Once upon a
time during my semi-misspent youth as an activist I found myself at a luncheon
on Mackinac Island. My table companion, a patrician elder lady sat across the
table from me, protected by a barrier of a pair of matching table
settings. My setting included, and I
know because I counted, four forks, three spoons, three knives, 7 pieces of
china and 3 pieces of stemware.
I was duly
intimidated.
Now, I’d
heard the old silverware rule of “start at the outside and work your way in,”
but one of the knives was at the top of the setting, and I had no clue what to
do about the three goblets.
Rather than
panic, I decided to pretend I was Jane Goodell, and as the lady across the
table and I conversed I observed her very carefully. She seemed very comfortable in this
environment. I didn’t touch a single thing on my side of the table until after
she did.
At the end
of the luncheon, she complimented me on my manner, that I had been a perfect
gentleman, allowing her to set the pace for lunch and that I was very attentive
during our time together, a habit she thought had been lost on the younger
generation. I thanked her, wished her a good afternoon and thought to
myself “Lady, if you only knew!”
I have
always been somewhat fascinated by etiquette and social customs. For years I
have been collecting and reading books on “how to be a gentleman” from
different eras. One of my most treasured
books on the subject came to me as a gift from a cultural historian that I had
worked with during our time as historians at Jane Addams’s settlement house,
the Hull House.
At the end
of my time with the project Ellen handed me a package that clearly contained a
book. Of course I love books, so I was pretty happy to receive this. It wasn’t
until I opened it that I saw what a treasure it was. The book is called “The Golden Censer: the
Duties of Today, The Hopes of the Future,” written by a Mr. John McGovern,
published in Chicago in 1891.
It is a book
written in1881 on how to be a modern gentleman. How to navigate the waters of
the shifting of America from the rural to the urban landscape.
There are
chapters on governing oneself, and also chapters that explain the duty that a
man owes to his parents and his sister, which include your not falling in with
a bad crowd because it will damage her reputation, and how to be sure that she
marries a man who will treat her with the respect she deserves.
Nine years
later, Theodore Drieser will publish a book called “Sister Carrie,” a
cautionary tale of a young woman, who unsatisfied with her rural life, follows
her sister, safely married, to Chicago to pursue a more exciting life. I won’t
tell you the whole tale this morning, but let’s just say that the trouble
begins when she takes a position as a sales girl in a downtown department
store, which leads to inferences that because she works outside the home, she
might have some questionable morals.
Oh, Sister
Carrie is in for some wild times, with all that talking to male customers who
are buying gifts for their wives.
A more
universal exposure to etiquette for many might be the story of Pygmalion, the
play by George Bernard Shaw. In the
play, Professor of phonetics Henry Higgins makes a bet that he can train a
bedraggled Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, to pass for a duchess at an
ambassador's garden party by teaching her to assume a veneer of gentility, the
most important element of which, he believes, is impeccable speech. The play is
a sharp lampoon of the rigid British class system of the day and a commentary on
women's independence.
The story
was also popularized in song as “My Fair Lady,” which is how I first heard of
it.
Shaw’s
commentary on class system and etiquette, softened up a bit by Lerner and
Loewe’s treatment, still presents the idea that nice manners, a nicely
presented exterior, is morally bankrupt without an interior life that matches
it.
I guess it
could be stated, from the lessons learned there, that it is better to be gold
on the inside, that’s a little scruffy, than to be all polished on the outside,
and hollow.
And that’s
what I think most of us think of when we hear the word etiquette.
That it’s a
way, a very stiff and rigid way, to appear polished on the outside, no matter
how disordered things are inside. I think that we have found this way wanting,
and have frequently and consistently rejected it.
For some of
this, I’d like to lay the blame on President John F. Kennedy.
That’s
right, John F. Kennedy. You won’t often
hear him criticized from Unitarian Universalist pulpits, but you will today.
In his book
“Hatless Jack: The President, The Fedora, and The History of American Style,”
Neil Steinberg lays partial blame of the demise of the fedora squarely on the
head of John Kennedy’s fear of being photographed wearing a hat, lest he should
look like an old man.
With
presidents doing kooky things like not wearing hats at their inauguration, the
social fabric of the nation began to unspool.
Now, this is an obvious, and hopefully humorous oversimplification, but
there’s apparently some truth to it.
Etiquette
and social graces are not only suffocating and empty rituals. They are also
guidelines for safety in uncertain situations.
These rules
were devised in part to smooth over the rough edges of community life. Now,
yes, it’s true that some people went a little overboard and got all
persnickety, but at their core these guidelines are a help, not a hindrance to
society.
Amy
Vanderbilt wrote her book on etiquette, as Sarah shared with you earlier,
in 1958, compiling many social and societal norms. She knew that norms would change with time,
and said so in her introduction, but still she wanted to produce a helpful
guide to navigate the “modern” world of the 1950’s.
We have
become a world wherein we travel more than ever. In the song titled “The Long
Way ‘Round,” the trio known as the Dixie Chicks sing “My friends from high
school married their high school boyfriends. [They] moved into houses in the
same zip code where their parents live, but I, I could never follow. I hit the
highway in a pink RV with stars on the ceiling. Lived like gypsy, six strong
hands on the steering wheel.”
More and
more of us do this.
Maybe not in
a pink RV, but how many here in this room no longer live in a house in the same
zip code as your parents?
