The March on Paris

The year is 1789 and the date is the 5th of October. Crowds of discontented women are assembling in the market places of Paris, France. They are fuelled by food shortages, harsh economic conditions and a growing sense that their King and Queen care nothing about their plight. Eager to make their voice heard, the women march to the Hôtel de Ville, where they hope that city officials will listen to their grievances.

Unsatisfied by the responses, the congregation of women became even more agitated. More women left their work in the Parisian fish stalls to join the growing crowd. Pretty soon the group numbered around 7,000. Eventually, without apparent foresight, the women began slowly marching to Versailles, the King and Queen’s country residence twelve miles West of Paris.

Reduced to the status of animals, the women were singing songs about raping the queen, while others demanded to have her entrails.

No one could have prepared King Louis XVI or Queen Marie Antoinette for what they would encounter the next morning when the crowd reached the gates of their peaceful grounds. The king’s royal bodyguards were overpowered by the women, who killed two of them before displaying their severed heads on a couple of pikes.

Pressing their way into the grounds, the women soon broke into the palace itself. Once inside, they ran straight for the queen’s bedchamber, demanding her body parts. When a group arrived in the queen’s bedchamber, they found it empty. Marie Antoinette, having heard the commotion, had fled to her husband’s room only minutes earlier. Angry to discover that their victim had fled, the women plunged their knives deep into her bed, leaving her mattress in a thousand pieces.

By what seemed like a miracle of diplomacy, the King and Queen managed to negotiate for their very lives. They agree to march back to Paris, effectively prisoners of the revolution. Paraded behind the severed heads of their former guards, the King and Queen were jeered at, humiliated and mocked for the entire twelve mile journey back to Paris.

Fruits of Revolution

Three years later, on January 21, 1793, King Louis XVI was executed on the guillotine. Later in the same year, Queen Marie Antoinette was forced to follow her husband to the national razor, but not before being subjected to the most discourteous treatment.

The King and Queen were not the only ones to suffer at the hands of the revolutionaries. By summer of 1793, power over all of France had become concentrated in a 12-man war dictatorship known, ironically, as the “Committee of Public Safety.” Led by Maximilien de Robespierre, the committee sentenced over 40,000 French citizens to have their heads chopped off. More than 350,000 Parisians spent time in jail for being suspected enemies of the revolution.

The French revolution left a legacy of civil war and international conflict in its wake that would last for the next twenty-five years.

A Revolution in Manners

Looking back at this spectacle over two hundred years later, the question the naturally occurs to us is, ‘What could have caused so many people to turn into virtual animals? How could 7,000 Parisian women, and later the entire nation of France, become so inhuman towards their own queen?’

Lots of answers present themselves, and certainly many factors coalesced to incite such barbarism. From food shortages, anti-royalist propaganda, mismanagement of the country’s financial resources, nonsensical Enlightenment philosophy, a monarch who was disconnected with his people’s needs – these were just some of the many factors that influenced the grotesque behavior described above. However, one key aspect that is often overlooked is that the revolution was made possible by a titanic loss of good manners.

At least, that is what the Anglo-Irish statesmen, Edmund Burke (1729 –1797) argued when he took up his pen to lambaste the French revolution in his famous book Reflections on the Revolution in France. While Burke was sensitive to the array of historical and social factors that were antecedent to the uprisings, he argued that fundamentally the revolution in France arose out of a deficit of good manners. As he put it, “But among the revolutions in France must be reckoned a considerable revolution in their ideas of politeness.” “Humanity and compassion are ridiculed as the fruits of superstition and ignorance.” He went on to observe that “There ought to be a system of manners in every nation, which a well-formed mind would be disposed to relish. To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.”

By good manners Burke had in mind more than merely lifting your hat to ladies or observing proper etiquette at table, although it certainly included that. Rather, he meant the entire network of social graces and ethical obligations which, as he put it, “beautify and soften private society.” He believed that such manners had their origin in the ancient chivalry and were absolutely necessary for the preservation of Christian Europe. Not only did such manners beautify and soften private society, but Burke argued that they had the potential to invest the pedestrian activities of life with a sense of unspoken grace, obligation and dignity. Such manners dictated norms of behavior, interaction and expectation to a degree that mere law never could.

It was these good manners that the revolution of France, following the reductionism of the Enlightenment, had abandoned. This gave Burke cause for concern since “France has always more or less influenced manners in England; and when your fountain is choked up and polluted, the stream will not run long, or not run clear, with us, or perhaps with any nation.”

