Your guest asks to use the bathroom before bed and politely closes the door so as not to inflict the sound and odor of her excretions on you (because it would contaminate your brain with contemplations of the disgusting). She washes her hands with a new bar of soap you’ve put out for her, so that she doesn’t have to use your family-contaminated bar or share her contamination with your family. As she wishes them good night, she keeps a polite distance from your partner and children, but gives you a quick hug.
The Dance of Manners
Your visitor is thus very polite, and so are you. You are each willing to accept some individual cost to ensure that you don’t disgust or infect the other. At the same time, neither of you wants to appear more concerned with protecting yourself than with your friendship, so you demonstrate your intimacy by tolerating some risky contact. If you weren’t both so skilled at the parasite avoidance manners dance, you wouldn’t be able to be friends, and, as a result, you wouldn’t get all the benefits that go with friendship: the warm interaction, the exchange of useful social information, and the mutual support in times of need.
This mannerly dance is played out every day, in every social interaction, in homes, schools, offices, factories, trains, restaurants, and shops. Yet we do the dance largely unaware of why we do it. We are not consciously aware that we are avoiding parasites, nor do we rationally calculate how best to avoid inflicting our pathogens on others. Instead, we have vague intuitions that it would be better not to disgust a guest by appearing unkempt, by showing them into a slovenly house, or by offering them a dirty towel. We know from previous experience that we would feel ashamed if we did such things and that we would feel particularly mortified if our hygienic lapses became the object of gossip. We try to behave in the “proper” way, and that usually means the way that we have been taught by our mothers and teachers.
The Origins of Manners
So if we are not aware of the disease-avoidance purposes of much of our mannerly behavior, how did we become a species that does what it does? At some point in our evolutionary past, manners did not exist. When did they arise? It is hard to be sure. Disease-avoidance behavior is ubiquitous in animals, as it certainly was in our ancestral lineage. Our mammalian predecessors discovered the benefits of social living and would therefore have had to deal with the problem of contact with conspecifics, who were prime sources of parasites. To avoid getting an infection, social mammals are known to avoid, or quarantine, the sick, the less healthy or odd-looking, and the poorly groomed.6
If animals can avoid potentially sick others, do they also “know” not to inflict their own emanations on others? While there certainly could have been an adaptive advantage for a social mammal in behaving in ways that reduce the disease threat that it posed to others, it’s very hard to untangle behaviors that protect the self from behaviors that protect others. Did being well groomed, for example, help an individual baboon stay “in” with the troupe and hence provide a further explanation for the evolution of grooming behavior, beyond individual benefit? Certainly, early humans, like their animal ancestors, would have tended to avoid nasty, smelly individuals who failed to groom themselves or to keep their environments clean. Early humans were groupish, getting selective advantage from hunting or gathering in bands, for example. Those who were shunned by the group for their hygiene lapses would have paid a high cost in terms of exclusion from the benefits of social life. A society where the majority tended to avoid the dirty, ill-groomed, and slovenly would have set up a selection pressure on individuals to avoid being avoided. Those individuals who could better control their own emanations and thus appear less disgusting to others would have been better placed to profit from their social relations, thus gaining a selective advantage. This selection pressure, maintained over thousands of generations, would have led to changes in brains. Any tendencies that caused individuals to self-police their own hygiene—that is, to display good manners—would have helped them avoid paying the costs of social ostracism.
In humans this selection pressure probably spawned what we call shame. The shame system evolved because it predisposed us to learn to behave adaptively. Shame works by teaching us manners. Perhaps we went to school in a dirty shirt and the other kids called us names, or a guest refused to eat the food that we served that was past its sell-by date. The feeling of cringing shame was so painful that the offending behavior was never repeated.
Indeed, I suspect that one of the reasons that we are able to wear disgust on our faces and to make distinctive disgust noises is to communicate our disapproval of another’s bad manners. It is to our advantage to get others to employ hygienic manners. By pulling a face and by exclaiming “Yuck!,” we demonstrate disgust for another person’s disease-threatening behavior. This elicits shame in the target, and they, as a result, modify their behavior.7 Bad manners are not displayed, shame is avoided, and disease transmission is minimized. I suspect that we do this pretty much automatically, without needing to use our higher reasoning or, indeed, without needing to use higher facilities such as theory of mind.
