A Metaphysic of Manners

by Samuel Hux (August 2015)

A pretentious title, but this is as close as I’ll ever come to Immanuel Kant—to whom I apologize most politely for my titular imitation of his Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals. And there is, isn’t there, something graceful about the alliteration?

So James Como’s essay in the May 2015 issue of The New English Review is all the more welcome to me: “’The Tongue Is Also a Fire’: The Left, Madness, and Manners.” While everybody talks about civility, the Left only talks the game while it practices what Como calls “diseased speech”: Robert Bork would have brought back slavery, Sarah Palin should diet on excrement, and a plague of etceteras. Como is writing Big Ethics, let me call it, lamenting the absence of grace in the political arena. My present concern, call it Small Ethics, is less public:  I just want the slob next door to turn down his f***in’ radio. Both the Big and the Small are subsumed under the wonderful expression of John Fletcher, Lord Moulton, “obedience to the unenforceable.” I am profoundly grateful to Como for introducing me to the English parliamentarian and his unforgettable definition of manners and grace.

I have become obsessed of late with some lines of a poet long out of critical favor, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and not likely to be returned to favor soon for fairly complicated reasons which would take a volume to explain and even then would not reflect too kindly on the shapers of literary opinion in this age which values rawness. Nor do I think that radical feminists (who have already seized upon, as “sisters,” several poets from the past with whom they could never have carried on a conversation) will try to revive her (not if they read her). She was too insistent on being a lady, in an old-fashioned way, no matter how sexually liberated, and I cannot imagine her being peeved by a bow or a lifted hat, nor imagine her entering a room unless the accompanying male opened the door first. And there are, perhaps, other vaguely sociological reasons for her current disfavor of an apparently more consequential nature.

I invite one to ponder some lines deeply. “Sweet sounds, oh, beautiful music. Do not cease! / Reject me not into the world again,” she pleads in her sonnet “On Hearing a Symphony of Beethoven.” “Reject me not, sweet sounds! oh! let me live”—for as long as the music continues (“Music my rampart, and my only one”), one escapes the world out there of “The spiteful and the stingy and the rude.”

I am trying to define the “world” one doesn’t want to be rejected into again. And it’s not the large world of death and lamentation, creation and joy—which is expressed in the music—but the trivial, petty, and disheartening world of “the spiteful and the stingy and the rude.”

I could defend myself (and Millay) readily and dismiss the notion in several superficial ways. I could say for instance that I mean the opposite, I mean that the lower classes are civil and gracious and the middle and upper are rude and gross. But, in fact, I don’t mean that. I could say the lower tend to be crude but that’s good because authentic, and the established tend to be genteel but that’s a mark of phoniness. But I think that’s nonsense. I could say that some of the lower are this, some that, some of the upper that, this. And if I were the reader then, I’d stop reading so as not to indulge the inane. What I would prefer to be able to say is that rudeness and civility have nothing to do with class. But that is merely a variant of the immediately above, and although I would thereby insure liberal credentials I don’t even possess or wish to, I’d know I was lying to myself. They do have to do with class.  .  . but in a very complicated way.

I think if you’re going to insult some deserving one you should do it with style, as a rapier is keener than a baseball bat. (Example: On hearing that a suspicious growth removed from Randolph Churchill turned out to be benign, Evelyn Waugh remarked that it was a doubtful achievement of modern medicine to discover the one part of Winston’s son that was not malignant and to remove it.)  There is of course this rhetorical aside to manners. But, to the substantial.  .  .  .  If one is a decent person, if one is kindly disposed (at least to some people), if one is what used to be called a “good” person, a “moral” person, then why should there be a discrepancy between the graciousness of one’s soul (for that’s what we’re talking about) and one’s private and public manners? Why shouldn’t there be an external sign of one’s inner grace? And isn’t it a mark of alienation, on the other hand, to be decent inside and to insert finger in ear and dig with same across from a soup-eater? I’m speaking of a kind of moral-and-aesthetic consistency. (George Santayana thought ethics and aesthetics twin disciplines. See his The Sense of Beauty.) And this requires attention, it seems to me, or there would be no problem: manners are, again, acquired.

One lives in the world of death and lamentation by natural necessity. One lives in the world of personal relationships—casual, profound, and unavoidable—by social necessity. One is victim of the first world, and there is little to be done about it, although we try with science to prolong life and with psychology and art and philosophy and religion to adjust to the unavoidable. One is victim as well as beneficiary of the second world, and we do have some choices. But, while we try to limit the victimization in the first world through public controls of economic and political behavior and through religious-moral schemes (Big Ethics), we increasingly reject the notion of self-controlled behavior in the second. Manners are froth, merely bourgeois stuff.

None of this bothers me—someone might say. (Insensitivity is a great defense against botheration.) Well, but you can’t call it victimization—another might urge. I think I can, at three levels: as (1) a thoughtless tampering with delicate psychological balance, as (2) a delimiting of chances of intimacy, and as (3) a symptom of cultural schizophrenia. 

But most important of all: the denigration of manners and graciousness, or the insistence that they are of no large consequence, is a symptom of a disease which wracked the twentieth century and wracks this one as well: the dissociation of culture from morals, morals from culture.

I don’t know if I am merely complaining or suggesting a program of reform. For the latter I am at something of a loss: perhaps insisting that school children be forced to say “Sir” and “Madam,” that any teacher who says “Just call me Jack” be locked in a room with a very loud boom box, unbreakable and with dials removed. Considering such, I prefer merely to complain. But I locate the complaint in a specific social area.

Manners and graciousness, as I have said, do have to do with class, in the way I have already suggested. I welcome the democratization of society. I am often told that one evidence of it is the slow disappearance of class distinctions as the middle class becomes slowly ubiquitous. I allow that question to be begged for the sake of argument. But need the price that’s paid be the wasteful abandonment of those traditional middle-class values that aren’t economic, that were originally imitations of an aristocratic ideal of behavior? (And that newcomers to comfortable status are now to be discouraged from embracing.) Need the price be the elevation of those mythical lower-class values that excite so many of us as being “authentic”? It’s the middle class that leads revolutions, of manners as well as politics. And as Marx himself said, revolutionists tend to imitate. And they usually imitate a myth.

But, hypocrite though I may be, maybe the point is that Como and I are not far apart at all. Big Ethics needs Small Ethics. Civility in the public realm is not a very likely expectation from people incapable of “obedience to the unenforceable” in the daily exchanges of ordinary life.

 

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Samuel Hux is Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at York College of the City University of New York. He has published in Dissent, The New Republic, Saturday Review, Moment, Antioch Review, Commonweal, New Oxford Review, Midstream, Commentary, Modern Age, Worldview, The New Criterion and many others.

 

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