THE DIVINE AND MISS M: The previous post talked about what manners do well. But Miss Manners’ The Right Thing to Say also exposed what manners don’t do well. For example, she notes, “Here is a list of topics that polite people do not bring into a social conversation:

“Sex; religion; politics; money; illness; the food before them at the moment and which foods they customarily eat or reject and why; anything else having to do with bodily functions; occupations, including their own and inquiries into anyone else’s; the looks of anyone present–especially to note any changes, even improvements, since these people were last seen; and the possessions of anyone present, including their hosts’ house and its contents and the clothing being worn by them and their guests, even favorably.

“These are only the traditionally banned topics. Miss Manners has been steadily adding to the list of what is likely to be explosive or soporific.”

These stringent rules are meant to keep people from leaving a party in tears or falling asleep at the table. In attaining that end, they do quite well. That’s the “social” in “social conversation”: The purpose is to form and maintain social, amiable connections between people who do not know one another very well and don’t yet know if they want to know one another well. Conversations with a different purpose–such as philosophy, the love and pursuit of truth, say–need not and cannot adhere to these rules.

My college debating society eats together most nights. We used to joke that we’d reversed the rules of manners–all we talked about at dinner was sex, politics, and religion. (Generally not in that order, thank goodness.) That’s because the purpose of our conversation was not the same as the purpose of most of the conversations people enter into at parties. One of the deals you made when you came to our group, one of the things you needed to be ready for, was that we would expect you to (as a friend put it) bring your sacred cows to the dinner table. We aimed at personal transformation in the service of truth (we joked that we were “a cult–but it’s a cult of the good!”), and so our dinners necessarily were unmannerly insofar as they favored searching and tenacious philosophical (and personal) questioning over social conversation.

That didn’t mean they were rude. Blogs also join in conversations that are not social conversations, and do not follow Miss Manners’ restrictions on social conversations, and yet, as Eugene Volokh points out, it’s perfectly possible to blog without making oneself obnoxious. “Blog manners” don’t forbid most topics, but they do exist; generally they act as a damper on invective and personal insults, and there are also some mores having to do with linking and with quoting emails. Because we a) haven’t entered a group that seeks personal transformation, and b) generally don’t know one another in real life, bloggers can’t spot and gently, privately point out personal hypocrisy. But we can point out, politely, contradictions in stated worldview. So again, we can “get away with” something that is outside the bounds of social conversation–in fact, we have to transgress those bounds, it’s why people read us.

This suggests that there are situations above manners as well as below them. Now, everyone wants to use this idea as an excuse for rudeness–“this [my feelings, for example, or my desire to know whether my seatmate on the Metro has accepted Jesus Christ as her personal savior] is so important that manners don’t matter!” Miss Manners is a useful corrective to this idea; she points out that for the most part, importance isn’t the criterion. Something can be of consuming importance, and yet disrespectful to bring up in certain situations. For example, she counsels that it’s perfectly all right to smile vaguely but remain silent when accosted by proselytizing strangers on the Metro. The proselytizer, though well-intentioned, has invaded your privacy and broken the implicit social contract of the city-dweller; fine, so do telemarketers and for much less reason. You don’t get to be rude to them, but neither are you obligated to stay on the line if you’re not interested.

But throwing in questions of final importance, like the existence and nature of God, highlights the fact that there are situations “above manners.” The saints, for example, tend to be notably uninterested in social conversation! Miss Manners doesn’t go there, because it’s not within the scope of her work; she’s trying to maintain the societal harmony that gives us peace of mind and rest from questions of final importance. In some cases that harmony strengthens us, makes us trust one another more, and thus eventually makes us more open to considering personal transformation. But in other cases societal harmony is preserved at the expense of witness to the truth, and that’s wrong. The trick is to be a witness without being a moralizing jerk.

There are no rules for that–it’s a stance toward the world, a “Preach the Gospel without ceasing; if necessary, use words” thing, not something that can follow set guidelines. There’s a Miss Manners’ Basic Training: Eating, but there can’t be a Miss Manners’ Basic Training: Witness. Study of the lives of the saints is one good way to go about the thing. Practicing charity and humility–traits often exemplified by manners, as Miss M emphasizes–is another. I do think it’s possible to act according to Miss M’s guidelines in the social situations for which they were designed, while also acknowledging that there really are moral and religious emergencies as well as the physical ones for which we all know manners can be suspended.

To put it another way, I don’t think Miss Manners would require us to respond to St. Francis’s decision to give all he had to the poor by saying either, “How nice for you!” or, “Oh dear.”