Chivalry and Propriety

I hear a lot of people say these days that chivalry is dead. This statement isn't really wrong, as a definition of chivalry primarily equates it to knights and noblemen, and these days, people get knighted for writing books or being actors, and nobility definitely seems more and more simply a distinction of heredity rather than character. However, while my pedantic soul is satiated, my practical soul is not. Chivalry, as the popular definition goes, is a set of mannerism that pertain primarily to the social operations of a male and dictate that he do things for other people for no apparent reason besides that he can, in his small way, make being alive suck a little less. This, people claim, is dead.

Is it really? Because to understand this concept, one should break it down. Chivalry, according to what people seem to think (when they bother), is made up of two parts: doing things for no reason, and decreasing world suck. Surely, no one would argue that people are any more prone to adhering to reason now than they have ever been. On the contrary, many would argue just the opposite. Likewise with decreasing world suck, many people do many things that decrease world suck, even if some would say it isn't enough.

No, Chivalry isn't dead. Propriety is dead. By propriety, I mean quite simply, acting properly. Acting properly should be a social norm, like letting people step off a bus before getting on, not standing in the middle off a walkway, or moving your bag from the seat next to you so someone else can use it. This is what I mean by propriety. People haven't forgotten to be nice to each other, as the bewailed death of chivalry may suggest, we know full well exactly what nice is. What we've forgotten is what it might be like to be someone besides ourselves. The death of propriety, I believe, is one of the major reasons society today has gone to the dogs of hedonistic degradation. I hesitate to assert that people now only think about themselves and and only that, because your average person, my optimistic self wants to believe, is quite a kind person (or at the least, neutral in this regard). But there is a reason why while the individual can be affable, empathetic, and relating, groups of people somehow transcend all sense of moderation and often go to extremes and polarize themselves again and again to the side if illegality, rambunctiousness, belligerence, and most often, downright stupidity. This is because we no longer have a sense of propriety. We don't have what it takes to conceive of another person's mind, and thus, riots of people destroy everything they contact with their caustic hostility and hive mind. Senseless destruction of private, commercial, and even public places have become a norm, for the riots of this day and age.

Honestly, I have no propositions on how to solve this problem. All I know is that if I do my best to not give in to the tunnel vision of vanity that I have come to despise, maybe my life and that of those around me won't be as terrible to live. And perhaps, if we all believe this, that would be all we need.