A Short History of Rudeness
Manners, Morals, and Misbehavior in Modern America
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A funny and provocative cultural history of class, manners, and the decline of civility
In his smart and thought provoking new book, literary/social critic Mark Caldwell gives us a history of the demise of manners and charts the progress of an epidemic of rudeness in America. The breakdown of civility has in recent years become a national obsession, and our modern climate of boorishness has cultivated a host of etiquette watchdogs, like Miss Manners and Martha Stewart, with which we defend ourselves against an onslaught of nastiness. But Caldwell demonstrates that the foundations of etiquette actually began to corrode several centuries ago with the blurring of class lines. Touching on aspects of both our public and private lives, including work, family, and sex, A Short History of Rudeness examines how the rules of our behaviour have changed and explains why, no matter how hard we try, we can never return to a golden era of manners and mores.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Manners are more important than laws," said Edmund Burke. The perceived decline of manners, and of all society with them, gives Caldwell (The Last Crusade) his true subject in this serious examination of 20th-century etiquette. Caldwell appears to have set out to write a history of American etiquette books, only to find that the messy and unpredictable business of how we conduct ourselves quickly overruns the restraints of academic history, branching into wedding dresses and caskets, management theory, highway fatalities and e-mail flaming (where piling up obscenities is "de rigueur"). Etymologically, etiquette means "ticket," implying the "close and troublesome" relation between manners and class. It's our ambivalence toward rank, argues Caldwell, and our obsession with preserving at all costs the autonomy of the individual, that together have made contemporary manners so dependent on context--a dependence he sees as essential to their proper functioning. He looks, for instance, at how "Excuse me" is not a true apology but is useful precisely because it implies no emotion at all, and how an apparent compliment can be a snub, while a seeming put-down in fact betokens affection ("a fact without which screwball comedy would scarcely exist"). After trekking through today's "politicized mentality that reads the whole history of oppression into every unconscious slighting remark," he brings his witty and up-to-the-minute history to a reasonable conclusion: "Manners work best when not laden with moral significance." Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