In one of the most moving passages in all of his Reflections, Burke laments this loss of both manners and chivalry:

But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists; and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defense of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness. This mixed system of opinion and sentiment had its origin in the ancient chivalry; and the principle, though varied in its appearance by the varying state of human affairs, subsisted and influenced through a long succession of generations even to the time we live in. If it should ever be totally extinguished, the loss I fear will be great. It is this which has given its character to modern Europe.

But was Burke really correct? Do good manners really play such an important role in preserving our humanity and keeping us from lapsing into a purely functional barbarism?

More than merely animals

In answering that question, consider that a society saturated with a sense of mannerliness is a society with unspoken precedents, taboos, ceremonies and protocols governing almost every situation. Most of the time we take these things for granted. I stand up when Grandmother comes into the room and, if there isn’t a seat available, I offer her my own. When introduced to a new acquaintance I reach out to shake his hand. I wait until everyone is seated before I begin eating. And I instinctively know not to bring up that around the ladies.

While some of these social graces have a prima facia usefulness, as a whole they bespeak an entire network of sensibility which cannot itself be defended within a purely utilitarian and functional schema (why take your hat off in the house and not your tie?). As Thomas Howard notes in his book Chance or the Dance?

…we shake hands. Nothing is gained by this, at least nothing utilitarian. It is pure ceremony….It doesn’t accomplish anything. It’s just what we do.

Just what we do. Exactly. “Just what we do” is to acknowledge, by tokens that are difficult to derive from the bare necessities of the moment, something that is at work in the moment, and that lies underneath whatever else is going on. In the case of a handshake, there is no clear functional connection between what our hands do and what we mean by it (which is “Hello, I see you, I grant your existence, I honor you”, and so on). (Thomas Howard, Chance or the Dance?: A Critique of Modern Secularism (San Francisco, Ignatius, 1969)

The heightened consciousness of experience via form given us by good manners (which both imposes upon and draws from the raw mater of the world a significance that is transcendent) suggests that we are not materialists at heart. We continually shape our experience metaphysically. Though these shapes vary from culture to culture, and though these shapes change over time, they have one thing in common: they recognize a superstructure to our lives that raises it from the shivering nakedness of brutal animalism. That is why things like ceremony, ritual and frivolity help to keep us human. They reinforce the same cadences of the mind that good manners evoke. Thomas Howard suggests that the whole effort seems “energized by the invincible suspicion that the appropriateness we sense in establishing these correspondences is more than merely haphazard – indeed, that it might have something to do with the way things are: that everything means everything.”

But all this can be lost, as is often the case in societies that have embraced materialistic worldviews. The cold, functional, efficient work state of the Marxist nations, with no time for either frivolity or ceremony, is at least trying to be consistent with the rejection of all superadded ideas. (No child who was raised on such frivolous trifles as Humpty Dumpty or ‘This Is The House That Jack Built’ could ever grow up to be a Marxist.)

In elevating our consciousness beyond the mere demands of the moment good manners remind us that we are more than merely highly developed apes. In raising us above the bare necessities of the present, good manners remind us that we are not work machines for the state. Good manners restrain the animal within us by showing that there is more to the business of life than what is purely functional. They continually remind us that the immediate needs of the moment must always take a back seat to something that is transcendent, elusive, non-material, yet very real.

That was what the women marching on Versailles in 1789 had lost. They had let themselves become mere animals, without the dignity they could have gained with some simple good manners. Having little or no self-respect, they had no respect to give their queen as they raced to carve out her entrails as a memento.

It wasn’t until the revolution’s war dictatorship turned against the Parisians peasants themselves, that the world finally saw the fruits of a society that had lost its manners.

Holding the Center

Since society, no less than nature, abhors a vacuum, the loss of manners often ends in either totalitarian tyranny or anarchical chaos. This is because the social modus operandi which highly developed cultures observe dictates a broad range of behaviors which mere law can never cover. When these mannerly modes of operating are neglected, law attempts to fill the void as an alternative to complete anarchy.

Put another way, between law on the one side and freedom on the other, there needs to be a middle territory where good manners (including the entire network of socially acceptable taboos and precedents) govern. These manners, which Burke called “inbred sentiments which are the faithful guardians, the active monitors of our duty” , create a body of expectations that are far more extensive than the scope of legislation can be. No one has to tell a group of Americans standing by a limited but available resource that they need to form a line: they just do it because that is what our particular convention of good manners dictate.

