Last week I had a bit of an offbeat piece in Discourse Magazine, thinking about manners and the pandemic, and how being alone/in my house so much more than before makes it harder to observe good manners (mostly table manners, personally, but I suspect a lot of people have felt this in various ways).

One of the themes here that I’ve touched on before is that choice isn’t always a good thing, or at least not an easy thing. Choices make work. When manners—or any other set of rules or conduct or difficult but useful habits—become optional, they become much harder to practice.

I start the piece by recounting how I semi-seriously used to think that ties, or fussy rules about forks and knives, were basically designed for the purpose of building character by making one miserable (Calvin’s dad style), or to enable a stealthy sort of class discrimination. I always thought of manners (and especially etiquette) as a sort of religion:

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?

Then I write a little bit about this weird, very-online “how to be a gentleman” stuff, which baffles me quite a bit but also makes me wonder how much wisdom was not passed on to my generation. Nonetheless, I dislike things which aren’t anywhere near as serious as religion, but which bill themselves as that sort of thing.

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.”

But a better analogy than religion is actually fiat currency. I think this is the core of the piece, and probably explains a lot of the pandemic-era social dislocation:

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.

Basically, once something becomes or feels optional, you have to sort of work backwards to re-justify doing it—to justify affirmatively choosing it, where before you simply did it because you did it. Junk food does this to vegetables; contraception does this to having children; driving in a comfy private automobile does this to walking, biking, or riding transit. Being alone all the time does this to manners.

That doesn’t mean one choice is more moral than the other; it just means that in all of that choice, there are probably good things that we have made harder—more precisely, psychologically difficult—for ourselves to do.

I wrap up with another analogy (I couldn’t pick just one, as you see, and I’m glad my editors let me keep this all in here!):

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.

So that’s my thesis: lots of behaviors and customs that never had to be justified now do, either at the social or individual level. And it would be simplistic to view this as liberation from dusty old superstitions, as I suppose I would have once viewed it. Am I complaining that my suits and ties are getting dusty in my closet? That I can wear pajamas during the work day if I want, or burp at the table? Not really. But maybe it would be better if I couldn’t.

Related Reading:

Waking Up to the Joy of Clock Radios

Station Wagons and Affluence

Vornado’s Long Life

Thank you for reading! Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. You’ll get a weekly subscribers-only piece, plus full access to the archive: over 900 pieces and growing. And you’ll help ensure more like this!

Share