Michael Moynihan: Forget dog licences — we should need behavioural licences to go out in public
'Does it undercut my generalised opposition to having a dog sneeze into my cup, or take a leak against my pants, if I don’t specifically object to an animal joining me for a latte?'
The scene: a coffee spot in Cork city.
The cast: me and a relative. A dog owned by said relative.
The dialogue: mostly one-sided and directed at me (by the relative, not the dog.)
"Why won’t you sit up properly? It’s as if you don’t want to be seen with your own . . . stop hiding behind the chair. Is it the dog?" Yes, it was the dog.
Readers may recall a column I wrote some time back about a phenomenon observable in Cork, and in other places also, I’m sure.
Namely, people bringing their animals into spaces such as shops and cafes where they can defecate, urinate, and slobber to their hearts’ content, though not to the content of anyone else present. When I wrote the piece there was a howl (cough) of protest from those who feel their fur babies should be accommodated everywhere, and a sigh from everyone who thinks the term ‘fur babies’ should qualify users for the Chateau d’If.
Which is a long way of saying that yes, I was conscious of my position: warrior for human rights — in the very broadest sense of the word — on the one hand, while on the other sitting in a coffee shop with a small dog and undermining one’s own policy position more than somewhat.
This is an element of column-writing which people tend not to think about until it can’t be ignored. Today you write about some common discourtesy or selfishness that is detrimental to the good of the entire community; tomorrow you are doing exactly the same thing.
Making peace with your own conscience here is a matter of bridging a gap, the one between condemning something that doesn’t affect me but which gives me a warm feeling of superiority — a luxury belief, in the parlance of our times — and taking a stand which makes you re-evaluate your own behaviour.
In this case, I’m not in favour of having a dog in a cafe but I don’t make a point of throwing them out of such venues either.
Does it undercut my generalised opposition to having a dog sneeze into my cup, or take a leak against my pants, if I don’t specifically object to an animal joining me for a latte?
(Actually, going the whole hog as above would be very unwise, as owners tend to have no sense of humour about their hairy dung-generators. Or pets, as they’re also known.)
We can twist this around, of course. Instead of asking columnists to enforce the rules of polite society, we can reverse the question.
What happened to polite society to begin with?
A member of my household had a near miss last week when a cyclist flew past on the footpath approaching Albert Quay and Albert St.
The cyclist stopped at a red light — yes, this happened — and the member of my household pointed out how close she had come to a colliding with a pedestrian.
"I have to ride on the footpath because there’s no cycle path", was part one of her answer. The second part was shorter: "fuck off".
(Wherever that cyclist is, I hope a mangy Jack Russell is clearing its throat into her flat white.)
Everyone has a similar story. The caubogue with his TV show blaring from the phone while on the bus, the creep abandoning his car athwart a footpath “for a minute”, the beast who drips sweat on the gym bench but fails to wipe it... the thousand-and-one micro-aggressions of modern life have fed the comedy of Larry David for years but for most of us they are not a path to riches and fame.
I recently read a David Brooks piece in entitled How America Got Mean: “We inhabit a society in which people are no longer trained in how to treat others with kindness and consideration. Our society has become one in which people feel licensed to give their selfishness free rein ...”
It’s a terrific read, well worth your time. In it Brooks wonders what is behind the rise in despair, anger, and rudeness across American society and acknowledges some possible causes which will be very familiar to us here: technology (the corrosion of social media), sociology (the isolation from and lack of community organisations), demography (the panic driven and exploited by demographic change), and economy (the uncertainty created by economic uncertainty and inequality).
It was even more interesting to me that Brooks isolated a key element in trying to quell the spread of despair and meanness — getting people to restrain their selfishness. How?
By “teaching basic social and ethical skills” because, as he pointed out, in our modern society “... people are no longer trained in how to treat others with kindness and consideration.” Here we get down to it. Without defaulting to a generalised downfall-of-Western-civilisation line, it’s clear that there is a breakdown in social and ethical skills. That is not catastrophising. The evidence is all around you.
The well-read may cite the famous lines attributed to Socrates about declining standards in behaviour (“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority...”), and it is certainly true that for centuries the older cohort of every generation have bemoaned the shortcomings of the youth.
The problem now is that such shortcomings are certainly not limited to the younger generation. They’re found in every age group, including the amorphous crowd referred to as ‘old enough to know better’, though that phrase is no longer fit for purpose. Modern life shows us that no cohort is old enough to know better.
Brooks’s point about the need to train people to behave with basic social and ethical skills is a very strong one. The obvious places to do so are those public spaces where a lot of training is done already, our schools (and where we were supposed to learn civics once upon a time, of course).
These are lessons which are needed by far more people than those aged between four and eighteen, however. Maybe we should have behavioural licences, like driving licences, with tests on conducting yourself in public rather than focusing on hill starts or reversing around corners.
A little extreme? Maybe. Then you witness the latest demonstration of the general collapse of personal responsibility and consideration of others, some exhibition of selfishness leading you to think, "Haven’t seen before."
And I’m not talking about a columnist having coffee with a dog, either.
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