Nice Distinction

Loren Lomasky from the April 1997 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

There is a final arrow in Kelley's quiver. One should not, he urges, treat actual and potential trading partners in the same way one deals with vending machines into which coins are deposited and from which goods are extracted. To steal from either is wrong. But toward persons one should, in addition, be courteous and accommodating. That is because they are not merely tools to be employed in furtherance of one's own projects but rather are beings with ends of their own to which they are as wholeheartedly devoted as you are to yours. Persons, unlike mere things, merit treatment that underscores their status as rational agents. It is through employing forms of behavior and speech that conventionally express respect and regard that we acknowledge the dignity that is properly theirs.

Kelley's account rings true but is somewhat off-kilter. Again he has discerned but misidentified an authentic virtue. Attentiveness to forms of civility is not benevolence but rather mannerliness. And make no mistake about it: Mannerliness is indeed a virtue, not some superfluous affectation practiced by those with too much time on their hands. Rudeness is not made good by a no-nonsense concern for the bottom line. Courtesy matters even where money is being raked in, perhaps especially there, in virtue of the heightened sensitivities that typically accompany major pecuniary transactions. Kelley's observations concerning why that is so are perceptive. They serve as a useful prologue to the important new book from the very woman who takes her name from manners -- or might it be vice versa?

It is not polite to blow someone's cover, especially when that someone is a lady, nay, a veritable grande dame. But the readers of REASON deserve the complete, unvarnished truth. So here it is. You may have been told that Miss Manners (known to her auto mechanic and a few other confidantes as Judith Martin) is a syndicated advice columnist who instructs a public mystified by multiple forks, cryptic notations such as RSVP, and the rule covering how to address the Archbishop of Canterbury should he happen to take a seat on one's bus. Through the oracles she delivers in The Washington Post, readers learn to cope with etiquette's endless stream of requirements, thereby rendering themselves more fit denizens of high society.

There is some truth to this characterization -- some, but not much. I don't, of course, mean to suggest that Miss Manners does not know the rules or that she is not sufficiently forthcoming in her willingness to share that knowledge with others. But that no more conveys an adequate sense of her activities than does describing a librarian as someone who recites Dewey decimal numbers. Miss Manners Rescues Civilization includes some data concerning fork norms and the like, but this is not an especially good source in which to look up lists of Do's and Don't's. Many other books, including some of her own, are more comprehensive.

The present volume is, though, a splendid source of insight concerning why our society, like every other civilization, has devised such lists; what the consequences are of not affording them a conspicuous role in our own conduct and the education of our children; the substantial penalties we pay when we allow the heavy guns of law to replace the subtler constraints of etiquette; why authenticity and sincerity by themselves aren't enough (and why, indeed, they may be much too much); and considerably more.

Miss Manners is, in a word, a theorist. Indeed, I believe her to be one of the most important social commentators of our time. I do not lightly divulge this information, and I fear that she will be displeased when she learns that I have done so. (It is well-known that individuals who take on the secret identity of a mild-mannered journalist guard that subterfuge with considerable zeal.)

For one thing, syndicated columnists, especially those esteemed for making straight and sure the step of faltering yuppies, make a nice living for their troubles. Philosophers earn substantially less. Moreover, the latter typically present their ideas in a prose weightier than lead and more trackless than the Gobi Desert. I would be most chagrined if anything said here precipitated a decrease in the lady's royalties or led readers to expect her syntax to be indistinguishable from that of, say, John Rawls. Either circumstance would mean that she is being read less, and that would be a pity. More incisively and certainly more entertainingly than most academicians, and to an infinitely greater extent than anything produced by the Democrats or Republicans during their most recent traveling road show venture at persuading the public that they have a clue about the requisites of successful sociality, Miss Manners reveals how we can do better at that difficult but necessary job of living together in some modicum of peace.

Her account is too nuanced and sophisticated to be easily summarized. It is fair to say, I think, that she places herself less in the tradition of Emily Post and Amy Vanderbilt than that of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Like the latter, she is vividly attentive to the fact that people's natural propensity to bias in their own favor inevitably leads to unpleasant carnage unless it is tempered by a durable social veneer. A coercively enforced legal structure represents one layer of that veneer; another is supplied by morality.