This middle area, regulated by obedience to unenforceable good manners, is just as crucial to society as law and freedom, since it prevents either the former or the latter (necessary in their place but tyrannical when amplified) from rushing in to become all-encompassing. If freedom succeeds in filling the void, the result is anarchy. If law succeeds in filling the void, the result is totalitarianism. What will normally happen, however, is that a society that has surrendered the middle becomes a precarious knife-edge between both chaos and control, with increasing regulation required to contain the anarchy that is being unleashed. But law will always fail as a substitute for good manners, as Burke again reminds us:

Manners are of more important than laws… Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in.”

Burke argued that the collective consent to an unenforceable system of opinion, sentiment and chivalry (in short, good Christian manners) is what made Christian Europe so great and it was this that was lost at the time of the French revolution:

It is this which has distinguished it under all its forms of government, and distinguished it to its advantage, from the states of Asia, and possibly from those states which flourished in the most brilliant periods of the antique world. It was this, which, without confounding ranks, had produced a noble equality, and handed it down through all the gradations of social life. It was this opinion which mitigated kings into companions, and raised private men to be fellows with kings. Without force or opposition, it subdued the fierceness of pride and power; it obliged sovereigns to submit to the soft collar of social esteem, compelled stern authority to submit to elegance, and gave a dominating vanquisher of laws to be subdued by manners.

But now all is to be changed. All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.

Good Sexual Manners

The same principles apply with equal force to good sexual manners. Such manners include everything from polite interaction between the sexes to modest apparel to modes of behavior which continually reinforce and reaffirm gender identity. Such manners have fallen out of fashion and the result is an assurgent animalism reminiscent of the French revolution. As typically happens in such a situation, the twin polarities of freedom and control rush in a disparate competition to occupy the vacated center once held by these good sexual manners.

This helps to explain the strange tension in our society between the toleration of all sexual deviations, on the one hand, and the legislative diarrhea on the other hand concerning all things potentially sexual. Examples of the latter would be such things as laws which criminalize ballet instructors from touching their pupils, or regulations preventing parents from accompanying their own children to carol services unless they are first given a criminal record check to make sure the parents are not pedophiles or the widespread taboo against teenage pregnancy and the laws accompanying that taboo. (For the former, see Daniel Foggo and Jack Grimston, ‘Schools vet parents for Christmas festivities’, The Sunday Times, November 29, 2009. On the latter, see  ‘Frederica Mathewes-Green, ‘Let’s Have More Teen Pregnancy’, available at http://www.frederica.com/. Also see Mark Earley, ‘Why Wait? Marrying Earlier’, available online at www.breakpoint.org/. Also see Mark Regnerus’s article “The Case for Early Marriage” available online at www.christianitytoday.com.)

Materialistic Animalism

The sexual animalism implicated by materialism manifests itself in a variety of increasingly bizarre acts and activities. Equally significant, however, is the fact that this animalism has subtlety affected how we think of ourselves. Believing that there is nothing more to our bodies than our bodies, materialist feminists cannot condemn a man for raping a woman with any more severity than they can condemn a man for beating up another man (aren’t we all just molecules, anyway?). I have already cited feminist author Camille Paglia when she said that if rape “is a totally devastating psychological experience for a woman, then she doesn’t have a proper attitude about sex.” Rape is just ‘like getting beaten up. Men get beat up all the time.’”

As much such a statement ought to fill every man and woman with horror (whatever Paglia says, we instinctively know that being raped is most certainly not the same as getting beat up), such remarks are a consistent outworking of a thoroughly materialist anthropology. This is because materialism reduces human beings to the sum of our parts. To be sure, we are a more complex collection of parts than rocks, cabbages and apes, but the difference is quantitative not qualitative. The real difference between our genitalial and our elbow is simply that they look different and have different functions. Yes, for a materialist, rape is just like getting beaten up, only it occurs in a different part of the body.

Good sexual manners act as a hedge against all such nonsensical reductionism. Good sexual manners – whether it is a woman making sure her bra strap is not visible or a man opening the door for a lady – constantly recognize and reaffirms that the raw mater of our world has a certain shape and poetry that goes beyond the naked facts of existence. Good manners proclaim that materialism is false as loudly as chivalry proclaims that men and women have been made differently.

