Did 80’s Manners Kill Smoking Customs?

Smoking in public is again becoming bad manners. The private label “impolite” may ultimately have more effect on people’s behavior than the surgeon general’s label “unhealthy.”

BOSTON The man seated at the table on my right is smoking. Actually, he is just holding. The cigarette is smoking. Nevertheless, due to my own charm and magnetic appeal, the smoke has chosen to drift directly from his left hand to my right eye.

With a gesture born of years of experience, I subtly wave my menu at the offending current. The man doesn't notice. I then lean over, tap him on the shoulder and ask if he would mind redirecting his smoke. The man apologizes sheepishly, and shifts the cigarette from one hand to the other.

The smoke now begins to drift into the eyes of another diner. This man tips his chair back, touches the smoker on the arm and asks if he would please rechannel the flow. The smoker sighs and with a gesture of defeat, squashes the glowing offender into the glass ashtray.

At the moment his cigarette meets its premature end, it occurs to me that the same vignette is being repeated a thousand times a day in a thousand restaurants, offices, airports, and shopping lines.

The smokers who once owned the air are being pushed back into special zones and corners and closets. They can be seen searching desperately for ashtrays, stepping out for smokes, and holding their cigarette over their heads, directly under an exhaust fan. It's all a bit like watching the Virginia Slims reel go into reverse. Smoking in public is again becoming bad manners. The private label “impolite” may ultimately have more effect on people’s behavior than the surgeon general’s label “unhealthy.”

If so, it won't be the first time that social pressure has made social history. This is precisely what happened to an ancient and honorable habit known as spitting. In Norbert Elias’ book, “The History of Manners,” he describes a host of changing attitudes and habits from medieval times to ours. He even gives a brief chronology of how spitting became a victim of “civilization.”

Medieval etiquette authors started with the basics: “Do not clean your teeth with your knife. Do not spit on or over the table.” Spitting under the table in those days was allowed even among the best company.

Sometime during the 16th century, our genteel ancestors were being advised to refrain from spitting during mealtime. By the 17th century, they were admonished not to spit on the ground.

The spit repression went on for centuries. In 1859, when spittoons had become a proper substitute for the ground or the napkin, one arbiter of good taste was advising: “Spitting is at all times a disgusting habit. I need say nothing more than never indulge in it.” Fifty years later by 1910, even the spittoon had vanished like some relic of a coarser age.

By now, public spitting itself has virtually disappeared except among the crude, the coughing, and the baseball players. Even writing about it feels vaguely improper. We now consider spitting “uncivilized” and this whole change in social behavior is called “progress.”

As Elias describes the evolution of manners: “The decisive role (was) played in this civilizing process by a very specific change in the feelings of shame and delicacy.”

Admittedly, during the past half-century smoking flourished. There was little support in this era for the virtues of “shame and delicacy.” People worried more about repression than rudeness. I suspect that smoking was an example of pseudo-freedom.

But now, with the help of medical researchers, civilization is creeping up again on the tobacco barbarians. You can see it in clear signs — “Smoking Not Permitted” - and dirty looks. The balance of embarrassment has shifted from non-smokers to smokers. The balance of rudeness has shifted from the critics of smoke to the purveyors of smoke.

Will smoking go the way of spitting, from rude to extinct? Remember what happened to the spittoon. If you have any stock in ashtrays, sell. — By Ellen Goodman for the Boston Globe, 1982

 🍽Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber of The RSVP Institute of Etiquette, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia

When Respect Grew for Manners

Erasmus of Rotterdam ~ The Father of Children's Etiquette Instructors … The bronze statue of Erasmus, in Rotterdam. Created by Hendrick de Keyser in 1622, it replaced a stone statue from 1557.

New Respectability For Manners; Scholars Tackle a Topic Long Thought Too Trivial for All but Fussbudgets

The subject of manners once seemed worthy of serious attention. The authors of the Talmud took up such topics as burping, yawning and bad breath. Erasmus wrote the 16th-century equivalent of a best seller on civility and Edmund Burke considered manners more important than laws.

But somewhere between the Renaissance and the late 20th century, the topic got a bad name. Manners came to be viewed as trivial, hypocritical and superficial. Heavy thinkers abandoned manners to the authors of etiquette books, with their fussing about finger bowls and the evils of blowing on soup.

