Josh ([info]cardinalsin) wrote,
@ 2007-05-03 18:14:00
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R E S P E C T
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2071099,00.html

The above article - about the perennial problem of people behaving inconsiderately in public places - is worth a look. The author confronts misbehaviour on several occasions and seems to meet with complete lack of any comprehension.

This stuff genuinely worries me, but I don't know what - if anything - should be done about it. Cameron burbles on about social responsibility but doesn't want to do anything about it, while Blair et al have tried the ASBO route - which may or may not be working, but certainly doesn't cover the behaviours described anyway. I have my doubts that lack of respect is really a new phenomenon, but it still amazes me the lack of shame people have in such behaviour when confronted.

It's a culture thing, it seems. Some people seem to feel free to act however they like, and most people are either unwilling or unable to confront it; perhaps that lack of confrontation is what encourages the first group to carry on acting that way, and instils the belief that any confrontation which does happen is abnormal - the result of some busybody getting involved - and not their problem. But how can anyone change this culture?

Could it be that some people think this culture is "right"?

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[info]undyingking
2007-05-03 05:33 pm UTC (link)
"Well, I just wondered why you worried about other people. I thought it was a socialist thing to do."

Appealing though this theory is, it may be a touch simplistic.

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[info]secondhand_rick
2007-05-03 07:06 pm UTC (link)
Seems to me it's about lack of integration.

People no longer seem to feel like they're a part of society at large, and therefore have no commonality or connection with strangers around them.

Similarly people no longer feel any pride in, or attachment to, public places so littering (for example) is ok, because it's not their place, and therefor not their problem.

The woman making phone calls on the train doesn't care about the quality of life on the train because it's not something she has any investment in, and as for the goth chap in the ladies loos, he could hardly be more clearly distancing himself from any societal connection to those using the loos.

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[info]secondhand_rick
2007-05-03 07:08 pm UTC (link)
Oh, yeah, and in light of all of that, both Cameron's and Blair's lot are trying (as politicians always seem to) to fix the symptoms and not the causes.

There's a lack of social responsibility because there's a lack of society.

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[info]cardinalsin
2007-05-03 07:12 pm UTC (link)
Ok, but how does one get to society? All this stuff seems to be self-reinforcing, so to an extent treating the symptoms may help to slow things down, but how to we get an actual reversal?

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[info]secondhand_rick
2007-05-03 08:36 pm UTC (link)
It may already be too late. Bloody game theorists.

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[info]cardinalsin
2007-05-11 06:44 pm UTC (link)
Perhaps the solution is to kill all game theorists...

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[info]inskauldrak
2007-05-03 07:17 pm UTC (link)
I read the article and was struck by it as well.

An interesting comparison is when I was back in Glasgow a while back and a bloke asked if I wanted a day bus ticket (at a bus stop) - I instinctively thought it was touting but realised the guy was well-dressed (and clearly well fed) and no-one else seemed to be bothered about his behaviour.

Turns out he was genuinely just finished with it for the day and happy to save someone else 50p and moreover this was normal to everyone else because that's just something that people do now and again.

I'm not sure exactly why, but it does seem that the further out from London/South East you go, though it's clearly not universal and is offset by bad behaviour, the more nice behaviour happens.

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[info]onebyone
2007-05-04 08:50 pm UTC (link)
Are the buses subsidised by government money in Glasgow?

Not that I'm frowning on what he did, but if everyone did it, clearly the ticket prices would have to go up, which is kind of counter to the ideal of mass transit as a public service. So while his behaviour was nice in a local sense, it was also arguably anti-social.

At least touting is wealth-redistributing...

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[info]al_fruitbat
2007-05-04 06:58 am UTC (link)
Are we 100% sure that people aren't the same as they always are? I know it's a popular meme to say that rudeness and 'antisociality' is on the increase, but I'm not sure that's true. Were there less robbings, knifings and murders in Britain 50 years ago? 100?
Perhaps they were less visible, but I'm pretty sure they were always there. Even during the Blitz, there were still burglaries.