Disgust demonstrations are especially important in the social training of our own kin, where the disgust face and the yuck! noise help us teach our children how to behave appropriately in public.8 Every mother attempts to toilet train her infant, and most succeed by the time the child has reached the age of three—though it can be much earlier in some African societies.9 This doesn’t require giving lectures to toddlers about the dangers of germs in poo, but only a mother exhibiting a disgusted face and emitting a few yuck! noises when faced with inappropriate excretions.
But lack of hygiene is not just a matter for individuals and their families; it is also a threat to the wider social group. Conversations around the late Pleistocene campfire probably went something like this: “It stinks of poo around Og’s house; I’m not going to visit him,” or “Ig’s kids are always filthy and are covered in sores; I’m not letting my kids play with them,” or “Did you see the lice crawling about in Ag’s hair? I’m not sitting next to her.” And such gossip was of great interest, since humans are hypersensitive to information that is salient to their survival and reproduction. It’s important to know who has the most hygienic behavior when you are looking for a play pal, a babysitter, or a mate for your daughter. Individuals in hunter-gatherer bands could thus acquire reputations as being clean or dirty types, and the latter would tend to be avoided or excluded, depending on the degree of threat that they posed to public health and on their willingness to reform their offending behavior.
This picture of Pleistocene tribes caring about the hygienic manners of others doesn’t fit well with the usual stereotype of the ill-groomed, grubby, parasite-ridden, mannerless caveman. But all animals, including primates, are hygienic. Some of the very earliest human archaeological artifacts are hygiene-related, including combs, middens, and cave paintings of clean-shaven hunters.10 Hygiene behavior is a universal attribute of all tribes in the anthropological record.11 Sure, cavemen were dirty if you compare them with us today, but they probably did the best they could with no flushing toilets, power showers, shampoo, or steam laundries.
In a small-scale society, where everyone knew everyone else, there was a selective advantage to being able to avoid lapses of hygiene, since you would be welcome in society, rather than being punished by being excluded. The long juvenile period of the species Homo sapiens gave plenty of time for elders to beat hygiene rules into the youngsters, for their own good and for the good of everyone else in the group, and being equipped with the ability to feel shame meant that youngsters quickly learned to mind their manners.
Our own studies have found some evidence for a connection between punishment and poor manners. One of the categories of disgust that my PhD student isolated was for people who commit unhygienic acts, for example, failing to wash hands, to groom, or to defecate in a toilet. People who were especially disgusted by this category of infractions in others also scored highly on a psychological scale designed to
uncover how punishment-oriented they were (for example, being more likely to want criminals to be locked up). We found a strong and significant association between the desire to punish and disgust for poor hygiene-related manners in others.12 It seems likely that this connection must have originated in small-scale, reputation-based, Pleistocene society or even earlier.
The story of the evolution of manners saw animals being hygienic as a means of protecting themselves from infection, then early social hominids who stayed clean to avoid being avoided, and then modern humans who could gossip about hygiene and who felt shame if they upset others with their emanations. What happened next in the story of manners? As humans became more social, learning to live in groups larger than extended families, new problems presented themselves, and not just of disease.
Copy the Common
Let’s try another thought experiment. Imagine that you are a new immigrant to a group; perhaps you are a new bride moving into your husband’s family compound. How are you going to thrive in this new social setting? Proud as you may be of the skills that you’ve already acquired at home, it would probably be a good idea to figure out the local way of doing things. Maybe you should learn your mother-in-law’s grilled fish recipe, pick up the local words for vegetables, copy the way your sisters-in-law toilet train their children, and note the correct way to address senior members of the clan. By copying behavior that is common, you are using strategies that have worked for others in this setting. By copying those who have high social status, you may also find success and curry their favor. If you fail to follow the local rules, however, you will remain an outsider, short on sympathy and, more importantly, on tangible support, when you need it. By adhering to local norms, you are not just more likely to be successful; you are also demonstrating that you have become an insider, “one of us,” that is, someone who is prepared to invest time and effort in her new group, and hence unlikely to run off with the clan’s valuables or its offspring. In short, you become someone who can be trusted.