Now an interest in the subject, which once preoccupied the middle classes, is back in vogue, and not just among politicians like Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who earlier this week went so far as to invoke Plato in his continuing quest to make New York City a more orderly, civil and, well, mannerly place.

Judith Rodin, the president of the University of Pennsylvania, has convened a 48-member national commission, made up heavily of academics, that is in the midst of a three-to-five-year study of what some believe is an explosion of incivility degrading the quality of public life.

At Johns Hopkins University, P. M. Forni, a professor of Italian literature and culture, has organized a wide-ranging project that includes a course on civility, manners and politeness. It also includes research on civility in schools and in health care, and efforts to encourage scholarly work in the field.

Last fall, the university offered the course not only to its own undergraduates but also to inmates of a maximum-security prison in Jessup, Md. Having spent the semester studying texts like Erving Goffman's, “Interaction Ritual,” both groups came together at the end to discuss what they had learned.

And next month, Johns Hopkins plans to hold a three-day, international symposium titled “Reassessing Civility: Forms and Values at the End of the Century,” with speakers ranging from historians who have written on manners to Judith Martin, the author of the Miss Manners columns and books.

“Manners were expelled from respectable scholarly thinking: ‘Who would be interested in a stupid thing like that?’” Ms. Martin said in a recent interview. “Never mind that the answers are Burke, Mill, Emerson, Aristotle, Cicero, Castiglione, Erasmus, Locke.”

There is indeed a long tradition of serious writing on manners, not the least of which were three centuries of “courtesy books” originally written to instruct young princes but later directed to the sons of the upper classes.

One of the best known of the genre was Erasmus’, “De Civilitate Morum Puerilium” (“On Civility in Boys”), first published in 1526, which went into more than 130 editions and covered everything from dental hygiene and the importance of clean fingernails at the dinner table to when and how to spit.

A wide-eyed look suggests stupidity, Erasmus advised. If mucus falls on the ground while blowing one’s nose with two fingers, step on it, fast. When offered a communal tankard, wipe your mouth first. If food sticks to your teeth, remove it (with a quill or a toothpick, not a knife).

“The whole idea of manners was linked to civilization,” said Richard L. Bushman, a Columbia University historian and the author of “The Refinement of America” (Alfred A. Knopf, 1992). “It would be listed right along with the growth of art, science and law as a sign that we were civilized.”

But that view changed, at least among scholars. Michael Curtin, a historian in Oakland, Calif., has traced the shift to the late-18th and early-19th centuries, when he believes the long association between manners and morals was irrevocably broken.

In an article published in the Journal of Modern History in September 1985, Mr. Curtin in particular blamed Lord Chesterfield's courtesy book, “Letters to His Son,” published in 1774, which Mr. Curtin said “appeared to represent manners at their most cynical, expedient and immoral light.” In the book, manners seemed to be entirely in the service of self-interest and self-aggrandizement rather than of any broader civic good.

At the same time, Mr. Curtin suggested, Romanticism helped doom the courtesy book. Cosmopolitan standards of civility became suspect. As he put it, the Romantic quest for deep and authentic feeling, uninhibited by propriety and social convention, was destructive of manners.

Others, including Mr. Bushman, trace the decline of serious attention to the subject to the rejection of the formality and triviality of late-Victorian manners. “We had to reduce it in scholarly importance, so we just cast it aside,” he said. “They were seen as something curious and quaint.”

But in 1978, a history of manners that was then 40 years old, “The Civilizing Process” (Blackwell) by Norbert Elias, was published in English for the first time. Many scholars say has since inspired new interest in manners and helped transform the way they are seen.

First published in German in the late 1930's, the book followed the evolution of manners in Western Europe since the Middle Ages. Mr. Elias, a sociologist and social historian, tracked what he described as a rising level of shame about bodily functions and restraint in public, and traced it to the development of the modern state.

The emergence of the state, with its monopoly on violence and the growing interdependence of its members, necessitated greater degrees of individual self-control, Mr. Elias suggested. People began to modify their approach to everything from eating and scratching to spitting and sex.

Tracing the Fork And the Spittoon

Mr. Elias tracked such things as the arrival of the fork at the end of the Middle Ages, which put distance between diner and dined upon; the increasing restrictions on the way knives were used, the introduction of the nightdress, the handkerchief, the chamber pot, the spittoon.

