What Is Civility?

For the past few weeks, everyone has been paying lip service to civility. If that were all we needed, we would now be awash in civility.

Of course, we do not feel more civil. We feel like we have been sprayed with the byproducts of excessive lip service: spittle and drool.

There’s no civility in that.

Nor is there any civility in lecturing people about the need for civility. If you want people to be more civil, set a good example. As John Podhoretz pointed out, when the crowd at the memorial service cheers raucously, it is not a civil moment.

Let’s start over, by trying to understand what civility is. Right now, most people think it’s just another word for nice. They think that civil is the opposite of angry.

On both counts, they are seriously mistaken. Which may explain why we are not very civil.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with anger. Sometimes anger is the only right emotion. And you don’t always need to keep it to yourself.

If a politician promises one thing and delivers another, he has defrauded you. If you do not feel even a twinge of anger, you are a clod.

Aristotle said that the right anger is found at the mean between too much and too little anger. If your anger is proportionate, you should express it civilly. That means, Aristotle says, expressing it: “to the right person, to the right extent, at the right time, with the right aim, and in the right way….”

If you lose control of the emotion and fail to express it within the confines of polite discourse, you are not being civil.

Kind and nice are not always civil and are not always right. If someone attacks you, physically or morally, responding with kindness is not civil; it is pusillanimous.

In truth, civility is not about how you feel. It is about how you act toward other people. Civility is as civility does.

As a code of conduct, civility entails politeness, courtesy, and good manners. It’s opposite is rude, crude, coarse, vulgar, and tactless.

Your soul can be awash in lovely sentiments, but if you don’t know how to chew with your mouth closed, you will not be behaving civilly.

You may feel all of the world’s gratitude, but if you fail to send a thank-you note, you are being rude.

Civility is not about how you feel, but about how you make others feel.

When people confuse civility with kindness they are recommending that you go out and get some therapy.

They are telling you to purge your negative emotions and to get in touch with your warm, fuzzy ones.

If you reject therapy, civility’s proponents will happily police your language, the better to cleanse it of any words that might give offense.

Neutering your language is not a sign of civility. It is a sign of oppression.

If you want to become more civil, you should not be rummaging around in the depths of your soul to conjure up some niceness. You should be logging on to Amazon to purchase a few volumes of Miss Manners.

Civility lies in formal gestures, in rituals and ceremonies. It does not lie in the full and open expression of feeling.

If you want to practice civility, you should do so in all of your behavior, whether in everyday etiquette or in political debates.

When it comes to political debate, civility lies in the formal gestures of respect that legislators seem always to use: “the distinguished gentleman,” “my esteemed colleague,” “my dear friend.”

These are not lip service. They are gestures of respect. They assert, openly and actively, that disagreements are not personal. They allow a full and open airing of each side of the argument.

We have been losing our civility for decades now. It was a casualty of the 1960s counterculture. Incivility became de rigueur when the antiwar movement declared war against the Vietnam war.

Rather than present their arguments civilly, young radicals believed that they could only advance their cause by being revolting.

Led by the Weathermen they organized a mock insurrection, called Days of Rage, at the Democratic National Convention in 1968. Of course, they had to fight in the streets. Otherwise people would have thought that they were against the war because they were cowards.

Even for those who were not allied with William Ayers, the counterculture glorified rudeness and made it a way of life. It insisted on the virtue of spontaneous enthusiasm over the polite and respectful performance of social rituals.

With the election of George W. Bush and the Iraq War the antiwar movement was roused from its torpor. The armies of incivility awoke and ramped up the rhetoric and heaped vitriol on anyone who supported Bush and/or the war.

Compared to the violent rhetoric thrown at the Bush administration, Tea Party activists who showed up at Town Hall meetings and exercised their rights to free speech decorously, if somewhat loudly, were amateurs.

Why We Should All Love Miss Manners

For quite some time I have considered Miss Manners to be one of our great moral philosophers.

Hopefully, you will not be smirking or thinking that I am setting you up; I am entirely serious.

