Manners is woke

 According to Marc Fumaroli, the French word, politesse, was a borrowing from the Italian, pulitezza – one of the Italian exports to France in the sixteenth century, along with Leonardo da Vinci. The Italian word, Fumaroli notes, is “a translation of latin words, urbanitas, politia, which refers us back to the Greek, polis, in other words to the harmony of the political body.

The veins of etymology are inexhaustible.

This overlap between the city, politics and politeness is not just a way of getting to the salon talk among French aristocrats: it is, as well, at the heart of a long American dynamic that pits the Jacksonian, the countryside populist, against the abolitionist radical. The Jacksonian’s manners are all defiance and self-assertion; the abolitionist defies, as well, but founds itself on a higher sense of manners – manners as recognition. Manners that, drowned in the democratic flood, saturated through and through, comes back as recognition, as a heightened sense of the equality of the other, and a heightened sense, as well, for the humiliation that the Jacksonian accords to those who stand in the way of the privileged countryside class. To recognize that manners are owed to the other, to the black, the Indian, to women, is to operate by bits and pieces of everyday behavior to bend the order towards justice for all.

American manners poses the question: can respect, urbanity, be accorded to an other that is totally subjected?

This has long been the violent question at the heart of the American dream of order – a violence the brunt of which is being borne, today, once again by people of color.

The standard American political thinker of the moment, be she academic or pundit, spends too little time thinking about manners, that micro-disarmement, that form that holds together those birth twins, politics and politesse.

“Evidently, politeness, in the generic sense of the duties of man in society, is inflected according to the principles of the political regime.” The New Left, Fumaroli observes, rejected politesse in the 1960s. Fumaroli was an inveterate anti-68 figure: a conservative of the French type, prone to call himself “liberal”. Fumaroli’s observation, to me, is a definite hit. Manners, in the old New Left view, were a form of hierarchical passive aggression, and needed to be liquidates so that comrade could speak freely to comrade. What the New Lefties didn’t recognize was that the manners of very hierarchical society acted, in that society, as a kind of utopian exit from the cruelties inherent to that hierarchy. But the utopian form of quotidian intercourse that minds its manners, that grounds itself on respect and recognition – that is the kind of thing that gets us back to the more radical impulse of the abolitionist tradition.

Manners is woke.

2

France, I sometimes think, is held together by bonjour. Sometimes, living here in Paris, I forget. I go into a store, I stumble around looking for something, I see an employee, and the American in me comes out and I say something like, can you tell me where the tortillas are? Some dumb question. And I get a cold response. I deserve it.

I did not say bonjour.

In the French language itself, as every student knows, there is a tu and a vous. When I was learning this in the states in high school, I thought that this must have been some 18^th century thing. Surely not a common thing now? But you quickly learn, in France, that as a foreign accented person, you might be excused for a tu, but that this is a very real thing.

In the South where I grew up, around Atlanta, you had sir and ma’am. I didn’t use sir very much, but ma’am is a permanent routine of my tongue aerobics. It comes out quite without my thinking.

These links of bonjour and ma’am are, the rationalist, the calculator thinks, dispensable things. The lefty thinks it is all shuffle and jive, while behind the scenes, in the secret transcript, it is resistance (a magical, inflated word)  – while the righty thinks it is a sign of weakness while rudeness and the habit of humiliating others is a sign of strength. 

I can see where these two ideologies come from But I also think that these links that bind us are integral to the way we do things with each other. A barbarous remnant, a price which civilization must pay to barbarism or face the penalty of inhumanity. At the moment, it seems to me, civilization is embracing inhumanity hard.

I can’t sir or ma’am or bonjour that.