The value of politeness
I'm not a fan of David Brooks. I stopped regularly reading his column in The New York Times several years ago. I found his writing tendentious in the extreme as he praised politicians who I found to be outrageous in their views and downright unpatriotic in their actions. I suppose if I had agreed with him, I wouldn't have found him quite so tendentious! Anyway, I don't usually read his column but the one from yesterday caught my eye and I did settle down to read it. I'm glad I did. The title of the column is "Suffering fools gladly" and the topic is politeness, a value that is too often missing in our lives today. Indeed, the modern view seems to be that politeness is a weakness. It's a philosophy of life that is much more interested in the snappy comeback, in showing up the ignorance or stupidity of one's adversary than in being kind to people. And, in this world view, everyone is an adversary. Brooks points out that many of the people that we admi...