Beyond Good Manners 2

Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others.  If you have that awareness, you have good manners, no matter which fork you use.  ~Emily Post

As Emily Post, the guru of good manners acknowledges, it’s what’s inside that counts. It is possible to conceal a core of evil behind a smiling facade. A woman can be sweet and pleasant to your face and then figuratively stab you in the back with hurtful words. A man of "good-breeding" can politely send millions to their deaths in the misguided name of ethnic cleansing. These are moral infants who have never grown beyond the outward show of good manners to the internalised virtues that they are designed to represent.

A truly virtuous person has learned to value the underlying virtue over the external form of manners, without neglecting or devaluing the manners themselves. André Comte-Sponville, in A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues, encapsulates this by saying, "It is better to be too honest to be polite than to be too polite to be honest," valuing the virtue of honesty over the external show of politeness. Compte-Sponville is not advocating rudeness here, but just that we learn how to be truthful. Sometimes honesty means acknowledging our own limitations. How often do our lives get too busy because we are too polite to say no to people who ask favours of us? A frankly spoken “no” could save us from much bigger problems like resentment and burnout.

The value of internal virtue is also the lesson of Jesus when his disciples were caught handpicking grain to eat on the Sabbath, which was illegal. He rebuked their accusers with a quotation from the Scriptures saying, "If you had known what these words mean 'I desire mercy and not sacrifice,' you would not have condemned the innocent." According to the outward form of the law, the hungry and roadweary disciples were in the wrong, but Jesus valued their health and comfort above the strict letter of the law. He excused them without ever devaluing the law itself. The law is an outside imposition, a schoolmaster, what philosopher Emmanuel Kant calls an "external constraint," to teach people right and wrong through obedience. The real goal has always been that we would develop a true compass within us, guiding the way to right behaviour. This requires self-discipline and a lifetime of practice, which is why we teach manners to children.

We never outgrow the necessary social lubricant of politeness. But that must not be all that we have to live by. Good manners are meaningless without empowering virtues like the respect that indwells every "please," the gratitude that inhabits each "thank you," and the compassion that must infuse every sincere "I'm sorry." In all of our dealings, we should strive to be driven by these internal values. In addition to teaching our children the outward form of good manners, we must teach them the respect for others that is much more important.

Beyond Good Manners

My grandson William is not yet one year old, but his mother is already training him to say please. When William wants something, she reminds him, "Say please," and he responds by making a circular motion on his chest in the manner of American Sign Language. What can be the advantage in teaching a child who is still working on "Mama," "Dada," and "Nana" how to say please when he can't even really "say" it? All around the world parents devote much time and literally thousands of repetitions to reinforce the practice of saying please and thank you, and various other manifestations of what we refer to collectively as good manners. Politeness is the social grace and the slippery grease that lubricates our personal interactions. Without politeness the painful frictions of misunderstanding and hurt feelings can slow down the progress of our relationships or even cause them to blow up altogether. The tedious and painstaking repetitions involved in training a child in good manners are well worth the considerable effort expended.

But the most valuable lessons that have their seeds in the social graces are not as obvious. Manners, after all, are all on the surface, all glitz and gloss and only for show. For people like my dear little grandson the real value in good manners begins not in just saying "please," but in acknowledging his mother or father to whom he says it. If the psychologists are to be believed, very young children are completely egocentric. It is impossible for them to see the world from another's perspective. They first need to identify and understand that "others" even exist.

Saying please is an outward recognition of the "otherness" of the parent. It is the beginning of respect, which is the beginning of moral behaviour toward others. It is the end of the notion of the child as the centre of the universe. In being polite to another person, I am acknowledging his or her value and not just my own. Of course, all this philosophizing is lost on the toddler. But without realising it, his horizons have been broadened to include the concept of others through the simple act of saying please and thank you.

All virtue begins with this type of discipline. We need what Emmanuel Kant calls this "external constraint" to teach us how to be good. This is not something we can manage on our own. The French philosopher La Bruyère said that politeness makes a person "seem externally what he really should be." La Bruyère’s compatriot André Comte-Sponville says in his book A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues that "morality is first artifice and then artefact." We train a child how to act before she can even understand why she should act this way. We teach a child what to say before he understands the full meaning of what he is saying. This important training plants the seeds that can later grow into the true virtues of compassion and mercy toward others.