Many of us have been led to believe that etiquette-- the field in which Miss Manners has excelled-- is just a trivial aspect of ethical behavior. If we have accepted that idea, we need but remind ourselves that George Washington-- yes, that George Washington-- consumed etiquette books with uncommon ardor.

Washington believed that he could only found a Republic if he knew the proper rules for kindness, consideration, and courtesy. He also believed that etiquette books would help him to create rituals and ceremonies that would allow citizens to participate in it.

Today‘s thinkers tend to believe that America was founded on ideas. George Washington understood that a nation cannot live on ideas alone.

Even if that were not true, etiquette would, Miss Manners has been at pains to teach us, make life more pleasant and enjoyable.

The word ethics comes from the Greek word “ethos” which means character. Ethics is about how to build good charcter, the better to have more harmonious personal interactions and to live in a more functional community.

Ethics aims at social ties. It concerns what happens between friends, not what happens in the family.

The basic ethical principles were written down in religious texts and by philosophers like Aristotle. No one has really added anything substantive since. Principles have been disputed, especially by those who want to rationalize unethical behavior, but they have not been expanded or revised in any significant way.

The basic ethical principles are relatively easy to understand. Problems arise when it comes to their practical application.

Knowing the principle of negotiated compromise is one thing. Knowing how to effect a compromise between two parties who are lunging at each other’s throats is quite another.

Which leads us to Miss Manners. She does not express her ethical thought via a philosophical treatise, but in newspaper columns where she examines specific problems offered by individual readers and tries to shed some ethical light on them.

They are, as a young therapist once told me, essential reading for anyone training to do therapy or coaching. Isn’t it better to learn how to evaluate real moral dilemmas than to ram a patient’s experience into a grand narrative where he is enacting his one true Freudian desire-- to copulate with his mother?

Wouldn’t it be better for therapists to see their patients as normally constituted human beings confronting difficult, even insoluble, moral dilemmas? Wouldn’t that be better than assuming that they are sick or deranged or perverted?

Not because mental illness does not exist. It does and it should be taken seriously. Yet, most people who consult with therapists and coaches are not sick; they need moral guidance more than they need medicine.

In her column this morning Miss Manners confronts the kind of problem that arises for people who live in a society that does not value privacy. Link here.

A woman writes in to explain that she is dating and loves a man who does not belong to her social circle. She is shy, a prim and proper church-going lady. Her boy friend is a self-described red neck.

People who come from different communities often have different values. How can this young couple reconcile theirs?

The man in question seems to feel that their bedroom antics are worthy of public display. When he exposes them to her circle, she gets angry and embarrassed. He dismisses her concern as a symptom of her feeling embarrassed to be dating a red neck.

Her evident discomfort has not caused him to refrain from continuing to spill their intimate secrets.

Despite it all, she loves him, and she has come to believe that once she figures out how better to express her feelings to him he will naturally want to stop.

Of course, Miss Manners will have none of it. Basing her thinking on the venerable idea that we should respect the feelings of other people, she expresses her dismay that the woman’s boyfriend would not cease and desist as a gesture of respect for his girlfriend’s feelings.

She writes: “Meanwhile, he should be restraining himself, whether he understands or not, because it is important to you. That much anyone ought to be able to do out of love.”

A wonderful response, most especially because Miss Manners is also saying that doing the right thing does not require you to understand why. As I have been discussing the past few days, insight should never be a precondition for good behavior.

The boyfriend should do it here and now, because it will take too much time for this woman to offer him a long course in basic ethical principles. How can you explain to someone who lives in a “tell-all” culture, why privacy matters? And why in a culture that honors intemperate self-expression over all other social values, you should respect the feelings of other people?

In her words: “It will be quite a job for you to explain, in a tell-all society, that there is dignity in reticence, beauty in modesty and pleasure in having your own intimate world for just the two of you. These are subtle concepts which will take a while to get across as you point out examples in others and in your own lives.”

Miss Manners does not tell this woman what to do about her relationship. She merely tells her what she has a right to expect from a man who loves her.

Happily, she also corrects the woman’s therapy-induced misapprehension: that the man needs to understand the basic principles of privacy before he shuts up about their private life.

