Of all the silly rituals that govern social life, perhaps none is sillier than that of holding open doors. We all go through it several times a day: As you prepare to enter a room or building, you must quickly determine whether anyone with the same plan of entry is following at a certain undefined, but intuitively felt distance. If so — or at least if you lack plausible deniability as to their presence — you must then abate your progress, put your life on hold, and wait for your fellow citizen to pass unimpeded.
The benefit of such courtesy, presumably, is that followers are spared the onerous task of opening the door themselves. Yet relief from this labor comes with an inconvenience of its own: To save the door-holder from an unduly long wait, we can’t help but feel obliged to quicken our pace. The resulting discomfort — the forced change in our immediate life plan — is often more of a burden than the act of opening the door unassisted; and the loss of autonomy is a harm in itself. This custom hence cannot be reduced to any mutual benefit iteration theory: Reciprocal altruism has little explanatory power when the practice is net utility-reducing.
It might be suggested that the ritual serves some sort of edifying or democratizing purpose. Yet holding doors to avoid social sanctions — that is, to avoid looking like a jerk — no more fosters habits of selflessness than paying taxes in order to escape criminal sanctions engenders a spirit of charity. Indeed, the fact that door-holding often occurs in cases of clear disutility shows that it is done more out of obedience to the rule itself than in service of the rule’s ostensible aims.
In this way, this seemingly trivial custom speaks to a larger phenomenon: the bureaucratization and general malaise of American public life. In a society animated more by unthinking obedience to rules than meaningful concern for one another, cheap acts of “humanity” seem to obviate the need for any genuine courtesy, kindness, or sociality.
Consider another somewhat trifling example. When someone nearby sneezes, friend or stranger, it is completely obligatory that we utter “bless you” — words that do nothing more than assure the sneezer his highly unpleasant spasm did not go unnoticed. During classes or meetings, it’s not uncommon for half a dozen people to spit out this incantation with Pavlovian automaticity — thereby causing a much greater disturbance than the sneeze itself; and the sneezer, of course, must then reward all parties to the disturbance with a hoarse “thank you.”
We begin now to see how our public interactions are characterized less by spontaneous sharing and support and more by rigid rules and rituals — a symptom of what Weber called the “disenchantment” of modernity. Long gone are the days of the polis when community living was a collective project; upon us are times of deadening individualism in public life, where urban forms and bureaucratic forms are more salient than human forms. We rely on the occasional door opening or “bless you” to provide the barest of substance to citizenship, but such token duties fail to puncture our cloak of self-concern.
They let us go on autopilot while crude custom takes care of our dealings with others.