On Decorum

Something happened yesterday and I have been turning it over ever since, which is generally how you can tell an interaction has stopped being an event and started being a specimen.

Someone came into my space and questioned something I’d written.

Fine. Good, even. That’s the job.

I answered. I clarified what I’d meant. She indicated she understood the clarification.

At which point, by my reckoning, the transaction was complete. Question asked. Question answered. Understanding achieved. Everybody go home.

But the conversation did not end. It changed genre.

It moved from what does this idea mean to here is how you should have communicated this idea. My communication was then described as defensive. Then as adversarial. And then — and I want you to sit with this one the way I have — I was told that as someone she perceived to be an expert, she expected more decorum from me.

Decorum. In a comment section.

I want to be clear that I laughed, and that the laugh was not entirely kind, and that I’ve since become interested in why it was the word decorum rather than any of the preceding accusations that made something in me stand up and say: wait, what are we doing here.

Decorum reaches us from Latin, where decorus meant seemly, becoming, fitting — from decere, to be fitting. Push further back and it rests on an Indo-European root meaning something like to take, to accept. The same root gives us decent and dignity. It also gives us — and I want to be clear that I did not arrange this — docile, doctrine, dogma, and orthodoxy.

The whole family is about what gets taken, taught, and accepted. Decorum is not a branch of ethics. It isn’t a branch of clarity either. It is a branch of acceptability.

In classical rhetoric the word had an actual job. Cicero used decorum to render the Greek to prepon, “the fitting,” and the doctrine ran like this: style must suit the subject, the speaker, the audience, and the occasion. Horace applied it to poetry. Quintilian systematized it. And in the neoclassical centuries that followed, decorum did exactly the work you’d expect of a rule about fittingness — it governed which characters were permitted which register, indexed to their station. Kings in high style. Servants in low. A rule about who may speak how, keyed to rank.

Which is the thing to notice, and the reason that word went off in my chest like a flare when the previous three hadn’t.

Decorum is never a property of an utterance. It is always a judgment about fit — between what was said and who said it, to whom, in what venue, from what position. You cannot deploy the word without importing a social order, because the word has no content without one. There’s no decorum in the abstract. There is only decorum for someone, in a role, before an audience.

And notice where the word still lives. Courtrooms. Legislatures. Places with a presiding officer, a floor, and a gavel. The decorum of the House.

So when it turns up in a comment section, something fairly specific has occurred. A chamber has been conjured where there wasn’t one — a floor, a set of proceedings, a standard of order. And a chair, occupied by whoever invoked it.

I hadn’t been ruled out of order. I’d been informed that order existed.

Two things happened in that sentence and they’re worth separating.

The first is that I was assigned a role. Expert. I hadn’t claimed it, hadn’t sought it, and had in fact spent a fair amount of time in that same space describing the ideas in question as unfinished, exploratory, and quite possibly wrong. But the role got conferred anyway, the way roles do.

The second is that obligations were attached to the role and then enforced against me. Experts owe decorum. I had been made an expert without my participation, and was now in breach of an office I never took.

This is a genuinely interesting thing that happens to people, and I don’t think it’s specific to me or to autistic people or to the internet. Ascribed status comes with a job description you never read. You get promoted by acclamation and disciplined by the same crowd. What’s specific here is only that the promotion and the disciplinary hearing arrived in the same message, roughly eleven seconds apart.

Here’s the part I actually care about, because I think it’s the real thing under all of this.

There is a difference between repair and correction, and it is not a difference of degree.

Repair is what conversation does when meaning fails to transfer. You said something, I didn’t get it, I signal that, you try again, I get it. Repair has a terminus. It’s over when understanding arrives. That’s the whole definition — it’s finished when it works.

Correction is a different activity wearing repair’s coat. Correction begins after understanding has been achieved. It isn’t oriented toward meaning at all, because meaning has already landed. It’s oriented toward form. And form has no terminus, because there is always another way you could have said it.

Repair has a finish line. Correction is a subscription.

So when a conversation moves from what did you mean to here’s how you should have said it, something has actually changed underneath, and the thing that changed is what the conversation is for. It stopped being about comprehension and became about compliance. Not aggressively. Not consciously, I’d guess. But that’s the switch, and I appear to have a nervous system that detects it at approximately the speed of a smoke alarm.

Which, fine. I’d like to think there’s a reason for that.

The analogy that came to me first was the obvious one. Someone walks into your house, rearranges the furniture, is asked politely not to rearrange the furniture, and responds: wow, I can’t believe you’d treat a guest this way.

Then files a report.

It’s a satisfying analogy and I’m going to undermine it immediately, because a public post is not a house. That’s the honest complication and the essay is worthless without it.

A house is private. A post is an invitation. When you publish an idea you have genuinely opened something — people are allowed to disagree with it, allowed to misunderstand it, allowed to think it’s bad, allowed to say so in public where you can see them doing it. Anyone who publishes and then acts shocked that strangers had reactions has confused a newsletter with a diary.

So the furniture analogy fails in the direction of my own comfort, which is usually the direction analogies fail.

But here is what survives it. The invitation was to the idea. And somewhere in the last decade we quietly stopped distinguishing between access to a person’s ideas and access to the person.

Watch how short the ladder is:

Access to the ideas becomes access to the person. Access to the person becomes standing to evaluate the person. Standing to evaluate becomes an expectation that the evaluation will be received. And declining to receive it becomes evidence of bad faith — proof you were never really open to dialogue.

