More Manners, Less Nuisance

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More Manners, Less Nuisance

July 21, 2024

Here we discuss why manners are important and how they keep us from nuisance. Nuisance is a huge drag on our society and the less Christian we become, the more nuisance we will see.

Click Here for Matthew Crawford Substack article I reference

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Transcript

Hello, For The King listeners. I am not your host, Rocky Ramsey. My name is Will Drzymski, a brother-in-Christ and friend of Rocky's, whom he has generously invited onto the show in order to verbally showcase my artwork to you in 50 seconds.

As an artist, I strive to accurately reflect the glory of God and everything that I paint, and through that process, I hope to flood as much of the earth as possible with paintings, which accurately proclaim the undeniable fact that Jesus is Lord and the creation which he made commands us to worship him. So if you would like to join with me in distributing clean, refreshing artwork showcasing the creativity of the God who made us, I would be overjoyed to have your help. I run my own website called Reflected Works, where I showcase the artwork I've done in the past, sell original paintings and prints, and take requests for unique commissions.

Once again, that's ReflectedWorks.com, all one word, and I'm looking forward to helping you further the kingdom of God right now here on this earth by putting some of your free wall space to productive use. Thank you very much for your kind attention, and now, enjoy the show. And I'll not apologize for this God of the Bible.

Welcome to the For the King podcast. This is your host, Rock Ramsey, and on this podcast we proclaim the edicts of the king, namely and chiefly that Yahweh reigns. Welcome to another episode.

I got a few guests with me this afternoon. I got Bryce, I got Noah, I got Jason. How you guys doing? What's up? Good.

Good. We got a weird topic for you guys this afternoon. I'm here.

I'm right here in the mic. So recently Matthew Crawford had an article that he put out about public nuisance, or what we're going to call the lack and ability of reading the room. And like his main case study and that as an example, was people taking mufflers off their car and being indecent in public and being extraordinarily loud to decibel levels that can harm your eardrums to be looked at.

There are people that want to have attention, want to be looked at in public. So yeah, we're kind of calling that the art of reading the room and the lack thereof in modern society. Okay.

Any thoughts on that as we open up here? Great introduction. Thank you. I think the muffler one is a prime example of that.

I see that all the time. My wife and I were on a walk on our street and a guy pulled out. I mean, we have a stroller.

There's a baby. We're talking about brand new eardrums that are very sensitive. And down the street for us and he pulls out in his car and speeds off and he has his muffler taken off.

And it sounds like a gun firing right next to your ear. Super loud, obnoxious. It hurt my ears.

My ears were ringing afterwards. And to be honest, it kind of pissed me off. It's really annoying to see people doing stuff like that.

Especially when like obviously you have a baby right here. Like I don't want my child's eardrums to be harmed from somebody in public doing something that's just so silly. I mean, that's just like I basically the question where I think we should probe here like 15, 20 minutes in this podcast episode is like that idea of not being able to read a room.

Like what's wrong with these people? What might drive somebody to not connect the dots and want to be that obnoxious in public with a vehicle or like a motorcycle where it's extraordinarily loud? What do you guys think? What's this like? Even concerts, people love going to concerts. That's just crazy loud. You have hearing issues afterwards.

I see that all the time. People have hearing issues. I mean, you're in health and safety.

So when you're on the job site, people should be wearing hearing protection so they don't destroy their ears. But I don't know. What do you guys think on some of that? What I was thinking about, and that doesn't really pertain specifically to that question, but… Don't answer it.

The art of reading the room, that type of person is… they're a psychopath. That is what they are. You have different secular psychologists who would call it these people are hyper-conscious.

They are so conscious that they're aware of themselves but not of anything else. And that's like the main issue is that there's only a self-awareness. There's not a sociological awareness.

There's not an awareness of other people, that there are other minds out there, there's other people, there's other image bearers of God who actually matter. So it's a person who just takes for themselves and doesn't seek to benefit society, to love and regret themselves. Yeah, they think that they're God.

That's probably the ultimate end of it. They're the only thing that exists. They get to make the rules.

So you guys agree? You two agree? Yeah, I mean another example of this would be people playing like loud and vile music in a public place. I know. Your children around, it is a total lack of awareness.

I don't even understand how you can enjoy listening. Even at work, it's probably not the best place for me to play my Christian heavy metal. Because I could be getting a false appearance of, oh, this guy is just crazy.

