The Wisdom of Solomon
Who’s Deborah Solomon? I don’t know, apart from the fact that she writes for that monument to mediocrity, the New York Times. She says dumb things in this article on Lynne Truss’s new book on rudeness.
To be sure, most people, regardless of the precise elasticity of their flesh, would like to live in a world where everyone respects one another. Yet Americans have always harbored a suspicion of manners, which evoke visions of English history at its most hierarchical and hoity-toity – of dukes, earls, lords and viscounts tripping over one another in phony displays of deference and veneration. Who would want to live with all that kneeling and curtsying, all that monarchy-mandated fawning? Not the American revolutionaries, who believed that a fluid class democracy should subscribe instead to “republican manners” and promptly did away with titles.
Manners evoke visions of hoity-toity hierarchies, of earls and dukes, of kneeling and curtsying? What is she, an idiot? What’s kneeling got to do with anything? What have dukes? Manners is about things like not pushing in front of people, not grabbing things, not making a noise when people are asleep or studying nearby, being grateful when people do something kind, doing something kind yourself now and then, helping people when they need help – it’s about being considerate, and attentive, and observant, and kind, and helpful, as opposed to being selfish and mean and careless and greedy. Dukes and kneeling are neither here nor there. It’s imbecilic to think they are.
In our own time, the belief that manners reinforce social inequalities was key to the upheavals of the 60’s, when the shaggy-haired counterculture broke every rule in Emily Post’s book of etiquette.
What belief? What belief? What belief? What cretin ever believed that? Manners don’t reinforce social inequalities – low wages reinforce social inequalities, along with signs saying ‘Whites Only’ and landlords who don’t rent to coloureds and people who go out on Mississippi back roads at night with guns. Does Deborah Solomon think racial segregation and union-busting are now or have ever been carried on in a polite manner? Does she think the goons who beat up the Reuther brothers did it in a ducal manner? Does she think the white people who expected black people to yield the sidewalk to them were polite about it? Does she think the white folks were polite to Rosa Parks that day? What can she be talking about?
But bad manners are not necessarily all bad. In 1996, in an essay titled “Seduced by Civility,” the critic Benjamin DeMott defended rudeness not only as a basic right but also as a necessary inducement to change and social progress. Indeed, who wouldn’t rather live with incivility – with the curse words in rap songs and the excessive chatting in movie theaters – than with inequality?
Eh…what? Those are the choices? Those are the only alternatives? You can have civility, or you can have equality, but you can’t have both. The one displaces the other. Kind of like the way you can be on top of Mt Everest or you can be in Fulham but you can’t be in both places. But – why would that be? Why would it be at all, even a little bit? Why would it be even microscopically true? Why wouldn’t it in fact be the opposite of the truth? Why isn’t it far more likely that equality goes with the idea that everyone should be treated politely, not just the rich or the white or the elaborately-dressed? Because…the same idea works if everyone is treated rudely? Is that it? Is that the idea? If so, it’s a hateful idea. To repeat – manners aren’t just some posh frill, they’re not about spoons, they’re about treating people decently. They’re basic. Arguably the same idea is behind manners as is behind equality – simply that people should be treated decently. Treating people badly on principle is not a good plan; I’m against it.
In her new book, Truss remains mostly silent on the subject, forgoing social analysis in favor of groaning about the status quo.
Forgoing social analysis. Of the kind you just did? That kind of social anlysis? Gee, I wonder why.
And finally – as she winds things up – the coup de grâce.
For what are manners, anyhow, but a distancing device, a mechanism for widening the spaces between people?
How true! How true, how wise, how deep. What, indeed, are manners, anyhow, but a way of shoving people back as hard as you can. Yes sir. The way to pull people close to you and give them a great big fuzzy hug is to run over them as they cross the street, push them when you want to get past, elbow them aside when you’re in a hurry, park your car in the middle of the sidewalk and then laugh when they fall down as they try to maneuver around it in the ice and snow, blow smoke in their faces, bump into them in crowded shops and then call them names for being in your way – and so on. Yes indeed – there’s intimacy for you, there’s closeness and trust and narrowing the spaces between people.
I tell you what – I just crossed Deborah Solomon’s name off the guest list for my next dinner party. Thank you.
(First time caller) Fantastic piece! I hope you’ve sent it to the NYT – they’d love it – the perfect Britsi reposte. If it wasn’t nearly 5am I’d say something more substantial…
Somewhere, Miss Manners (whom I like very much) is having kittens again. She agrees with you entirely, and keeps repeating that manners are not about forks. I used to read those not-about-forks columns and think, “What kind of cretin doesn’t know that?” I guess I have my answer: the kind of cretin at the New York Times.
The Truss book did not leave much of an impression on me either way, and neither did that review, partly because of overemphasis on Truss’ discretionary spending and partly because of a pesky ad in the middle. However, Miss Manners can hardly be praised too highly. “Star Spangled Manners”, if I recall rightly, is a nice, concise refutation of the idea that manners and equality don’t mix.
But I highly recommend all her books.
Greetings, Strooth! It’s not actually a British riposte though, on account of how I’m Murkan.
Yeah, Miss Manners is great. Hilariously funny, and right besides. I thought of her when I said the spoons thing – considered citing her authority – but the point seems to be kind of independent. It springs from Solomon’s inanity rather than from MM.
The review did make an impression of me, because of the eye-widening stupidity of the assertions in question. I haven’t so much as seen the Truss book, but the comment is about the review, and general assertions therein, rather than the book. Fair game, I think! Solomon did make those generalizations, so we can nail them.
On. On me. Not of.
And MM doesn’t bore us with creepy elbow-skin fetishism either…all right, that may have been Truss’ contribution rather than Solomon’s, but still.
