Friday, September 13, 2013

Eating with my Hands (and Wearing Denim)

It is generally considered a faux-pas in civil society to eat with one's hands. That's what cutlery is for. Sitting in the food court (Urban Eatery, to use the marketing department's name for it) at Eaton Center I was struck by the great diversity of diners, from all cultures and ethnicities, joined in the process of evolutionary back-sliding.

We judge our level of civilization in very odd ways. It is strictly forbidden to smoke within 9 meters of the entrance to any public building. I wonder who came up with that distance and whether it was the subject of intense negotiations. 9 meters is 29'6" - a number with no significance whatever. It isn't a half chain (33'), or two rods (also 33'), or 39 spans (29'4"), or any other division of any unit of measurement I can think of. But it is a measure of how civilized we are. We don't dump our refuse on the streets, we don't spit indoors, and we don't smoke anywhere we like. But we do eat with our hands.

I can hardly remember the last meal I ate requiring cutlery. This is mostly attributable to my unhealthy diet rather than a complete lack of social grace. I guess it just seems strange to me that the desk I used in the Physics and Astronomy building at the University of Western Ontario had two indentations on the top - one for an inkwell and one for an ashtray. The first students to use those desks wore suits to class, smoked continuously, and wouldn't dream of eating with their hands.

We have, as a society, made trade-offs in the last half century. Convenience in return for, what? I'm not bemoaning the availability of an incredible assortment of food (all of it at approximately $10 per meal) I can get in less than ten minutes, eat with my hands and walk away from. This is one thing I wouldn't care to give up. But I would like to know precisely what it was I traded for this convenience.

I'm not going to suggest the trade was one for one. It was a lot of things all combined, some gained, some lost. And the gains weren't necessarily gains, nor the losses necessarily losses. Similarly, what seemed like a gain might have been a loss in the long term and vice versa. But here is where denim enters the equation.

If you look at a picture of any public gathering 50 years ago (a parade for instance) you will see the men all wear jackets (and most wear ties) and the women all wear dresses (and most wear hats). A picture from a parade taken this decade, you will see guys in t-shirts, women in sweatpants with slogans across the ass, and so on.

The terms blue and white collar might not seem to have much relevance these days. Financial workers and lawyers are white collar - everyone else is something else. The availability and stability of blue collar work simply does not exist anymore. The categories are broken, largely irrelevant. I think it is worth considering what they once meant, what they originally meant. A blue collar worker wore a blue collar at work. Everywhere else he dressed in a shirt and jacket - same as a white collar worker.

We gave that away at some point. More accurately, we won the right to surrender it incrementally. My sister-in-law's grandfather doesn't come to family events much anymore. He is old and has reached the point where infirm might be a better description. He worked in agriculture - I forget whether he owned a farm or sold farm equipment but either way he was about a blue collar as you can get. Yet he always wore a shirt and tie, typically under a sweater, for family gatherings. His clothes always fit and he was always tidy. He wasn't a dandy; no one would dream of accusing him of being a fancy boy. He just looked dignified. It wasn't that he took pride in his appearance so much as he maintained a very high minimum standard for himself. He wore the most comfortable clothes he could while dressing in a way he considered appropriate.

That is what I see when I look at pre-denim era pictures. The people captured in them are not slaves to fashion. They are not automatons afraid to express their individuality. They are people who would consider going out in public without a certain level of formality in their clothing undignified - their standards are higher. Somewhere along the way, in our quest for (what? convenience? self-expression?) we have surrendered the opportunity to assert the dignity of equality, of community. We have lowered our standards for ourselves and consider it a victory.

Many people would say that trade off was actually the freedom from the expectation of conformity (and all the repercussions should that expectation fail to be met). I disagree. Today's jeans and a t-shirt has replaced the jacket and tie of a half century ago. You can go to almost any public event in jeans and a t-shirt and not draw attention to yourself. Go wearing anything else and you stand out. The pressure to conform hasn't gone anywhere; all that's changed is the standards. Given the choice, I would rather conform with a standard that allows me to look dignified.

There are so many ways society conspires to strip individuals of our dignity. Those ways of preserving it that remain to us are worth fighting for. So I wear a shirt and jacket almost everywhere now. Certainly everywhere I expect to speak to people. I'll go to the store in jeans and a sweatshirt but not many other places. To be clear, I don't dress particularly well. I can't afford it. Good suits are extremely expensive. The effort I make is not in the hope I will be mistaken for someone with style - it is with the expectation I will be recognized as someone who will stand up for myself and not allow my dignity to be stripped from me. At least, not without a fight.

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