-
Recently Written
-
Blogroll
-
Reads
-
memeorandum
-
Admin
Search
the tyee
-
Nov
15
Grazing
November 15, 2007 |
Dalrymple: The idea that one’s pleasure or desire of the moment is the only thing that counts leads to antisocial behaviour. Let me give a small and seemingly trivial example of this.About half of British homes no longer have a dining table. People do not eat meals together - they graze, finding what they want in the fridge, and eating in a solitary fashion whenever they feel like it (which is usually often), irrespective of the other people in the household.
This means that they never learn that eating is a social activity (many of the prisoners in the prison in which I worked had never in their entire lives eaten at a table with another person); they never learn to discipline their conduct; they never learn that the state of their appetite at any given moment should not be the sole consideration in deciding whether to eat or not. In other words, one’s own interior state is all-important in deciding when to eat. And this is the model of all their behaviour.
Young patients now eat in doctors’ offices; they eat above all in the street, where of course they drop litter as unselfconsciously as horses defecate. This is not evil, though it is antisocial, but you can easily see how people who attach such importance to their own desires, and lack any other criteria to help them decide to behave, come to do evil. front page via Edward Michael George
At our house we have a dinner table. And around that dinner table we have rules. Some are about using utensils - which is a bit tough for Max at just four but he tries and that is what counts - others are about conversation and the general idea that talking and listening are both required. Some are about wearing a shirt and, well, pants, some are about saying “thank you” and “please”. When we can we dim the lights and light candles. And, for, say, twenty minutes, a certain culture, a particular set of manners, are passed from our parents to our children.
Comments
7 Comments so far
My boyhood was a happy one, but marred by an almost anal insistence on rules at the dinner table. No leaning over! No elbows on the table! Don’t eat one thing on the plate first! No leaving anything on the plate! No shovelling!
Jeebus, it was enough to make a person a libertarian. I hope you’re showing a little balance when you lay down the law, Jay, or comments like this might appear in a blog combox long after you’ve passed on.
I liked this quote best:
One reason for the epidemic of self-destructiveness that has struck British, if not the whole of Western, society, is the avoidance of boredom. For people who have no transcendent purpose to their lives and cannot invent one through contributing to a cultural tradition (for example), in other words who have no religious belief and no intellectual interests to stimulate them, self-destruction and the creation of crises in their life is one way of warding off meaninglessness. I have noticed, for example, that women who frequent bad men - that is to say men who are obviously unreliable, drunken, drug-addicted, criminal, or violent, or all of them together, have often had experience of decent men who treat them well, with respect, and so forth: they are the ones with whom their relationships lasted the shortest time, because they were bored by decency. Without religion or culture (and here I mean high, or high-ish, culture) evil is very attractive. It is not boring.
Trying to wrap my head around this idea that a happy childhood can be marred by dinner table etiquette.
Dawg, it’s obvious by reading the comments you leave at other sites and also the posts at your own site that you have been instilled with extraordinarily good manners. While many on the right don’t agree with your opinions, most welcome your well-mannered presence in any online discussion. This places you in sharp contrast to Robert McClelland who wouldn’t know a good mannerism if it bit him in the ass. Anyone want to place any bets on what mealtimes were like in his home?
Sean, that’s very complimentary, although I’ve been known to fall below those standards. : )
My issue is this. Good manners come down to consideration and respect for others. Period. But “table manners” are a tangle of rules and conventions that, if Georg Simmel is to be believed (”The sociology of the meal”) have a lot to do with maintaining class distinctions. They often have very little to do with basic consideration, and a lot to do with formality. Elbowing you, or splashing, or talking loudly and too much, are obviously disrespectful–I happen to believe in the importance of commensalism. But using the fork in the right hand? Eating my meat first? Not so much.
Yikes, that’ll teach me to name-drop. I meant Norbert Elias. Big on class and manners.
I shall certainly have to read Mr. Elias. Good table manners are not formal table manners; rather they are the consideration and thoughtfulness which are the foundations of the rest of a gentle person’s conduct.
(Which is not to say that formal manners do not have their place - one advantage of learning which fork to use is that you are never discountanced by situations in which such things matter. (Though the rule - “watch what your hostess does” - has saved me some embarassment when confronted with things like two fish forks.)
There is a rather interesting borderline between manners and etiquette with the later being class bound while the former is simple consideration. Both can be learned at the dinner table.