Risks and Temptations: On the Appeal of (In)Civility

MacLachlan talks about Amy Olberding's The Wrongs of Rudeness. Following the Confucian tradition she draws upon, Olberding understands "good manners" to mean both everyday interpersonal politeness and political civility in the public sphere. Olberding defines these as "behaviors that symbolically demonstrate prosocial values," expressed or communicated according to the rules and codes that constitute local etiquette. In order to best understand the prosocial values in question, Olberding turns away from contemporary accounts that frame manners in terms of respect and toleration to a deeply relational understanding of life with others, one that emphasizes our social nature and our dependency. We need good manners not to reinforce and assert our separateness as distinct individuals but rather to acknowledge that we are profoundly and unavoidably connected. Furthermore, we are connected because we have to be: we each need the others around us. That might still seem like a somewhat reluctant endorsement, but Olberding and her Confucian sources assure us that if we must cooperate in order to survive, doing so with the symbolic and expressive power of manners "transforms cooperation into something both more substantive and more meaningful than transactional need fulfillment."