Courtesy of the modern world.

There is a gallant man who works at a grocery store not far from where I live. I know he is gallant because he is invariably cheerful, despite standing at his checkout counter for hours on end. He packs the frozen peas with elan, and endures his querulously churlish customers with a certain phlegmatic charm. But it's not easy: you have to be, he tells me, prepared for anything. In a "trendy" neighbourhood that teems with high-maintenance, tightly-wound, maxed-out urbanites, people have no compunction about hectoring him regarding their sky-high expectations, which generally he is not able to meet.

Ah yes, he agrees, courtesy is a lost art. And it really is a lost art, in the truest sense of the word. I don't think people believe it is possible to be rude. No, instead, they are communicating their needs unambiguously. In fact, if pressed on the matter they may well characterize this behaviour as exemplary. In their incivility, they demonstrate civil virtue. Why? Because they are being honest: honest about their feelings, honest about their demands, honest about what they expect you to do for them. Frequently, in their day-to-day dealings, people seem motivated by a vengeful inversion of the Golden Rule that can be expressed thus: I work at a lousy job, I take all the garbage people throw at me, and now it's my turn to be served by you, and you owe it to me, buddy.

Martha Gellhorn, the beautiful, talented, chronically restless and just a tad emotionally deranged writer and war reporter, for whom Ernest Hemingway left his Catholic wife and three young sons, was an acute observer who once penned to a friend, "I write like someone screaming." Amended slightly, this vivid phrase captures the convulsed propulsion of existence of a majority of North Americans, about many of whom it could fairly be said, "He (or she) lives like someone screaming." This is certainly true of the already-vanished presidential candidate, Howard Dean, who simply made audible the zeitgeist.

Screaming is not something one associates with courtesy--a word which derives from the old French word curteis, or courtliness. The courteous person is at pains to keep his, or her, own difficulties from impinging on the well-being or peace of another. Nor is screaming generally associated with men; it is by nature a woman's purview. Men may scream, but thankfully it is a rare occurrence, denoting the gravest of distress. Courtesy, on the other hand, is very much the province of manliness, if one may dare to use the word, as evidenced by the valiant knights of medieval times.

Rampant discourtesy, routine rudeness, is symptomatic of a culture that is both radically secularized and feminized. As St. Edith Stein wrote, a particularly feminine defect is the inordinate desire to penetrate the intimate lives of others: a feminized culture traffics heavily in hysteria and a prurient emotionalism. Thus do "reality shows" proliferate to meet the insatiable appetite of the emotional voyeurs.

Yet, paradoxically, women are becoming more masculine in demeanour and behaviour. We, the sisterhood, now swear, smoke, sport tattoos, spit on the sidewalk, and these are the more innocuous manifestations of our alleged emancipation. But, hell: we know what mayhem ensued after Lady Macbeth voiced that guttural snarl, "Unsex me now." When women take over, men are taken aback. And particularly masculine defects are to clear out, to abdicate responsibility, or to assert dominance by brutal means. So men abandon their God-given, natural role as leaders and protectors (the foundation of courtesy) and the women are left to fend, often bitterly and furiously, for themselves. Which of the sexes is more to blame, if one may state it bluntly: women for forsaking femininity, or men for abandoning masculinity? It clearly has been a cooperative venture in perversity.

Theologian John Saward noted that "during the Middle Ages, courtesy was built upon the sexual order of God's creation." Now that natural sex-roles are topsy-turvy and "androgyny admired" what flourishes is "contempt for the little and weak"--the defining attitude of the culture of death.

English poet William Langland, who predicted that lack of courtesy would be a mark of the antichrist, according to Saward in Catholic World Report, December 1994, issued a call to arms as it were: by the "gentle weapons" of Christian courtesy, such as reverence for the Blessed Sacrament, devotion to Our Lady, charity and chastity, can discourtesy be defeated. The battlefields will vary from person to person, but it can safely be said that for most of us, they will include our own heart and the grocery store.