Some days ago, I was chatting on-line with my sister. At one point, I wrote in Italian: Call me now.
She said something like: Can you please be a little kinder?
This conversation could sound normal and common, but to me it was not.
I felt like Vitangelo Moscarda in the wonderful book
One, No one and One Hundred Thousand by Pirandello, when he suddenly finds out, as an adult, something he has never known before: his nose is not completely straight! From that moment on, Mr Moscarda discovers that everyone he knows, everyone is has ever met, has constructed a Vitangelo
persona in their own imagination and that none of these
personas corresponds to the image of Vitangelo that he himself has constructed and believed to be.
In the same way, I was suddenly hit by this wave: What does my sister mean by "rude"? Is she still from Naples or is she becoming British (which would be great anyway, she should just tell me in order for me to adapt to her new cultural way of communication)? In a nanosecond, 10 images passed through my mind. I thought of so many experiences of miscommunication I had had around the world, especially in France.
I also thought of a Spanish friend of mine. We were once chatting on-line and I started three topics at the same time, he called me
Neapolitan and he asserted that in Naples we all talk about at least three things at the same time. Fortunately, he knew this, so he immediately perceived that as a cultural thing and not as an offence. But how could my own sister perceive something that is completely normal for us... as an offence? Was I too
Neapolitan or had she become too
British?
My seven years in France passed before my eyes: Every time I said directly what I thought, it was perceived as an offence. Is it possible to learn not to say what you think? Is it possible to learn to replace
Call me with
Would you please call me, if you please dear? Is it fair to judge as rude what could possibly be merely behavior that is influenced by culture? And what is politeness, by the way? I strongly believe that POLITENESS is a relative, cultural concept and I could experience that many, many times in my life. Politeness is not universal nor univocal; many answers, ways of answering, things, behaviors, words can be polite somewhere and impolite somewhere else, even within Europe or the Western world. For example, take the concept of politeness: what French people share is not a universally accepted definition of politeness. In France you have to say
Bonjour every time you go into a shop and you're supposed to say both
merci and
au revoir every time you leave, unless you want to be looked at as if you were a weird, bad-mannered animal; whereas in Italy you don't have to do all this and nobody is going to think that you're impolite. Inversely, in France (especially in Paris) it is totally ok to thrust people in the tube's corridors and to knock them down, and to plow into people in the street, whereas in Italy no one plows into you, no one elbows you and people just move out of their ways in order not to knock you down. So, for me being plowed all the time is really impolite, whereas for a Parisian that is completely normal, but not saying
Good morning, thank you and
goodbye would be inacceptable. Politeness is a relative concept indeed and we could be more aware of that. Does it make sense to organize a World Summit about rudeness and politeness?
Once, just arrived in Milan from Paris, I tried to apply the Paris' way to walk in the tube: just keep going, don't stop and don't change direction for any reasons. I ended up with twenty people yelling at me for how I was IMPOLITE! That made me laugh! It took me SEVEN years to learn to plow and knock people down in the tube in order not to be plowed and knocked down and now I was yelled at! Life is so funny.
Politeness is indeed, as many other concepts, relative and culture-based. Think of something like
freedom, how relative can this concept be?
Other examples are welcome! I'm ready to review my own position.
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