Who Were the Sea Peoples?

"Manners and decorum differ from culture to culture, but in their highest aim they manifest the same recognition that human beings should act with dignity, elegance, and courtesy." -- Claes G. Ryn, A Common Human Ground , p. 24 Manners are excellent domain for illustrating the point I have been stressing concerning the relationship between the universal and the particular. Much of our society falls into one of two camps on this topic, each of which, in its own way, misunderstands that relationship. On one hand, we have those who recognize the universal element in, for instance, morality. But they miss the particularity of the way their own culture embodies the universal, and misunderstand their genuine insight as meaning that what is right for one person or one culture in one time and place must be right for all people or all cultures in all times and all places. The result is an imperious rigidity and a closure to knowledge one might glean from cultures other than on...

While lecturing on externalities on Tuesday, it struck me that a significant role for customary manners is that they let us known which negative externalities it is OK for us to complain about, and which we must just let go. So, at a restaurant, if someone orders a dish that smells bad to us, we should just let it go: one is not allowed to complain about others choice of foods, since there is nothing "impolite" about choosing any menu item the restaurant serves. But if our neighbor buries his head in his bowl of pasta and begins eating like a dog, we may complain: the behavior is impolite, and we are permitted to ask that it cease. People who get worked up about manners being arbitrary have missed the point: it is far more important we coordinate on certain standards of behavior than is what the particular standards are. Neither slurping nor not slurping soup is intrinsically good or bad: in the US one should not slurp it, and in Japan one should. Differing eating habits ...