Sometime during the 1920s, at an exclusive party at Count Boni de Castelanne’s, a great French lady felt herself beginning to die at the dinner table. “Quick, bring the dessert,” she whispered to the waiter.
She was not overcome by greed. She simply wished to hurry dinner along so as not to drop dead before the party rose from the table. In other words, she did not wish to cause discomfort to those present. Needless to say, the lady had impeccable manners.
Now, please don’t get me wrong. I do not expect anyone nowadays to avoid leaving a room when feeling unwell in order to not cause discomfort for the rest. I simply brought up a true story to illustrate how far our mores and manners have fallen these past 100 years. Back then, a grand lady dropping dead would have caused somewhat of a scandal. The hostess of the dinner would have become associated with the death forevermore. Such were the joys of a closed society. Especially in Catholic France, where the old guard tried its best for years to resist the Napoleonic nouveaux, with their extraordinary titles granted to them by the Emperor for having served him well on the battlefield. (Boni de Castellane’s family was titled long before the great Corsican came along, and his pink palace on Avenue Foch I remember well when I was young and lived nearby. Sadly, it is no longer there, torn down and replaced by apartment houses mostly inhabited by rich Arabs.)
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Perhaps it sounds stuffy, but I am nostalgic for the good old days when manners were exquisite. You might think that this is a bit much, but not really. Things are so bad at present that even returning to the time of strict etiquette, I find, would be a blessing. Manners, you see, are as important as morals, and have very little to do with a man’s outer attributes—birth, rank, or education—but rather involve his inner qualities of character and behavior. At present, people take phony offense at anything and everything, yet rudeness is de rigueur and boorishness a virtue. It is hip to be discourteous, trendy to act primitive, and “in” to be coarse.
Those who form our culture nowadays—magazine editors, TV writers and producers, and of course the Hollywood elite who put out the absolute dirt emanating from the West Coast—bombard us with stories and shows of coarse people using the coarsest language possible but always shown in a favorable light. Gentle folk speaking without using the f-word are always depicted as bigots. No ifs or buts about it.
In language, of course, is to be found one of the most crucial lines of demarcation between the vulgar and gracious people. I will deal with those responsible for the coarseness of our culture later, because in order to tackle vulgarity we need to stop celebrating it, but for now let’s establish what good manners are: Natural good manners are putting other people before yourself without thinking about it. Actually, Christianity is good manners. The men who queued in an orderly fashion for lifeboats on the Titanic, or allowed others to go first, died in a very Christian manner. Compare that with a recent British survey of 20,000 people, where 91 percent of those asked admitted to no longer saying thank you. Perhaps that is why I don’t actually believe in surveys. It seems impossible that 91 percent of those we extend some small service never thank us. Maybe this is so in downtown Los Angeles or in San Juan, but not in Britain.
Never mind. There are still American and European gentlemen who walk on the outside of the pavement and stand up when a woman enters the room. Some men still give up their seats to women in public transport, although the ghastly #MeToo movement will soon put a stop to it. The irony of it all is that the men I just mentioned are mostly working stiffs and white. Self-reliance plays a large role among the working classes, thus a woman’s vulnerability is paramount to them.
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Edmund Burke insisted that manners are more important than laws, but I wonder how many of today’s television producers eager to push the boundaries, and other promoters of “edgy” art, have ever heard of the great man. If they had, perhaps they would not have contributed as much as they have to the incivility corroding our society today. These talentless ruffians like to claim that they espouse a counter-courtesy in the shape of political correctness. But PC is nothing but political manipulation, communism in disguise, a central control of people’s lives, the imposition of a political agenda by a minority on the majority. One day not far off, good manners will be deemed politically incorrect, just as they were in Orwell’s chilling 1984.
Good manners are not a superficial activity. They serve a moral purpose. They are the outward signs of an inner unselfishness, a readiness to put others first. They are the direct opposite of the me, me, me mentality, what W.B. Yeats defined as the essence of civilization. Manners are the opposite of brute force. The duel, once a benchmark of settling differences between gentlemen, had a mannered code, and was a downside better than a knife in the back or a street brawl.
How did we get to live in such a mannerless world? How did we breach the period when that grand lady asked the waiter to hurry up with the dessert to today’s world of nonstop four-letter expletives? I suppose when triumphant ignorance took over responsible positions in the media and entertainment and publishing industries. Better yet, when these above-mentioned industries related popular culture with obscenity, boorishness, and a constant diet of puerile filth. Anyone resisting these affronts to good taste and civilized living is seen as a reactionary, which brings me to the vile and coarse texting that goes on with the internet. (Personally I do not text and do not tweet and do not allow comments on my website that use vulgarity.) There is no doubt that the boundaries of taste and decency are being pushed ever further back in the name of connecting with one another through such useless and horrible inventions as Facebook. (Sadists regularly troll grieving families who have lost children, desecrating their memories. Zuckerberg and his gang of billionaires call it freedom of expression.)
