Introduction: Why This Book Exists
Did you know there are at least four women named Judith who are internationally renowned experts on manners? There is Judith Ré of the Judith Ré Academie, Judith Bowman of the National Civility Foundation and Protocol Consultants International, and Judith Martin—perhaps the foremost Judith in the manners industry—who has for nearly half a century written a syndicated advice column as “Miss Manners.”
Then, there is Judith Johnston Vankevich, also known as Judi the Manners Lady, to whom I am particularly partial. She is my personal favorite of these Judiths of the courtesy biz for many reasons, the most salient being the fact that she is also my mother.1 Her life—defined by selflessness, by hospitality to the stranger, and by embracing the richness inherent in life with others—was a powerful example to my brothers and me growing up. Informed by their Christian faith, my parents raised us with beneficence, a lovely old word for “active goodness.” Beyond the “do no harm” principle that life with others requires, we were taught to seek opportunities to brighten the lives of those around us.
My mother also instructed us in politeness: the techniques of mores, manners, and etiquette. Manners mattered to my mother because, she was fond of saying, they are an outward expression of our inward character. I remember I once surprised her when I divulged that I’d learned, over the course of writing this book, that this sentiment was also expressed by etiquette expert Emily Post a century prior. “Great minds can come to the same ideas independently,” she quipped, a sentiment that, as we’ll discover in Chapter 2, held more wisdom than I realized at the time.
Being constitutionally allergic to authority, I sometimes questioned arbitrary, capricious, and superficial niceties. When I was asked to set the table with forks of different sizes on the left and spoons and knives on the right, I questioned why we set the table as we do—or why we use forks and knives at all! I had difficulty accepting that we should continue to do things just because we’ve always done them, or because someone, somewhere, sometime had once decided that we should. In our egalitarian, informal moment, what purpose do stuffy norms serve, and should we have norms that show preference to people of certain ages or genders over others? I was also willing—and maybe a little too eager—to dispense with propriety and the rules of politeness if they affronted my sense of justice.
Despite my mistrust of rules of etiquette, I found that my mother’s promise—that they would smooth over our interactions with others and lead to friendships, success, and happiness—came true. Politeness’s polish, I found, gave me a slight advantage in school, work, and life in general.
Politeness and Its Discontents
The rules worked well for me.
Until they didn’t.
When I moved to Washington, DC, and took a job in politics, my confidence in politeness was shaken. I discovered that those who survived and succeeded in Washington often did so using two tactics: punishing ruthlessness or extreme politesse. At first, I thought these two modes were opposites, two poles on the spectrum.
I learned that instead they were two sides of the same coin: both originated from a dark place in the human spirit—a place where people are willing to instrumentalize and use others as means to their own selfish ends.
While some—usually the younger, greener politicos—chose to be overly aggressive and hostile, the seasoned political operators were cleverer. They knew that overt aggression would only take them so far. They instead used politeness as their weapon of choice. This allowed them to shroud their opportunism in the appearance of altruism, disguising their true aims while disarming their opponents. When I first met these people, I thought that I had finally found a contingent who, like me, had faith enough in social pleasantries to gloss over differences and enable working relationships. But I soon came to realize that, for them, the rules were merely a tool of self-aggrandizement. They sabotaged anyone who threatened their goals. I was confused. I heard my mother’s words echo in my ears: “Manners reflect our inner character.” And yet I was surrounded by people who were polished and well-mannered enough, but also ruthless and cruel.
One day, a colleague approached to ask for help with a project, a request made with an earnest smile and in saccharine, honeyed tones while telling me how particularly radiant I looked that day. His polish smoothed the path to making his request, and I agreed to assist—not realizing that he expected me to do the entire project for him. Once I sent him the completed project, gone were the pleasantries. He passed my work off as his own, and even presented my ideas at a meeting, without so much as an acknowledgment of the help I had lent him. He had gotten what he wanted from me, and because I was no longer useful, he no longer bothered with trivialities such as compliments and courtesy.
One may smile, and smile, and be a villain.
—William Shakespeare
At least with those who chose bellicosity in their interactions with others, I knew what to expect. With the polite contingent I worked alongside, the subterfuge threw me. It felt like guerrilla warfare: I would receive their praise one moment, and then prepare for attack the next. I didn’t know what to make of this mismatch between manners and morals that surrounded me, but I was determined to weather this new terrain. In this survival-of-the-fittest environment, I tacked hard in the direction that seemed most suited to success: extreme politeness. I did not use politeness as a ruse to actively undermine others, as I saw others do.
But I now realize that my pleasantness toward others was a coping mechanism, and masked my foundational fear: I saw people callously cast aside and fired at a moment’s notice, and lived for a year of my life knowing that any day, at any time, and for any reason, I could be next. My hope was that if enough people saw me as agreeable and polite, I might be spared. Growing up, politeness had helped me advance. Now it helped me survive.
I brought in cupcakes to celebrate birthdays, handed out Christmas and Easter cards, invited coworkers to cocktail parties and dinner at my home, and took them out to coffee. My mother modeled kindness and hospitality for us, and these practices were enmeshed in our lives growing up, so doing these things had long been second nature to me. To this day, our family still sends Christmas and Easter cards, and hosting dinners and parties remains a regular practice in our home. I continue to have faith in the transformative power of friendship and hospitality—themes we’ll explore throughout this book.
