially dysfunctional.

From a theoretical standpoint, the error is egregious. There is no such thing as a human being that does not belong to a social group, and whose identity does not involve his or her place in the group. After all, isn't that what is at stake with rudeness.

The other reason therapy has missed the mark is that it has failed to understand trauma. Ever since Freud therapists have imagined that psychic trauma must involve criminal activity and must be understood as a detective story. The consequence is that therapy has ignored the need to learn how to respond to rudeness and has preferred teaching people how to fold all such events into appealing fictions.

Rudeness aims at one's place in society. In a community like New York where the extraordinary mix of peoples and cultures makes any determination of status and standing ambiguous at best, rudeness is a way to see how we stand in relation to others. Rudeness tests who is up and who is down, who is putting on airs and who is up to the task.

Ups and down are part of the way we talk about the issue. We know that we should stand up for ourselves when others are trying to put us down. When someone is rude to us, we should not slap him down; we want to allow him to back down voluntarily.

This is what Dr. Forni means when he recommends that we answer rudeness with civility. We do not want to answer rudeness with aggressiveness, contentiousness, litigiousness, or argumentativeness. And surely we should not indulge in histrionic displays, displays that draw so much attention to ourselves that our offending neighbor does not even have the chance to reflect on his own bad behavior.

Perhaps Dr. Forni is overly optimistic when he recommends that civility can diminish the sting of rudeness and restore relationship harmony. I have often been accused of the same myself. But while civility is not the appropriate response to every imaginable act of rudeness, it is surely the place to start and the resource that needs to be exhausted before trying more radical methods.