Since the book’s appearance in English, a number of scholars, many of them influenced by Mr. Elias, have published books that have tended to view manners as a source of power or political authority and as a reflection of larger tensions in developing societies.

“Elias opened the door to a new kind of cultural history,” John F. Kasson, a historian at the University of North Carolina, has written. That kind of history, he said, is “keenly attuned to changing standards of emotional expression, bodily control and personal interaction, and seeking to correlate these with larger changes in social structure.”

In his own book, “Rudeness and Civility” (The Noonday Press, 1990), an examination of manners in 19th-century urban America, Mr. Kasson challenges the idea that so-called improvements in manners necessarily represented an unalloyed good.

“I wish to stress how established codes of behavior have often served in unacknowledged ways as checks against a fully democratic order,” Mr. Kasson wrote, “and in support of special interests, institutions of privilege, and structures of domination.”

As an example, he cites the case of the Astor Place Opera House, built in New York City in the 1840’s to embody the latest standards of etiquette and refinement. The house was “aristocratized,” with open seating eliminated and red damask seats sold only by subscription.

To exclude women of dubious respectability, Mr. Kasson writes, women were admitted only in the company of men. Men were expected to comply with a strict dress code that included evening dress, a fresh vest and kid gloves — a calculated slap, Mr. Kasson says, at working- and lower-class men.

“To look at manners in the 19th century is to realize that so-called good manners were often at the expense of a lot of deference to a broadly speaking privileged middle class,” Mr. Kasson said in an interview. “If class is the dirty secret in American life, manners is a way we launder it.”

Mr. Kasson is hardly the only current scholar of manners who acknowledges a debt to Mr. Elias. Another is Nancy Bentley, an assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, who in 1995 published “The Ethnography of Manners” (Cambridge), an analysis of the fiction of Henry James and Edith Wharton.

“People like Elias say there is a doubleness about manners,” Ms. Bentley said recently. “They are really about how you get along in a group. At the same time, these acts of gentility are also codes that do reinscribe power in some ways, even if they make for more peaceful coexistence.”

Table manners, for example, thus become arbitrary codes. “Insiders know these codes,” Ms. Bentley said. “If you don't, you won't be recognized as an insider. It becomes a way that you can have a kind of identity and recognition and joining of power that outsiders aren't able to claim.”

Ms. Bentley's sister, Amy Bentley, a cultural historian and assistant professor in the department of nutrition and food studies at New York University, has studied table manners in some detail. In a recent interview, she said she shared the view that manners are about power.

“They're necessary, but the ways they’re devised and developed can be about distancing people from one another,” she said. “Who is at the head of the table, who is carving, who waits until they are spoken to — all those kinds of rules about gender, age and other things.

“So I'm not anti-manners,” she said. “Because manners are good. But the ways that they've been used or developed can show interesting things about what people were anxious about in the society and who they were anxious about.”

A correction was made on

March 5, 1998: An article in the Arts and Ideas pages on Saturday about recent scholarly interest in manners referred incorrectly to the role of P. M. Forni in starting the civility project at Johns Hopkins University. He was one organizer; he shared that role with Giulia Sissa, a classics professor. –By Janny Scott, NYT, 1998

 🍽️Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia

Dining History and Knife Etiquette

A silver and steel “bird” knife, which was a forerunner of the serrated-edged, steak knife
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According to Tallement Des Réaux, Richelieu was responsible for the rounding off the points on table knife blades in France in 1669, apparently to prevent their use as toothpicks, but probably also to discourage assassinations at meals. It became illegal for cutlers to make pointed dinner knives or for innkeepers to lay them on their tables. Other countries soon followed suit. Pointed knives for all diners were later to return to the dining room table, but as steak-knives, which have a special image...” 
– Margaret Visser

Ever since the 16th century there has been a taboo against pointing a knife at our faces. It is rude, of course, to point at anybody with a knife or a fork, or even a spoon; it is also very bad form to hold a knife and fork in the fists so that they stand upright. But pointing a knife at ourselves is viewed with special horror, as Norbert Elias has observed. I think that one reason for this is that we have learned only very recently not to use our knives for placing food in our mouths: we are still learning, and we therefore reinforce our decision by means of a taboo. We think we hate seeing people placing themselves even in the slightest jeopardy, but actually we fervently hope they will not spoil the new rule and let us all down by taking to eating with their knives again.