Yeah, you're self-aware. Yeah, I'm self-aware to recognize that people are going to have a specific perception of me based upon what I'm doing or what I'm listening to or what I'm saying. So it's important, and this is kind of important just in my field, in the construction field, of knowing the lingo.

Like somebody obviously will understand, if you have no idea what you're talking about, based upon what you call things. Like if I say, oh, that person stubbed up a pipe, they know, oh, I know what I'm talking about. Or if I said something about, there's this PVC just sticking straight up out of the ground, then they know I don't know what I'm talking about, because I'm not using the right lingo.

So it's like the same thing. Our language works because we have a consensus basis about what we're saying, and it's the same thing with reading alone. You have this sort of consensus.

It's like the idea of manners. Back when our country was founded, George Washington said that was a big reason why we were able to win the revolutionary war. We had the same religion, and he includes manners in there, like your way of life, the way of public life that we had.

It was all synonymous, it was all homogenous, and we would live our lives the same way. Hearing you talk, it reminded me of the proverb where even a fool was thought wise when he keeps his mouth shut. You can read the room and say, if I open my mouth right now, people would probably think I'm stupid because I don't know what I'm talking about.

So I probably should just shut my mouth, you know what I mean? So you need to have that kind of wisdom and prudence as a Christian, which is, in a Christian society, the question is, would there be mufflers removed from cars? Would there be super loud motorcycles or really belligerent concerts with super vulgar music that's really loud, that harms your eardrums, that's super repetitive and gets you into a trance? Where you're doing weed or at a rave or a mosh pit or whatever, it's like, would those things be present in a Christian society? It's like, no. I guess Christians have a category for the general consensus in public, like reading the room, having an awareness of yourself. The basics of manners is showing that you have some level of respect for others.

Yeah, yeah. And maybe there is just a lack of manners in general in our culture, like it's not really emphasized like it used to be. I think I've seen a lot of old time, older books that are literally just about manners and teaching manners, that school children would have been taught nowadays.

Jane Austen's novels are really big into that, like manners play a big role in Victorian England. Yeah, it facilitates higher culture. You have the basis of order, of behavior, I guess.

And when you run across a random bystander in public, you can kind of expect something out of them. But in our society, if you just bump into somebody, you don't know if they're the kind of person that would remove a muffler for a car just to be a nuisance in public, and might want to harm other people because they're psychopathic. There's just not that general consensus anymore, and it's really sad.

There's no more norms, you know? Yeah, etiquette's completely thrown out now. Yeah, it's terrible. Which goes to show etiquette, even though it's not necessarily something, like it's not a moral law, you're not sinning by breaking etiquette.

But at the same time, you have in our society, we just have accustomed norms that we end up doing based upon our religion, based upon our culture, all these things. But yeah, it's interesting. As you see pluralism heightened, where everybody just has their own religion, it's just their own faith, their own conscience is determined what is true, then yeah, it's a no-brainer why you see etiquette thrown out the door.

Some families eat together every single night for dinner, and some families don't. That's, you know, we have completely different etiquettes, which shows that we all have different odds. I think the two, I think it is, and to be honest with you, if you're driving down the road, and you're blaring your music, and you're blaring your muffler, or whatever you're doing, because you're violating two biblical principles, which is to love your neighborhood yourself.

Philippians 2, 2, 3 comes to my mind. So I do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but humility can look not only to your own interest, but also the interest of others. When you're doing those things, you're not looking at the interest of other people.

We've created and cultivated a culture that is selfish. So these people, they ultimately don't ever consider how their actions, even in the public sphere, are affecting everybody around them. Not include your neighbors.

Your neighbors, you know, be blasted and blaring their music, or they've got a nuisance dog that never stops barking. Those are all things that you're, even how you conduct yourself around your neighbors, and how you take care of your property, those are all things that affects how your neighbors are going to perceive you, and not even affects the gospel, too. You can get legalistic with some of that stuff, but in reality, it's a culture, and so we shouldn't be surprised when we see these things happening.

But nonetheless, it doesn't mean that we shouldn't be angry about it. But we've cultivated a culture of me, me, me, me, selfish ambition, not loving your neighbor. So I think those are biblical principles that are violated everywhere today, where you can't go out in public and honestly not get angry by what you're seeing or hearing, no matter where you go.

Well, and we've gone beyond, like, you know, John Locke says that we're all just blank slates that we need to be, like, fashioned and molded by our society. Now there's not even any, like, there's no expectation for you to even be molded anymore. It's really this heresy of individualism and authenticity, where it's really just whatever you want.

