Old Wine in New Bottles, Preface Part I

Old Wine in New Bottles, Or, A Primer on Manners for Civilized men and women living in a post-christian, post-civilized, and post-human world

Having returned from several weeks in Norther Italy, I have been reflecting on the old sentiment that “travel broadens the mind.”  This may well be true, but only of people who are used to using their mind.  Most of us, including intellectuals, scholars, and pundits, are just as likely to find their attitudes narrowed by any confrontation with the manners and behavior of other people.  The proverbial expression, that civilization is the art of forming a queue, was probably inspired by some Englishman’s experience of Naples.  

I was once waiting in the taxi line at the Athens airport, when a determined Greek lady close to 80 years old pushed herself in front of a dozen people.  A woman in her fifties read the old dragon the riot act in Greek, then turned to me and observed, “I was born here, but after a couple of decades in America, I find their manners impossible.”

I am less disturbed by the Italians’ failure to accept regimentation than I am by the increasingly Americanized behavior of young Italians, who are almost as tatooed, pierced, and addicted to junk food as their American counterparts and, if anything, even more zombified by laptops and iPhones than the adolescents I see everyday in the American Middle West.

In discussing possible presents for nieces nephews—as well as their children—and grandchildren, my wife and I sometimes consider giving them an etiquette book to ease the strain between the generations, but then, what would we give them?  Contemporary advice columnists all seem to say that if something feels good and does no obvious physical harm to other people, then it is acceptable.  “In my younger and more vulnerable years,” I had a spoiled rich friend—let us call him Scott, which is his real name.  Scott would sometimes get a hankering to play the Chinese game “Go” at 6:00 AM, and in such a mood would throw rocks at my window.  When I cussed him out, he reminded me that, “My New York Psyche says I should be myself and other people would learn to deal with it.”  I told him that if I had to deal with it again, he would be on the receiving end of a miniature baseball bat kept for such occasions. 

On the other hand, to give one of the barbarians an old version of Emily Post would be as practical as telling some postmodern lout to follow all the rules handed out in Leviticus.  It is not that we should not yearn for the day when old fashioned manners prevailed at least among the bourgeoisie, but if we aim our sights too eye, we shall fail worse than if we did nothing.  E.A. Robinson's Miniver Cheevey, "child of scorn," had to drink away his disgust for a world that had outgrown chivalry.

Etiquette books are a modern phenomenon.  Every known society has rules that govern how we behave at meals or at religious ceremonies, how we show respect to elders and superiors, how we court and marry our wives, what to wear—and what not to wear—on specific occasions, but such norms and regulations are learned in the course of growing up rather than formulated in a book of rules.  The social anthropologist Paul Bohannon once observed that the primary task of any culture is to confront the mass of barbarians who arrive on the scene every year and teach them how to be socially responsible human beings.  By barbarians, he meant children.  Then one of the purposes of child rearing and education--but also of art and literature and sports--is to tame the beasts and teach them at least the arts of hypocrisy.

I have spent most of my life reading and studying the language, literature, history, and social life of ancient Greeks, but I have not yet come across a manual of social behavior, much less any evidence for the ancient equivalent of an advice column.  We can, nonetheless, form a conception, however roughly, of Athenian social norms by reading the dramatic poets and historians and scrutinizing the assumptions taken for granted by the speeches of the orators.  It is, perhaps, even easier to draw up such a sketch for the Roman upper classes in the age of Cicero and Caesar or the age of the Antonines.

In the Eastern Empire, eventually, the protocols of court ceremonial became so elaborate as to be a mystery to barbarian Franks, when they visited “The City,” as Constantinople was known, and they must have been a serious difficulty for social outsiders and parvenus making their way up the Byzantine ladder.  Circumstances demanded a set of rules for court behavior, and the demand was fulfilled in a Book of Ceremonies written or commissioned by Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus.

