Ideas

The Age of Awkwardness (or The Case for Guilt)

Clayton Trutor

I remember it well. The moment when people stopped being polite and started getting real, back in the summer of 1992 on MTV’s first iteration of The Real World. I remember watching Kevin, the New York cast’s stock erudite angry black male, go toe-to-toe with Julie, Season One’s wide-eyed Southern jailbait. They were all up in one another’s grill, talking candidly about race in America outside of their pre-Giuliani Manhattan brownstone. I remember thinking that this was some deep and profound adult stuff they were talking about, but I was only eleven at the time. A few years later, an MTV retrospective on the early seasons of the Real World commemorated this confrontation, using it as an example of what was so great about the show. Kevin and Julie had dropped their guards, quit it with the manners and niceties, and said what they really thought about one another, how they each symbolized something dangerous to the other person. It was an important moment in television history, said Kurt Loder or Tabitha Soren or Alison Stewart or Dan Cortese. If more Americans were honest about their feelings, like Kevin and Julie, America would be a better place to live.

It seems like most people I encounter have taken Dan Cortese’s words to heart. The whole world has recast itself in the image of the Real World. People make such a goddamn production out of not being polite and being real these days that they have lost the capacity to treat one another courteously. In an age when Americans have withdrawn themselves from their communities to an unprecedented extent, we have become the realest people in the history of the world, willing to let every skeleton out of the closet and uncover the underbelly of every aspect of our society. We have become so real in fact that we have broken down enough barriers of taboo to live in a world without mystery, without the simple dignity of privacy. Self-expression has replaced mystery. Our expository selves, aided and abetted by technological innovation, have turned life into a never-ending confessional. Americans have expressed themselves more in the last ten years than the previous hundred generations did in their entire lifetimes.

Technology is only part of the problem. It is convenient to blame machines for the choices we all make on a daily basis. Our desire for self-expression, for an end to mystery, pervades the culture we choose to consume. On our remaining bookshelves, memoirs have replaced fiction as the most popular form of literary storytelling. We’ve convinced ourselves that all writing is autobiographical, thus rendering the veil of imagination an inconvenient flourish that keeps readers from the real details of a story. In fashion, this desire for self-expression has fostered a perpetually devolving hoochification of female attire and a related explosion of form-fitted male vanity. Clothing has gone from covering the body, to accentuating it, to merely displaying it. There is no mystery left on the radio either. Top 40 stations used to be a bastion of half-baked metaphor and simile. Whoever constitutes the Tin Pan Alley of 2009 refuses to take a stab at even perfunctory nuance. Everything is on the surface in recent radio sensations like Jeremih’s “Birthday Sex” and Flo Rida’s “Right Round.” The decline of lyrical nuance is just as evident on country, alternative, or adult contemporary stations.

In such a real age, one devoid of mystery, the most unnerving thing a person can do is practice old fashioned politeness. Politeness is pure veneer and that’s exactly what’s great about it. Politeness, or the pretense of courteousness, demonstrates one’s concern for the comfort of others. It reveals a sense of duty and obligation to the people you encounter. Real people don’t find politeness cute or nostalgic. They find it creepy. They question what ulterior motives would lead a person to start being polite and stop being real.

For the time being, America has become a largely impolite culture. The nation is well on the way to becoming an "a-polite" culture, one which does not recognize the possibility of interpersonal courtesy serving as an organizing principle for society. Few people know how to initiate courtesy or how to accept it anymore. When people make the effort to be polite, things just get so awkward. In the last five years, awkward has emerged as the go-to descriptor of any social situation where people aren’t being real. All of a sudden, the world has become an incredibly awkward place. This awkwardness, which has emerged from a decline in politeness, is the result of a number of factors. First of all, the tendency of people to employ the language of "rights" in almost every social situation, especially in situations where an individual wants customer service, puts a tremendous strain on politeness. Secondly, changing gender roles have led to a great deal of confusion about what constitutes proper public decorum for men and women. Thirdly, the ongoing "culture wars" both reflect and exaggerate the lack of a broad social consensus on a number of moral and cultural issues. Fourthly, the increasingly multi-cultural character of American society contributes to the awkwardness of American life. The efforts of millions of immigrants from Latin America, Asia, and Africa to both acculturate to and reshape American society have put notions of common social courtesy in flux, particularly in America's cities.

All of these reasons have contributed to the rise of awkwardness in American life, but none are sufficient to explain it. The primary culprit in the decline of politeness and subsequent rise of social awkwardness can be found in all of our hearts. It is a pervasive lack of guilt in our society. Of all human emotions, guilt always gets the worst rap for the obvious reason that it doesn't feel good. Unfortunately, guilt is among the most socially beneficial emotions. It forces people to reflect on their treatment of other people. It encourages us to fulfill our obligations to the people around us. Politeness emerges in a community when a broad social consensus agrees that it is desirable for people to show respect for one another in social settings. Guilt provides a powerful impetus for people to be polite to each other. Conversely, awkwardness implies social discomfort. The self-centered individual, who puts the self ahead of his or her obligations to their family and community, has made awkwardness the norm.

The increasing secularization of our society and the corresponding efforts of churches to make themselves culturally relevant in an increasingly secular age have helped foster the decline in guilt. Guilt is seen by both secularists and people of faith alike as a heavy-handed vestige from an earlier, more judgmental age. Making someone "feel guilty" about their behavior has become a taboo of the highest order. While the combination of guilt and fear of eternal damnation provide plenty of motivation for people to lead a moral life, it is unfortunate that religion is seen as having a monopoly on guilt. Religion has never had a monopoly on ethics. In the West, religion, in fact, came late to the dance. Morality and ethics are strongly tied to personal conscience, so the exclusion of guilt, one of the primary emotional responses of an ethical person, from most discussions of contemporary secular ethics is a glaring omission.

We live in an age when people are willing to broadcast their inner lives to the world. Yet guilt has been largely expunged from our efforts to express ourselves. Whenever personal guilt comes up in conversation or is depicted in the media, it is treated like a medieval torture device, long ago discarded by civilized people. I suggest that a revival of guilt will do just the opposite. It will serve to further humanize our expressive culture by offering a fuller depiction of the complexity of human emotions. Guilt will serve our communities by forcing us to look out for one another.