Is Etiquette Making a Comeback?

For yo these many years, those of us who are older and presumably wiser have been imploring the younger generation to cease and desist with their constant rudeness and to start learning good manners.

Now the New York Post reports that more and more twentysomethings, in serious want of jobs, are turning to etiquette coaches. Link here.

Considering that rudeness, as we discovered a few days ago, has now been shown to be neurotoxin, it is not a minute too soon.

Some millennials are being sent by their employers, some by their parents. Some are even paying for it themselves.

All seem to realize that if you don’t know how to eat soup properly or how to chew with your mouth closed, you will be excluded from the dinners where connections are made and deals are negotiated.

For a generation that made a fetish out of rudeness these classes are merely a baby step that begins a very, very long journey.

Bad manners are bad habits. They do not just go away because you know the proper use of a napkin.

Replacing boorish habits with good ones is a long and arduous process, made that much more difficult when so many of your friends will not have taken the same etiquette classes.

If you step outside of the company lunch room and discover that you are the only one who is not slurping the soup, you are going to feel like an outsider, a reject, a pariah.

Peer pressure will induce you to retain your bad old habits. If you have one set of manners for the business lunch and another set for Happy Hour with your pals, you are going to find yourself split in two, not knowing which one is the real you.

My advice: once you learn good manners, practice them all the time, even at the risk of having your friends treat you like a retrograde cultural element.

If your habits are bad, they show themselves in nearly all of your day-to-day activities. If your friends are similarly deficient in acts of common courtesy and respect you have no doubt been suffering the neurotoxicity of bad manners for quite some time.

Bad manners do not begin and end and the dinner table. To mean anything at all they must become a way of life.

If your table manners are impeccable and you are chronically late for meetings, you will have missed the point. And if you are perfectly well put together sartorially but text during interviews and meetings, you will have shown yourself to be a poseur.

But, where did everyone’s good manners go? I think it fair to say that they were a casualty of our recent multicultural delirium. Think what you will about whether all cultures are created equal-- to me the idea makes no sense-- but there is only one set of manners that makes you courteous and respectful in your local community.

Table manners are local, but all cultures have table manners. If you believe that ingesting food is an opportunity to express your unique individuality, to take a stand against the dominant patriarchal culture, or to practice the virtues of spontaneity, then you will have been trained in rudeness.

Unfortunately, it’s a lot easier to get into rudeness than it is to get out of it.

What's Wrong with New York?

Imagine yourself a cultural anthropologist a few centuries hence. You are studying New York City at the turn of the millennium, trying to figure out how it lost its global preeminence. How did New York lose its place as center of the world ?

You have been digging up shards of broken pottery, have examined scores of movies and television shows, and are hard at work on the print media. Still the question is hanging over you: What went wrong with New York?

Then, unexpectedly, you light on a passage by Naomi Wolf, a leading feminist of the time, describing a strange custom that had metastasized through a segment of New York's elite. Link here.

Would do you make of it?

In Wolf's words: "Consider this typical exchange among successful, affluent, educated women in Manhattan where I live. These are women who have everything that feminism, Western culture and consumer society define as highly valuable: income; choices; stylishness; fascinating, high-status work; rich and equitable, if demanding, family lives. Yet among themselves the question 'How are you?' is almost never followed by 'Great.'

"In fact, if someone in this realm asks me how I am and I smile and say, 'Everything's good, thank heavens! Kids are healthy, partner's great, work is going well,' people gaze at me blankly for a beat, as if I have just gotten off the bus from a small town in a forgotten agricultural region. For them, it is more socially acceptable to answer the question with a list of complaints: too busy, workload too heavy, contractors on the new addition taking forever. If you are closer friends, you can add teenagers acting out and college applications too demanding."

Some of you who do not live in New York might have found some of my posts about the culture of complaint to be a bit exaggerated, so perhaps Wolf's experience will show that I did not make it all up.