So etiquette's thrown out the door, right? You just need to be yourself. That means that you're blaring music and dancing while you're going down the street, and that's a good thing. No, actually it's not.

That's not a good thing. That is a hindrance to society. You're uncivilized.

Yeah, it does not produce good, godly civilizations. So even though John Locke's a liberal in that regard, because we're not blank slates, he still at least had the image that you should be molded into something for education. But now we've just thrown out the mold.

So we don't even know. We're just a big blob and glop of nothing now. That's what hyper-individualism produces.

You know, we're trying to be... And that's like the celebrity culture. They determine what they want their mold to be and what they want to become. And when individuals choose that for themselves, everybody's pretty much the same thing at that point.

Because you always are going to choose these hyper-sexualized celebrities that, whatever their fashion trends, no matter how retarded they are, you're going to just start doing that. Well, to your point about the individualization of the society, it gets back to the selfishness. I'm counting my own interests.

I want to be unique. We really don't have any... Because there's no norms on what you should fit into that you can be unique into a mold. Now you need to try to figure out how to be unique.

You have to make that trailblaze uniqueness for yourself. And usually what people will stumble upon would be being a nuisance in public, to be seen. And that Matthew Crawford has some really interesting, looking at the etymology, the history of that word, nuisance, and where it comes from.

I forget what the guy's name was, but when somebody's being a nuisance, it's just they want to be disrupting public. They want to publicly do something that disrupts, like you said, society and how society works, just because. And that's why it is psychopathic.

It's not even really cynical. It's just it's psychopathic. When you see that kind of activity increasing in society, that is an indication of radical individualization, and there's no more any societal norms.

I think the guy was riding out of the French Enlightenment, so we could see the fruits of that, why people were starting to do stuff like that. Isn't that kind of where the word, innocence, comes from? I think so, yeah. I think they were attached.

The opposite of nuisance or nuisance is an innocence. I think it was in this article that you mentioned that he started a political party kind of on that. Yeah, exactly.

The example of the muffler that he brings is this guy in New York City that goes to the Bronx, and every single night blares his music and then goes like 100 plus miles per hour down a street in the Bronx. We're not talking about a highway. He's in a street, going 100 with no muffler on, and people can't sleep.

There's a cop that pulled him over, and he's an African-American fellow, so obviously he's not allowed to be arrested or anything. That's public indecency. You're not allowed to do stuff like that, and he has the right to arrest him, but because you're not allowed to arrest people that are African-American anymore, he's a protected class, the sacred cow.

It's really sad that people can get away with stuff like that now, and it incentivizes nuisance. When you don't reprimand it, it incentivizes it. To clarify that, though, that police officer, his hands have become tied because of Democratic liberal prosecutors.

In those situations, I guarantee that officer is probably wanting to take that guy into custody, but because he knows that they're going to kick him right back out, and he's going to be back out here in about a half hour. Four hours later, doing the same thing over and over again, but that is cultivated because there is no accountability, because he gets to do whatever he wants. You become a lawless society, which is what you're seeing, and you just open your eyes.

You see this stuff. That's a small thing on a small scale in all of these liberal, Democratic-brand cities because they've cultivated. You just do whatever you want.

There's no consequences for it. But what happens is the people that are law-abiding citizens are reaping the consequences of these tyrants, and then the people in the streets become tyrants, and then they're acting like that. So the way that Christians can be is counter-cultural, where we obey the authority.

We seek to do good to them. That's counter-cultural. That's what we need to be doing.

I think Michael Foster has put out some good articles on how being normal is the new counter-cultural. Just being a normal human being, you get up and go to work nine to five, you love your family, you kiss your wife, you fight with your kids, you play with your kids, all that. Normal is the new counter-cultural.

That's the new abnormal. The bar is so low. It's easy peasy to be like, wow, you're exceptional.

You show up on time to work every day, and you actually work the whole day. For that to be now, if you can meet that standard, you're an exceptional worker in the American economy. It's like, wow, yikes.

Have you guys seen all the shoplifting that goes on, especially out west and California, how liberal it is? Petty theft under 200 bucks, it's literally not worth the cops' time to pursue that, so they never do. Target, all these big companies have a whole budget, like a petty theft budget, where they, for their year, know they're going to lose $50 million in merchandise for all of our big chains across the nation. We know we're going to lose that because we know we're not going to have enough time to investigate each little instance of petty theft.

