Impersonal Kindness
Public etiquette, repatrimonialization and Gandhi
I published a book of short stories titled Thinking About Leaving. They move between my time growing up in India and moving to the United States. It is about a hundred pages and people typically breeze through it on their travels or during a picnic in the park.
Righteous Anger
At the movies, there is a middle-aged couple seated behind us. The husband starts talking to the wife, but it's clear that he wants everyone else to listen to what he has to say in his thick Texas twang. Nicole Kidman's writhing naked body appears on the screen, and he goes, "I thought you said this was a funny movie," then follows it up with, "Well, she looks good for 60". In response, the wife laughs giddily, like a coyote that had finally figured out how to trap the roadrunner. This seemed like a performance that they repeated every time they went out. Some kind of twisted game between the both of them. I contemplated turning back and saying something heroic that would save the day, but I knew that was exactly the kind of response that he was looking for. No one took his bait, and halfway through the movie, he said, "You think this is funny" to his wife, but also the audience, and then slinked away from the theater.
I don't know when public etiquette started crumbling. You'll get different answers based on who you ask. The liberals would say it began with Donald Trump getting elected, the culture critics would say it is because people spend too much time on their phone, and the right wingers will say it all really began with the fall of Roman empire. Perhaps its always been like this, and I just never left my house often enough to notice.
After the movie ended, we found ourselves stuck in the parking lot. The movie theater validated the expensive downtown parking ticket, but ours was asking us to pay $40, more than what I had paid for the movie. The validation did not take. Cars were lining up behind us, so I paid the $40 in good faith that I could get the theater to refund it. I trudged back up the flight of stairs and explained the situation to a teenager who was looking helpless and lost before I even finished a sentence. She pointed vaguely in the direction of an older man. I regurgitated the whole thing again to the new judge of my fate. It is a feature of contemporary protocols of living that explaining why something did not work is usually more complex than completing the task itself. Usually, you are asked to explain the issue multiple times to the individuals concerned. It is a humiliation ritual that you are put through to deem the worthiness of your request. Upon listening to my case, the older gentleman replied, "Oh yeah, there's nothing we can do about that. The validation machine is broken. You just have to do it multiple times until it works."
I replied, "What can I do to get my money back?"
He repeated, "Well, there is nothing we can do."
"Why don't you put up a sign that says the validation does not work. please try it multiple times?" I asked
He repeated, "there's nothing we can do" again, and listening to the same phrase chanted thrice seemed to awaken some daemon in me that responded with, "I've been coming to this theater for four years, and this is how you treat me, fuck you fuck off I'm never coming here again"."
When I repeated the story to a friend, he took my side and said, "You have an accurate sense of justice." This only fueled my righteous anger daemon.
What Would Gandhi Do?
Another day, a fine Saturday morning. I'm walking back to the car after getting coffee with my girlfriend when I see that a truck has blocked us in. Furthermore, the vehicle is parked on the wrong side of the road, diagonal to the curb. I look around and see plenty of parking space but for some reason the person driving the truck decided to wedge us into a tight spot. I asked Camille if I should go back to the coffee shop and find out who did this. She says no, so I get back in the car. Just as I start the car, I see a man with long hair walk up to the truck. His appearance immediately brings to mind the word "snake." I get out of the car and head towards the man, shouting, "Why do you have to do this?" as if seeking a rational explanation would yield results. The man makes eye contact and immediately rushes to his car without saying a word. He knows he's done something wrong. He flees the scene, but in the microseconds leading up to this, I see fear in his eyes. Now I just feel bad. Have I just become one of the barbarians who can't forgive and forget?
I go back home and do what any rational South Indian man would do – I start thinking about what Mahatma Gandhi would do.
In the year that I moved to Austin, I went on a date with a girl who, after asking me if I grew up in India, followed up with "What do you think of Mahatma Gandhi?" I had not been asked about Gandhi since my 7th-grade history class. Caught off guard, I did not have much to say other than that he is revered in India, but is a godlike figure who is to be used as an example but never emulated. She responded with, "Did you know that he slept with his cousin?" I did not remember that from 7th grade history.
In school, it was drilled into us pretty early that the lesson from Gandhi was that responding to violence with more violence does not yield any results. I did not know the nuances of Indian history, or if Gandhi slept with his cousin, but I remember being taken in by the aesthetics of Gandhian philosophy, and to my young self, Gandhi was the first person in my life who gave an aesthetic to forgiveness. I used this aesthetic to justify my meekness and lack of agency at that age. I remember being bullied by someone much more heavyset than me. He kept pushing me in the chest, and I did not respond, so he tried again several times, but I did not move. He looked exasperated and left. It was not a brave act of defiance or patience, but it was the best response to being in a weaker position. I attempted to do the same in my house when faced with my father's exasperation and anger. My mother, ever the Gandhian, repeated often, "it's best if you don't say anything back."
