What's wrong with a small practical joke that confronts people with their own harmless hypocrisy?
Such was the thought of a generally well-behaved newscaster (yes, Miss Manners realizes that her Gentle Readers may not believe that such a combination appears in nature) who decided to play a trick on her colleagues. The ruse was to catch them criticizing her in a way that they would not do to her face, thus showing the two-faced manner in which guests behave.The lady invited these people to her apartment for a luncheon meeting, served them bad food that she claimed with some pride to have cooked herself, and then left the room so they would be free to complain about the meal to one another, which they had not done in her presence. As expected, remarks were made, the guests being unaware that the hostess was recording what was said in her absence.
The lesson she wished to illustrate was about lying. "From the time we are very young," she pointed out, "we are conditioned and taught and given the habit of not saying what we really think. Most of us don't notice that we don't tell the truth about what we really feel."
Being given something unpleasant to eat and yet pretending to the hostess-cook to find it acceptable is, as the lady knew, a common example of such dissembling. And indeed, she had taped a perfect vignette showing the discrepancy between what people had really felt and what they had been willing to say to her.
According to news reports of the luncheon, some of them had a great deal to say later about what they really felt -- not about the food but about the experiment. One, in an equally common example of how we communicate to one another today, consulted a lawyer.
They felt betrayed. They felt worried about their jobs. They felt that their privacy had been invaded. They felt that trust had been destroyed. They felt that the ethics of their profession were in question.
Miss Manners can hardly blame them for being annoyed for being unwittingly involved. The fact that the food was purposely bad spared the hostess from the hurt that would be felt by a hostess who had genuinely worked to please her guests, but she had not spared them.
But what about the premise? Isn't anyone outraged at the idea the set-up was intended to demonstrate?
It is bad enough that the privacy and trust of these individuals had been shaken and that a hostess had committed the social crime of deliberately embarrassing the guests under her roof. It wasn't much of a joke, but it could be passed off as one.
It seems, however, that the intent was an attack on the chief peacekeeping device of society. "The whole point," said the perpetrator of the luncheon, who quickly retreated from the idea of airing the result and observed that her guests had been "just so sweet" to her, was that "everyone was caught in the act of being polite."
We can't have that, can we?
The "conditioning" of which she was speaking is courtesy.
Miss Manners wouldn't have thought that there was enough of it around to inspire a major effort to stamp it out.
Years of labeling kindness as lies and hypocrisy has had its effect. The mistaken notion that expressing one's feelings is a higher virtue than worrying about trampling on the feelings of others is commonly held. People who fail to understand that the complications of life often require choosing between incompatible virtues often now freely -- and smugly -- insult others on the grounds that they are paragons of honesty.
Judith Martin is the author of "Miss Manners Rescues Civilization" (Crown). (C) 1999 Judith Martin, Dist. by United Feature Syndicate Inc.