For the fact is, that people have commonly eaten food impaled on the points of their knives, or carried it to their mouth as balanced on blades; the fork is in this respect merely a variant of the knife. With the coming of forks, knife points became far less useful than they had been; their potential danger soon began in consequence to seem positively barbaric. The first steps in the subduing of the dinner knife were taken in the 17th century, when the two cutting edges of the dagger-like knife were occasionally reduced to one. The blunt side became an upper edge, which is not threatening to the fingers when they are holding knives in the polite manner.

According to Tallement Des Réaux, Richelieu was responsible for the rounding off the points on table knife blades in France in 1669, apparently to prevent their use as toothpicks, but probably also to discourage assassinations at meals. It became illegal for cutlers to make pointed dinner knives or for innkeepers to lay them on their tables. Other countries soon followed suit. Pointed knives for all diners were later to return to the dining room table, but as steak-knives, which have a special image, linked deliberately with red meat and “getting down to business” when hungry. They are still quite rustic in connotation. — Margaret Visser, The Rituals of Dinner

Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia

Renaissance Etiquette and Manners

Etiquette and manners were a response to the violence and crude behaviors run rampant in burgeoning European cities. They were  the means of reinforcing social order and distinguishing the privileged class from everyone else. It was at the dinner table, that these newly defined codes of conduct were especially important.

Italy was one of the leaders of the 16th century and 17th century cultural revolution, and that included table manners. Italian poet Giovanni della Casa advised in “Galateo,” his 1558 book on manners: “One should not comb his hair nor wash his hands in public... The exception to this is the washing of the hands when done before sitting down to dinner, for then it should be done in full sight of others, even if you do not need to wash them at all, so that whoever dips into the same bowl as you will be certain of your cleanliness.” 

Taking into account that one's hands were also one’s “utensils” for hundreds of years, this advice was truly of utmost importance. In his study on the social customs of this period, sociologist Norbert Elias noted that “In good society one does not put both hands into the dish. It is most refined to use only three fingers of the hand. ... Forks scarcely exist, or at most for taking meat from the dish.”

Some of the earliest known uses of forks with food occurred in Ancient Egypt, where large forks were used as cooking utensils. The personal table fork was most likely invented in the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire, where they were in common use by the 4th century, though the origins may even go back to Ancient Greece, before the Roman period. By the 9th century, according to records, a similar utensil known as a barjyn was in limited use in Persia within some elite circles. By the 10th century, the table fork was in common use throughout the Middle East. Forks were originally viewed by most in Western Europe, as excessively refined. Forks were also viewed, in the case of men, as a sign of effeminacy.

The custom of Western Europeans using table forks as dining implements began in Italy. They were at first a hit, but forks were slow to catch on in Northern Europe. The use of forks to get food from plate to mouth, didn't gain wide acceptance in Northern Europe until the 17th century—and even then, only the well-to-do could afford them. 

Spoons were communally used—making the etiquette of eating soups a delicate matter. "If what is given is rather fluid," Dutch theologian Erasmus of Rotterdam writes, "take it on a spoon for tasting and return the spoon after wiping it on a napkin.

Some human behaviors were deemed permissible at the dinner table. On passing gas, Erasmus wrote, “If it is possible to withdraw, it should be done alone. But if not, in accordance with the ancient proverb, let a cough hide the sound.” Most modern etiquette books advise that “civilized folk will protect others from any sounds or smells that may be displeasing.”

This isn't to say that all Renaissance manners are indeed outdated. On respecting fellow diners’ personal space, Giovanni Della Casa wrote, “It is also an unsuitable habit to put one's nose over someone else's glass of wine or food to smell it.” And Erasmus advised, “It is rude to offer someone what you have half eaten yourself; it is boorish to redip half-eaten bread into the soup.” 

Even modern science shows that a great means of spreading bacteria, is re-dipping partially-eaten foods. It certainly gives you an idea of what Renaissance society was trying to improve upon—and how far we've come since that time period. –Some of our sources; Smithsonian.com, 2011 and leitesculinaria.com

Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber is the Site Editor for Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia

Norbert Elias and Etiquette

Norbert Elias meeting someone with a civilized handshake, 1987 ~ Über den Prozess der Zivilisation, or The Civilizing Process, by Norbert Elias (first published in German in 1939, then into English in  1969) describes the growth of civilization in Western Europe. Known as his greatest work, it provides a detailed study of the development of Western society's accepted code of manners and social behaviors, giving a historical perspective of the civilizing process and the process of expansion from the etiquette of nobility, or central governing authority, to the bourgeoisie, tracing the civilizing of man and manners, from the late Middle Ages to the 20th century.

