Friday, January 30, 2004
Why Manners Matter
When I get fed up with the humbug and hypocrisy of contemporary life, and feel in need of a moral tonic, I reach for the writings of Miss Manners. Under the dainty cover of guidance in etiquette, Judith Martin’s syndicated columns have been a fount of secular moral wisdom for decades.
I don’t always agree with Miss Manners, as she rails against Casual Fridays, gift registries, and other manifestations of our changing social mores. But her basic insight, that how we behave in our everyday lives shapes and expresses our deepest values, strikes me as true and important.
Not all of morality is about how we make the big choices in life. As the philosopher and novelist, Iris Murdoch, explains: The moral life.... is something that goes on continually, not something that is switched off in between the occurrence of explicit moral choices. What happens in between such choices is indeed what is crucial. Murdoch thinks that the way we pay attention to what’s around us, especially to our fellows, is morally crucial. And manners are a matter of paying attention to our fellow humans.
Which brings me to the airport. Over the holidays, I spent hours stuck in airport lounges being subjected to other people’s cell phone conversations. Some people wield their cell phones as a badge of their own importance. Their message is: “Unlike you poor losers, someone needs to talk to me RIGHT NOW and they need to hear my opinion in a REALLY LOUD VOICE. And just in case you can’t tell how important I am, I’m going to pace and wave my arms in a dramatic way to MAKE SURE you’re listening.” I guess Reality TV promotes the idea that every moment of everyone’s life deserves a TV viewing audience in the millions. So who can blame these celebrity wanna-bees for forcing me to listen in on their private lives for an afternoon at Detroit?
Well, I do, actually. I don’t want to be an unpaid extra in the movie of someone else’s life. I want the minute deference to my importance that consists in lowering your voice on the cell phone. Maybe I’m just hanging on to Old World assumptions about what should be kept private and what public. But the American writer, Jonathan Franzen, notes that, though there’s been much discussion of the erosion of privacy, through new technologies of mass surveillance, little has been said about the erosion of the public sphere, as we don our headsets and tune out those people immediately around us. Franzen laments the demise of the public sphere as a place where we were on our best behavior, out of respect for the sensibilities of our peers. Under their scrutiny, we reined ourselves in.
The codes that govern behavior used to vary depending on whether the context was public or private, formal or informal, personal or professional. But these distinctions are getting blurred. The public spaces of billboards and the internet are peopled with barely clad models, people in cinemas behave as if they’re in their own living room, and restaurant wait-staff aspire to be our buddies as we dine.
But I don’t want perfect strangers to assume first name terms with me: Hi, I’m Cindy and I’ll be your server tonight invites the response, Hello, I’m Louise and this is my husband, Andy, and we’ll be purchasing your services for the night. If the one sounds tacky, so should the other. I don’t want to hear about strangers’ business deals and office feuds, and I’d prefer they reserved some secrets of their flesh for their lovers.
Hence the importance of manners. Manners give us a script for interactions with strangers: We don’t have to fake instant friendship, but we shouldn’t just tune the other out. Manners acknowledge that the other person is more than a mere figment of my imagination. Thus, as Miss Manners likes to point out, manners are the basis of morality.