But looking back, when I practiced these things in government, I realize I had a second, subliminal hope for them, too: that they would help me transcend the office power games and perpetual angling, and help me become someone who everyone thought was too nice to be a target of sabotage or sacking. I may have performed kind actions in inviting my colleagues to our home—but they were at times for the wrong reasons. The pressure of being externally pleasant and agreeable, while internally fearing for my professional survival, weighed on me. Beneath these acts was fear. This strained my soul, exhausting me emotionally and physically. Though I felt stuck in a toxic environment, I knew my soul could not tolerate the burden of this strained and synthetic way of being much longer.
Lessons on Civility from Dr. King
In fall 2017, I joined a group of congressional staffers, civil servants, and political appointees from across the political spectrum on a weekend retreat along Maryland’s Wye River at the invitation of the Aspen Institute, a DC-based think tank. The majestic trees, the crisp air, the ripples of the river, and the whispers of the clouds elevated our minds from the mire of Washington, and provided an ideal backdrop to our exploration of the weekend’s theme: challenges to civil discourse in America, past and present. Our country was founded on protest and revolution. Could these modes ever be civil? Is civility always good—or are there times when departing from civility is justified? And what is civility anyway? The disagreement was honest, fierce, and respectful. Our conversations about big and important ideas were a soul-refreshing reprieve from the survivalism and animosity that defined my day-to-day experience in government. For the first time in nearly a year, I felt able to voice my thoughts honestly and without fear of offending anyone and making myself a target. It was a breath of fresh air, and invigorated my soul.
That weekend led me to several realizations about the role of civility, and inspired me to write the book you’re now enjoying. As our group discussed Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” I recognized three insights about civility—the “why” behind civility and our duty to respect others that I had longed for my entire life—which I had not fully appreciated before. The letter helped me understand why I was dissatisfied with the two extremes of aggressive hostility and duplicitous politeness so pervasive during my service in government. It also reminded me that it wasn’t just government that struggled with instrumentalizing others. Doing so was part of the human condition, and could happen within any vocation, in any environ, in any period of time.
Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.
—Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail”
First, Dr. King’s letter taught me that there is a moral foundation for civility. Treating others with decency, dignity, and respect is nonnegotiable, because they are our fellow human beings. When discussing the evils of racial segregation, Dr. King invoked Martin Buber’s I-it and I-thou distinction. It is wrong to use others, because this treats a person—a “thou”—as though they were a thing—an “it.” Why? As Dr. King said, human beings share an irreducible, equal moral worth. We have dignity, Dr. King noted, which is why he dedicated his life to creating a world without the evils of racism, and “in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality.”
Dr. King’s words helped me realize that the defining ethos of my time in government was instrumentalizing others—seeing them as a means to an end instead of beings with dignity and moral worth, and as ends in themselves. But this tendency is not unique to politics or DC. It can surface anywhere, anytime, because it emerges from part of the human personality that we all share. Human dignity was the moral bedrock for Dr. King’s battle against racism. It is also the moral foundation for civility and any environment of human flourishing.
The two extremes of aggression and faux niceness, present during my government service and in our public life more broadly, corrode human dignity because they instrumentalize human beings—treating them as “its” and not “thous.” Those who are hostile and demeaning to others see people as mere means or obstacles to their ends, to be degraded and discarded along the way. Those who weaponize politeness—putting a polished exterior over malicious intent—view human beings as pawns to be manipulated. We must recover Dr. King’s view of personhood and human dignity—a way of looking at others that sees them as ends in themselves, and worthy of our respect. Dr. King’s philosophy of personhood helps us recover the moral foundation of civility: the basic duty we have to all people, including those who are unlike us, who disagree with us, or who can do nothing for us in return.
Second, in the same way that there are just and unjust formal laws, there are just and unjust informal laws. Informal laws include mores, manners, and social norms. Dr. King’s letter offers a litmus test for how to distinguish between just and unjust laws. A just law is one that uplifts human personality, while an unjust law degrades it. Dr. King writes, “All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority.”
His framework also applies to norms of civility, and can help us distinguish between just and unjust informal social mores. To paraphrase Dr. King, any social norm that uplifts human personality is just, while any norm that degrades human personality is unjust. A just social norm is rooted in eternal and natural law. Social norms that divide, silence, and oppress distort the soul and damage the human personality—that of the person being oppressed, but also that of the one who does the oppressing. Our task is to continue King’s work, elevating norms that affirm the dignity of the human person and the unity of the human community, and devaluing norms that degrade personhood and divide us. King knew that not all laws, formal or informal, were equal, and that even laws formed with good intent could be applied in unjust ways.
I found this to be true in government when I saw people use norms of common decency and courtesy as a means of disarming and undermining unsuspecting others. Even well-intended norms can be applied in ways that instrumentalize others and can therefore be harmful. The motivation behind our compliance with social practices matters. It can transform a just law or norm into an unjust one. Blindly following hard-and-fast social rules—like unthinkingly following the blunt instrument of law—is not enough to promote justice, and can sometimes lead to injustice. Our loyalty must be to the “bedrock of human dignity”—the moral foundation of all just formal and informal laws—first.
Third, there is a fundamental difference between civility and politeness. People tend to use these terms interchangeably when referring to all things to do with mores, manners, and etiquette, as well as to general standards of social propriety and living well together. But not all social norms are equal—or desirable. Civility—the motivation behind our conduct that sees other persons as our moral equals and worthy of basic respect—is much deeper, richer, and of greater import than politeness, or external compliance with rules of etiquette. Politeness and manners are the form, the technique, of an act, but civility is more.
Copyright © 2023 by Alexandra Hudson
