Back to Reticence!

By LANCE MORROW

Cultivated to a high degree by art and science, we are civilized to the point where we are overburdened with all sorts of social propriety and decency.

--Immanuel Kant, 1784

Jimmy Connors does not labor under Kant's burden. Sometimes when the tennis gets intense, Connors grabs his crotch and shakes it for the crowd. He pelts the linesmen and judges with rotten language. He shoots his finger. The umpire usually responds with the flustered and ineffectual dismay of a curate who has discovered the servants copulating in his study.

This sort of court behavior, also indulged in by John McEnroe and Hie Nastase, is what kindergarten teachers call "age inappropriate." It is punk tennis, the transformation of a formerly pristine game into the moral equivalent of roller derby. The spectacle is symptomatic of something that has befallen the American's idea of how one ought to behave. What would once have been intolerable and impermissible public conduct has now become commonplace. If it is not exactly accepted, then at least it is abjectly and wearily endured.

Social habit in the U.S. has taken decisive turns toward the awful. Since the end of World War II, Americans have been steadily relinquishing their inhibitions about the social consequences of their actions. They have lost a crucial sense of community, even while highways, jets, satellite TV signals and leisure travel have brought them physically closer together. The social environment has grown polluted along with the natural; a headlong greed and self-absorption have sponsored both contaminations. Somehow, Americans have also misplaced the moral confidence with which to condemn sleaziness and stupidity. It is as if something in the American judgment snapped, and has remained so long unrepaired that no one notices any more.

The daily grind of the offensive is both tiring and obscurely humiliating. It is impossible to watch the nightly news on network television without being treated to a stream of 30-second treatises on hemorrhoids, tampons, feminine deodorant sprays and constipation. "I want to talk to you about diarrhea," says the earnest pitchman. T shirts, sweatshirts and bumper stickers proclaim their aggressive little editorials. Some are mildly funny (a woman's T shirt, for example, that says so MANY MEN, so LITTLE TIME). But often they are crude with a faintly alarming determination to affront, even sometimes to menace. They are filled with belligerent scatology. Something or other always SUCKS.

Constitutionally protected grossness--edible underwear, the vibrators in the drugstore window, massage parlors, sex merchandised in its pervasive richness--has spread the pornographic spirit widely. The Twelfth Night Masque, the oldest private subscription ball in Chicago and hitherto a bastion of Midwestern decorum, has suffered a recent rash of crudity. Last year some guests showed up at the ball dressed as hemorrhoids when President Carter was so afflicted; two years before, when the masque theme was "The Father of Our Country," a number of Lake Shore socialites appeared as penises or sperm. No one proposes calling out a SWAT team to deal with this sort of whoopee-cushion wit. It is not sullenly antisocial, like the blaring radios the size of steamer trunks that adolescents haul onto public buses to cook up a small pot of community rage, or the occasional pistols that got waved in gas lines.

Much of today's offensiveness began in the guise of a refreshing virtue: honesty. The doctrine of "letting it all hang out" got propagated in the headlong idealism of the late '60s. The result is a legacy of insufferable and interminable candor. The idealism has vanished into the mainstream of the culture or into thin air. We are left with the residue of bad habits, ugly noises and moral slackness.

As in some burlesque science fiction, the nation seems to have been injected with a truth serum designed to make people bore one another to death; it has given them a compulsion to confide embarrassing intimacies, has led them on to endless emotional ostentations, as if, as Saul Bellow once wrote, "to keep the wolf of insignificance from the door." A man sits down at a New Jersey dinner party, beside a woman he met half an hour before, and hears in elaborately explicit detail from soup through coffee, how the woman and her husband managed to conquer their sexual incompatibility with the help of a sex therapist. A magazine writer not long ago met the new young husband of Novelist Erica Jong at a party and realized with a disagreeable little jolt that she knew from Jong's novel How to Save Your Own Life just how large the husband's penis was.

The book racks are filled with volumes of confession and revenge. People rush to destroy their own privacy, possibly judging that loneliness is worse. In the past ten or twelve years, everything has tumbled out of the closet in a heap. Some homosexuals parade themselves like walking billboards, the placement of the keys and handkerchiefs in their back pockets acting as a semaphore to signal the specific secrets of their sexual tastes.

The depressing quality of much American public behavior--from Connors to T shirts--is its edgy meanness. Bad enough that it is calculatedly cheap. Worse is the stolid nastiness of it, the rock in the snowball, the compulsion to affront. Even re lentless candor -- wounding friends or family by telling them their defects in the name of honesty--is a symptom not only of stupidity but also of unkindness and buried anger.

There are doubtless profound cultural reasons for such anger: the aggressive self-regard of the era now perhaps passing, the centrifugal individualism, the loss of authority, the sense of alienation from "the System," a precipitous disenchantment that tended to discredit all rules, including those of social behavior. It is possible that the price of a certain amount of personal liberty is excess and mess, all the frictions and bad smells generated by social change and people exercising their constitutional rights. Jefferson had an idea that democracy should be genteel, but it did not work out that way. And today, there is no point in growing as mistily sentimental as a Soviet realist hack about the pleasures of right thinking and conformity.

Still, it is possible that the '80s are going to demand some virtues unknown in the '60s and '70s--self-control, selfdiscipline, stoicism, decorum, even inhibition and a little puritanism. It may be time for a touch of reticence. Coercion cannot produce such attitudes, but the mood of the time may. Americans may find themselves agreeing in some paraphrase of Elihu Root when he walked through a squalid Siberian village as Woodrow Wilson's emissary in the first Soviet revolutionary dawn. "I'm a firm his in democracy," he said, as he skeptically eyed his surroundings. "But I do not like filth."

--Lance Morrow

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