I hope you will not be disappointed if I do not take up Wolf's theoretical challenge and read her description of this strange and disconcerting custom as a reflection on feminism. I do tend to believe that feminism does promote incivility, but I also believe that it belongs to a larger countercultural movement that has been working long and hard to undermine civility, formality, respect, and common courtesy.

If you are a cultural anthropologist you will be most interested in the way the everyday ritual of greeting people, a ritual that connects people socially, was deformed into something that is, to Naomi Wolf, off-putting. You will be asking how the simple question, How are you?, became an invitation to pour out your heart about everything that is wrong in your life.

You might well conclude that this ritual deformity represents everything that was wrong with New York. Clearly, New Yorkers had purposefully abandoned the art of getting along.

Human connection, the affirmation of our belonging to a social group, occurs through formalities like the ritual exchange of greetings. How are you? is not, as Miss Manners has been at pains to point out, an invitation to assert your individuality.

Formal greetings require that you share good news, that you put a positive spin on things. You want to lift up your friend's spirit, make him happy to see you, and make him look forward to seeing you again. You do not, off the top, want to burden him with your problems.

When you smile and greet a friend with the news that your life is going well, you are making yourself more likeable. If you were wondering why I have been emphasizing the importance of being likeable, you can see from Naomi Wolf's experience that far too many sophisticated New Yorkers are anything but.

In a social world saturated by narcissism no one seems to care about how anyone else feels. Everyone seems to believe that the only authentic communication involves complaining about everything that is going wrong.

I should mention that these women are also engaging in ritualized bragging. They are asserting that they have full lives, with the complicated problems that torment the well-healed. They are certainly being rude, but they are also asserting their positions on a social hierarchy.

Of course, bragging is just another form of narcissism. More importantly, these people find it so important to complain that they have incorporated it into the most innocent social ritual... the gesture of greeting a friend.

Wherever did they get such an idea? However did they learn such a habit?

It is clear to me, as a denizen of this world, that they learned it in therapy. Some of you have suggested that I have in these posts been offering something of a caricature of therapy and the therapy culture. Now you see, via Naomi Wolf, that I may have a point.

I do not want to suggest that all therapists teach their patients to be chronic complainers. But, as I said a few days ago, if a Harvard psychiatrist has to put up a sign in his office saying: Thou Shalt Not Whine, there must be quite a bit of it around.

Whatever happens in the offices of individual therapists, we do know that the culture creates expectations about therapy and the culture defines the right and wrong ways to meet and greet other people in the course of a day. We all know by now that therapists who establish a good human connection with their patients provide better and more effective treatment.

If so, they must be spending a large part of their time countering the noxious influences that persist in the therapy culture, and the bad habits that this culture has made into common discourtesy.

Even if a therapist has learned from cognitive theory to teach his patients to balance the good with the bad, the fact remains that far too many people, influenced either by personal experiences of therapy or the therapy culture at large, have come to believe that they should reject formality in favor of authenticity. And they have come to believe that complaining about everything that is wrong is the most authentic communication.

Hopefully, future cultural anthropologists will be able to sort it all out.

Coaching Lessons: The Rule of Three

How do you deal with rudeness? What is the right response to impoliteness, insults, and impudence? What do you do when someone treats you with disrespect, whether intentional or accidental?

The question often comes up in discussions of rudeness, but we rarely have anything like a rule, a guideline, that tells us when to ignore it and when to respond.

Dare I say, there's rudeness and there's rudeness. No rule applies to every different kind of rudeness. But Peter Bregman's rule, which he calls the rule of three, feels as good as any that I have seen. Link here.

Bregman applies this rule, or better, he shows how it can be applied to workplace situations, especially those where an employee or a colleague commits minor infractions against corporate decorum.

It matters that we sensitize ourselves to these minor breaches, because it is much better to clarify a relationship when the problems are less emotionally charged and less costly.

If you want to judge someone's character, it is best to look for the small things. In that way you will not be too shocked when you discover that the person's character is wanting in relation to more vital issues.

Bregman offers the case of Anne, who was, on one occasion, ten minutes late to a client meeting. Bregman noticed her tardiness and said nothing. Anyone can be late for reasons beyond her control.

