The Lost Art of Etiquette: How Emotional Intelligence and Personal Accountability Are Side Effects of Etiquette & Why That Matters

“Honoring those who have gone before and feeling profound responsibility for those to come.”

There’s a Chinese food restaurant in Boerne, Texas, called Shanghai Chinese Restaurant. The restaurant was a regular spot for my friends and me to eat in high school. While there we sometimes ran into our classmates, other kids our age who were also meeting at the restaurant to escape campus for an hour. I’ll always remember one afternoon in particular, my friends and I had ordered, and we were eating, talking, and enjoying ourselves. On the opposite corner of the restaurant, another party of high schoolers was seated, they were loud and disruptive, throwing shit, and being needlessly obnoxious. We sat there comparing ourselves to them, well, we were comparing our behaviors to theirs. My friends and I were more mature than most people our age. We recognized that we could enjoy ourselves despite, and be considerate of the people around us, not at the expense of the others surrounding us. With all that said, I recognize that it’s a rite of passage for our culture to have rebellious youth. This disobedience is an exploration of self. We’re not rebellious for the sake of rebelliousness, our behaviors are the side effects of deeply intimate, ambiguous introspection. Most people need to rebel to explore their relationship with their role as adults in our society, but not everyone is compelled to rebel, some of us experience a more conscious approach to self-reflection; this conscious approach isn’t better, it’s just different, in either case, the result is self-exploration.

Regardless of how you experience this transition into adulthood, it’s personally and socially urgent that you do it. Because it’s not merely a phase to regret or to be nostalgic for, we’re planting seeds that develop throughout our twenties into real indispensable emotional qualities we must have as adults. One example of these qualities is etiquette. Rebelliousness begets etiquette, etiquette begets empathy, empathy begs self-respect, self-respect begets confidence, and confidence that grows out of empathy begets acceptance and thoughtfulness. We aren’t merely bestowed good qualities, and we can only develop good qualities once we recognize signs of them already within us. A rite of passage allows us to [subconsciously] explore the qualities we want to build in ourselves.

Etiquette is one of the most important qualities to cultivate organically because the seed is universal, it sends out shoots through our emotional and behavioral processes that influence our actions and reactions throughout our lives. Maintaining etiquette at the dinner table, for example, weaves through interactions, and develops through relationships. When taught that different social situations call for discerning behaviors, we consciously prepare ourselves to behave appropriately in specific situations. There are other seeds, like etiquette, that are important to plant and nurture, I like to call these characteristics the cardinal prerequisites, attributes that might seem archaic or meaningless but that are responsible for a set of emotional guidelines that create an essential natural balance. I’m writing this today because etiquette isn’t just changing, it’s disappearing, and that’s largely a consequence of unceasing rebelliousness.

          I came of age during the Clinton and Bush administrations. I’m a member of a latent generation pigeonholed between Generation X and Millennials. According to the standard, I’m a Millennial, however, because the world started changing so quickly between the late '90s and the late 2000s, generational cohesion became incoherent, and Millennials especially set off a chain reaction that we’re still experiencing the fallout of today. We invented mainstream complot-politics and remote expression; because of Myspace, the newly developing social media platform The Facebook, and cell phones, the world got smaller for us very quickly and our voices were suddenly a lot louder. But we weren’t emotionally ready for any of that, because it happened while many were still rebelling, we were still trying to explore who we were and what we wanted our role to be in a world that we didn’t yet know no longer existed. My latent generation, the elder Millennials, saw an eventual fork in the road rapidly approaching a crossroads that promised to lead us into either rooted acceptance or hopeless indignation.

Many of you won’t remember this but during that time the whole world was concerned with social media’s effect on how people interact with one another. There were conversations about whether physical interactions would be weakened and how younger generations would suffer from substandard social skills. Of course, we all waited for someone else to solve the problem like the answer was some over-the-counter capsule, and in the meantime, we merely gave up on ourselves. I struggled through issues of my own: social, emotional, and financial, and sought to find balance and maintain personal accountability. Synchronously, I witnessed traditional nuances, such as etiquette, discarded, not because of moral dissonance but because we resented the roles others had in our lives, we resented that the life we didn’t choose demanded effort without the promise of reward. At the onset of this attitudinal exodus, I was excited about the possibility of genuine change. It never occurred to me that there might be a wrong way to do that; well, there’s a wrong way to do it, and we managed to stumble upon it. One obvious misstep was that everyone stopped holding themselves accountable; people accepted only the truths they valued through their lens of limited perspective, and there are too many people to justify that approach.

