As if etiquette isn't unpopular enough, Miss Manners occasionally has to argue against com-passion and forgiveness.
It's so unfair. She feels like the high-school debating champion who has been assigned "Resolved: The school year should be extended, homework should be increased, and instead of a senior prom, there should be a review session the night before graduation to check that seniors haven't forgotten what they crammed for examinations."Miss Manners against compassion? Isn't she always nagging people to do nice things for others and refrain from hurting their feelings? Isn't that what etiquette is all about?
What hurts Miss Manners' own feelings is the slanderous claim that given a conflict between the letter and the spirit of the etiquette rule, she would merrily throw over the principle to stick by the rule - especially if this offered an opportunity to stick it to someone else.
"I'd like to thank you now," a dignitary of Miss Manners' acquaintance told her guest of honor publicly during an official meal, "but I suppose Miss Manners would disapprove." Oh, right. As if it were Miss Manners' purpose in life to stamp out gratitude on technical grounds.
As for forgiveness, etiquette is the inventor of the apology, a device expressly designed to cancel misdeeds. Unlike its successor, the punitive damages settlement, the apology is available free (although flowers are always welcome). Etiquette also supplies the polite response to an apology, a gracefully murmured, "I'm sure it wasn't your fault," and "Of course, I knew there must be some explanation."
Yet - wait while Miss Manners takes a deep breath - there is such a thing as fostering bad behavior by misplaced compassion and forgiveness. There. She said it.
When all transgressions are automatically explained away and immediately wiped from the record, there soon is no standard of good behavior. The more tolerant and understanding the society becomes, the worse the situation seems to get.
People of widely varying political views have noticed that the criminal-justice system suffers from the same horrifying and unintended consequence. Miss Manners is not the only person to be puzzled that modern juries are increasingly sympathetic to criminals - and the society in general reluctant to hold criminals' records against them - while the citizenry from which those juries are drawn is increasingly terrorized by crime.
Her own habit of suspecting the best of people has her worrying that this comes from a kind but mistaken sense of manners. Decent people now feel obliged to consider everyone innocent after being proved guilty.
Faced with the individual instance, they generously make allowances - just the sort of allowances for which Miss Manners is always pleading. That the person who did wrong perhaps didn't realize it. Or probably had a good reason.
The catch is that when this is used as a general rule, rather than as an exception, it defines crime out of existence. Either there was a sociological or psychological reason for committing any crime, or it was an irrational act. It seems as wrong to condemn someone who was merely the instrument in an inevitable chain of cause and effect as it does to convict a crazy person. There isn't anyone else in the docket.
Miss Manners does not want to pursue this point in respect to crime. She tends to be an old softy herself. Only when the argument is used to disarm etiquette of its one protection - the option of showing disapproval of people who behave rudely, mostly by avoiding them - does she start foaming at the mouth.
When people maintain that you can't expect this person to be polite because he's had a difficult life, or that one not to be rude because she is too busy to be bothered with etiquette, they give notice that everyone has license to be rude.
When they treat transgressors as members of society in good standing, they destroy the usefulness of reputation as a guide to character. It sounds polite to whitewash blemished records, on the grounds that someone who did wrong "has suffered enough" (been caught) and "paid his debt to society" (been convicted). But if personal history never counts, society only ends up assessing people less fairly, by using that easily manipulated, ersatz substitute - image.
Miss Manners objects, and not only because society needs protection. She objects philosophically, too. So there.
The manners system, no less than that of morals, is based on the presumption that human beings have souls and free will and all that good stuff. Sure, they are influenced and handicapped by the circumstances of their lives. However, it is ultimately their ability to control their behavior, rather than merely to be acted upon by events, that gives human beings their dignity.
Puppets with no autonomous power, and therefore no responsibility, would not merit respect - that one offering of etiquette that everyone on the street admits craving. Their lives would be merely records of the way they were buffeted about by the past. No credit would be due to the virtuous. If there are no bad reputations, there can be no good ones either; if there are no villains, there are no heroes, either. There are merely the lucky and the unlucky.
Miss Manners isn't really arguing against compassion, which is one of the foundations of her calling. She is only warning against overusing it at the expense of another such value, respect.
Feeling incorrect? Address your etiquette questions (in black or blue-black ink on white writing paper) to Miss Manners, in care of this newspaper. The quill shortage prevents Miss Manners from answering questions except through this column.