“Manners” means a number of things. If I know my host will be insulted by my belching at the table and I do it anyway, not only do I have bad manners but I lack a moral concern for my host’s feelings. If I hold my fork wrong and shovel food into my mouth because I don’t know any better I have bad manners, but there is no moral dimension except possibly my negligence in not researching how to hold my fork. If I nearly run over old ladies crossing the street and then yell at them to get out of my way, I am rude and immoral. The really disturbing thing is when evil people have impeccable manners – and this happens. I have known many oldtimers from the U.S. South who were polite to a fault and who were nevertheless unashamedly racist. That said, I suppose a polite racist who doesn’t park his car across the sidewalk is better than a rude one who does (if that is the choice).
“The really disturbing thing is when evil people have impeccable manners – and this happens.”
Hmm. Yes, perhaps, up to a point – but only up to a point. Which is another way of saying it depends what you mean by manners. My claim is that it covers a good deal more than table manners and the like. It’s entirely possible to have flawless table manners and still treat people badly, but I dispute that it’s possible to have flawless manners in general and still treat people badly. At some point the manners are going to have to deteriorate, or the bad treatment can’t happen.
The article is entirely odd, awkward..made my skin crawl. It’s hard to believe (isn’t it?) that such a scattered and poorly-written article is given so much space in the NYT.
” It’s hard to believe (isn’t it?) that such a scattered and poorly-written article is given so much space in the NYT.”
One word. “Transgressive”.
Bit of a logic problem, isn’t it?
Good manners are certainly, in my mind, a necessary condition for civilised society. But alas they are self-evidently not a sufficient one.
On the other hand, ‘good manners’ can prevent people telling the truth about all sorts of things, especially if ‘good manners’ is interpreted to mean, as it can be, a respect for outward signs of propriety.
Re. what OB said, it is also quite possible to be exquisitely polite to someone whom one is dismissing from their job, refusing healthcare to, or otherwise condemning to immiseration, suffering, squalor, etc etc…
If manners alone were able to prevent this, then politeness would be another word for ‘absolute equality’…
While the writer certainly seems to be at fault in endorsing patent nonsense, there is something to be said for one or two of her points (even the blind pig sometimes finds an acorn, as the saying goes).
For one thing, manners have at various times been strongly associated with inequality – even if this association had little foundation in reality. To mock her claim that people have believed and do believe that manners reinforce social inequalities is just silly; though the belief itself is largely daft, it’s one that is commonly held. More than t ever motivated the hippies it motivated the punks; it’s a treasured belief of goths, too, and among many other rebellious youth subcultures.
In admitting that the association between manners and inequality is largely mythical, though, I have been careful to add a qualifier. Manners do play a role as signifiers of class and social status and thus could indeed be said to have a role in reinforcing inequalities. As Robertson Davies observed, people love manners because they admit you to any number of secret societies.
I’d say that what OB is really talking about is not manners per se (which certainly does include What Fork You Use) but civility, of which manners may or may not be a part.
G. Tingey – Molotov was known to be quite boorish, though. Perhaps appropriate for someone who named himself “The Hammer”.
OB – Actually surprised to see such trite nonsense given bandwidth on this site, although your outraged response was one of the funniest I’ve seen lately…
OB, when Solomon says that the notion of manners “evokes” a train of images, which is connotative, you go right for the denotative. I spot a bit of unfairness, here. In fact, I think Solomon is right. If you look at travel books by, say, Fannie Trollope or Dickens, or you read Twain, you will certainly find manners DO evoke visions of inequality.
As for her comment on the 60s, I don’t think Solomon is on the wrong track only in terms of the shaggy haired image. In the south, good manners certainly prescribe the segregation of whites and blacks. You might say, no, that was the law — but it wasn’t law but manners that enforced that segregation in the private sphere. You seem to want to impose an absolute standard of manners that wouldn’t be recognized by white culture, but that seems like a rather odd idea. Do you think that manners are unchanging? That the manners of, say, the Incas in 1490 and your manners today are the same? To my mind, that makes a mockery of the term “manners”, since it requires rules that no person in a culture would have access to or in any way know about.
Hmm. I don’t know, roger – I think that space between denotative and connotative is where people do fancy rhetorical footwork. I think that’s what Solomon is doing. Let’s take a look –
“Yet Americans have always harbored a suspicion of manners, which evoke visions of English history at its most hierarchical and hoity-toity – of dukes, earls, lords and viscounts tripping over one another in phony displays of deference and veneration. Who would want to live with all that kneeling and curtsying, all that monarchy-mandated fawning?”
In the first sentence she says manners evoke dukes and deference – then in the next sentence she asks (indignantly) who would want to live with all that – as if ‘all that’ were established fact – were denotative – as opposed to merely a train of ideas set off in her mind but not necessarily anyone else’s. So which of us is really being unfair there? I think it’s Solomon. It’s a bit of trickery to say in effect ‘manners make us all think of dukes; who wants dukes?’
No, of course I don’t think manners are unchanging, but I do think it’s inaccurate to claim they are inherently cut free from morality or inherently inegalitarian. (I have read Fanny Trollope by the way, so I do know what you mean. Manners to her were indeed all about inequality. To her son, too, which is one reason I find him unreadable. She on the other hand is hilarious, and rather fascinating.)
Furthermore…I suppose it could be that Solomon had a sort of argument in mind – perhaps a Veblenesque argument, that manners are just a way of demarcating the Good from everyone else. But the trouble is she didn’t bother to make the argument – she just made some flat assertions. It’s the kind of childish non-argument people make when they assume people already know what they mean so they don’t need to spell it out – it’s a sort of breakdown in Theory of Mind. Solomon seems not to realize that not everyone will follow her particular train of thought – she thinks it’s self-evident, as toddlers think everyone knows what they know. That’s why she gives such an impression of silliness, I think.