Happened to read two interesting takes on the whole concept of good manners, and it underscores something I’ve thought modern, “civilized” people should always keep in mind: We’re skating on thin ice if we’re relying on Niceness to keep us out of trouble.

In “Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behavior,**” author and social anthropologist Kate Fox mentions that foreigners often find English social rules confusing, but then reflects:

But then, surely, all politeness is a form of hypocrisy; almost by definition, it involves pretence. The sociolinguists Brown and Levinson argue that politeness ‘presupposes [the] potential for aggression as it seeks to disarm it, and makes possible communication between potentially aggressive parties’. Also in the context of a discussion of aggression, Jeremy Paxman observes that our strict codes of manners and etiquette seem ‘to have been developed by the English to protect themselves from themselves’.

By a coincidence, I almost came across a similar view from another English author in the book “Talk to the Hand”***. The book is subtitled “The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door.” It is all done in good humor, of course, but gets rather pithy, all the same. Speaking on the subject of personal space, author Lynne Truss says:

I have to admit, I am rather keen on keeping other people at arm’s length. If a chap stands an inch behind me and loudly crunches and slurps an apple, I suffer and moan and clench all the clenchable parts of my anatomy, but what I really want to do (please don’t tell anybody) is to turn round on the spot with fists raised, and with an efficient, clean one-two, knock all his teeth out. What I would really appreciate is a kind of negative polarity I could switch on in personal-space emergencies; in fact, now I think of it, is there any lovelier, more comforting four-word combination than “Activate the force field”?

Is the world getting coarser, less mannerly and more impolite with every generation? Definitely. There might be nothing new in that, or at least in the older generation thinking it’s true of the younger generation.
But if it’s an ongoing complaint, it doesn’t mean that things have stayed essentially static. The whole situation may never “come to a boil,” but at the same time that the world is getting smaller and more intimate all the time by virtue of electronic communication, there’s something here that we need to understand about each other. Religious people are regularly upbraided by secularists around us for trying to bring something into the culture that it no longer requires. There’s a strong desire, I think, to relegate Christianity to the ash-heap of Things Enlightened People Have Outgrown. But on this count, at least, they’re dead wrong.

The entire culture of English-style courtesy and good manners, the nearly-dead impulse that still makes us say “Have a nice day” way, WAY too much, is something that arose as a result of the Christian ethos. We’re coasting on the capital of many generations who had been taught that their fellow man, even a foreigner, a stranger or an enemy, was made in God’s image. When we undermine that tenet of the faith and then expect that the entire fragile system of civility will hold together, we’re just fooling ourselves.