America has become schizophrenic about manners. By the millions we flock to scatological comedies, from the toilet-mouthed South Park to the masturbatory American Pie. And at the same time polls reveal that a huge majority believe American manners and morals have undergone a precipitous and deplorable decline. Eighty-nine percent of respondents to a 1996 U.S. News & World Report survey agreed that the nation is “basically uncivil.”
Enter Mark Caldwell, a literary critic and social historian at Fordham University — a New York City school located in that heart of American manners, The Bronx. His new study, A Short History of Rudeness, isn’t so much a discussion of “rudeness” as a rebuke of what he calls “jeremiads” on manners, from Christopher Lasch’s 1979 The Culture of Narcissism to Gertrude Himmelfarb’s 1995 The De-Moralization of Society. Believing that such books turn “optional niceties into duties in the hope that this will stiffen our moral spines,” Caldwell sets out to discover whether manners are — or even should be — related to morals.
