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There are many cultures that do not use the fork at all. Some of these cultures are very sophisticated. They would point out that they believe the fork was used for hygenic purposes originally (I do not know if that is true) and that since the were knowledgable enough to know this they washed their hands before they eat to avoid the need for a fork.

Are not manners a by product of the culture that you live in? When I visit my in-laws rarely will anyone eat with me because I use a fork, and they use their hands or chop sticks as their culture dictates. The fork also allows me to eat faster.

I do agree that the fall of family meals and the rise of fast food is a problem that needs serious consideration but the problem is not really the lack of use of the fork. =)

Reminds me of Lord Peter Wimsey’s response, after being accused of always being a gentleman:

“Can’t help it. Bred into one when too young to resist.”

On the other hand, I find that it works better to use a knife and fork in the European manner simply because it is less awkward and it allows me to keep the knife in my right hand in case the person sitting next to me should try to steal my food. And cutting a sandwich in the German manner makes a friend of mine very nervous as he is native German and was raised with the custom. It means that he cannot try to seduce every woman at the table by speaking German to them because he is not sure how much of it I understand.

And then there is the practical side of utensils, as anyone who has fought with hot pizza can attest.

I’m not a native English speaker, but if by “weaker hand” is meant the left hand, that is not correct. In Europe, a right handed person will hold the knife in the right hand. (Actually, I didn’t know Americans did this differently. The switching sounds very cumbersome to me…)

In his book , the Jesuit philosopher Bernard Lonergan identifies a variety of ways in which humans organize their patterns of being in the world, one of which he terms “the dramatic pattern of experience.” Forgive a long quote:

For human desires are not simply the biological impulses of hunger for eating and of sex for mating. Indeed, man is an animal for whom mere animality is indecent. It is true enough that eating and drinking are biological performances. But in man they are dignified by their spatial and psychological separation from the farm, the abattoir, the kitchen; they are ornamented by elaborate equipment of the dining room, by the table manners imposed upon children, by the deportment of adult convention. Again, clothes are not a simple-minded matter of keeping warm . . . . Sex, finally, is manifestly biological yet not merely so. On this point man can be so insistent that, within the context of human living, sex becomes a great mystery, shrouded in the delicacy of indirect speech, enveloped in an aura of romantic idealism, shrouded in the sanctity of the home. (210)

But he continues to analyze the deformations of the various patterns of experience: just as there are a variety of ways of being in the world, so to there are a variety of ways to deform our world making. What he terms dramatic bias is a failure of love, ie, a failure to love the gift of the world and its knowability: “just as insight can be desired, so too it can be unwanted. Besides the love of light, there can be a love of darkness” (214).

And thus a need for wisdom: the longer quote above has much to commend, if, and only if, we properly understand the phrase “in man they are dignified by their spatial and psychological separation from the farm, the abattoir, the kitchen.” If the spatial separation is misunderstood we risk a kind of gnosticism, a rejection of the concrete and definite good of this bit of land, this community, this herd of cattle on this pasture–in short, we risk so loving the distance, which is what I suspect is the danger with Miss Manners’ notion that to be “further removed from the practical result” is “always a sign of refinement.” Here of course she means the practical result of instant satisfaction, but the gnostic danger is present if we aren’t careful.

On the other hand, Lonergan also worries about what he terms “general bias,” the sense that only the practical and pragmatic are what really matters. And general bias is a form of deformation resulting in the shorter and longer patterns of decline, ie, the rejection of intelligent and reasonable actions in favor of the immediate and sensate. But this can be caused by a failure to attain distance from the practical and biological, the failure to be “further removed from the practical . . . .”

Dual dangers: gnostic removal from the immediate gift of land or collapse into the immediate concerns of practicality (and the same person or group could fall into both dangers at the same time, it seems to me–isn’t that our contemporary culture?)We are both far removed from the practical–the land, the work–and lost in the efficiency and technocracy of mass culture.

And it is here, in my judgment, that traditionalists are at their best and strongest. Close to land and the community, perhaps growing as much of their food as they can, but fully aware that the labor of tending and keeping this garden gives dignity to the worker and the fruit–thus the “distancing” rituals of table and bedroom. And most of those distancing rituals are received in a certain sort of piety towards to past and its experience. One doesn’t rationalize one’s way into such rituals, one is “reared”.

My grandmother knew this: she spent her early years in a sod house in western Canada, collecting dung to burn in the stove. She, until very recently, rolled dough, made strudel, baked pies, shelled peas, picked flowers. As a result one always washed, dressed, and sat for dinner (nor did one snack before). Real work went into this, work not too far distant, but still properly separated, and thus food was pleasant.

Makes me think of a slogan from the Slow Food Movement (and again, this must be understood properly)–the right to pleasure. But if one has a right to the end, surely one has the right to the means–and in this case the means are community, land, and work. What happens when Grandmothers (and Grandfathers) no longer rear (absence), are no longer heard (impiety), or no longer bake (efficiency)?

I’d offer just two brief points. To second Empedocles, it would seem that thinking of manners as “extinguishing” our nature is just the wrong way to think about them; but I take it that this was a weak instance of phrasing in an otherwise wonderfully illuminating essay. Deneen is following Aristotle that it is our nature to become civilized and that therefore we are acting against our nature when we so fail in such cultivation that we eat like ranvenous cannibals and copulate like promiscuous inbreds.

I would not even bring up this point did I not suspect that it was the defense of “artificial society” by such worthies as Swift and Burke that sent manners and all things else on a trajectory back toward philistinism and barbarism. As Aquinas understood, everything is natural but God, who is accordingly supernatural; therefore, when we try to claim conventional behaviors are somehow unnatural in the sense of “artificial” or “contrived” (in the opprobrious sense), we are merely finding ways to stop thinking about the very things it is proper to our nature to think about and act upon. The real distinction (in human life, anyway) is between that which is in accord with our nature and the telos that gives that nature form, and that which is not proper to or in accord with that nature, which is evil.

The connection between eating and politics here lays the ground for further, complicated reflection on the nature of public and private. Rochelle Gurstein’s great book “The Repeal of Reticence” offers, in its first chapter, a compelling account of the private as that which is too precious to be exposed to the eyes of all, and the public is that which can and must survive such a gaze. Eating, copulating, etc., must be done in private not because they are autonomous activities — private, in the sense of not subject to another’s will. Rather, they are private, because we are vulnerable when we engage in them, and because one of the purposes of manners, as Deneen writes, is to shelter and give “decent drapery” to activities that might otherwise lose their real value if done before all eyes. One could spin off in myriad directions, but I’ll just twist in one: if politics is in some sense founded on table manners, then Deneen has given us a fine image to illustrate that politics is founded on the delicate conventions of private life. Politics, as that term is typicaly used, man’s most public act, relies permanently on the “pre-political” cultivation and civilization of the person. To that extent, “all politics is private.” The analogy, as Burke put it, between family and state is no analogy; the state, or the political realm, is intimately tied to and depends upon the hearth and table to give it form.