It may be that I just attract rude people, the way others attract eccentrics or wet paint. But I don't think so. I think life's getting ruder. When you get to that point where the rudeness of everyday life is constantly amazing, you have two choices: you can shut up about it, for fear that you'll expose yourself as a cardigan-wearing fusspot, or you can expose yourself as a cardigan-wearing fusspot. So here goes.

Manners today are a disgrace. Look around. Stand in the street until a group of people sauntering four abreast blithely drives you into the gutter. Wait by your phone until someone calls to wheedle some dough out of you at dinner-time and then hangs up before you've finished saying "No thank . . ." There are shelves full of books in the bookshops about manners and rudeness, which suggests that there's either an epidemic of incivility, or a resurgent concern for social delicacies, which doesn't seem likely. We all know it's happening. Even John Howard knows it. Like a dismayed patriarch, he has repeatedly expressed his alarm at the vulgarity and diminishing civility of public life. Manners evolve organically; good manners are defined by an unwritten code. That's why they have to be taught, demonstrated, absorbed. It usually starts in the home. Or not, as they case may be. In her book Talk to the Hand, English author Lynne Truss tells the story of a documentary maker who was talking to a class of children about the concept of apology. "Children," she said, "in every family home, there's a word which people find really hard to say to each other. It ends in 'y'. Can anyone tell me what it is?" There was a pause, Truss writes, "while everyone racked their brains, and then someone called out, 'buggery?' "

TECHNOLOGY usually gets the blame for incivility. Mobile phones, MySpace, the Blackberry tempo of daily life. Each new gadget automates our lives further, seals our networked social pod from the mess and BO and delays of other people. Technology lets us spend most of our days in a virtual space inhabited only by our contacts and friends. So when we get out into the street and find ourselves f2f with people we don't know - omg! - we find ourselves floundering for rusty social graces, like long-forgotten dance steps. No doubt the speed of change has outpaced the gradual social consensus which dictates courteous behaviour. My ear still recalls the day my father nearly yanked it off my head when I failed to stand up to greet an adult; today, standing up when someone comes into the room is naff. In my circles, anyway. To offer your tram seat to that probably pregnant woman, or not? That is the question. Or maybe this is the question: How much decorum do we want in public life? When Tony Abbott informed Lateline viewers the other week that "shit happens" he was probably hoping to hit a note of likeable frankness. Instead, he sounded like a potty-mouth.

But blaming confusion about manners for incivility doesn't wash. To be confounded by modern manners you first have to care enough to wonder about them. The fact is, cars pre-dated road rage by nearly a century. It's not cars or phones that make selfish idiots jabber on the mobile while they're driving one-handed. It's selfish idiots. If we're so confused about how we should behave, why is it that we know perfectly well how everyone else should behave? They should get out of the way. They should never presume to tell us how to behave. They should treat us with respect. Clearly, this isn't a golden age for courtesy. Please, thank you, sorry: there's a sense now that old magic words are for fogeys, the dull, the slow-laners. The very idea of saying sorry seemed to disgust Alexander Downer last week when asked if Kevin Andrews should apologise over the Haneef case. What do you want him to do, Mr Downer mocked the press pack, "fall on the ground and grovel? Eat dirt? Come on, get real." Yes, let's get real. We don't aspire to the quietly honourable life now. We want the big life, the movie life, a life so grand and busy that anyone who isn't useful or part of our circle is either invisible or in the way.

Some blame the spirit of the free market for this plague of solipsism, as Peter Saunders notes in his 2006 article, "Don't Blame Howard for Decline of Civility". In fact, markets generate civility. Or that's the theory. Adam Smith explained all this two centuries ago, apparently. "For strangers to trade with each other," Saunders writes, "they must be able to trust one another. Shared norms of behaviour emerge to make transactions between individuals possible." But when there's no pecuniary interest - when we're dealing with strangers on the street, or the train or the cinema - what's the point? In the deregulated environment of social behaviour, manners are elective. And it's not clear what you get by choosing them.

The reality is that manners have been slipping since they were invented. Letting them slip is a way of expressing contempt for the suffocating rules of the past. And this can be a good thing. Manners, in the form of etiquette, used to be a subtle way of reinforcing social hierarchies. Formal etiquette is all but dead now, and I suspect that few people miss it. Anyway, we secretly like a bit of rudeness. We tend to delight in the hideous ways other people behave, as long as we are not the object of the behaviour. In Fawlty Towers, Basil's un-self-censored spleen was delicious because it crashed through taboos, and it felt freeing. Now, we are free to behave as badly as we like. The trouble with that is, as the philosopher John Rawls put it, "if liberties are left unrestricted they collide with one another". Individual freedoms always exist in delicate balance with the constraining counterforce of the freedoms of all the other individuals. So there's a lot of colliding, in which the brash and powerful tend to prosper.

