Politeness now signals inhuman conditions rather than human address

Evidence

Thus individuals begin, not without reason, to react antagonistically to tact: a certain kind of politeness, for example, gives them less the feeling of being addressed as human beings, than an inkling of their inhuman conditions, and the polite run the risk of seeming impolite by continuing to exercise politeness, as a superseded privilege. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 32

Categorization

• XREF: Reverses the reader’s own note on silence-as-decorum toward corpses — politeness read as a suspicion of one’s conditions. — connects to: Advice to the helpless has become indistinguishable from condemnation; Politeness and social mixing mask a tacit acceptance of inhumanity — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1690; Polite conduct can be conscious resistance rather than unconscious hegemonic concession — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 883