A Case for Manners

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We may start by broadly reviewing John Locke’s understanding of government and its depiction of a liberal society upon which the American regime is based. In his Second Treatise of Government, Locke describes the circumstances under which political power is absent, namely, the state of nature. The human condition in this state is characterized by freedom, equality, and rationality, grounded in the belief that human beings are made in the image of God. This belief consequently endows man with pre-existing, inalienable rights that no authority can violate. Locke thereby distinguishes his notion of government from the absolutism of Thomas Hobbes, setting forth a theory of liberalism that articulates and defends an array of political rights. 

Locke’s promotion of freedom is most relevant to our larger argument. By birth, he claims, we are each naturally free and this inherent freedom must be honored by others. His conception of freedom is therefore remarkably capacious, and yet its very breadth also presents a problem. As political philosopher Uday Mehta writes in Liberalism and Empire, “What ensures that Locke’s condition of perfect freedom will not issue in a state of license and anarchical libertinage?” 

Locke admittedly provides for the danger of anarchy and social dissolution through his ‘Law of Nature’ and the matrix of natural laws that qualify human freedom. Locke as such is committed to political freedom without endorsing either a crude libertarian position or anarchy per se. For Mehta, however, this theory is inadequate because “the moral boundaries that natural laws set upon the potential liberality of human action are themselves presented as part of the natural endowment of human beings.” Since man comes to know and judge natural law only through reason, individuals who have not all cultivated their reason in a similar manner may reach wildly different conclusions about its character. This potential dissimilarity between individuals’ comprehension of natural law makes coexistence difficult. Although men may contract into society together, the lurking danger that someone withdraws his consent on the basis of his particular interpretation of natural law remains. This is not to relativize natural law, which remains an objective, God-given standard. Rather, the variability of individual reason and judgment vis-á-vis natural law means that Locke’s society, as described above, is constantly vulnerable to corrosive and insurrectionary individual behavior. What is required, therefore, is a regulating force to coordinate the wide range of individual judgments.

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Mehta turns to a rich sociological tradition to address the issue of moderating desire in a system that valorizes freedom. Here, the importance of manners, and civility writ large, comes to the fore. Mehta cites European sociologists like Emile Durkheim and Pierre Bourdieu for their analysis of how social structures and conventions delimit the range of individual thought and self-expression. Bourdieu defines his theory, known as “habitus,” as “The systems […] predisposed to function as […] principles which generate and organize practices and representations without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends.” Habitus refers to the phenomenon by which individuals, shaped by the same external influences, develop a shared disposition toward the world. This disposition is instilled below the plane of consciousness, affecting conformity not by explicit formulation but through unarticulated means. It is a “product of history” that “ensures the active presence of past experiences” and “perpetua\tes itself into the future.” This unique character of the habitus produces coherence among society’s members, both in the immediate present and across time, forming a genuine community that is in partnership with past and subsequent generations and sustains its own reproducibility. 

Early 20th-century American sociologists also engaged in the same project. George Herbert Mead, a key figure in American pragmatism, offered an understanding of gestures illuminating in this regard: 

“The first individual is conscious of the meaning of his own gesture […] in so far as he takes the attitude of the second individual toward that gesture, and tends to respond to it implicitly in the same way that the second individual responds to it explicitly.”

An individual understands the meaning of his behavior, in part, by internalizing the attitude of others to such behavior. By harboring within himself the attitude of others, the individual is inclined to self-regulate his action so it is acceptable to others. Norms of action are therefore deeply social artifacts that cultivate the sentiments of empathy and self-limitation that different persons bear toward each other. This analysis should not be construed solely as an explanation for the formation of individual identity but as an explanation for how and why society, including large multicultural ones like America, cohere as well as they do.

The tacit pressure that social life exerts on the individual resolves the dilemma of anarchic individualism. For our purposes, manners are not trivial gestures but crucial components of the historically generated mechanism by which American society has moderated individual freedom and its wide array of diverse interests, providing for its continued survival. Manners acknowledge and affirm our condition as fellow citizens participating together in a particular, historical society. As British philosopher Roger Scruton writes, “The teaching of manners to children goes beyond just controlling their behavior. It also involves a kind of shaping, which lifts the human form above the level of animal life, so as to become fully human, fully sociable, and fully self-aware.” They elevate man from an island into a social being. 

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We are now in a position to understand manners: they are among the semi-codified norms, mores, and customs that thread the needle between preserving individual freedom and maintaining community. 

T.S Eliot, the poet who perhaps best exemplifies the Modernist movement, in his essay The Aims of Education summarizes the entire issue quite nicely: 

“The danger of the separation between the social and the private life – which has the corollary that the only criterion of morals is whether their conduct is harmful to one’s neighbors, and that every man should be free to do as he likes with himself – is that […] the social may prove in the end to encroach more and more upon the private.”

Extreme license vitiates the social order by making necessary interventions into the private sphere, the very interference that a regime of individual freedom seeks to prohibit. In consequence, a delicate social equilibrium must be sought in which man retains the power to act freely without abusing that power. Eliot achieves this balance by valorizing the human capacity for shock:

“Fortunately, we do not yet submit to universal regulation in the public interest; and fortunately we are still capable of being shocked by private behavior, even when it does not appear to injure anyone but the culprit himself.”

