As we head to the weekend and much of New Zealand head to sports fields around the country, we do so in the knowledge that another couple of referees have hung up their whistles, having reached the final straw with the frequent and excessive abuse they receive on the field.

It makes you wonder whether we are living in as tolerant a society as we would like to think.

We live under the impression, that with more public discussions on issues such as race relations, pay equity and the #metoo movement, that we are moving to a more progressive and tolerant society.

On the other hand, we are also living in a time when often through the dreaded social media, people don’t feel any constraint when it comes to dishing abuse and bile to someone simply because that person has expressed an alternative point of view.

Getting back to the sidelines, referee abuse is not necessarily a new phenomenon but clearly, it has now got to a point where it is either a lot worse than it used to be, or more referees are finding such behaviour intolerable.

Gone is the humour and gentle ribbing that a ref might get in days gone by. “He’s been doing it all day ref!" is now replaced with accusations of bias, cheating and other personal abuse to the extent that, more and more, referees are reconsidering whether volunteering their time for this sort of “reward” is really worth it.

So how has it come to this?

You have to wonder whether, despite the passage of time, human beings are essentially unchanged in our innate biases and instincts. Under the surface, we probably battle with the same prejudices as we did hundreds of years ago. And if you look around the world at ongoing conflicts it’s clear we still have the same warmongering and destructive potential towards our fellow men or woman as we have always had.

What is it that has separated our so-called enlightened society from more barbaric times?

The word is civilisation.

It might be a long bow to draw from war to the sports fields, but I do wonder if we are becoming less civilised. While we have all the trappings of technology and the sophistication of modern living standards, perhaps at our cores we are unchanged. But on our surface, we are becoming less civilised in the way we interact with one another.

Are we deluding ourselves that we are civilised because of the public discussions we are engaging in on progressive issues? Because when it comes to more day to day interactions, we need to buck our ideas up.

I’m not suggesting we should all be tiptoeing through the tulips, but perhaps we need to dial it back a bit at times.

Back at the sports fields, anecdotal evidence from the refereeing community suggests that in midweek sports fixtures, the players (and refs) have a vastly more enjoyable experience in the absence of the mums and dads, whose presence only serves as an unwelcome and embarrassing distraction from what sport should be. That is, fun.

So here is an idea.

Maybe we need the odd parent-free sporting weekend to remind parents and spectators that they need to pull their heads in until they can learn to be a little more, well, civilised.