A Lamentable Deficiency

"Never forget that Karate begins and ends with respect."
--the first of the Twenty Precepts of Karate, by Gichin Funakoshi

One time I was making an extemporaneous commentary on generic workplace woes, typical of any job. My sister-in-law, whose immediate and irresistible inclination is invariably to take the contrary stance on any issue I talk about (be it political, philosophical, or even how to cook spaghetti), naturally rebuked me as usual, throwing an old maxim at me: "Respect is earned."

Well, yes. And no.

I have earned the respect of many people, usually after long periods of consistent hard work, loyalty, high-quality performance, and virtue. That doesn't mean everyone should have to prove themselves on a case-by-case basis with every single person they ever interact with over the span of a year before they are no longer treated like crap. And what about people you only know for half a year before they transfer away? Does that mean, since you don't have time to "earn" their respect, that they are right to disrespect you? Come on.

I submit to you this amendment: respect is (or at least should be) automatic, whereas admiration is earned.

Admiration is earned once you discover what the person is truly made of. Yes. Earned. Over time. But respect shouldn't have to be so elusive. Respect is a matter of behavior.

It goes far beyond just another one of a hundred thousand Goddamned semantic arguments with my apparently infallible harpy of a sister-in-law. It's more a commentary on American culture itself. We have bad manners to begin with, and our view of our neighbors is "asshole until proven otherwise." Think about traffic, for example. Everyone but you is an idiot, right? Riiiight. That's exactly what I'm talking about here. We have problems in this society.

One thing I love about dojo mentality is the automatic respect, the formality. It's not too stiff and rigid to be comfortable, though. It's not a vapid and insincere display of ceremony. It's more a matter of reverence, donning a uniform and becoming part of something much larger than yourself, participating in a discipline that has been around long before your parents were born. You can't help it. You can't help but feel transformed somehow by tapping such a legacy. In the dojo, the cacophony of rude society is left behind. And if you still exhibit even a hint of rudeness or lack of discipline, believe me, you will wish you hadn't.

Dave Lowry writes, "The assumption that all formality is fake and contemptuous and limits the free expression of the self is one of the more lamentable curses of our times. What is worse, it is a curse that we have inflicted upon ourselves. By confusing formality with 'snobbishness,' decorum with pretension, dignity with egalitarianism, we have dispensed with etiquette and standards of behavior in nearly every facet of our lives. Perhaps we did get rid of the snobbishness and falsity by choosing informality. But we have lost something else as well, haven't we? We have lost a sense of decorum and dignity, and, more important, we have lost the self-confidence and courtesy and respect for ourselves and others that are hallmarks of all worthwhile civilizations."

Respect, admiration, reverence, formality, politeness, courtesy, propriety, decorum, culture, etiquette, whatever you want to call it. I think most of us could use a bit more of it in our personal codes of daily conduct, don't you?

Spend some time in the rural Midwest, teaching teenagers. You'll see the worst of what I'm talking about on an almost nonstop basis. Better yet, spend about twelve seconds at Wal-Mart. Americans are loud-mouthed, opinionated, uncouth, rude, and just all-around appallingly disrespectful more often than not. Furthermore, we have no rules of etiquette. Most of us don't even know how to behave at a concert hall. Most of us are so uncomfortable wearing a suit and tie that we have to either fidget the whole time wearing it or make a point to act like an iconoclastic buffoon in public to demonstrate that we can't be bound by such formalities. The fact that we have a motto such as "respect is earned" speaks to our own abysmal lack of it.