In our
travels, vacation or career inspired, we have encountered social norms. Some of
those norms are deeply ingrained and important. Such as never show the bottom
of your shoe to ANYONE in an Arabic culture. Others are also important, but
lack the insult of the shoe sole, for example, when I went to England for the
summer and my backpack was stolen. I had no idea how to call the police. There
wasn’t a sign at the Manchester airport that said “Welcome to Manchester, in
case of emergency dial 999 on your mobile phone.” No, it just said “Welcome to
Manchester.” Now a stolen, second-hand backpack, or rucksack as they kept
calling it, is not a big deal. But what if I had witnessed someone having a
heart attack, or a serious car accident. I would have stood there helpless.
Or social
norms can be as harmless and amusing as the whole “Pop” or “Soda” divide. I’ve
lived on both sides of that divide, and tried using “sodapop.” I still get
funny looks.
In fact
someone here at social hour corrected me when I asked for a “soda.” You mean a pop, don’t you they said with
grin.
So much for
diversity. ;-)
To get back
to President Kennedy for a moment, all kidding aside, his refusal to wear a hat
can easily be seen as him taking part in the modernist movement in
America. In Modernism, the past was
eschewed as unnecessary, irrelevant and in some ways extremely harmful.
You can see
this Modernist movement in all manner of disciplines. You can see it starting
with Frank Lloyd Wright in the early 1900’s, but really it’s extremely visible
in the work of Meis Van der Rohe’s buildings, a style called “New
Internationalism.”
In church
music, you can hear this movement anytime you listen to work by Randall
Thompson.
In
gentleman’s wear, you can see it by the lack of a hat.
People have
been wearing hats since the dawn of time and there are often good reasons to
wear them. There are religious reasons, status reasons and weather reasons to
wear them. But the Modern Man tossed them aside, along with his father’s
Oldsmobile.
It’s true
that not all things from the past deserve to be dragged forward into the life
of today. I can think of a number of classifications of people whose lives are
easier and better off then they were in the past. One of my favorite quotes
illustrates this quite nicely.
Beth
Lapides said "I was at a party where somebody was talking about 'The Good
Old Days.' I was like, 'Which Good Old Days? During the McCarthy Blacklist? Or
when blacks couldn't vote? When they burned women at the stake because they
were herbalists? THOSE Good Old Days?'"
But to throw
aside all of the past is a bad idea.
Because the
past had ideas and rules with which we knew to, or learned how to, interact.
Worse yet is
to paint, with a broad brush, the idea that old ways are universally bad and
oppressive. Without social expectations we have come to a place where store
clerks, like our dear old friend and lost soul Sister Carrie, no longer strive
toward customer service, but rather, they spend time at the counter texting on
their phones and talking with one another, ignoring the store’s customers.
I heard a
story about an event like this just this week.
When the
remove our cultural context completely, as Modernism has tried to do, we are
left swimming in a turbulent lake of unknowns.
This fall,
in a new show called #selfie, the story of Pygmalion is once again
reconstituted. The series follows the life of Eliza Dooley, a woman obsessed
with the idea of achieving fame through the use of social media platforms,
including Instagram where she posts selfies. She begins to worry that
"friending" people online is not a substitute for real friendship,
and she seeks help from Henry Higgs, a marketing image guru.
It seems
that every thing old might indeed be new again.
In pretty
much every one of the books I read on the art of being a gentleman the advice
given is that it the responsibility of a gentleman to set the stage so that
each person in his presence is comfortable. One cannot make another feel
comfortable, of course, but there is a responsibility to think of others first,
to consider the needs of your meeting-mates, your date, the random person that
you encounter on the street.
This idea is
etiquette at it’s finest.
Some rules
may feel antiquated to us, and perhaps they are. After all, Amy Vanderbilt
herself wrote as the dictionary changes over time to reflect the malleable
English language, so too must the book of etiquette.
Like the
dictionary, though, it ought not be tossed out completely because it feels like
something from a by-gone era.
It’s true,
gentlemen don’t wear hats anymore, well they’re starting to start again,
thankfully! I mean, a hat is cool! (Though I don’t know about fezzes…) And
ladies certainly don’t wear gloves and carry matching bags anymore. In fact, many
women bristle at the very term “ladies.”
There are
many examples of what happens as the guidelines of etiquette shift. One of them
happens right here in this sanctuary every Sunday.
It is
conundrum of clapping.
We clap at
concerts, right? But do we clap at church? If by showing either our exuberance,
or our delight, are we turning church into a performance? Some would have us
never clap in church because to do so would be breaking the spirit of the
gravitas of church, and some would clap in church, demonstrating how fully they
are moved by the experience of church.
We can
either see rules of etiquette as things that strangulate us, or we can see them
as helps along the way to navigating a life wherein the people you meet are
more likely to feel comfortable in your presence.
As Unitarian
Universalists we strive to be more welcoming to those around us. The new comer
to our church, the new comer to our neighborhood, and the new comer to our
nation.
A common
etiquette makes it easier to be a new person in a new situation.
If you
forget all the rest of the funny rules about how far a stamp should be from the
corner of your letter, or how one should introduce a baroness to a duchess,
don’t worry! I mean those things are kind of fun to know, but no one should
sweat that kind of stuff, let alone be offended by the misapplication of such
rules. But always, always let kindness be your guide in your interactions with
others.
Be kind to
the stranger.
Be kind to
your friend.
Be kind to
the store clerk, who may not be as attentive or kind to you in return as you
like.
Be kind to
those you love
Even those who you used to love.
Even those who you used to love.
And be kind
to yourself.
Blessed be.
© The Rev. Joseph M Cherry
October 19, 2014
Written for and Presented to
The Unitarian Universalist Society of Cleveland
