The Conscience of Manners

by Eve Tushnet - March 14, 2008

Reprinted with permission.

The roadside memorial was anything but swank – so why was Miss Manners defending it?

A reader had written in to ask for the etiquette expert's advice on what to do about the sidewalk shrine, set up by friends and family of a high school student who died in a car crash. The memorial, "never beautiful to my eyes… is now little more than a pile of trash," the reader wrote; how soon could it be politely dismantled?

Miss Manners' reply takes a different tone: "You do see the pathos, and not just the unsightliness, in these shrines, don't you?" While she did suggest that her reader could "clean this up without violating the spirit in which it was built" by "notifying the high school that it is time for the students to collect what they want to preserve, and to think about a more lasting tribute to their friend," she also forbade anyone to refer to such little memorials as "trash."

This exchange (from Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior) illustrates one of Miss Manners' common themes: that the person who believes himself to be defending propriety can nonetheless be the greater offender. It also gets at two of the core purposes of manners: protecting the vulnerable, and respecting our gentler and better feelings at the expense of our pettier ones. Miss Manners gently chastised her reader for focusing on appearances to the point that his own attitude became ungentle.

Judith Martin, the author behind the Miss Manners persona, has made a career out of delineating not merely the rules but the principles of etiquette. She's developed manners into something akin to a spiritual discipline. Living according to her lights would, if practiced consistently, lead to greater humility, patience, and self-discipline – and better dinner parties, as a bonus.

Miss Manners begins with a sharp analysis of human nature. She knows that "expressing our feelings" too easily becomes expressing our worst selves. She praises the tried-and-true responses to joyful announcements or tragic ones, knowing that when we try to get more authentic than "Congratulations!" or "I'm so sorry," we end up expressing that rotten, nosy, judgmental, self-centered self who wants to know whether the baby was planned, or who says the widow should grieve less because "he's in a better place now."

In a section on behavior on airplanes, Miss Manners sums up her position: "Stress may produce crankiness, unpleasant-vocabulary recall and the desire to smack that silly expression off the nearest face, but such feelings are what etiquette exists to control. Alone against all other personal-behavior wisdom of the era, etiquette shouts 'Don't express it! Never mind if you'll feel better if you let it all out – what about the rest of us? Keep it bottled up! It won't kill you. Be a hypocrite! Act as if it doesn't matter!'"

Manners help take the focus off our own feelings and our own opinions. Manners teach that there are some questions we don't get to ask, no matter how much we want to. Our curiosity, or our desire to give unasked-for advice, is less important than protecting the privacy and dignity of others. (Miss Manners frequently pushes her readers to imagine the lives of others from within, and consider that their prying questions or uncharitable assumptions may touch on areas of painful vulnerability, as when an attempt to chat with a stranger about how business is going prompts a tearful admission that one has just been downsized: That's one reason "it has never been polite to inquire, under social conditions, about other people's professional success, much less to probe a possible lack of it.")

It's somewhat startling how many of her rules and guidelines stem from the basic principles of putting others first and protecting them from our rougher feelings: how to write a thank-you note for a present you didn't like; how to respond to a friend who gets embarrassingly drunk at a party (and how that friend ought to behave the next morning!); how to politely and charitably point out that someone has cut in front of you in a line. Even the correct way to refuse an invitation (apologize, but say no firmly, and don't make excuses) is concerned in part with sparing others' feelings: If you say, "I'd love to, but I'm afraid I'll be flossing my otter," you not only invite argument and attempts to persuade you away from your excuses. You also let your friends know exactly where they rank on your scale of priorities – possibly above cleaning the gutters, but definitely below otter dental hygiene.

Miss Manners knows she's asking a lot of us. She acknowledges, "It is extremely difficult, not to mention unfair, for the victim of blatant rudeness to have to be the one who calmly refuses to react." But continuing a Cycle of Rudeness leaves everyone a little angrier, a little more cynical, a little more abrasive, and a little more scraped-up.

These moral prescriptions (Miss Manners uses the phrase "a duty of mercy" entirely without irony) are frequently presented with tart, champagne-dry humor, and even a little wry Burkeanism. When a gentleman writes in to defend his peculiar way of holding a fork ("To me, the cut-and-shift American way of using a fork is silly and I find the tines-down English way to be ineffective"), she brings out the big guns: "You, sir, are an anarchist, and Miss Manners is frightened to have anything to do with you. It is true that questioning the table manners of others is rude. But to overthrow the accepted conventions of society, on the flimsy grounds that you have found them silly, inefficient and discomforting, is a dangerous step toward destroying civilization."

If you want to avoid destroying civilization – or toughen up what Miss Manners calls "the conscience of manners" – the two best places to start are the little, invaluable Miss Manners' Basic Training: The Right Thing to Say, and the big, comprehensive Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior.

Eve Tushnet is a freelance writer in Washington, D.C.