One lesson we might take from this brief exposition is this:  Etiquette books (and the like) are only necessary when social norms are not understood by everyone in a society.  This might happen as a result of foreign conquest, or in the course of developing a very refined aristocracy, or when different peoples of differing cultures live within the same society.  

Imagine, for example, a simple British society of Protestant farmers and merchants that imported a sizable minority of “Latino” (that is, people of Spanish and Indian descent) Catholics.  Until the two sides reached some sort of mutual understanding and merging of cultures, there would be endless strife over noise levels, courting rituals and treatment of women, and moral norms.

It is pretty clear, then, why the Mantovano nobleman Baldassare Castglione, composed The Courtier at the elegant court of the Duke of Urbino.  As a diplomat for the Duke of Mantova, to whom he was distantly related, Castiglione had met with Italian aristocrats and writers from several regions and had dealings in Milano with the French.  

The late 15th century was a period of unrest and movement, both geographical and social, and upwardly mobile merchants, scholars, mercenary soldiers, and rustic aristocrats would find themselves at sea in the highly sophisticated courts of the great Signori in Milano, Verona, Mantova, Ferrara, Urbino, Florence, and Rome.   An etiquette book or any institution or set of customs that teaches children to be human and converts foreigners into natives has a purpose somewhat akin to the purpose of Southern Living magazine, which, according to my friend John Shelton Reed, was created to teach middle0-class immigrants to the South how to be Southern and upwardly mobile southerners how to be middle-class.

The members of any highly developed society can be classified in many ways, but, if we stick to the people who live in a courtly society, there are perhaps three groups: The first consists of those who know and play by the rules, in other words people who are basically sound, just, decent; the second are the churls who may be fine people but, because they do not know the rules, are viewed as fools or peasants.  Italians often call such a person "scemo" or fool, as I once heard Mt. T. say in the dubbed version of the A Team.  

The third group, less commonly encountered than fools but certainly more pervasive than the sound, are those who know the rules but apply them only to others.  I saw an interview with an aggressive black man--middle class, so far as I could tell--who had pushed his way through the line of people getting on a plane.  When asked what he was doing, he replied to the effect that he knew what other people were supposed to do, but he did whatever he wanted.  We often refer to such a person as a jerk, while Italians will call him "sciocco."

Shakespeare’s Touchstone, asked by a shepherd how he likes rustic life, gives a sort of parody of the courtly view:

"Truly, shepherd, in respect of itself, it is a good  life; but in respect that it is a shepherd's life, it is nought. In respect that it is solitary, I like it very well; but in respect that it is private, it is a very vile life. Now in respect it is in the fields, it pleaseth me well; but in respect it is not in the court, it is tedious."

When he learns that the shepherd has never been to court, he exclaims:

"Why, if thou never wast at court thou never saw'st good
manners; if thou never saw'st good manners, then thy manners must be wicked; and wickedness is sin, and sin is damnation. Thou art in a parlous state, shepherd."

Touchstone lies at the right end of the spectrum—a very narrow spot these days—while those who dictate manners and morals to the shepherds all sing to the same anti-human funeral dirge one of Anthony Burgess’ characters attributes (in Tremor of Intent, 1966) to the Sixties kids who now rule the world:

"These new youngsters, who could have all the sex they wanted, were very sexless really.  Their dances were narcissistic.  They were trying to make themselves androgynous.  Perhaps it was the first state in a long process of evolution which should end in a human worm.”

Since we in North America long ago reached that point of vermicular androgyny, the question of manners becomes more difficult, more complicated than teaching an unwashed Frankish baron how to behave at the court of Alexios Komnenos.  But, if any modern barbarian aspires to sprout arms, legs, and the organs that will distinguish him from her, he or she will need the sort of guidance I am proposing to offer.

In the second part of this preface, I propose to state clearly both the general conditions of life in any tribe of larger brained baboons and the excruciating conditions that our dominant class of vermicular androgynes imposes.  After this tedious exposition, we shall get down to such questions as whether or not people who use cell phones in restaurants should suffer summary and immediate executions,