Shouty phone calls on buses, cyclists on footpaths ... Civilisation is falling apart

Andy Burnham is being pelted with online invective after announcing his crackdown on train passengers playing audio aloud on their phones.“Twat,” declares one of Instagram’s teeming amateur anthropologists.“Prick,” agrees someone aptly named andy.craven12.“Traitourous (sic) c**t,” chimes dukewinston11.READ MOREOthers suggest the British prime minister should get off the effing train and stop the effing migrant boats, rising prices, the riots in France, wars, pestilence, famine and Man City scoring goals. (OK, that last one might be poetic licence.) The vitriol shows Burnham has hit a nerve with his “enough is enough” campaign. Let’s hope the Taoiseach takes note and copies it, pronto.Slapping £100 (€119) fines on selfish passengers who force their horrible, tinny music and video babble on everyone else in the carriage is a simple measure. But it just might stop civilisation from collapsing.If engagement with social media is making the world more turbulent, involuntary engagement with it is leaving many of us seething. TikTok is noxious enough without it being forced upon innocent bystanders. Incessant eruptions of canned laughter has a way of fomenting murderous thoughts in a normally peaceable mind.[ Sally Rooney could have made things a great deal easier for herself. She chose not toOpens in new window ]When all you want to do is sit quietly or read or gaze out the window and daydream, it’s a triggering start to the morning having Clint Eastwood growling “make my day, punk” on the phone beside you. Because you’re too polite or too shy or too intimidated to ask your neighbour to wear headphones or switch if off, you alight in a state of fuming resentment. Maybe you’ll snap at a shop assistant, let a door swing in a stranger’s face, arrive in the office fulminating and despairing.We wonder where all the anger is coming from these days. It’s coming from:Shouty phone calls on buses and trains that shred your nerves;Drivers using your housing estate as a rat run even when the road signs explicitly forbid it;Able-bodied motorists occupying parking spaces designated for people with disabilities;Drivers parking in front of your gate, blocking you in;Getting nudged off the footpath by the two or three-abreast pedestrians stomping towards you;Cyclists on footpaths;Phones ringing in the cinema, the theatre and the middle of a funeral;The voice on the utility company’s line saying: “You are now ninth in the queue. Please hold.”[ Andy Burnham making TikToks about parking tickets seems to be missing the pointOpens in new window ]The more ways modern life is dehumanised, the more our quality of life is impaired and the angrier we humans get. This is how social cohesion begins to unravel.It starts small. Avoiding eye-contact; acting impervious to each other. Eschewing headphones because other people don’t matter. Bullying others out of your way, on the footpath or in traffic. Barging through a door held open by others without a word of thanks or a smile of acknowledgment. Belittling shop assistants. Gratuitously ugly language with a ring of menace. Vaping sickly-sweet fumes on the bus. Dropping litter in the street and expecting someone else to pick it up.When society tolerates the small things, the small things get bigger. Speed limits are flouted, verbal abuse is normalised, tailgating too. Fireworks are thrown at a neighbour’s shed and passersby are accosted for daring to even be in the country. Some days, it feels like there is somebody spoiling for a fight around every corner.And on it goes, getting bigger, getting worse, poisoning the atmosphere. Fuel protesters think it’s justifiable to use their trucks and tractors to impede others from going about their normal lives, regardless that pregnant women are trying to get to hospital or that airline passengers must drag their suitcases behind them as they trudge alongside the M50 to the airport. The more we tolerate mé féinism the less likely we are to treat each other as human beings and the more society tears itself apart.[ Fr Dougal Maguire hit on an under-recognised truth about faith and religionOpens in new window ]Mutual respect is an old-fashioned value that needs to be reclaimed because, without it, civilisation is going to hell in a handcart. Its absence is what provides the oxygen for all those noisy phones and slammed doors, the road rage and aggressive abuse.It’s no coincidence that Burnham is also planning to clamp down on impossible-to-contact customer service departments. The attitude du jour is self-service or no service, from the bank to the supermarket to the airport check-in desk. It’s an ethos predicated on the disposability of humans and it’s adding to the general anxiety of modern life.Shutting down everyday opportunities for social engagement has to be affecting the way we communicate with one another. Social media’s proclivity for scatological discourse (see above) and the isolation caused by technology are rightly blamed, but the shrinking interludes of routine human engagement cannot be overlooked as a contributing factor in the simplism of public conversation.Calling someone “a twat” – or worse – is unlikely to be entertained as serious debate, unlike the specious either-or argument that is offered with alarming frequency in the guise of intellectual rigour. You know the this-or-that routine that goes “Burnham should be fixing the train tracks instead of fining passengers” or “why build a Dublin metro when we can’t fix the ghost buses?” Believe it or not but governments can, actually, manage to do two things at once.The banal choice-argument licenses yet more anger. It inculcates a sense of powerlessness. It leaves those who think their wishes are being deprioritised for the benefit of others feeling aggrieved and it pillories all politicians – some of whom, clearly, need no help in this regard – as galumphing incompetents. Next thing they know, Government ministers are receiving death threats and their families are being evacuated from their homes because they are no longer regarded as human beings.So, let’s deal with the everyday intrusions that are making the world angrier. Ban the sneaky charges and the automatically renewed subscriptions. Ban the cacophonous phones on public transport. At the same time, make the trains big enough so that passengers are not squeezed into them like sardines and, Dublin Bus, please restore the exit door beside the driver to let passengers say thanks when disembarking.Otherwise, we might as well invite the robots to take control. After all, they ape us in every way, except for our humanity.