Accountability is so enveloped in our psyche that it influences much more than our responsibilities, well beyond the scope of our social obligations. People stopped recognizing policies and laws they had no hand in proposing, regardless of the legislation's purpose—including natural law and traditional codes. I’m not nor have I ever been one to acknowledge or accept policy for the policy’s sake. Also, I don’t believe that rules are meant to be broken as much as they are meant to be discerned. I recognize the rationale of understanding the rules, and keeping them close, as a tool to reference, however, it’s important to acknowledge that there are policies, designed and unwritten, that merely manage the flow, and some of them influence the development of our emotional stability. We need to be more thoughtful about how to develop personally and as a society. There are ‘rules’ that encourage our natural development in positive, healthy ways. The cardinal prerequisites: etiquette, discipline, effort, accountability, and empathy, act as infrastructure for personal and social growth. These ‘sets of rules’ instill a more deeply rooted sense of compassion than one might otherwise develop. Practicing etiquette is far more deliberate than just a boomer’s finger-waving insistence for obedience. A strong, stable emotional intelligence evolves from cultivating the cardinal prerequisites.

A benefit of practicing and appreciating an attitude as simple as etiquette is establishing the foundation that teaches us how to pause and apply critical thought to situations where reactionary outrage is the most common, although certainly not the best approach. Our indifference toward etiquette makes it easier for us to justify showing arbitrary hostility to people because of economic or political ideology as an example of how easy it is to abuse, including how delicate the observance of personal freedoms can be. Our freedoms are fragile ideals and they have been for all of human history, and, because it’s easier for us to oversimplify and to critique a person or a philosophy, we blame the fragility of our perception of freedoms on a particular person or philosophy. However, understanding why blatant, ambiguous subjection has, and continues to, exist is far more complicated than the fact that there are “bad people,” or ideas that we disagree with. The answers are in the nuance of understanding the difference between revering personal freedoms and feeling entitled to them; it’s almost like there are emotional prerequisites for mentally regulating the promise of freedom, of ‘owning your truth,’ and for the promise of happiness. Etiquette is not only a precondition for respect, but a filter that helps us to learn how to discern appropriate attitudes for appropriate situations. Etiquette teaches us how to react in ways that create accord.

Emotional intelligence can’t be taught, intelligence can only be nurtured from behaviors and unwritten codes, like etiquette (which can be taught); developing the cardinal prerequisites (etiquette, etc.) supplies you with resources for a healthy, stable, and balanced emotional intelligence. For example, the act of holding the door open for someone, not because of timing or for recognition, but rather to acknowledge that they exist in a manner that reflects a shared experience, and then returning the acknowledgment by saying, “Thank you,” when the door is held open for you. Holding open a door is an action that develops into something greater, like building muscle. We can’t shame a person into being emotionally intelligent, we can’t cancel a person into being emotionally intelligent, we can’t judge a person into being emotionally intelligent, and we can’t be conscious of the benefits of emotional intelligence and also be an awful person. To practice social etiquette is to reflect self-respect, you cannot have respect for yourself and not own your truth or abuse your freedoms.

Emotionally intelligent people, those of us who are confident with ourselves and in our relationships are the most assured spouses, parents, siblings, and friends, we are not arrogant or egotistical; emotional intelligence cannot be switched on and off. The nature of our best selves isn’t predicated by political affiliation; hate begets only hate, nature doesn’t discern between hate and righteous hate, whatever ‘reason’ many of you think you have to dismiss etiquette as archaic or meaningless is rooted in a harmful place and should be reevaluated. We are sacrificing etiquette, discipline, effort, accountability, and empathy and as a result, we’re in short supply of compassion, understanding, and genuine art (among other things); for example, resentment and indifference, which are currently leading the drive of our ongoing social revolution, are the wrong prerequisites for ‘owning our truths’ and exploring our freedoms. Accountability, however, is an example of a necessary prerequisite for understanding and learning to practice freedom, there is no room for judgment if we are all individually empowering ourselves and exploring our freedoms.

Cultivating etiquette and the cardinal prerequisites is essential for personal and social growth. By embracing these qualities, we develop emotional intelligence, empathy, and self-respect (among other things), leading to a more compassionate and balanced society. Let us recognize the value of etiquette and work to revive it, not as a rigid adherence to tradition, but as a conscious choice to nurture our emotional intelligence and foster a culture of respect, empathy, and understanding. By doing so, we honor those who have come before us and pave the way for a brighter future for generations. Ideas that may come across to us as archaic, traditional for tradition's sake, or meaningless should be held over a sifter as we shake their confines loose from our culture because there are seeds, like flakes of gold, scattered throughout tradition that mature into some of our best qualities, and that are essential for balance and emotional intelligence.