Honesty vs. manners.

When I returned to work after my mother's death, a kindly coworker -- the first I saw that morning -- asked how I was doing.

"Lousy," I snapped. 

That was a long time ago, and I've regretted my honesty at that moment ever since.

We have an authenticity issue in our culture, but this is nothing new. As long as people have realized they could make stuff up and mask their thoughts we have known that people can lie. Even the animal kingdom is full of lies, camouflage, and duplicity. Toddlers come up with whoppers. All part of the human condition. 

But in the postwar years we got sick of politeness and manners that masked bad intent. That's fine with me; we would like our villains to be obvious and clear even though we don't wish to be ourselves. In the rush, though, to clear off phoniness, generations of Holden Caulfields wanted to throw out politeness entirely, to erase manners, to get through to the truth.   

To rip off the mask.

This has not worked well.

First of all, it is never a good idea to lose manners. Second, we don't really want as much honesty as we think we do. Finally, getting rid of good manners, we discover, does not even really lead to authenticity after all.

For a long time manners have been seen as foolish and artificial. Ron Barrett's comic strip Politenessman spent years showing manners as the enemy of intelligence -- although my experience and probably yours do not tell us that the stupider people are the more polite they are. Comedies of manners have a long history in our culture, making a lot of hay out of the artifice of manners. But if manners are unnatural, it is in the same way that steel and farms and music and performing arts are unnatural -- they don't exist in nature but we need them for civilization.

I think most of us with a little perspective see the value of manners. As Dave Foley's character Troy said in Blast from the Past, "[G]ood manners are just a way of showing other people we have respect for them. See, I didn't know that. I thought it was just a way of acting all superior." Manners have been taken for snobbery, for hiding ill will, for a means of lying, and indeed can be used for these things. But what they are mostly is the sign of respect we owe one another, which functions as the oil in the social machine. Maybe you'll get more honesty with no manners, but the respect wears away quickly and the machine breaks down anyhow.

As for the next issue -- how much honesty do we want? When someone asks you how you are doing, do you or this other person really want to talk about your bunions, your hemorrhoids, your large electric bill, your kid's shoplifting, your other kid's drinking, your shoddy brake pads, your sinus infection, your anxiety over the side effects of Cialis? I'm thinking probably not. Manners give us pleasant, general answers that can be used to indicate that things are not 100% swell but are okay. Which is also important, because the embarrassing examples I give are pretty common, but if they happened to me, I could not consider them proof that I had the worst life of anyone in the world. Manners can give us perspective and allow for gratitude.

Finally, I argue that trying to express your real, possibly miserable self also may lead to just more phoniness. Why? I know people who enjoy -- and I do mean enjoy -- a reputation for being grumpy or mean. (I was like that in college, for a while.) What do guys like that do when they're having a good day? Ruin the reputation? No, they hide their happiness under grouchiness, they act mean even when their hearts aren't in it. The "truth" has just become another mask.

So, by throwing away good manners we gain very little and we lose social cohesion. We can probably all agree that there's very little social cohesion about these days, and little to find good about that. Letting our terrible selfish insides out has not turned out to be the truth that sets us free, but rather just makes us enemies of one another some more.

I am at least trying to ask for the salt rather than grabbing for it. You have to start somewhere.