Bob P.'s American Life

I was struck by a couple of comments on my last post about bringing civility back to social discourse. Folks were making the point that we all need to have more manners, especially our children, the vast majority of whom, apparently, have no manners at all. I'm not sure I want to dispute any of this, although I know quite a few well-mannered adolescents, and quite a few ill-mannered adults, but it seems to me that devoting a blog post to the state of our manners is not the best use of my time, inasmuch as writing goes, nor is it of yours, inasmuch as reading goes. The fact of the matter is that people had bad manners 300 years ago, they have bad manners now, and they will always have bad manners. If you don't think this is true, and that there's some golden age when people were more polite than they are now, have a look at John Strausbaugh's review of John Kasson's monograph, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth Century Urban America, which appeared ...