On philosophy, morality and good manners

“It starts when you begin to overlook bad manners. Any time you quit hearin ‘Sir’ or ‘Mam’ the end is pretty much in sight.” 

Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, No Country for Old Men .

Roger Scruton made architecture central to discussions of art and beauty. He did so in part because construction has inescapable implications for the overall aesthetic geometry of the public space. You cannot, in the normal run of things, integrate a building into a private collection, and make it available only for selective viewings. And if you visit the Louvre Palace, you cannot help but be confronted by I.M. Pei’s glass-metallic pyramid, which competes for your attention with the Renaissance architecture of the Cour Napoléon .

Questions of what counts as good or bad architecture are therefore, at least in part, also questions of what counts as good or bad manners. The material instantiation of an architectural vision will endure over time; it would be poor form were it to be a bad fit with respect to the landscape it is being attached to, a landscape that is geographical, cultural and historical in character. And therefore vulnerable, on several fronts, to the transient whims of architectural fashion. Like a dog, a bad building is with you for life.

But what are manners, and what is the nature of the claims (if any) that they make of us? I am going to suggest that they are ineluctably attached to morality, not as useful lubricants of social interaction (although they have a role here) but as instructors in the virtuous life.

A bit of conceptual house cleaning first, by way of a distinction.

Etiquette is local and contingent, while manners are universal and timeless. The correct way to set the table will vary from culture to culture, place to place and (certainly in my home) sitting to sitting; the manners which make for the good dinner guest, on the other hand, are manifestations of courtesy, through which he acknowledges the moral status of his companions and the respect they are due as human persons. The appreciation and practice of good manners serve to remind us that we are, as Aristotle would put it, social animals – and therefore not merely animals at all. If manners speak of something essential about the human person, then etiquette is a sort of dialect within that language.

When looked at like this, the connection between morality and manners seems obvious — to the degree that the lack of attention given to the role and status of good manners in  the literature of moral philosophy seems, well, impolite. This neglect is understandable, perhaps, if we remember that it’s not that long ago that the dark arts of positivism were ascendant in the Academy, and the analysis of genuine moral practice was consequently displaced by a sort of linguistic fetishism. In service of an unattainable analytical purity, the more influential philosophers lost sight of what they were trying to explain: the real-time, frustratingly inconsistent behaviours of actual people (including their fellow dons, incidentally; they were not short of available subject matter).

This connection, between manners and morality, is more obvious when we think about the increasingly ersatz “manners” of the post-modern West. Some years ago, the philosopher Harry Frankfurt wrote a paper, On Bullshit , in which he suggested that lying is by no means the lowest form of deception and that fakery is worse – for the faker and for his mark. The successful liar must at least take an interest in truth; the proficient faker acknowledges no such obligation, and her fakery corrupts even herself.

Similarly fake manners, a species of hypocrisy, are more obnoxious than bad manners, a function of laziness. We all have our own experiences of this contagion: the disembodied voice tells you that your call is important to it (when it’s not even that important to you); the receptionist informs you that unfortunately the nearest available appointment is at the fag-end of 2027; the apology so  impressively crafted such as to be no such thing (“I’m sorry if you took offence”); and – my own bugbear — when near-strangers assume first-name familiarity.

 All of this is weaponised politeness, a caricature of authentic manners. We should remember that the Devil, the arch-tempter, is always charming and will make sure to enter your life while wearing a smile. As our society becomes more “inclusive”, it becomes more intolerant, and as it becomes more intolerant the tool of fake courtesy becomes more salient.

We teach our children to be well mannered, not simply so that they become pleasing to others. We do so also to show them that the most valuable things in life are those which seem at first to be the most pointless. I can’t really explain to my son why he shouldn’t rest his elbows on the table while eating. But when he acquires the habit of not doing so, he is becoming initiated, gradually, into the rhythms of the moral life, in which virtue is an activity directed toward (take your pick) God, the Good or the Truth (spoiler: they’re probably the same thing).

And to those who take the contrary view, and for whom manners are outdated and constraining, I can only say the following. Thank you, but that’s what is so good about them. Because morality is not time stamped, and constraints are often necessary conditions of the only freedoms worth wanting.

Cormac McCarthy, in the above epigraph, sets out an Aristotelian insight: that morality is best practised in the small things, and that what seems like a trivial failure of manners can presage more significant moral decline.

That insight loses no force by being articulated in the idiom of the Texas-Mexico border, rather than that of an Athenian aristocrat, writing several centuries before the birth of Christ.

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