Second, Anne handed in a report two hours later than she had promised. Bregman started thinking that he was seeing a pattern of bad behavior emerge. Still, she might have been interrupted. His judgment was taking form, but it was not clear enough to merit an intervention.

Third, Anne bowed out of a conference call with a colleague, in an email, without offering an explanation. At that point Bregman decided that he had to address the pattern.

I will emphasize, as does Bregman, that none of these faults were costly for the company. Were it not for their indication of a certain carelessness toward professional duties, he could easily have overlooked them.

But, as I said, it is better to help Anne to correct her behavior and improve her character before she commits a fault that costs the company an account.

If Bregman had intervened after the first lapse, he would have looked overly sensitive, as though he were taking a random occurrence personally. It might have appeared that he was overcome with personal pique, and this would have drawn attention away from Anne's behavior.

If he had intervened after the second lapse, he might have looked overly critical, as though he were jumping on her for situations that were out of her control. Anne might have been late to the meeting because of an unavoidable traffic tie-up, and she might have had to hand in the report late because some she was unexpectedly forced to run out to pick up a child from school. Twice forms a pattern, but it the presumption of good character is sufficient to override two errors.

After the third lapse, Bregman says that he had to confront her. For my part I would not avoid the notion of confrontation. Many people will read the word confrontation and think that they should, under such circumstances, adopt a confrontational tone.

Bregman wants simply to bring the issue to Anne's attention. He does not want to attack her; he does not want to accuse her of anything; he wants to give her the opportunity to recognize that she has been developing a reputation for being unreliable and untrustworthy, and that, if it continues, the behavior will compromise her prospects for career advancement.

So, the rule is: when someone offends you the first time, notice it, and let it go. When he offends you the second time, register it as evidence of a developing pattern, and do not say anything. When he offends you the third time, you are within your rights to bring it to his attention. After the third time there can be little question of your overreacting, of being overly sensitive, or of looking for a fight.

Of course, the larger issue is whether or not there is something magical about the number three? I mean that semi-seriously.

For example, I have long advocated written thank-you notes. Everyone who has anything to say about etiquette and decorum says the same. I have made something like an original contribution in saying that a sincere and thoughtful thank-you note should contain three, and exactly three, sentences.

Strangers Acting Rudely

I've blogged about this before, but the question is worth more reflection: What should you do when strangers have bad manners? How far can you go to ensure that everyone demonstrates proper decorum in public?

A previous post of mine is here. Grotts' post is here.

Do you have the right or the duty to correct ill mannered strangers? If you do so, will you be striking a blow for civility or will you be aggravating the problem.

My answer, and that of Lisa Grotts and several other authoritative voices on etiquette, is: You do not have the right and you should not do it. As one writer so aptly put it: two rudes don't make a polite.

Of course, your best approach is almost always to ignore the behavior and refuse to engage with the person who is evincing it.

Unless, of course, their behavior is sufficiently obnoxious to be interfering with your ability to enjoy the concert. Then you are obliged to make a remark that allows them to become aware of the effect their antics are having on the rest of the concert-going public. Making them aware means assuming that once they are aware they will naturally stop what they are doing.

In that case you are not criticizing or correcting, but holding up a mirror to their bad behavior.

According to experts, the larger rule seems to be that you should mind your own business.

Surely, when you are eating lunch with a group of people and one of them has bad table manners, you should not correct him. The same applies to bad grammar.

I am inclined to believe that an adult should never correct another adult's table manners.

Why so? Among other reasons the gesture is demeaning and infantilizing. You are asserting a degree of social superiority that is normally not welcome among friends.

But what happens when your friend's fly is open. Isn't it correct to point it out, discretely? Or if your friend has a piece of spinach caught in his teeth? Isn't it helpful to say something? If you were in his position you would surely want to know before you had embarrassed yourself more.

Here, the answer is: yes and no. If you are a very, very close friend, you should make a gesture that alerts your friend to the problem. If you are not, you would do best to avert your gaze.