I'd also suggest that we as a society have hypocritical and inconsistent attitudes. The same behaviour can be condemned in one situation, and rewarded in another. Take a BMW wanker cutting in front of a queue of traffic - that very same instinct is probably what gets rewarded when he's at work, where being a pushy bastard is seen as a valued quality. Someone like Alan Sugar, Gordon Ramsay or Simon Cowell is clearly being an unpleasant shit to other people, yet that behaviour is lauded by millions.

Is there any surprise that many people genuinely believe that 'might makes right' and 'greed is good'?

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[info]cardinalsin
2007-05-11 06:36 pm UTC (link)
Ooh, new comments! Yes, I agree. This behaviour may well have been going on forever.

One interesting theory is that the behaviour was happening but was less visible. Or rather, it was confined to certain neighbourhoods and so was only seen by certain classes, i.e. not those who go on about how much worse things have got. Now we all mingle all the time, and so everybody sees everyone else behaving badly.

T'other day a kid threw an egg at the windscreen of a bus I was on. Is this the same class of behaviour?

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[info]onebyone
2007-05-04 09:32 pm UTC (link)
most people are either unwilling or unable to confront it

The question when deciding whether to confront it is, "which is worse - the bad behaviour, or the potentially violent confrontation required to stop it?". So naturally they will not always act even if it would be beneficial to do so.

The more afraid people are of confrontation in general, and violence in particular, the more likely they are to feel that only those with special authority should get involved. Hence also the more likely they are to feel that anything not banned by authority is fair game.

In particular, consider that a boy can sit in the women's toilets with a girl and cause such consternation not because his actual behaviour is annoying but, according to this journalist, because the victims of his mischief think he might be a rapist. If they just thought he was violating their privacy, which he was, then they'd have been up in arms and had him out in seconds. If they were afraid he might sexually assault them, then doing nothing makes more sense, because dealing with a rapist clearly isn't for the average person to take on lightly.

So I think you're right: whether he appreciates or not that the reason people do nothing is that they're deathly afraid of him, he will learn that he can have his fun and get away with it. If people are afraid of strangers, then strangers will become inclined not to respect each other. When neither side is behaving entirely reasonably (he shouldn't be in the toilets. The journalist shouldn't be thinking he might be a rapist), each will blame the other for the problem.

it still amazes me the lack of shame people have in such behaviour when confronted.

Individualism, and faith in oneself, are both highly rated. More so than consideration for others. These people presumably think that they're standing up for themselves, just as you or I would do if some weird person told us that the perfectly ordinary thing we were doing was, in point of fact, totally unacceptable.

The amazement to me isn't the lack of shame, because shame is, basically, considered pretty shameful these days. It's that the perpetrators consider these specific behaviours (such as stealing that extra seat on a train from a standing passenger, or bullying people in toilets) to be "within their rights" and hence worth defending in the first place, even though clearly they are doing harm to others.

There are cases when one should defend one's rights, even at the expense of other people's comfort. Some people who have done that have been canonized for their trouble. Nelson Mandela is the ultimate such example, and has the advantage of only personally having used violence against known "bad guys", but what about Larry Flint's or Eminem's rights to freedom of speech, or Banksy's extensive record of criminal damage?

Consideration for others is not an absolute, so it's easy to see why people can feel they can get away without it: the issue is why it is so frequently taken to an absolute the other way. There are two balances here: between personal wants and the harm they cause others; and between tolerance of others' freedoms and tolerance for the resulting harm caused to oneself. Society is never going to precisely agree where those balances should lie, because there is no canonical correct answer, but it must try to prevent people from considering only their own rights and never those of others.