Review of  The Civilizing Process 

One of the most interesting accounts of the rise of modern culture and politics in the past fifty years was Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process. His study begins by asking how the “modes of behaviour considered typical of people who are civilized in a Western way” were defined as the standard of civilized conduct. Through a careful survey of etiquette books and other documents dealing with topics like table manners, blowing one’s nose, spitting, the deportment of the body, facial expressions, and the control of bodily functions, Elias argues that Westerners went through a gradual and uneven affective transformation during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By the end of the process, behaviors considered normal in the Middle Ages had been ruled “barbarous,” and the civilized separation from barbarity signaled major changes in feelings of delicacy, shame, refinement, and repugnance.

Erasmus’s highly popular treatise De civilitate morum perilium (1530) stands at the threshold of this development. On the one hand, Erasmus deals with bodily functions with a medieval candor that would make later generations blanch. He states his disagreement with those who recommend repressing a fart “by compressing the belly,” warning that such a practice is unhealthy and criticizing “fools who value civility more than health” by suppressing natural sounds and smells. If gas can be expelled without sound, Erasmus writes, “that is best. But it is better that it be emitted with a noise than that it be held back.” Vomit, further, is not disgusting; what is disgusting is “holding the vomit in your throat.”

Yet, at the same time, Erasmus was seeking to inculcate something of “modern” civilite. One’s step should be “neither too slow nor too quick,” for either extreme is vulgar. Erasmus’s book was part of a trend that increasingly turned away in disgust at forms of behavior that appear to have been normal among medievals. Giovanni Della Casa’s Galateo (1558), for instance, urges “modest, honourable” men not “to relieve nature in the presence of other people, nor to do up his clothes afterwards in their presence.” It is also bad form to “hold out the stinking thing for the other to smell, as some are wont, who even urge the other to do so, lifting the foul-smelling thing to his nostrils.”

Etiquette books inculcated a new style of living, deliberately distanced from the earthy rusticity of medieval manners and from the lower, peasant classes:Modes of behaviour which in the Middle Ages were not felt to be in the least distasteful have increasingly become surrounded by feelings of distaste. The standard of delicacy finds expression in corresponding social prohibition. These taboos, so far as can be ascertained, are nothing other than ritualized or institutionalized feelings of displeasure, distaste, disgust, fear or shame, feelings which have been socially nurtured under quite specific conditions and which are constantly reproduced, not solely but mainly because they have become institutionally firmly embedded in a particular ritual, in particular forms of conduct.

Elias argues that these apparently minor changes were crucial in the rise of modern states. Changes in behavior helped form a courtly class and the extension of central courts’ power throughout various European societies. Beginning at court, refined behavior spread throughout society through the increasingly complex webs of social connection and interdependence that bound the court to the rest of society. If one wanted to be acceptable in court society, one needed to move, gesture, and speak with civility, and anyone interested in moving upward in the social hierarchy could not afford to be excluded from court society. New standards of behavior became badges of inclusion in court society, and were gradually internalized.

Norbert Elias (1897-1990)

Over time hardy warriors were transformed into effete courtiers. Medieval noblemen were largely independent of other noblemen, and largely independent of peasants and burghers. They expressed themselves with a swashbuckling freedom: An insulted knight struck out violently in defense of his honor. As victors emerged from the competition among well-armed medieval nobles, however, royal courts increasingly held a monopoly of force, and nobles were increasingly dependent upon kings, and on other nobles and even bourgeois tradesman and bureaucrats, for their own social standing and power. To get near the centers of power, one had to adopt a particular regimen of behavior, a regimen that held violent passions in check and maintained an air of politeness. Competitive politeness replaced the old military competition.

This situation required a complex response: On the one hand, nobles could maintain their status only by distinguishing themselves in dress and deportment from the rising bourgeois, while at the same time it was in the interests of nobles to convince everyone (not just nobles) that noble standards were the obvious standards of civilized conduct. These social pressures required courtiers to act and speak in stereotyped ways, suppressing not only their instincts for revenge but also lower bodily functions. The same regimen foregrounded refined bodily movements and conversation that did not include discussion of hemorrhoids, the smell of feces, constipation, or gas. Men who farted and laughed were no longer going to have a place at the king’s table. The transformation of manners is, for Elias, part of the story of the political centralization of Western states, and their monopolization of force, during the early modern period.