One day at the MCG, a friend and I were wedged in standing room in front of the loudest guy I've ever heard at the football. I could actually feel my skull vibrating every time this bloke erupted. My friend finally turned around to explain that he had an ear infection and wondered whether the fellow would mind toning it down a tad. The guy's eyeballs bulged. He was briefly too stunned to speak. But only briefly. There followed a fluent burst of C and F words in which his reply gradually became clear - "No". The argument was won by he who was prepared to shout loudest, and to back it up with the plausible threat of a kick to the head. We know that basic civility lies somewhere on a continuum, at one end of which lies anti-social behaviour and even violence. But basic manners in public might be important for a more fundamental reason. Perhaps they're crucial to the egalitarianism at the heart of our nationhood. "Australian egalitarianism," writes historian John Hirst in Sense and Nonsense in Australian History, "turns on the way Australians blot out differences when people meet face to face. They talk to each other as if they are equals . . ."

PEOPLE started calling each other "mate" on the goldfields because everyone was so grimy that you couldn't determine a man's status from the quality or condition of his get-up. It caught on; Australians liked it. This "democracy of manners" was a precious achievement for our nation, Hirst argues. "One of the reasons people fought for democracy was that they wanted respect for ordinary people, that they should not be humiliated and scorned." This makes stirring good sense to me. Establishing a civic ambience in which the least privileged are protected from scorn seems worthwhile. Because when someone is not worthy of basic courtesy, they're hardly entitled to occupy a place in a queue, either. Or to that seat on the train where your briefcase already is. Often it's a simple matter of tone. Think of the signs on letterboxes that say "No Junk Mail!" Who do they think they're talking to, those letterboxes, with that insolent exclamation mark unsoftened by "please" or "thanks"? The schmuck who has a job so lowly he or she stuffs letterboxes and doesn't merit a simple "please"?

When I was that schmuck a few years back, I made a point of respecting the stated wishes of "Please No Unsolicited Mail" boxes and stuffing "No Junk Mail!" ones to the brim with any stray papers, lolly wraps and leaves I could find. The way we speak to strangers in public is still crucial to this democracy of manners. But we're getting less and less formal, and informality is a particular problem in dealing with strangers, since so many of us exist in a state of permanent anxiety about whether our (anxiously) lofty idea of ourselves is shared by others.

The other day I was in a bottle shop. I took my purchase to the counter where the guy was waiting. He said, "Just that today, matey?" Maybe I was having a bad day, but I don't like being called "matey", especially by someone who is not my mate, and especially when I'm the one paying. "Yes." I said, nodding. I thought about it. "Thanks, champ."

Pretty pleased I was with that, too: a subtle slap of the goatskin gloves. He knew what I'd done; he knew I'd popped him back in his place. "There you go," he said, dropping my change on the counter and looking right at me. "Tiger." I blinked. Tiger? Who the hell did he think he was talking to? I left, defeated and fuming. Later, a friend of mine, whose milieu (building sites, gentlemen's clubs) makes him an expert in male braggadocio, confirmed what I already knew. I'd effectively been turkey-slapped. "Tiger" is the lowest. A duel with pistols would have been more dignified.

WHEN we don't know how to talk to strangers in public, it's easier not to try. At a local coffee shop, there's a sign which says: "Please do not ask us to warm babies' bottles as our response may offend you." Too late - I'm already offended. Where did the management assume the right to be rude when faced with a perfectly reasonable request? Signs like this are spreading, and I think they may well be a sign of our system of civility on the edge of collapse. It's as if we've lost faith in our ability to negotiate the norms of civility. Easier to go the knowing wink: "Smile, you're on camera!" Or dash off a splenetic note - like the anonymous person who leaves rude notes on car windscreens on my street, choice edicts such as, "Park between the lines you selfish f*&^ing idiot!!!" - and set the world to rights that way.

No, if we're all going to rub along in this age of self-actualisation, we need to get talking to one another again. And the magic words are all we've got to work with. I insist my kids use them, even though "excuse me" and "thank you" are meaningless to very young children. To a toddler, sticking "please" on the front of a request is purely arbitrary. You might as well ask them to tap their nose twice while blowing a raspberry. But eventually they might realise that "please" and "thank you" signify something meaningful: the recognition of the selfhood and autonomy of others.

When you say thank you, you recognise that the person you're thanking didn't have to do what they did for you, whether it was passing the jam or selling you a ticket. There was a sign in the stairwell at a friendly little Hong Kong flea pit I stayed in once: "Please do not shit on the stairs. Thank you, The Management." At first I thought this was a choice example of delightfully goofed English spelling; then, shortly after, I had an unforgettable encounter in the stairs with a fresh human turd. Still, this is a noble sign, I think. In its elegantly polite wording, it accepts that all of us have our own needs, preoccupations and dignity; it simply asks that we remember that everyone else does, too, even if the evidence suggests that some users of the stairs either couldn't read or chose to ignore it.

We have to put up with one another, after all; it'll be easier if we all try to be nice about it.