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[info]cardinalsin
2007-05-11 06:44 pm UTC (link)
Does that mean that the main objective for getting people to behave better is to reduce fear of actual violence so that people will feel brave enough to confront non-violent, but nevertheless obnoxious, behaviour? Hasn't violence actually decreased dramatically in the last twenty years? If so, and presuming that the trend has something to do with fear of violence, then why do people feel more in danger of violence?

You may be right about individualism, and this is certainly one of the stock explanations for this kind of thing. I guess I just don't know that many people, even extremely individualistic ones, who would ever feel it was ok to do some of the things that I regularly witness on public transport. It probably isn't a coincidence that most of the folk who seem to do it are young and working class (or at least appear to be).

That said, some middle-aged bloke on the bus t'other day had a remote control car in his seat - one of the "give this seat up for elderly or disabled passengers" seats, no less - and didn't move it even when a very clearly elderly passenger, one who looked as though she needed a seat, came by.

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[info]onebyone
2007-05-12 02:31 pm UTC (link)
I think that a braver society probably would tolerate less low-level antisocial behaviour, so it's certainly an objective in this case. And for it's own sake, for that matter. There are two basic approaches to preventing bad behaviour, though. You can make a list of specific things to avoid, and specific rights to uphold, and enforce them authoritatively (which, given that we have authority at all, I think is right for "big" things like violence), and you can encourage people to treat each other with consideration regardless of who has what explicit rights and obligations (which I think is right for "small" things like common courtesy).

Making people feel safer around strangers would fall under the latter category, because as I've said, I reckon that it's easier to be discourteous to someone who's afraid of you. So it's a significant aim, yes.

To be honest, I don't know whether violence has increased dramatically in the last 20 years. I haven't noticed it, but going on crime statistics I think from memory that rates of violent offences (both recorded and estimated) are much increased. What those national statistics don't tell us (or at least, have never told me in the papers) is whether my chance of suffering such an offence, is up.

Here's something from the BCS: look at the first sheet, under "All BCS violence", "stranger". That's the number of people suffering violent crime from a stranger per 10,000 adults. From 218 in 1981, it has wobbled between 191 and 247 to fetch up at 200 in 2005. 2% of the population. The number of such assaults may or may not be up (I haven't looked at the breakdown of offences), but at least the number of victims apparently isn't. If the victims are randomly distributed among the population (which I'm sure they aren't), I would expect to be attacked once every 50 years. This is not, frankly, something that should be affecting my day-to-day decisions.

So, although we know that violent crime is up, are we actually more likely to get clocked one for sticking our nose in? Maybe not. On the other hand, presumably if people were less cautious of strangers, those rates would be higher. So if we have (as I suspect) been getting more cautions over the last 20 years, then maybe so.

As for why people feel more in danger of violence, I'm not sure it has much to do with the actual rate, because of the irrational ways we all assess risk. For example, if you know that crime is on the increase, you'll probably be more worried about it than if it's falling, regardless of the actual number of crimes. So if the rate of crime rises 50% in one decade and then falls 33% in the next decade, I reckon people would end up feeling safer than if it fell 25% and then rose 33%. That's just a hunch, though.

In any case, between carcinogenic compounds, terrorism, road safety, violent crime rates, and global warming, I think everyone is (or at least, is consistently encouraged to be) more scared of everything than 20 years ago. There's no way to make random obnoxious behaviour in public be an exception: if people are going to have the courage to demand respect and consideration on behalf of themselves and others, they need to be comfortable and confident in general. It's no use me telling them that despite what they read about the world being a terrible place, dodgy-looking strangers are actually no more likely to have a go at them than they were in 1981. That's not actually how people assess whether they're in danger at a particular moment.

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[info]onebyone
2007-05-12 02:34 pm UTC (link)
I would expect to be attacked once every 50 years

Sorry, I should say that I would expect to be a victim one year in every 50. That might mean I'm attacked once for telling some bloke to get the hell out of the ladies loos, or it might mean I'm beaten up once a day all year, by a gang of hoodlums who've chosen to pick on me.

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