The law of social behavior, which we should take to include politeness, chastens freedom’s excesses without resorting to coercion. If there still appears to be a non sequitur between impoliteness and moral license, Thomas de Quincey’s famous quip is worth recalling: “If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.” 

For the sake of Eliot’s argument, however, establishing the connection between the law of social behavior and the survival of a liberal social order is unnecessary. Being capable of ‘shock’  is desirable in itself, for it demonstrates, according to Eliot, that we are “still human.” Civility is an intrinsic good independent of its advantageous effect on the social order.

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To end the analysis here, however, would be naive to the reasons why civility has become obsolete in the first place. The deterioration of civility in recent years, I am suggesting, must also be interpreted as a reaction against an abuse and misunderstanding of civility as defined above. Before delving into its contemporary abuse, it is first worth examining manners’ inherently exclusionary thrust. The aforementioned ‘elevation of man’ that manners induce is inherently an aristocratic notion, and its historical enactment reveals this natural snobbishness. 

As Mehta observes, Locke extols the importance of manners in Some Thoughts Concerning Education, which reads like a manual on propriety. Locke here valued manners for their socially harmonious effect; tied intimately to this end, however, was his desire to entrench social distinctions and denote class differences: “I think a Prince, a Nobleman, and an ordinary Gentleman’s son, should have different ways of breeding.” Convention and propriety were therefore means to accent distinctions in status and highlight hierarchical relations. The superiority of the English ‘gentleman’ was evinced by their distinct regime of manners.  

Likewise, civility previously demonstrated at times a certain ethnocentrism, viewing outsiders who did not meet standards of propriety as barbaric. Civility meant successful suppression and taming of one’s natural impulses; those perceived to have failed at this objective were wild and animalistic. Montaigne’s Of Cannibals (1580) — while rightfully condemned as relativistic — sought to respond to such condescension: “I find that there is nothing barbarous and savage in this nation, by anything that I can gather, excepting, that every one gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country.” 

The elitist bent of manners has long been objectionable to Americans in particular. As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “democratic people want equality in liberty, and if they cannot obtain that, they still want equality in slavery.” Manners insofar as they highlight our differences offend and endanger our congenital passion for equality. The 1790s debate over the appropriate address of the president sheds light on this disposition. Possible titles floated included “His Highness” and “Chief Magistrate,” yet the final title settled on was the plain “Mr. President.” Alongside what Scruton identifies as a Puritan preference for internal obedience over outward show, American decorum has therefore always tended toward a certain boorishness. 

Parochialism in manners chafes against the universalistic aspect of Locke detailed above. No longer are all men recognized as equal citizens based upon their shared commitments but defined by class, racial, gender, or ethnic affiliations. Keeping this in mind, civility as practiced recently has been damaging for two reasons. 

First, contemporary movements such as Political Correctness and Wokeness do not grasp manners’ non-legal, tacit quality. As Slavoj Žižek puts it, “The self-destructive deadlock of Political Correctness: it tries to explicitly formulate, legalize even, the stuff of manners.” The imposition of manners through Political Correctness poses a threat to our deepest-held individualistic impulses and procedural rights, fostering a repressive and intolerant culture. It takes the conformism inherent to manners and makes it insidious. 

Second, such movements unduly indulge civility’s propensity for elitism and sectarianism: use such-and-such language or else be judged an uncivilized barbarian. A similar move is made by identitarians who claim certain groups threaten American civility solely by virtue of their ethnic background or faith. 

A renewed civility would account for these shortcomings and adapt accordingly. Incivility by contrast has thrown the baby out with the bathwater. In repudiating cancel culture, it has discarded the subtler force of cancellation which tethers the public together. Manners cannot be used to obscure, suppress, or disparage the voices of certain constituencies, but should constitute the substance that comprehends the entire citizenry and renders them a community. 

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I would like to conclude with Edmund Burke, statesman, philosopher, and famed critic of the French Revolution: 

“Manners are of more importance than laws… manners are what vex or sooth, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant steady uniform insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe. They give their whole form and colour to our lives. According to their quality, they aid morals, they supply them, or they totally destroy them.”

For Burke, manners underpin society. Indeed, the Burkean marketplace does not function principally because of the mutual pursuit of self-interest (as disciples of the invisible hand might claim). Rather, it is enabled by an underlying web of trust and obligation reinforced by manners connecting the market’s participants. 

If Burke’s general suspicion is correct – that society is predicated upon a cultural substructure of which propriety is an integral component – we ought to be worried by this substructure’s corrosion, say, by vulgarity and trolling. The creation of superior policy may be regrettable if its mode of passage subverts the mores and sensibilities upon which the practice of politics relies. Apocalyptic predictions aside, the loss of such mores will at the very least result in an unpleasant world drained of intimacy and community. 

That being said, a new regime of manners will succeed only in proportion to its appreciation for past historical developments. In re-establishing the primacy of manners, the same errors which facilitated their dissolution in the first place cannot be committed. A difficult balancing act, perhaps. But certainly a necessary task for the sake of social cohesion.

Image: An Elegant Dinner Party in an Arcade, Jan Josef Horemans the Elder (1744)