The lady and the prophet

A short discourse on manners

Dear H,

Jesus said the truth will set you free, and it will -- from friends.  I'm not saying go out and con all your friends, but the truth is that nobody wants to say the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and that's why we make people swear they will.  But mainly on the witness stand, and then only under threat of legal punishment.

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"Truth" is a much bigger concept than human relations.  It has to do with your relationship to reality.   When you don't believe in reality you can't live successfully.  When you believe the wrong things about a person it's possible to screw up -- but in society it most usually makes things go better.  At least if people believe the right wrong things.

The art of delivering the right wrong impression is called manners.  They tell you when to speak up and how; and the pitch you say it in, the way you put the words, will be taken more seriously than what you actually say.  Manners are much deeper than chewing with your mouth closed*.  Upon deeper inspection they mean saying hi and smiling when you'd rather be left alone, saying thank you when the food you were given was nasty, ignoring a bad smell or letting an embarrassing moment slide.  It means acknowledging people you don't like, and saying something gently when you'd rather be yelling it.  Manners are the art of being hospitable, gracious, patient, and cool -- sometimes even oblivious -- when we're actually annoyed, or tired, or horny, or disgusted.  It's mostly acting, but the alternative is drama.       

Whether or not you're moral is almost beside the point.  Morality can only be proved occasionally and manners have to be proved constantly.  A man can be a scoundrel and if he has good manners everyone will think he's a great guy.  A man can be a saint and if he has bad manners everyone will think he's a scoundrel. A man who practices good manners isn't good, necessarily, but pleasant.  And these two things are usually confused for each other, because being around unpleasant people is horrible.

I think this is part of the reason Christ got crucified.  Truth is necessary and many times funny; but the truth people and the manners people are almost always at odds with each other.  The manners people tell you what you can say and can't say or how to say it.  The truth people are there to remind us that truth is bigger than our facade, and many of us are just pigs in lipstick.  One hides things that hurt and the other hurts to prevent hiding some things -- which he believes will hurt us worse in the long run.

Thus they're always in a game of hide and seek.  One is always hiding and the other is a little brother ratting him out to the others.  The prophet knows manners are a great thing until they're carried too far.  Eventually a wink at a vice becomes a gloss over crimes.   One small pass becomes degeneration in general.  The little bit of fakery we needed becomes mass delusion.  

But too much truth will get you killed also.  In the end, it isn't manners but wisdom that tells you what to hide and when rightly.  So the lady hides too much.  The prophet spares too little.  We like to praise the prophet, but his contemporaries usually try to kill him, and the lady has a way of strangling you slowly.  Polite and police come from the same root word, and it's no surprise that working around a  grand dame is a lot like living in a police state.    

The dowager countess: half lady, half prophet

Xenophon says, in his Education of King Cyrus, that the ancient Persians had the opposite policy of ours.  Their boys learned three things in school -- to ride a horse, to shoot a bow, and to tell the truth -- and took a stand against the deep urge to bullshit one another willy-nilly.  I assume there were grades given for truth-telling, or something like them.  I believe the more skillful liars even came across as more truthful, as they most usually do.  But even the attempt at eliminating lies in grade school is a big deal.  First off, it's the admission that everyone at heart is a liar.  But second, it's the fraud that we can live with one another in peace while being 100% truthful.  It's my opinion that the second idea is a farce, and totally validates the first.  But how much more noble is the Persian way than ours -- where children have to lie about obvious things in order to  keep a job?

Yours,

-J

P.S. The great difference between manners and lying is that one lies to benefit himself.  The former does too, but in the process he benefits other people.  Thus one is accepted by society and the other one will get you kicked out of it.  

Manners are the exact opposite policy and effect of Lex Talionis.  In an eye for an eye one bad turn deserves another.  With manners if you don't reciprocate a good deed others can give you a bad turn.  Lex Talionis stops bad behavior with the threat of equality.  The other one requires equality under threat of bad behavior.  Once someone behaves in a gracious way the only way to escape his clutches is to match him, or outdo him.  You refuse to return a courtesy and you put yourself in somebody's crosshairs -- and possibly everyone's he tells about it.

Rochefoucald says Maybe a man is ungrateful.  But he's less chargeable with ingratitude than the man who does good for him. 

*Above I spoke about Manners in grand form.  But "little-m" manners are about polish, and are equally important.  They don't tell you what to eat, but how to hold your fork, and how to hold your mouth, and what noises can come out of it.  You can eat at MacDonalds the right way and have more class than a person who eats at Ruth's Chris the wrong way.  As Jesus said, it's not what goes into a man, but what comes out of a man that makes him.  And eating is just as much show as it is chow.  While you deliver the food to your stomach, you deliver a version of yourself to your company.  This is why rich people hate a parvenu: when a pig sits in the same restaurant, it ruins their whole facade of superiority.

The truth is that everyone is a pig on the inside.  The idea of manners was that we could all be kings and queens on the outside.  Across the board, if practiced right, manners mean equality.  They mean you can signal to everyone you come across that you're just as good as them (and sometimes better), and that what counts most is how you behave.  It's the art of greasing the friction of human relationships, of softening them, of sugar-coating them -- of saying we need to do this to survive, so let's to this together in a way that we can tolerate, and even enjoy.  "Manners" is the art of cultivating your own dignity without having to prove it the hard way.  

The outcome of all manners is prejudice.  The higher the manners, the more complex they are, the more sugar-coated, the deeper the revulsion for rudeness.  The people who can't keep up, the people who won't keep up, the people who didn't have the time and resources to keep up, end up looking like lepers; and the eyes and ears of the well-trained become a second nose, smelling who fits in and who ought to be left out.  

My dad holds it as a point of pride that he never heard his dad curse.  There's a great truth behind this.  There is of course no bad word for "poop."  There are many words that mean the same thing.  But we said some of them were good and some of them were bad, and we separated the ones who used the "bad" ones from the rest of us.  It wasn't a game of what's right or wrong, but of who plays by the rules and who won't.  We signal to one another who's in control of himself and who isn't.  Like the well-manicured lawn, clean language signals clean behavior.  We deeply believe in hierarchy, and we fight hard over little ways to express it.  There will always be an underclass, and the majority is always a Pharisee.    

*Gordon Wood writes in Empire of Liberty, his history of post-Revolutionary America,

The Revolutionary leaders did not conceive of politics as a profession and officeholding as a career. Like Jefferson, they believed that “in a virtuous government . . . public offices are what they should be, burthens to those appointed to them, which it would be wrong to decline, though foreseen to bring with them intense labor, and great private loss.” They did not like electioneering or political parties, and they regarded public office as an obligation required of certain gentlemen because of their talents, independence, social preeminence, and leisure. [...] 

Franklin had always stressed that he was an independent gentleman whose offices were obligations thrust upon him. In not one of fourteen elections, he insisted, “did I ever appear as a candidate. I never did, directly or indirectly, solicit any man’s vote.”  Showing oneself eager for office was a sign of being unworthy of it, for the office-seeker probably had selfish views rather than the public good in mind.

Very tasteful manners, in my opinion, and it makes you want them more -- like a heated woman rejecting your advances only out of propriety.