What it does is it just incentivizes that behavior, so then people start to keep doing that. Then we saw what happened in 2020 with the riots and people looting stuff. That's how you get that mob mentality, when there's, back to what we're talking about here, there's no, you can't read the room.

There's no manners. There's no norms for the society. The normal things are now abnormal, and being normal is now like you're a stellar human.

It's just sad to see all of it. Who's the type of person who loots? Is it the type of person who has his muffler on, or is it the type of person who takes his muffler off? I think, if there's probabilities, generally speaking, it's probably the type of guy who would take his muffler off. Is it the Will Manor fellow, or the Will Manor fellow? A person who recognizes that there's a higher order of things, or this person who thinks that he is the top rung.

Think about just looking at it, juxtaposing order and chaos. You introduce a little bit of chaos when things get a little louder. When you elevate your voice in your household, as a father, you elevate your voice, what happens? You start introducing more chaos the louder you get.

You see what I'm saying? More potentially create order. You can use your volume and your voice correctly, but I'm saying, when I'm thinking about concerts, like raves, it's just real loud, it's chaotic, it's crazy. That's what the muffler is.

When you're trying to have, like me and my wife, we're trying to just walk down the street and enjoy just a walk together in the evening, and then somebody pulls out of their driveway for 30 seconds, it is completely destroying my eardrums in it. It is chaotic. That kind of noise level.

And really, the human would have never been introduced to that kind of noise level throughout all of human history. It's only through machines and modern technology can we create noises this loud, which is why we have so much hearing damage. You could just be a little bit on the spectrum, too.

Me? Because I'm so... You could just be very sensitive. That's true. Some people do have a higher sensitivity to loud noises.

I don't know. I kind of want to think about it in terms of order and chaos, to your point. Who's the person more likely to introduce more chaos? Somebody that's already wanting to do a little bit of chaos through taking my muffler off.

It's a little bit more chaos. It's the same thing. He who's faithful with a little is faithful with a lot.

He who's unfaithful with a little will be unfaithful with a lot. It's the same principle with both ways. You take your muffler off and then you have public decency next.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Like the gateway drug. Yes. Wow.

We're moving them up. Much more societal chaos. Well, I think back to Jason's point, that's kind of the main takeaway of this episode is as Christians, we do want to live very normal, upright, righteous lives.

We want to be above the approach. So we ought not to like introduce any chaos. We don't want to introduce any more chaos that already is in society.

Unless we have to do something out of self-defense. And obviously that's an ordered resistance to somebody trying to attack us or something. But when we're out in public life, if there's no need to defend yourself, then there's absolutely you should never ever try to escalate things.

We want to be peacemakers. We want to make peace wherever we're at. So I think the goal is to continue that precedence to show what a Christian society should look like.

When they see us at church, it'd be, wow, these people are very ordered. They're not super loud and obnoxious. A lot of megachurches are super loud and obnoxious.

And there's some chaos in the church service. At my job, what we're trying to do as Christians in construction is we're trying to reintroduce nobility, respect and etiquette back to the trades. Because now it's just a bunch of dudes with white theaters on, smoking cigarettes all day long, constantly taking breaks.

But we always wear pants. We always wear boots. We always tuck our pants in with nice belts.

We all wear nice hats. We try to look good. Look good.

Look professional. Manners. I think the art of knowing the room also needs to, as Christians living in a culture that has fallen into degradation, I guess you would say, would be part of knowing where you're at, too, when you're out in public.

Just because this is happening doesn't mean I should engage in it and confront it. Because if you've got a wife and kids and you're out there with them, that is not the time and place to start trying to police everything around you. So there's times to be discerning and being like, hey, it's just better that we leave.

Be thinking about where you're taking your family and your kids these days because you can put yourself into some bad situation. So it's also learning how an art of knowing what am I getting into publicly and where am I going and being aware of that and knowing that once you step outside of your home, you really have lost all, as you said, really all authority and jurisdiction. So in those situations, you just need to remove yourself.

Just get out of there. I hate sensing that in our society that there's like, wow, what a terrible public life we have. There's some places I would never even want to go.

I could never even bring my family because I know something bad would happen. It's just terrible. We live in a society like that now.

Yeah, let's try to, as Christians, continue to live a life that undoes that in our society. Thanks, fellers. Hope this was edified.

You guys listening. Thanks for tuning in. The King of the Age is immortal, invisible.

The only God we honor. Holy forever and ever. Amen.

Solely, deo, Gloria.