Chesterton's Wit and Wisdom

CHESTERTON'S MAIL BAG

Dear Mr. Chesterton,
If a lawyer friend of mine belches at table, does he have no manners, or bad manners?
Signed,
Confused

Dear Confused,
One of the greatest difficulties in any philosophical discussion of manners is the fact that the presence of bad manners and the absence of any manners are treated as identical. We say indifferently of a man of a more or less repulsive social ineptitude either that he has no manners or that he has bad manners. How entirely different these two things are may be tested by the fact that in no other affairs do we treat these phrases as synonymous. There is all the difference in the world
between saying that a man has no wine and saying that he has bad wine. There is all the difference in the world between the comparatively trifling biographical
statement, ‘He has no sons,’ and the really disquieting one, ‘He has bad sons’. If, when we were about to breakfast with a friend, a common acquaintance were to approach us and whisper impressively, ‘You will eat no eggs,’ the expression would amount to
little more than an interesting detail; if he were to whisper, ‘You will eat bad eggs,’ an element of tragedy would at once appear. But the difference between no manners and bad manners is quite as definite and important as the difference between no eggs and bad eggs.

The absence of manners is an unconscious and chaotic thing, the product of vagueness, of monomania, of absence of mind, of ignorance of the world. But the presence of bad
manners is a perfectly solemn, deliberate, and artificial thing, the result of
pride and vainglory, hypocrisy and blindness and hardness of heart. A great mass of human society may thus be simply and satisfactorily divided into two definite sections...uneducated people, that is to say, have no manners, educated people have bad manners.

Your Friend,
G.K. Chesterton

(“On Manners,” The Apostle and the Wild Ducks)
Source: 'Gilbert Magazine,' Volume 14 Number 6-7, May/June 2011.