Weekend America

Bill's Values

Elbows on or off the Table?

Bill Radke

MARCH 1, 2008

Gemaldezyklus fur das Kartauserkloster Nuestra Sen

(Francisco de Zurbaran)

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Tonight, my family will observe our Saturday night tradition of sitting down and eating a homemade pizza. My one-year-old daughter won't notice where my elbows are. But my wonderful wife Sara will and she would prefer that I get in the habit of keeping my elbows off the table, since that's the etiquette we'll eventually teach our child.

I feel differently. Maybe it's because I come from a large family and my parents didn't have time to explain to me that, while slurping is perfectly acceptable in China, my hosts and I might feel more comfortable if I practiced the American style of silent dining. Instead, I got barked at from across the table.

So maybe I'm nursing some old sensitivities here, but I think it's more than that. Etiquette is something we pitch to our kids as being a matter of grace and consideration for others. I think this is true sometimes. But more often, I think etiquette is about conforming and seeking the approval of others. And I don't think it's worth the cost.

I'm doing a monthly series on family values. My daughter turns 13 months old this week, so these questions are still in her future, but they're important to me now -- being a parent has me thinking hard about which family values are, and aren't, worth passing on.

In a moment, I'll seek advice from someone who's written about the history of manners. But first, I talked about the value of etiquette with my wife, her father Max, and his wife Sharon. Sharon told me she grew up with "elbows on the table" and still does it. Max said it's not something he notices much but he didn't think he did it.

Sharon quietly corrected him: "Yes, you do."

They all agreed that the don't-slurp-your-food rule is a good one, even though not all cultures observe it.

I told them I'd been reading about where etiquette rules come from. Some people think we don't put elbows on the table because, while most animals don't have elbows, our close cousins the apes do. We don't like to think we're apes.

My wife Sara acknowledged that. "A lot of human existence is denying our animal nature. But I want to teach our kids what the social expectations are so they can go into the world prepared." (Max offered that wearing pants should be enough to distinguish us from the monkeys.)

Then I spoke with author Mark Caldwell, who wrote a book called "A Short History of Rudeness," about the evolution of manners. He told me my family conversation was a classic manners discussion. Caldwell says concerns about the decline of politeness have a lot to do with democracy and class mobility.

Hundreds of years ago, the gentry and the peasants didn't do a lot of mixing. But in modern, egalitarian America social groups intermingle. We combine high and low culture. We travel and meet folks who weren't raised like we were. All of this has led to clashes among people who have different ideas of politeness. Caldwell says these clashes seem jarring, and the so-called decline of civility gets a lot of media attention, but it's really not an emerging crisis. People have been wringing their hands about the state of manners since the Middle Ages and the hand-wringing continues today.

"Roughly every two or three years a poll is done asking Americans whether manners are deteriorating," said Caldwell. "And the answer is always yes, and it's never yes by less than 85 percent of the people responding. If that were true, if the perception were echoed in fact, then we'd all be attacking each other with our knives and forks. We wouldn't still be eating with them, we'd be using them to gouge each other's eyes out. But the evidence is that manners always somehow find a level. The problem is, it's always a different level. It's always dynamic. Something that was regarded as rude a few years ago -- the use of language is a classic example of that -- if you simply look at broadcast commercial television over a period of 15 years, language that would've brought the nation to a halt in 1965 is on every TV sitcom every night and nobody blinks an eye at it."

So, how do we react to these sliding standards? Some people say we should tighten our grip; put more emphasis on etiquette, so that we all speak a common language of politeness.

Caldwell associates this approach with the French. "A staple of French culture is that the children are taught very early how to behave around adults so you constantly see children at French restaurants and by the standards of Americans, they're very well behaved. And I've always had this fantasy in my mind that this is simply because they were acculturated. They were taken out to restaurants and they were accommodated. They were not instantly expected to adhere to adult standards. It's perfectly all right to color in your coloring book, for example. But then, I talked to a woman who wrote a book on French manners and she said, 'No that's not how they do it. They do it by being mean to the kids. They do it by beating them.' Whether that's true or not, I don't really know, and it's a generalization. But still, a perennial debate in the intellectual history of children is: 'What are they, in and of themselves? Are they nobly born human beings with completely social instincts or are that little savages?'"

I told Caldwell that after reading his book, I'd concluded I was in the Jean-Jacques Rousseau camp. He said, "Yes, Rousseau is considered the forefather of the idea that children are born noble and that any bad behavior is a result of them being corrupted by the world they're born into. But there's a completely opposite school of thought, which is that they are born untamed and they need to be instructed in the arts of civilization. And I think there's plenty of evidence for both, I don't think anybody has ever figured out whether it's both, one or neither."

So, what do I think is the nature of children? I ask myself this a lot, being a new parent. I don't think Jean-Jacques Rousseau was recommending that we indulge our children. In fact, he abandoned his own children, saying he would have been a lousy father and they were better off at the orphanage.

But he also wrote about the difference between self-love and self-consciousness. Healthy self-love comes to us naturally, while self-consciousness is a social evil that depends on comparing ourselves with others. Self-consciousness, he wrote, breeds contempt, hostility and frivolous competition. Now that's etiquette the way I remember it!

So, when my wife says she wants to teach our daughter table manners so she'll feel comfortable and confident in social settings, I know what she means -- I'm all for comfort and confidence. But rather than talk to my kid about etiquette, I plan to talk to her about mindfulness -- noticing how the people around her feel -- and I'm hoping she can take it from there. If not, don't worry -- I promise I'll keep her out of restaurants!

• Music Bridge:

  Do Deep-Sea Fish Dream of Electric Moles

  Artist: Michio Kurihara

  CD: Sunset Notes (Ba Da Bing)

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