Sacrifices to the Manners God

What are “manners”? Informal habits based on being considerate to other people? Indicators of class, meant to stratify or exclude? Arbitrary rules intended to impose discomfort, replacing religion’s “offer it up” with mom’s “Y is a crooked letter”?

That last one was always what I had assumed as a kid: that the discomfort, and not the considerateness, was the point. For example, I always believed a tie was designed to be uncomfortable, that it had no real point otherwise. I thought the buttons on a suit jacket—button this one, but not that one—were more or less random ways of building secret knowledge tests into daily life, arcane little rituals to screw the regular guy.

The thing where you’re not “supposed” to pour the potato chip crumbs from the bottom of the bag—the best part—into your mouth? Or not gnaw at the bone of the lamb chop, where the tastiest morsels of meat remain despite your best polite knife-and-fork work? What possible explanation could there be for an imperative to waste the best part, other than that the fickle manners god demanded it as a sacrifice?

I’m being a little tongue in cheek—now, anyway. Five years ago, probably not. I wonder now if any other young people see manners like this, or carry these ideas around well into their 20s before wondering if maybe they’re not quite right. Which pieces of knowledge that seemed obvious to my parents’ generation simply weren’t passed on to me, making their ordinary practices feel utterly alien to me?

When I was in my master’s program in public policy about eight years ago, I remember thinking how young and inexperienced we all were, all told, and yet we were a year or two away from possibly having a part in real decisions that required actual technical expertise. It seemed unlikely to me that most of us would really be prepared for that kind of responsibility. How could a guy who still thinks ties are a conspiracy to make you feel like you’re hanging from the gallows all day be tasked with tinkering with other people’s lives?

Muddying the Waters

There’s also the internet, which, as ever, turbocharges the weirdness and difficulty of figuring out what things are all about.

If you read enough about manners and etiquette and “manliness”—whatever that is, though it seems like I’m supposed to know—you’ll eventually discover some strange bits of advice formulated as revealed truths, such as “never enter a pool by the stairs” (which, according to one blogger, holds both a literal and figurative meaning, which is two more than I could come up with) or—regarding the carrying of handkerchiefs—“a gentleman’s breast pocket is never empty.”

Let’s stick with the handkerchief advice for a minute. In trying to look up the meaning of the related, and even more cryptic, “the one in your breast pocket is for her,” I found this snippet:

Accommodating trends should not result in one becoming less of a gentleman and a gentleman’s breast pocket is never empty. The breast pocket on a suit jacket was originally designed to hold your nose wiping cloth so that it was not commingled with the dirty items you’d be carrying in your jacket’s regular pockets. A gentleman would never hand a dirty handkerchief to a lady, so in modern times the practice became: the one in your pants pocket is for you and your nose, the one in your breast pocket is for her. Obviously, you could carry the handkerchief for her in another pocket, but since almost any alternative you’d be carrying in your breast pocket—like a pen—will eventually destroy the jacket’s material by sliding in and out, why not simply be a gentleman and use your breast pocket as it was intended to be used. If you still feel compelled to bend to trends, you can vary the material of your handkerchief, carry a pocket square, vary your fold, etc. Be a gentleman!

I’m not sure, though, that this body of internet lifestyle advice really is “manners,” or even the more arcane “etiquette.” These are not falsifiable statements, nor are they statements of fact. They are not bits of advice which make intuitive sense once you understand their meaning. They are not fashion opinions. In fact, they are not really parseable or comprehensible as anything other than dogma. “A gentleman’s breast pocket is never empty” has no more relation to anything in the observable world than does “there is one God who eternally exists as three distinct Persons” or “only a validly ordained priest may confect the Eucharist.”

I don’t mean, by that, that religion is just as absurd as the trappings of the very online traditionalist gentleman. I mean something more like, the seriousness of religion should only rarely and carefully be applied to other areas. It is because I am a Catholic that I dislike things that have the trappings of religion, but aren’t.

But in a certain sense, manners are religion. They are norms or customs which describe a polite way of doing something, and later become rules, and then after that approach doctrine. Whether they’re “real” in some sense doesn’t really matter. If manners did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them.

Manners: A Pandemic Casualty

This, then, is to say that manners matter. You can shear off the air of mystery and cultural weight, and you don’t have to view transgressions as metaphysical offenses (“I’m a gentleman with an empty breast pocket!” or “No true gentleman ... ”) But we do need a set of more or less agreed-upon behavioral norms. That’s what manners really are.

Which brings me to the pandemic and post-pandemic period. Whether it’s unruly or rude customers in restaurants or on airplanes, an increase in aggressive driving or a rise in petty crime, we’ve all seen a breakdown in manners, considerateness and basic social graces over the past few years.

When you think about it, you realize that those manners and social graces are a sort of behavioral fiat currency. They “work” because we agree that they work. They are followed only because a critical mass of people follow them and ingrain them as habits. And once they begin to break down, they come under more interrogation than when they were intact.

Once observing manners feels optional—especially once you’re at home so much that the company of other people rarely imposes that necessity on you—you find yourself having to justify philosophically things that were once simply done and needed no explanation beyond these are things we don’t do in public.

If you’re not in public, what difference does it make? If burping at the table is only wrong if you do it with guests or at a crowded restaurant, and if that wrongness is not really a matter of morality but merely of considerateness, why not burp at the table? In other words, social graces are only needed in society, but are very difficult to cultivate outside of society.

It reminds me of a Reddit thread I read once, about the Catholic and Lutheran views of the ordained ministry. One Catholic asked, So do Lutherans think anyone could just take some bread anywhere, any time, and say the words of institution and do the Eucharist? At the dinner table? In the bakery aisle of a supermarket? The idea being, that’s absurd, so it suggests that the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers is mistaken.

But one Lutheran explained, the Lutheran answer would be Why would you do that? In other words, discipline and norms and obedience are enough; there is no need to create a doctrine of a ministerial priesthood simply to establish the idea that any old person cannot summon Christ’s presence with some Wonder Bread at the Harris Teeter, because nobody would ever do that.

Is this a true accounting of human psychology? Is “why would you do that” enough? Or is there some inexorable process by which anything that is possible or justifiable will eventually not only be done, but become hard to refrain from doing? Why wouldn’t I do it? When I find it difficult to observe table manners in my own home, I wonder.

In jurisprudence, there is a concept known as “ripeness.” If a legal question is not urgent—if a ruling can be issued and a dispute can be resolved on a technicality, below the level of fundamental legal philosophy—then that avenue is typically chosen. Judges are generally reluctant to make sweeping philosophical rulings when narrower avenues are open.

The questions of exactly what manners are and why we have them were never “ripe” before the pandemic—before widespread work-from-home and social dislocation. Before we realized how contingent our manners and social skills were on weak ties and the company of strangers. “We don’t do that in public” was the technicality. Circumstances didn’t force the question. But isolation, and doubt in the behavioral fiat currency, will eat away at that certainty. It will dull your devotion to the manners god.

Maybe that god is silly, or overly exacting, and maybe he doesn’t even exist. But we’re getting a taste of what happens when we turn our backs on him.