But just how do good manners proclaim that materialism is false?

Ought we to be polite?

In saying that good manners are inconsistent with materialism, it is important to stress what I am not saying. I am not saying that you have to have a certain worldview in order to have good manners. And I am certainly not saying that every materialist will necessarily be deficient in manners. On the contrary, I have known agnostics and materialists who had better manners than many Christians I have known. The question, rather, is whether a materialist’s worldview provides an objective basis for affirming the importance of good manners.

Note that this is a separate question to whether the materialist can give an adequate account of manners. There are many good Darwinian reasons for why human societies might have evolved manners. Even the points I made above, showing that manners give cohesion to a society that would otherwise suffer the polarities of chaos or totalitarianism, could be framed into a survivalist account for the origins of manners. But being able to explain how manners developed within a materialistic system is quite different to being able to defend why we ought to be mannerly. Manners may help human survival, but by what standard ought I, as an individual, to care about human survival?

This relates to the problem that David Hume identified when he pointed out that you cannot derive ought statements (a statement describing ethical normative that we are obligated to follow) from an is statement (a statement about how the world or human beings are). The difficulty which the is-ought problem poses for materialists is wonderfully demonstrated in Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion. In chapter 6, Dawkins attempts to show that you can have morality and still be a consistent atheistic materialist. Yet the best Dawkins can do is to give an evolutionary account for why we are moral – in other words, how “our sense of right and wrong can be derived from our Darwinian past.” But explaining why some people are moral is very different to explaining why everyone ought to be moral. The former does not necessitate the latter.

Biologist Edward Wilson and philosopher of biology, Michael Ruse, ran into a similar roadblock in their joint article, ‘Moral philosophy as applied science.’ After contending that all our knowledge, beliefs, appreciation of beauty, sense of personal identity and our perception of right and wrong, are mere illusions caused by our genes and brain neurons, they assert

Human beings function better if they are deceived by their genes into thinking that there is a disinterested objective morality binding upon them, which all should obey. (Michael Ruse and E.O. Wilson, ‘Moral philosophy as applied science,’ Philosophy 61, pp. 173-92.)

But proving that our brains have tricked us into thinking that we ought to be moral is a long stretch from establishing that we actually ought to be moral. Moreover, it completely undercuts the project of finding an objective basis for ethics since it relegates all morality to a neurological deception. What would we say to a rapist or pedophile who, who confronted over his heinous crimes, replied, “I did those things because my brain didn’t deceive me into thinking I ought to be moral.”

A further problem arises from the fact that the evolutionary explanations for the positive spectrum of human behavior can also be used to explain the negative spectrum of human behavior. If being mannerly is a survival mechanism for some, why can’t it also be true that being brutish is a survival mechanism for others? If evolution works itself out in some societies being moral, civilized and ethically conscious, might it not be equally true that evolution works itself out in some societies being cruel, barbaric and asserting the will to power? While the evolutionary account may be brought forward to explain both sets of behavior, it leaves us with no standard for adjudicating which set is right and which is wrong. Indeed, it does not even provide an adequate base for asserting that there is a such thing as right or wrong in the first place. It may explain what I in fact do, but it does not answer the question, “what ought I to do?”

Similarly, merely explaining how human societies gradually evolved their sense of manners does not even get us close to explaining why a society ought to have codes of manners. Granted that society works better and people are generally happier if there is a collective sense of decency and good manners, but what obligates me to be concerned with the happiness of society?

It is here that Edmund Burke comes back to our aid with the answer. Burke realized that, useful as good manners might be in restraining the darker side of human nature, they cannot co-exist with atheistic materialism. Atheism, he argued, strips from the universe the transcendent categories which alone can lift our natures out of naked animal savagery. Such materialism lays the groundwork for the inhuman spectacle of 6th October 1789 by undermining any basis for consistently asserting that we ought to be noble, human, civilized and well mannered.

But if, in the moment of riot, and in a drunken delirium from the hot spirit drawn out of the alembic of hell, which in France is now so furiously boiling, we should uncover our nakedness, by throwing off that Christian religion which has hitherto been our boast and comfort, and one great source of civilization amongst us, and amongst many other nations, we are apprehensive (being well aware that the mind will not endure a void) that some uncouth, pernicious, and degrading superstition might take place of it.

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