But complementary to these, insists Miss Manners, are codes of etiquette. It is all too easy to misinterpret others' intentions, to cook up from a few wisps of happenstance a bubbling brew of acrimony. In many social relationships the most common mode of understanding is misunderstanding. Anyone with children, parents, teachers, a boss, colleagues, neighbors, teachers -- or just co-inhabitants of planet Earth -- knows this.

Contemporary sensibilities suggest that a regimen of complete frankness and speaking one's mind is the indicated palliative. Contemporary sensibilities could not be more mistaken. To really be apprised of what others are thinking and feeling in their heart of hearts is a prescription for erupting enmity. According to Kelley, Rand rejected the proposition that the interests of rational individuals conflict in any fundamental sense. She too could not be more mistaken. It is precisely because germs of conflict are endemic that basic rights are indispensable components of our moral arsenal. They are the markers that distinguish mine from thine, thereby providing occasions for armistice in what the early liberal theorists called "the War of All against All."

Manners serve a complementary function. They are the lubricant that keeps us from chafing too severely against each other. They preserve our privacy from invasions of inquisitive eyes. They are means for announcing one's status and acknowledging that of others. They are not the fossilized relic of Victorian bygones but rather are as up-to-date as the television show Seinfeld, almost every episode of which revolves around conundrums of applying a contemporary urban, hip etiquette.

But isn't etiquette anti-democratic? Has it not traditionally served as a weapon for conducting class warfare and holding down minorities and women? Is it not the case that like those other cherished appurtenances of high society, the corset and the bustle, etiquette impedes and constricts people's freedom? Qualms such as these lead otherwise sensible people to be dismissive of etiquette. They are, though, uniformly ill-founded. Rather than being inherently undemocratic, Miss Manners rightly points out that "adherence to etiquette is a prerequisite for all the practices of a democratic state, including such governmental business as legislative sessions and judicial proceedings."

While hierarchical juggernauts can operate with no small success via command-and-control procedures, a politics among equals necessarily presupposes widespread compliance with customary forms. And although etiquette can be bent to the practice of one-upmanship, that hardly distinguishes it from virtually every other human activity. Law, religion, and celebratory post-touchdown end-zone dances can also be used to subjugate or demean. Judging a practice by its deformations is methodologically dubious. To the contrary, etiquette has always emphasized the imperative that all persons be treated with respect and consideration. (That is not, of course, equivalent to treating them exactly the same.) Indeed, the proviso that respect be displayed is more rather than less strict when one is dealing with those who are less powerful or less socially well-placed than oneself. To be sure, the rococo etiquette of Marie Antoinette turned this requirement on its head -- but look what then happened to her head!

Do we find ourselves less free in a society in which the grip of manners is strong? Miss Manners persuasively argues that this is backwards. A system of regulation of everyday life by the rules of etiquette "offers more freedom than any other we have tried." When raised eyebrows and icy stares no longer suffice to restrain conduct, more intrusive devices are sure to take their place. Consider, for example, the legal bludgeons currently deployed against smokers and those who incautiously step on land mines while wandering across gender frontiers. Much of the area now patrolled by the law was formerly under the jurisdiction of manners. Results were not perfect then, but neither are they now. What is indisputable, though, is that the transition has served up bigger dollops of heavy-handed coerciveness. Nor is it always the state that rushes into the vacuum created by retreating manners: In California, aggrieved motorists with shotguns emphatically correct rude freeway behavior, in a way that generates little recidivism. Where California leads, can the rest of us be far behind?

I have done enough harm to the lady's reputation by characterizing her as a theorist; I shall not compound misprision by adding the label libertarian. Still, whatever her own political views may be, the account of etiquette offered in Miss Manners Rescues Civilization neatly plugs into libertarian thought. Classical liberals have traditionally been big on attending to the scope of the state -- limited! -- but have given short shrift to the customary forms that sustain and vivify civil society. (Tocqueville is a conspicuous exception.) It is all well and good to proclaim the credentials of the minimal state, but absent means to keep it minimized, such proclamations are vain.