Politeness has its uses, but too often a demand for it is a weak defense for when there’s no better defense to make – and the idea of politeness as “professionalism” is a societal delusion.
That is: In the home or some other personal place where what’s provided is a kindness, reciprocation makes sense; when a good or service is provided for money or some professional matter is at stake, enforcing “politeness” is often a waste of time or mask for incompetence. At the very least, it can be a delay tactic. When I’m calling the customer support hotline of some service I pay for, especially for technical reasons, I’m not interested in hearing a call center worker read polite lines off a script to me, or that script trying to oblige me to be polite in return. I’m calling because there’s a problem, and solving it is my only interest and motivation. Asking how I’m doing delays me explaining my problem and getting my answer.
It’s fine to call a business and be businesslike about it. To be curt. To be terse. To be pissed. We aren’t airline pilots trained to announce emergency water landings with a chuckle.
Even worse is when you encounter excuses, dissembling or offensiveness and are challenged to be polite in return – and if you reject that challenge are considered to lack “professionalism.” I’ve cursed a blue streak about the repeated incompetencies of companies and long waits on hold followed by an inability to help. A reference to “this piece-of-shit software you sold me under false promises” will bring a rebuke that if I don’t maintain a certain degree of “professionalism” the company won’t help me, but things reach this moment only because a company can’t seem to help in the first place. That’s the point.
Professionalism isn’t what the customer brings to an exchange of money for value. Professionalism is the competence or skill expected of the provider.
If patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, per Samuel Johnson, the demand for politeness or deference or forgiveness as “professionalism” is an equally lame reflex. And it comes from people wielding “business” as an excuse for a bad behavior they are trying to get away with.
Doing something lousy and demanding decorum in return is victim-blaming, an excuse to get away with something while insisting you don’t have to feel bad about it because the other person reacted in a way that makes you uncomfortable – a layoff, for instance, when the “professional” thing to do, from the perspective of the former boss, is to go away without complaint.
Keep an eye on this. It goes beyond bad customer support, and even beyond cruel corporate practices. Politics also frequently enforces a gracious response to malicious policy – but unevenly, with thugs and criminals allowed terrible behavior because “that’s just the way they are,” while there’s shocked disapproval (and sometimes a mobilization of force) at bursts of outrage from ordinary citizens sick of being abused. Letting bad people set the terms for protest allows them to ignore dissent – but if dissenters were listened to when speaking in polite tones and indoor voices, they wouldn’t be screaming in the streets.
While I could choose a variety of inflection points in history to show this, I learned it first from pop culture. The show “M*A*S*H” was on television for 11 years as I grew up, following a 1970 Robert Altman film of the same name (which has – warning! –a streak of repellent sadism) based on a fictionalized memoir of doctors patching up wounded soldiers near the frontlines of the Korean War. Each focuses on surgeons who behave outrageously and challenge authority but cannot be seriously reprimanded or kept in line. Why? Because they are needed. They are, in the essence of the term, “professional,” no matter their antics or emotions: Their work, the thing they do in their profession, is exceptional.
Their impolite reactions to inhumanity are, meanwhile, only human.
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