Freddie, that ubiquitous ombudsman, has taken me out for a ride for bashing Martin Buber. I get the feeling our disagreement isn’t about Buber anymore, so don’t feel any special pressure to catch up before proceeding.
The basic disagreement between us is this: Should we try to love our fellow men or simply treat them with courtesy? (Or, should we make the public sphere more formal or more authentic?) Freddie, being on the side of love and authenticity, points out that, while my "society of well-mannered automatons" may get rid of vulgar sins, it gives suave evildoers plenty of room to breathe:
The fact of the matter is that manners are no defense against evil, or sociopathy, and reducing our societal responsibility to being well-mannered ensures that people will obey the form of civility while working actively to undermine what we desire its effects to be. Our literature and cinema is filled with charming psychopaths and well-mannered devils because such people exist. Helen would like to believe that by painting lines of good form and decorum, people will play within them. They might. History tells us they can do so while (charmingly, politely) slitting our throat.This may be low-hanging fruit, but I assume that Freddie can, in sixty seconds or less, come up with a dozen examples of throats being slit for the victims’ own good. A man can do evil with a shaken-not-stirred martini in one hand and a cigarette holder in the other, but he can do the same evil just as easily under the banners of compassion or moral outrage.
Freddie’s second objection is harder to answer. He claims that, when your interactions with other people become too mannered , you start to trade in masks and, more troublingly, start to feel like one. (He calls it "feeling like a phony.") I’ll lay my cards on the table: I am a mask, and so are you.* The psychiatric "talking cure" is based on the idea that the truth of a story is inseparable from its telling; in the case of a particularly thorny truth, if you don’t articulate it, then, for all intents and purposes, it doesn’t exist and can’t be meaningfully "true." Why then should it be controversial to say that my identity can’t be separated from its performance?** (Or, to stay with the vocabulary of Holden Caulfield, any man can go into where he was born, and what his lousy childhood was like, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but that stuff bores me .)
It was very kind of Freddie to call me "feisty," so I’ll live up to his praise by boiling down my basic argument into a single controversial claim: Good manners are a better guardian of conscience than conscience itself.
One advantage of Shame/Manners/Rules over Guilt/Ethics/Feelings is that the former axis is deontological; there are certain Thou Shalt Nots in shame culture that can’t be manipulated and rationalized-around the way ethical rules can. It’s a sticky world out there and we have to strike a balance between leaving enough space for exceptions and leaving too much space for a free-for-all, but, for my money, courtesy strikes it better than conscience. It’s very easy to rationalize bad and selfish decisions by screwing around with moral language—Eve Tushnet has pointed out how easy it is to twist abstract moral concepts (i.e. "rational flourishing," "true happiness") into meaning "what I want"—but the rules of shame are beyond one man’s power to redefine.
If a man really feels his conscience pointing him in a contrary direction, he’s got at least three options: he can violate the rules as discreetly as possible (what Thomas More wanted to do when the king’s loyalty oath came out, at least as A Man for All Seasons tells it); he can make his case to the public and hope they see his side; or he can decide that his conscience is worth the price of public disgrace, which, if he’s really motivated by conscience and not by moral laziness, it oughta be. Sometimes these are the right things to do. It’s an imperfect system, of course, but more reliable than the narcissism of conscience, because less easily manipulated. (I should point out here that I consider bohemianism a vocation; some people are born to be rulebreakers, and there are some pretty sweet neighborhoods in New York City set aside for them.)
But what of Christian love? Freddie isn’t the first to point out that Jesus didn’t tell us to be polite to our fellow man, or even simply to be excellent to them; love was and is the word. I care about brotherly love, too; I just think that sensitivity to shame gets us there faster. Virginia Burrus writes that "shame arises where we humans both honor and overflow our limits, where we recognize the limits of autonomy—where we observe, with no little alarm, the spreading stain of our mutual implicatedness." To de-pomo-ify that sentence: We only feel shame before people because we think that we’ve somehow harmed them, even though the only harm we’ve done is to have put a little more sin into the world. If we truly believe that putting sin into the world is a meaningful kind of harm, then we’ve come to terms with one of the most difficult implications of the brotherhood of man.
And, because I can’t resist, a last note on Martin Buber. Holdouts should reexamine this paragraph: "We must not proclaim that God can be served by only one, and by no other, act, but we must make it clear that every deed is hallowed if it radiates the spirit of unity. Every deed, even one numbered among the most profane, is holy when it is performed in holiness, in unconditionality." At no point does Buber try to walk this outrageousness back. A sane man would have thrown in some caveat like "We can never know whether a man is possessed of holy unconditionality, but the act of (say) murder suggests that he ain’t got it; Law or no Law, some acts are more equal than others." If I can plug Team Christian, the Gospel of John says The wind blows where it will, and thou hearest its voice, but knowest not whence it comes and where it goes: thus is every one that is born of the Spirit , but it also says If you love me, you will follow my commandments .
*I could introduce John C. Calhoun’s Senate speech on the claim that "All men are born free and equal," but I don’t want to get too political. For your convenience, though: "Taking the proposition literally, there is not a word of truth in it. It begins with ‘all men are born,’ which is utterly untrue. Men are not born. Infants are born . . . being destitute alike of the capacity of thinking and acting, without which there can be no freedom."
**My friend Noah has asked me whether I continue to exist when I’m alone in a room with myself. I recognize the tension he’s aiming at, but I am consoled! The best example of men alone with themselves that I can think of is Christian monasticism, and here’s Virginia Burrus writing about it: "The rise of asceticism was accompanied by the explosion of a distinctly voyeuristic literature encompassing travelogues and collections of mini-biographies as well as hagiographical monographs. As a number of scholars have pointed out, ascetic practice is inherently performative. Indeed, asceticism, like martyrdom, seems to require a spectator." Failing that, of course, there’s always the Big Voyeur Upstairs, and my relationship with Him is the most performative of all. What else do you call prayer?
