Manners, courtesy and gender pronouns

English jurist Lord Moulton once said that manners were the mid-point between law and anarchy. He was calling for restraint in what should be the domain of the law and pointing out that not all undesirable human behaviour needs to be legislated against. It is surely an important characteristic of civilised society that up to a certain level human interaction should be self-regulated. We need laws against murder and assault because anyone who would commit such acts would not be restrained by anything as prosaic as manners, but we shouldn't need laws to prescribe how we greet one another.

I have written before about the decline of manners and common courtesy and I believe it is no coincidence that at a time when governments are seeing fit to regulate every manner of human interaction, manners are falling into disuse. The latest area of government intrusion into what should be the preserve of manners is the use of gender pronouns in relation to transgender people. Canada has recently passed a law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender identity or expression and it has been predicted that it will have the effect of criminalising the use of pronouns other than what the subject wants. Canada seems to be in the vanguard of this because even before the new law was enacted, University of Toronto psychologist Professor Jordan Peterson got into hot water about his refusal to use new gender-neutral pronouns such as 'ze' and 'zir' in compliance with his university's policies. Peterson said he does not object to using whatever traditional pronoun an individual prefers but he objects to the heavy-handed imposition of new language, seeing it as yet another way for post-modern neo-Marxists to enforce control over every area of human interaction.

The way we address each other is a personal matter and very much within the realm of manners. There are traditional rules about the degree of formality that is appropriate in different situations and these are particularly strong in languages other than English that have grammatical rules about when to use the formal/plural third person form of address and the informal/singular. New Zealanders are renown for their informality and personally I find the forms of address that many of my countrymen use (such as calling a stranger 'mate') to be inappropriate and sometimes mildly offensive, but if I am not addressed in the way I prefer, I just politely correct the person. This is the way it should be - a matter of courtesy between the individuals concerned.

The problem with legislating everything is that it kills voluntary action. You cannot legislate to make people think in a particular way and using the cudgels of the law to force behaviour that should be the realm of manners is counterproductive because it destroys trust and mutual respect. If people cannot be left to negotiate even the form of address they use with other people - in other words, if there is no voluntary space left between the law and anarchy - then don't be surprised if more people choose anarchy.