Correcting someone else's bad manners is, as Grotts puts it, a willful intrusion into a zone of personal privacy. Most such intrusions will feel like aggressive acts and will often be treated as such.

In the old days of psychoanalysis, analysts assumed that patients were resisting their interpretations because their fragile egos could not bear to think that they harbored incestuous wishes toward their mothers.

By now no one would even think of taking offense at such an accusation. Everyone will pretty much take it in stride. At best, it is an unconscious motivation, so, why worry?

Most people save real resistance and overt hostility for comments about their personal appearance and table manners.

Perhaps they know better than Freud what really matters in life.

Common Courtesy: The Post-Interview Thank-You Note

Everyone knows that the first thing you should do after a job interview is to write a thank-you note. You get points for doing it; you lose points for not doing it.

In today's difficult job market, where you have lots of competition, failing to write a thank-you note sets you apart as someone who is not serious and not interested in the job.

How can we explain this? Today Amy Rauch Neilson offers a good discussion of post-interview thank-you notes. Link here.

For many people, Neilson suggests, the injunction to write a thank-you note sounds like something their mothers told them to do-- or even, forced them to do-- when they were in the third grade.

Thus, the whole process was tainted. Writing the note still feels like giving in to pressure and being dispossessed of one's autonomy.

Thank-you notes fall within the category of common courtesy. And we live in a culture that looks down on people who are common and courteous.

The culture tells us that we should be uncommon, unique, independent individuals. How better to signify uncommon strengths than not to do what is expected.

People who fail to respect protocol often feel like they are distinguishing themselves from all of the lemmings who take orders and automatically write thank-you notes. They feel they are showing off their creativity.

As it happens, no corporate hiring officer will interpret bad manners as a sign of creativity. He will see it as a sign of bad attitude, the one thing he least wants in the workplace.

Some people refuse to write thank-you notes because they do not feel very much gratitude. If they have learned that they should express their feelings and that they should not express anything more or less than their true feelings, they will not be able to say thank-you when they are not feeling it.

They leave an interview with a complex set of emotions. If they rummage through said emotions, they will be unable to find gratitude in the mix. No feelings of gratitude; no thank-you note.

A thank-you note is a formality. It is a required ritual observance. It is not the place to show off your unique individuality or to express what is really in your heart.

It doesn't matter how it feels to write it; it matters how it feels to read it.

The note must sound sincere. It cannot sound glib and forced. It cannot sound perfunctory and should not be loaded down with excess verbiage.

Clear, concise, to the point... but not too clear, too concise, or too much to the point.

You can best accomplish this by following a formula I invented to help people write these notes. A good thank-you note should contain three and only three sentences.

This also applies to the note you send to express gratitude for a gift, but that is for another day.

Look at the three-sentence formula this way. One or two sentences feels dismissive; it says that you know that this is a formality and that you want to get it over with the minimum effort.

Hopefully, you do not want to be communicating this message to a potential employer.

If you write too much, as one executive explained to Neilson, you sound desperate and needy.

Desperate and needy does not inspire confidence. It tells your interviewer to question why you have suffered so many rejections.

Three sentences, but not just any three sentences.

The first sentence should thank the interviewer for giving his time and for providing you with new and exciting information about the company.

The second sentence should echo something specific from the interview. This will help the interviewer remember you. If you forgot to provide some information about something that was discussed, you can mention it in the second sentence.

The third sentence should be forward looking. You cannot presume that you are going to be hired, but you need to express how honored you are to be considered for the job and how willing you are to provide further information, as needed.

In addition to this, Neilson says that it is acceptable to email a thank-you note, but that you should do so within 24 hours of the interview.

Since a thank-you note is an important communication, one where you want to show yourself as conscientious and diligent, the kind of employee they are looking for.

Take some care with the note. Rewrite and edit it. Do not use any abbreviations that might be suitable for texting. And remember that you are not writing to your bff.

Bringing Up Well-Mannered Children

At a time when rudeness often passes for creativity, Dr. Perri Klass's "New York Times" article, "Making Room for Miss Manners is a Parenting Basic," gives cause for optimism. Link here.