“Cultivation” came to be identical to the adoption of certain rituals of conduct, internalized in feelings of shame and revulsion, and this process is connected to the formation of a refined upper class that exercises power within a society as the constraint on body and emotions becomes a mark of membership in elite society.

A 2011 Review by Peter J. Leithart, for CredendaAgenda.org

Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J Graber, is the Site Editor for the he Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia

Understanding Etiquette's History

A few thoughts on etiquette from various authors ...

“Freeze or get stabbed, mate. It's your choice.”

“Politeness is a signal of readiness to meet someone half-way; the question of whether politeness makes society cohere, or keeps other people safely at arms length, is actually a false opposition. Politeness does both, and that is why it's so frightening to contemplate losing it. Suddenly, the world seems both alien and threatening and all because someone’s mother never taught him to say, ‘Excuse me’ or ‘Please.’ There is an old German fable about porcupines who need to huddle together for warmth, but are in danger of hurting each other with their spines. When they find the optimum distance to share each other's warmth without putting each other’s eyes out, their state of contrived cooperation is called good manners. Well, those old German fableists certainly knew a thing or two. When you acknowledge other people politely, the signal goes out, 'I'm here. You're there. I'm staying here. You’re staying there. Aren’t we both glad we sorted that out?’ When people don't acknowledge each other politely, the lesson from the porcupine fable is unmistakeable. ‘Freeze or get stabbed, mate. It's your choice.’” From Lynne Truss’, 2005’s “Talk to the Hand”

Distancing of oneself from others was its consummate expression?

“To enact their existence, to demonstrate their prestige, to distance themselves from lower-ranking people and have this distance recognized by the higher-ranking – all this was purpose enough in itself. But in etiquette this distancing of oneself from others as an end in itself  finds its consummate expression.” From Norbert Elias, 1983 “The Court Society”

Etiquette in these cases is merely current usage -- doing things in a way that is generally accepted today.

“What is Etiquette? It is often and glibly said that etiquette is merely a matter of innate consideration and kindness. This is, to my mind, a misleading oversimplification. One part of etiquette – manners – could certainly be so defined.

“Manners, however, are just one part of etiquette. Etiquette is also form – the specific and rigid form established by tradition for answering a wedding invitation, for instance, for introducing a church official, or for having your name engraved on a visiting card. These are all matters of form, and your innate consideration and kindness won't give you the answer to a single one of your questions about them.

“Nor are manners and form all there is to etiquette. As you will see, a great deal of the information in this book does not come under the heading of either form or manners. How to act in a business office, how to serve a buffet meal, and how to get along with your baby sitter are not determined by manners alone, and have certainly not solidified into rigid manners of form. Etiquette in these cases is merely current usage – doing things in a way that is generally accepted today.

“This book, therefore, covers etiquette in its most complete sense – in the sense of manners (our relations with other people), of form (our respect for convention), and of usage (our knowledge of how things are done today).  I hope that this book, either as a reference book for answering a specific question, or as a description of social customs of contemporary Americans, will help you fit comfortably, smoothly, and with confidence into any group of people you will find yourself among, in any part of America.” – From Frances Benton's 1956, “Etiquette - The Complete Modern Guide for Day-to-Day Living the Correct Way”

A knight receiving accolades for his success ~ “The original etiquette manuals of Western civilization were in fact success manuals.” 

“‘It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct,’ Sigmund Freud said.

“There’s always a tension between how much we should follow our instincts and how much we should yield to social conventions. But at times like ours, the tendency is to tilt too far toward our instincts, since the conventions are changing fast and there’s no consensus about them anyway. There’s a risk in that. You don’t know whom you might be offending or how you might be sabotaging your own success.

“The original etiquette manuals of Western civilization were in fact success manuals. As author Steven Pinker notes, they taught knights and nobles how to conduct themselves in the court of the king—which is where we get the concepts of ‘courtly’ and ‘courtesy.’” Rob Asghar, 2014, Forbes.com Contributor

 🍽Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber of The RSVP Institute of Etiquette, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia