Weekly Musing #30 Can decency be taught?

What does decency mean to you? Is it kindness, respect, or an instinctive sense of what’s fair? Or is it something deeper, a set of core values that guide your interactions with others?

I guess this is a question as old as humankind – I did a quick search on writings about decency and found, not surprisingly, a lot written by ancient Greeks and Romans.

For Aristotle, decency was about finding balance- of acting with moderation and integrity. He saw decency as part of the virtues necessary for achieving eudaimonia—a life of happiness and welfare. Meanwhile, the Stoics, from Seneca to Marcus Aurelius, believed that decency lay in controlling one’s impulses, acting with respect for others, and leading with moral integrity. Decency, for them, was a virtue and a duty—essential for a just and harmonious society.

That all sounds good and something to strive for, but how does one measure it and define it? And if we define it with a start and an end and maybe even on a scale from 1-10, how much decency should a society then demand it's citizens to have and express?

In Sweden today we have a debate about “Swedish values” and there are political parties that call for much clearer rules and regulations on what that actually means. We even have a initiative to create a Swedish literary canon that will tell us what we are supposed to read.

On a personal note I smugly enjoy the ongoing debate about the Swedish literary canon, especially the politicians that namedrop the books they think children should read, old books that neither they or me or my classmates ever read when we were young. But I guess that's just the way of romanticized nostalgia, always longing for a past that never was.

Sometimes I feel our biggest mistake growing up is forgetting we once were kids too.

But back to decency - Can a society define and enforce morals and decency? laws yes, usually hard boundaries of what you cannot do. But decency and morals?

Who gets to decide what decency looks like in practice? Is it universal, or does it vary from culture to culture? Don't we need to explore these questions more, especially when our definitions of decency risk excluding others? (Sweden again, throw out the ones that don't adhere to Swedish values).

So what IS decency? It might be easy to recognize but it's hard to define.

In everyday life, we can see and express examples of decency in small gestures: a stranger holding the door, taking your time and waiting your turn, being a bigger person in defeat or debate. These are simple acts, but they reveal something about the person behind them.

This leads to a deeper question: Is decency something we’re born with, or is it something we learn?

We often associate decency with values instilled by family, community, or culture. But how much influence do these have on whether someone chooses to act decently?

Does the simple exposure to respectful behaviour create respectful behaviour?

How do we teach and inspire decency when we can’t define it? And even harder – how do we enforce decency if we haven’t written down what it is or isn’t?

I mentioned laws, yes, the constraints of society, yet if everyone acted morally and decent, we wouldn’t need laws, would we?

And now it gets even more difficult. In a diverse society, how do we agree on common ground? How big is the circle of mutual understanding of what decency is?

And how do we reach it?

This brings me back to my original question: Can decency be intentionally taught? Can we instil values like empathy and respect in schools, communities, or through national policies?

Perhaps decency can’t be taught in the traditional sense, by reading about it in a book.

But I think it is important to reflect on it and encourage the discussion about what it means to us.

I compare it to when we do group development work at KTH Innovation and we strive to get the group talking not only WHAT they are doing but more importantly HOW they want to do it. And then from both concrete and abstract perspectives; concrete measurable things like regarding how often we meet, in what form, and which tools do we use to communicate and how we use them. And the abstracts – what are our common values, how do we want to treat each other, what is important to us.

But how to get a society to reflect on that?

What do you think? I’d love to hear (read) your thoughts here, I certainly don’t have the answers.

All I know is that I feel that we need more decency in the world.

Whatever that means.