[lit-ideas] Re: Giving Reasons and Morality
- From: "Mike Geary" <atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2006 10:38:59 -0500
Robert Paul's response to Walter's post made me think of how much energy goes
into the teaching of table manners. In fact, now that I think of it, the
teaching of "good manners" exacts an enormous amount of a parent's time and
energy -- maybe more than any other child-rearing activity. If children were
told not to kill people as often as they're told to say "Please" and "Thank
you", there'd probably be no wars. But of all the manners, it's table manners
that are apparently the most important. I was told not to pick my nose 4,380
times as a kid, but I was told to keep my elbows off the table 15,330 times.
Everyday, three times a day, it was the same: "Sit up straight, take your
elbows off the table, don't start eating until we've said Grace, you can't
leave the table until you've been excused, you won't be excused until you've
eaten your dinner, use your fork, don't play with you food, don't kick your
brother under the table!" As RP points out, no reasons are ever given for
these manners. But at a minimum disapproving stares were fast forthcoming at
every transgression. Manners are morality to a kid. But they cannot be
reasoned or intuited. I first realized this when I was teaching one of my kids
some table manners. He was eating soup and was dipping and lifting his spoon
from the middle of the bowl.
"No, no," I corrected him and modeled the proper method of eating soup, "you
should place the spoon into the bowl at the edge closest to you and lift it out
at the farthest edge."
"What?" his mother exclaimed, "That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever
heard."
Poor woman. She was raised in an upper-middle class manners-deprived
environment, I thought I had grown accustomed to the gaps in her suburban
education, but I was truly shocked that she didn't know this essential Postian
precept.
"It stands to reason," I said all smugly, "As a ship goes out to sea, I push
the spoon away from me."
"Oh, really?" my wife said. "I suppose your mother taught you that."
"Indeed she did. And it's stayed with me all these years -- it's just common
sense,"
"No doubt you think so," she said. "It makes as much sense as saying 'as the
ship comes in from sea, I pull the spoon toward me."
I would have ranted and raved, but I felt sorry for our son who was having to
pay the price of a mixed marriage.
Mike Geary
being strange in Memphis
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