Four rungs, and at no point does anyone do anything obviously outrageous. That’s what makes it work.

Now here’s what I can’t get past.

We are both autistic.

There’s a body of work — Damian Milton’s double empathy problem, and the studies that have followed it — suggesting that the communication breakdown between autistic and non-autistic people isn’t a deficit sitting inside the autistic person. It’s a mismatch, running in both directions, between two groups who each find the other hard to read. Crompton and colleagues have since shown that information passes between autistic people about as efficiently as it does between non-autistic people. The failure is in the crossing, not in one of the shores.

Lovely theory. I believe it. It also predicts that yesterday should have gone considerably better than it did.

So what happened?

Here’s my best answer, and it’s the reason I wanted to write any of this down.

Norms don’t survive because someone is standing there enforcing them. That would be enormously inefficient and no institution could afford the staffing. Norms survive because they get installed in people, and then the people carry them around and apply them for free, in every direction, including at each other and including at themselves.

Which means the person telling you that your tone was wrong may well be the person whose tone was corrected for thirty years.

That isn’t hypocrisy. I want to be careful here, because it would be very easy and very cheap to write the version of this essay where I’m the enlightened one and she’s the collaborator. That essay would be a lie and I’d know it by Thursday.

It’s closer to inheritance. If you spend a childhood being taught that a communication failure is always yours to fix — if they misunderstood you, clarify; if they’re offended, examine your tone; if your face looked wrong, fix your face; if your voice sounded wrong, fix your voice; if you were too direct, soften it; if you weren’t direct enough, be clearer — you do not come out of that with no rule. You come out of it with the rule installed at the level of reflex. And a rule installed that deep gets applied outward, because that’s what rules do. It’s not a betrayal of the community. It’s the community carrying the thing that was done to it.

The call was coming from inside the house, and the house is all of us, and none of us built it.

There’s one more mechanism and it belongs to the medium rather than to anybody’s neurology.

Text has no tone. This is a load-bearing fact about the internet that we have all collectively agreed to pretend isn’t true. There is no prosody in a sentence on a screen. No pitch, no pace, no pause, no face. The affect isn’t in there. It can’t be — the channel doesn’t carry it.

So the reader supplies it. Every reader, every time, unavoidably. And here’s the trick that makes it invisible: the supplied tone doesn’t feel supplied. It feels like it came in with the words. You don’t experience yourself adding hostility to a message. You experience yourself detecting hostility in a message, and detection feels like perception, and perception feels like fact.

Which is how a sentence with no tone in it becomes bullying.

I try — and I want to say try, because I’m not in a position to grade my own work here — to respond to what was written rather than to what I felt while reading it. It’s a discipline, not a trait. Some days it holds. I’d be lying if I told you it always does, and I’d be doing exactly the thing I’m complaining about if I claimed to know which of us was doing it yesterday.

What I am confident about is narrower: the disagreement wasn’t about the idea. The idea had been clarified and the clarification had been accepted. Everything after that was about form.

So I said the thing. This is my space, you don’t have to like how I communicate in it, you don’t have to agree with me, you don’t have to stay — but you don’t get to come in here and tell me how I’m required to speak.

And that was described as bullying.

Let me say the thing I actually want to say about that, because I’ve been drafting the wrong version of it in my head for two days.

The wrong version goes: I am not cruel. I am not a bully. Spend fifteen minutes in a room with me and you will know that.

I believe it. I’d love to write it. But I’ve just spent two thousand words arguing that nobody can read a character off an interaction, and I don’t get to suspend that the moment it’s my character on the table. If fifteen minutes in a room with me is sufficient to establish that I’m kind, then ninety seconds in a thread was sufficient for her to establish that I’m cruel — and I’d have traded the entire argument for a compliment.

So here’s the version I can stand behind.

I am accountable for what I do. If I’ve hurt someone, tell me what I did — the sentence, the moment, the specific thing — and I will sit with it seriously, because that’s a claim I can examine and be wrong about. I have been wrong about that before and I expect to be again.

I am not accountable for what I am. Not because I’m above it. Because cruel isn’t a finding, it’s a verdict, rendered on evidence nobody has access to, and there exists no procedure by which I could disprove it. Ask me to defend my character and you’ve convened a hearing with no standard of evidence, no discovery, and no appeal — which, as it happens, is the same building we walked into at the top of this essay.

Act, I’ll answer for. Character, I decline to litigate.

And if the refusal itself reads as arrogance, well. That’s the fourth rung of the ladder, and we’ve already climbed it once today.

I’m not going to argue with anyone’s experience of an interaction. I don’t have access to it and neither does anyone else, which is more or less my entire position. But I’d like to put a distinction on the table, because I think we’ve lost it and I think losing it is expensive:

Disagreement is not harm.

Ending access is not punishment.

And you don’t get to talk to me this way has never once meant you don’t get to talk.

It means you get to talk over there. In your space. Where you set the terms, and I don’t, and that’s correct, and I’d defend your right to it as loudly as I’m defending mine.

Bring me research. Bring me the place my reasoning falls apart. Bring me your lived experience where it contradicts mine, bring me the uncomfortable question, bring me the thing I’ve been avoiding. I genuinely, embarrassingly love that. It’s most of why I do this.

Just don’t bring me decorum.

Two autistic women, same ninety seconds, two entirely different maps of what had just occurred — and one of them thinks the other was cruel.

We’ve got problems, Lucy.