During the same time, I observed how several other men in my family behaved when having a modicum of power vs without it. I noticed that every interaction they had outside of the home had a patrimonial inclination to it – there was always some authority, real or imagined, to be pleased. Often at work, they behaved as if it was more important to keep the authority figure happy than to do the work. Outside of work, it was important to keep the elders or patriarchal figures in your family happy.
Later on, I learned the phrase neopatrimonialism, which is a type of organization in which relationships of a patrimonial type prevail. Your relationship to power and the people in power mattered more than rule of law or etiquette. Neopatrimonialism was the reality of men and women when I was growing up. One of the side effects of neopatrimonialism was how most men reacted to their lack of agency and powerlessness. They had two faces – The social persona, which was often pleasant, sterile, and impotent. And the family persona of a tyrant who took out all the latent frustration of social impotence on women and kids who were dependent on them. I wondered if I would behave the same way when I became an adult. Maybe I would have if I stayed. I left home and moved to place that valued citizenship and a certain kind of pluralism – or so I thought.
Commercialized Etiquettes
In his essay Making the World Safe for Criminals, Francis Fukuyama writes about the repatrimonialization of America:
The problem with state modernity is that it is unstable. Human beings are by nature social creatures, but their sociability takes the form in the first instance of favoritism to friends and family. This leads to the phenomenon of "repatrimonialization," a long word signifying the retreat of a modern impersonal state back into patrimonialism. This is a phenomenon that has plagued many earlier societies, like Tang Dynasty China, or the 17th century Ottoman Empire, or France under the Old Regime. In each case, an emergent modern state was captured by powerful elites close to the ruler. In France, for example, the king sold rent-seeking privileges like tax collection to the highest bidder.
I don't need to explain that the United States is undergoing repatrimonialization as we speak. What is remarkable about the Trump administration is the degree to which it is open about its own corruption. The administration has fired inspectors general whose job it is to monitor and stop corruption; it has refused to enforce the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act; and it has made decisions favorable to the business interests of colleague-in-crime Elon Musk. Tech titans like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos came to Trump's inauguration bearing hundreds of millions of dollars in gifts, in hopes that the king would shine favor on them. As Trump imposes tariffs on much of the world, there will be a further flow of supplicants asking for exemptions, which will be facilitated by personal side-payments.
When power and the state gets centered around the people you know and your friends, what happens to etiquette and day to day interactions you have with strangers?
America might have been the first modern state to commercialize etiquette. In a paper comparing the evolution of etiquette in the US, England, and Germany, Cas Wouters writes that the pressures of the great depression in the 1930s led to an increasing concern around manners in the business world, or business etiquette (as opposed to etiquette determined by aristocratic or social status). According to the paper, this is where the stereotype (and at this point, parodied to death) politeness that you are familiar with in American corporate environments and coffee shops comes from. Also worth noting that Dale Carnegie wrote his famous book during this decade. The paper contains this amusing anecdote about business etiquette:
According to Hodges, 'Even the railroads jumped on the courtesy bandwagon, as the the British [1937] article 'Smile School: Teaching Courtesy and Service to Railroaders, U.P. Trouble-Shooter's Job' would indicate. The troubleshooter'sjob is 'instructing railroad employees on the best ways to avoid getting angry at finicky passengers.
and this one about manners in American politics:
Until the present day, manners also have been more strongly emphasized than in the other countries; Americans take etiquette books and doing 'the right thing' more seriously, in business and in politics. The latter is expressed in these typically American sentiments, published in 1946: 'When manners break down,anarchy begins; and anarchy always ends eventually in force and tyranny of some kind...Fascism and Nazism are modern examples. A similarly serious appreciation of manners was demonstrated by President Bush when he used a term from the discourse of manners in formulating one of the arguments for ending the Gulf War; he said that it would have been'unchivalrous' to continue, for it would have only led to 'unnecessary killing'.' In no other country is the pacifying function of manners - to avoid 'unnecessary killing' and, of course, other humiliation - so heavily emphasized. The comparatively large overall importance attached to manners can be understood from their specific function in the integration process of a country with a quite open competition between Best Societies, businesses, and religious and ethnic groups.
Sounds to me like commercialization of etiquette was actually a good thing because good manners became impersonal and available to everyone, similar to the impersonal nature of the modern state – one which is being challenged by repatrimonialization. I for one would very much love it if everyone went back to treating each other like they are future customers instead of choosing loyalties based on tribal associations and how you feel on the day.
Epilogue
As for adopting the Gandhian aesthetic, It took a really long time to unlearn what was in fact a maladaptation and less of an epiphany about world peace. Perhaps this new found sense of you can just do things is what fuels a sense of righteous anger and annoyance I have about the world.
I was walking out of the coffee shop after finishing the first part of this essay when a dog nibbed at my ass as I walked past it. The dog owner, who was sitting right there, apologized in a manner that made it seem like I was supposed to find this behavior cute. One of those smiling, hand-wave sorrys people do when their dog licks you. I turned around and asked, "What the hell, man? Why do you bring your dog places if it's going to bite people?" once again, seeking a rational explanation where there was none. Maybe I'll go back home and think about Jesus this time.