A New York pediatrician Klass despairs over children who have no manners. While psychologists are trying to teach everyone to be nonjudgmental, she declares that she and every pediatrician she knows pass judgment on discourteous children.

However healthy the children are, and however well they hit their developmental milestones, they will be hampered in life for not having been trained to show consideration for the feelings of others.

The reason: they have been taught to be touch with their own feelings and to expect that everyone else will accommodate their occasional or frequent rudeness.

Klass offers the conceptual corrective to this pernicious notion: "I'm not telling you to like your teacher; I'm telling you to treat her with courtesy. I'm not telling you that you cannot hate Tommy; I'm telling you that you cannot hit Tommy. Your feelings are your own private business; your behavior is public."

Well said, these are words to live by.

And You Think You Have Problems

Consider the case of the poor sod-- that's British slang for a 48 year old male senior manager-- who wrote to Lucy Kellaway of the "Financial Times" to ask a burning question: Does he have to go to the office Christmas party? Link here.

If he sounds like a whiny child asking whether he really has to go to school, then you have captured the tone of the query.

As it happens, this man made a solemn vow to himself last year, to the effect that he would "never again" attend one of these celebrations. And he would have happily kept his word, were it not for the recession.

I, for one, would tend to place considerable value on sworn vows, even those made only to oneself. Yet, a vow made in a fit of pique should, if possible, be discarded. That is what his mind is beginning to tell him. Potential unemployment, like pain, focuses the mind.

As you might expect, many of those who have offered him advice on the "Financial Times" website have made it clear that he has a bad attitude toward his company and its culture. If he advertises his sour disposition and general disrespect in his everyday work, then his job is probably in some danger... recession or no.

Besides, given the fact that he has a job and that his company is among the few still holding Christmas parties, he should be able to find good reason to rejoice. That is what a rational person would be thinking.

Our sod, however, recalls last year's party as an unspeakable trauma, to the point where this year's party is "the most dreaded event of the social year."

Last year he worked himself into high dudgeon over the "fake camaraderie," the "excessive alcohol consumption," and, as though that were not enough, "the hideous vulgarity of it all."

Do you feel his pain? If not, let's make a stab at empathy. Imagine last year's party, a raucous event that was bubbling over with the raw energy of youthful exuberance. And let us imagine that our 48 year old sod was feeling somewhat out of it. One person's "hideous vulgarity" is another, probably, younger person's idea of a good time.

A normally-constituted older person would accept the reality of his advancing age and would arrive early and leave before the high jinks shifted into higher gear.

Our sod did not think in these terms. He responded to the festivities, one imagines, by oozing the kind of unctuousness that is going to alienate everyone in the room.

He had not considered that it is possible to act your age and still to have a good time among people who are half your age.

A Christmas party, like many other events that count as crucial to the creation of a strong corporate culture, matters far more in the breach than in the observance.

In many ways minor obligations are more telling than major ones. It's like the man who is having a job interview over lunch. He is thoroughly ingratiating to his potential future colleagues, but is extremely rude to the waiter. If you are the interviewer you must hold the rudeness against him. It tells you that his charm is unreal.

Going to a Christmas party requires so little effort that our sod will look very bad indeed if he blows it off. He will be telling his colleagues that he does not want to celebrate the end of the year with them. They will probably be able to read in his tone of voice or facial expressions that he considers them to be vulgar, pretentious, and empty.

It is not just a question of holding on to a job. It is a question of doing a job well and effectively in a difficulty business environment. At times like these people should do everything in their power to ensure the effective function of the company and the good morale of the staff. One essential step in that direction is showing up at a party that you may have outgrown. It does not feel like too great a sacrifice to make for the good of the team.

Skipping the party with a lame excuse is very bad form. It will likely grant you many unhappy returns of the day.

Pacman and Deion

If HBO had thought that a reality show about the Dallas Cowboys training camp would be full of drama, they must have been disappointed. This motley crew of outsized personalities and recovering criminals spent their training camp ... working hard, being coached, and creating team spirit. No drama there.

