Defending Courtesy and Civility

 Courtesy is such a quiet force that its crumbling in formerly expected places can feel as shocking as a trusted handrail suddenly giving way...

The flashiest slurs have emanated from the White House. In November President Trump aggrieved by a female reporter's question about Jeffrey Epstein, snapped back: "Quiet Piggy!" Earlier this month he dismissed Somali immigrants as "garbage". When the Hollywood director Rob Reiner and his wife were fatally stabbed... Trump suggested that Reiner's tragic death was caused by his negative stance on the president himself and because he suffered from a mind-crippling disease known as Trump Derangement Syndrome...

The First Madness of Ophelia
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882)
Photo Credit: Gallery Oldham [CC BY-NC-ND] 

Trash talk aimed at political opponents and journalists or socially divisive language, did not commonly feature in presidential statements... By maintaining decorum in their public speech, previous presidents signalled the boundaries of discourse acceptable for ordinary citizens. That public conversation has been coarsened not just in the US but, thanks to the reach of social media, Britain as well...

Today  the online shock jeeks such as Fuentes ("Hitler was awesome") and Tate ("women are intrinsically lazy") are energetically monetising gross discourtesy chiefly for a young male audience...

If the callousness of dissatisfied youth is curbed by more senior role models, it may indeed prove a developmental flash in the pan. But if indulged and exploited by older adults it can swell into something truly horrific, as demonstrated by the youthful zeal that surged through Hitler Youth, Mao's Red Guards, and closer to home the rival paramilitaries in Northern Ireland.

Visitors to the UK are still advised that the British value civility: respecting queues, giving up seats on public transport to those in need, speaking politely to others and getting your round in. These may seem small gestures, yet a common thread unites them: the automatic extension of respect to one's fellow man or woman. In the actual country, rather than the online one, mistrust of crude, belligerent posturing has deep roots: it's part of why England ultimately saw through Sir Oswald Mosley and his strutting Blackshirts.

We should hang on to that in 2026, in this era of boasting and jeering and insulting. The defence of courtesy is becoming an act of resistance against the rapid reshaping of our world for the worse: it's much more British, in its way, than waving a flag. 

(Jenny McCartney, The Times, 2025) 

Surely courtesy should not be governed by the use of language uttered by an American president? Just because his abusive words are an affront to common decency does not mean that gives individuals the licence to follow suit. Aren't we all responsible, as adults, to follow codes of conduct and civility that are not determined by "influencers" or social media in general but by a moral and behavioral  code that has informed our thoughts and actions from a young age?