Thwack, thwack, thwack. Silence.
It was 20 minutes from the end of my weekly tennis clinic — six courts of men and women with an instructor feeding balls on each one — when everything came to a halt.
I looked to my left and two middle-aged men were in each other’s faces. One gave the other a quick poke on the shoulder, pushing him back a little. I didn’t see what started it but one called the other a cheater and the other responded with something cruder. The pro from our court quickly hopped over the net and got between them. It took a couple of minutes to separate the combatants. Then he sent them home.
“What did you expect?” a friend of mine asked when I recounted the story. Another friend had a similar reaction. When you look around, they suggested, we live in a world where bullying is rewarded. It was obvious that both of them were talking about the current resident of the White House. I could hardly disagree. For 10 years now, the public has been subjected to a constant stream of vitriol and insults live and on social media. Surely, it is having some impact on us that the most powerful man in the world behaves like this.
Polling suggests this is true. In 2023, the vast majority of Americans said they thought there had been a decline in civility in the previous decade. The poll, conducted by the American Bar Association, found that 85% of 1,000 respondents said civility in today’s society is worse than 10 years ago, while 8% said it was better. Per Reuters, “When asked to cite the primary factor in declining civility, 29% said social media, 24% said media, 19% said public officials, and 8% said the educational system.”
What do such polls really tell us? Are there surveys in the past where people have responded that civility is improving? I’d be surprised. There’s always a little bit of a “hell in a hand basket” kind of response when you ask these questions.
There is some evidence that the impression people have is grounded in real life, though. There are, for instance, more road-rage incidents than there used to be. Last year Pew researchers looked at the Gun Violence Archive and found that “The number of reported road rage incidents involving guns — including those in which guns were only brandished and in which shots were fired but no one was hit — peaked in 2019 at 692” and the number of “people killed or injured in such incidents jumped in 2020 and following years.”
Still, when I thought about my tennis clinic for a while, I wondered whether it really represented anything new. I thought about my childhood. Schoolyard brawls were more common back then. Also my parents both played a lot of tennis when I was growing up, and I was regularly regaled with tales of their opponents and partners who cheated or swore. Occasionally racquets were thrown, too.
Bad boy John McEnroe was the most famous professional player at the time, so maybe these men were taking their cues from him. McEnroe got a lot of press for his antics, which may have just encouraged him. But in 2022, talking to NPR after his memoir came out, he mentioned that Björn Borg (who was older and much calmer) gave him some advice during a match. Borg put his arm around McEnroe and told him to enjoy himself. “It made me think, ‘Look, just go out and play and do your thing because that’s exciting enough and it’s going to be awesome’.”
McEnroe acknowledges that he didn’t always act on the advice. But the question of how far incivility goes is partially dependent on how others respond to it. Does anyone want to play with these people after they behave like this? The response of the people I played with was, almost universally, “How could grown men come to blows over a tennis clinic? It wasn’t even a match!” But also, “Why are these men wasting our time?”
And perhaps that’s the attitude that many Americans take toward the drama in politics, too. They keep wishing for a return to “normalcy,” for public servants who don’t bring so much drama to their offices, who are fighting over principled differences without resorting to personal attacks (let alone fisticuffs). Most of us just want to be able to go to work, spend time with our families, and get a little exercise in peace. If only we could just send the offenders home.