It was not just HBO that had their hopes dashed. Sportswriters had been drooling in anticipation at the chance that Terrell Owens (aka TO)would says something, anything, to cause trouble in Cowboyland. After all, TO had been benched by the Eagles for being a disruptive influence. How could anyone believe that Jerry Jones had magically transformed him into the ultimate team player?

Even if TO was likely to let the sportswriters down, they still held out hope for the new Cowboy cornerback-- Adam Jones, aka Pacman.

Where TO was merely benched by a team, Pacman has been suspended from football for a year, by the Commissioner, Roger Goodell. The reason: an incident in a Law Vegas strip club. I will spare you the details, which involved throwing around cash and bullets. Eventually, Pacman copped a plea to a misdemeanor and did some community service.

As if that was not enough, the Cowboys had also signed a great middle guard named Tank Johnson. Tank had one-upped even Pacman: he had done time on a weapons charge.

Like I say, sportswriters could barely contain their anticipation.

The rest of us can learn a few things from this. If you are in business and are responsible for managing difficult characters, you could do worse than to emulate Jerry Jones.

Cowboy owner Jerry Jones appeared often in "Hard Knocks," mostly saying that he could be anywhere, doing anything with his time. He had chosen to be at training camp. He chose to be there with the players because he loved the game and loved the players.

It matters that the owner is there, on the field, at practice and at scrimmages, in his shorts and golf shirt. It shows that he cares about his players, and not just as they performed for him.

Jones was something of a contrarian investor in talent. He did not merely pick up players that no one wanted; he signed players that no one knew how to deal with.

How did he deal with them? Simply. He showed them respect, he treated them like men, and he cared about their lives beyond football. If a player had a problem with a coach-- as TO did with Bill Parcells-- Jerry Jones had lunch with him and talked it out.

Let's not forget: the Cowboys have a large and efficient player personnel department to keep track of the players and to offer them guidance.

Supposedly, Pacman was going to be a challenge and a half. To manage their potentially great cornerback the team enlisted the help of Michael Irvin and Deion Sanders. Irvin himself knew well how to get into trouble and how to get out of it. Deion Sanders, a former Cowboy and resident of Dallas, was probably the greatest cornerback to play the game. Besides, he was an idol and a hero to Pacman Jones.

Deion especially had decided to mentor Pacman. He welcomed him into the Sanders family, invited him to picnics, and showed him what a good family life was like and how it felt to spend time with friends.

It's one thing to tell someone to stay out of strip clubs and to avoid the wrong people. It is quite another to show him a viable alternative. As Aristotle said, it is not enough to repress bad habits; you need to replace bad habits with good ones.

For me, one exchange epitomized the greatness of Deion's mentoring. In the last episode of "Hard Knocks" we saw Deion and Pacman out fishing. This is the kind of scene that brings out the cynical side of sportswriters.

The scene had been filmed a couple of days after the NFL Commissioner had reinstated Pacman for the entire season. Obviously, it was very good news.

So Pacman and Deion were discussing the reinstatement, when Deion turned to the younger man and asked him whether he had called the Commissioner to thank him.

Pacman replied that he had sent a letter.

Deion suggested that that was not quite enough. The situation required a phone call.

(You would have thought you were listening to an etiquette coach!)

Anyway, Pacman was not persuaded.

So Deion changed his tactics and offered a hypothetical: Which would you rather receive, he said, a letter from Oprah or a phone call from Oprah.

Pacam got the point.

Call it a dialogue between youth and experience, between the troubled 24 year-old and the forty-something All Star. Obviously, Deion understood something that young people simply do not think about: the way that small gestures can improve relationships and build character.

A phone call is more personal and more gracious than a letter. It is certainly better than a text message. A phone call requires you to stand up like a man. Roger Goodell had given Pacman a great opportunity; Pacman owed him that much respect.

More than that, Deion knew how to persuade Pacman to do it. He taught him to put himself in someone else's shoes. How do you feel when someone important sends you a letter? How do you feel when that same person calls you on the phone?

The least we can say is that this approach does not lend itself to drama. Thankfully, for everyone involved.