This almost instinctual ability to mold ourselves to others, to scan for social norms and then follow them, has become part of the invisible glue that holds societies together. Given the multiple advantages that individuals gained from living in groups, those with strong copying tendencies (up to a point, of course) were likely to thrive and hence pass on more “copyish” genes to the next generation. Ig and Og around the campfire didn’t have table manners, but they surely took care where they defecated and to wear their skins in the latest fashion. As settled agricultural societies became feudal and hierarchical, it became advantageous to curry favor with the elite, by copying their fads and fashions—what Elias has called the “civilising process.”13 As culture evolved, new ideas about hygiene and manners accrued; better ideas about child care and food handling, for example, would mostly have replaced ideas that were less beneficial.14 And as technology advanced, it made more refined manners possible, fancy bathrooms and multiple types of eating implements led to conventions about how to use them, and industry learned how to exploit our copyishness to sell more jeans. Though we may not always be aware of it, we pay very close attention to the conventions of our social group. When we find ourselves in a new social setting—the tennis club, the parent-teacher meeting, or the holiday hotel, for example—we scan for the local mannerly conventions and rapidly try to adopt them.
Someone who wears a fresh robe to the temple does not just reduce the threat that he will spread his ectoparasites to the congregation, but the cut and color of the robe signals that he has paid attention to local tradition. Should he wear an outrageous color or a style worn by the tribe next door, he is signaling a desire to be different and will be less trusted as a result. Kids in most societies experiment with individuality as a means of distinguishing themselves but soon revert to following the mass, when they learn the lesson that only a few high-status individuals can get social benefits from being different. Wearing the “right” clothes to a wedding, meeting, or funeral is good manners, as conforming to convention allows group processes to proceed without distraction.
Small Courtesies
As group sizes grew from groups of related individuals, to clans, to whole tribes who came together from time to time for joint enterprises such as war or irrigation works,15 the problem of cooperation with unrelated others became more serious. Individuals who tried to get the benefits of social life without paying their share of the costs could derail the whole cooperative enterprise. Humans became adept at looking for clues to who was likely to cooperate and who was not.16 Manners provided an indicator. Those who were careful with hygiene and those who copied group norms were good candidates, as were those who went to lengths to show that they put the interests of others before themselves. The child who passes the plate of food before serving herself is not just sparing others from her pathogens and demonstrating that she is socialized into the rules of the in-group, but she is also showing that she puts others before herself. In effect she is saying: “Look how well my mother has taught me! If I can show such self-control now, how useful a member of this society will I be in the future! In the meantime you can safely do business with my family.” And the child was no doubt taught by her mother that restraint with cake now would be likely to lead to her getting more total cooperative cake over her lifetime.
Such cooperative signals have to cost something to produce; otherwise anyone could fake them. By being continent with bodily fluids so as not to inflict our parasites on others, by investing time in learning the local conventions, and by making an effort to be courteous in small things, humans can demonstrate their ability to control their own greed, their readiness to put the needs of others before their own, and their willingness to invest in their social group. Youngsters who master these skills are set to reap all of the many benefits that come from living in a highly cooperative ultrasociety.
Manners are thus a signal of social intent. However, manners that concern hygiene have a particular force, as befits those that arose from the ancient and prehuman need to prevent disease in social groups. Philosopher Shaun Nichols hypothesized that norms around hygiene were likely to have greater cultural staying power than those that were simply local conventions, since the former are underpinned by the emotional resource of disgust.17 He tested this hypothesis with a tract on manners, Erasmus’s 1530 text On Good Manners for Boys. He classified these norms into two types. The first was about continence with bodily emanations. For example,
“It is boorish to wipe one’s nose on one’s cap or clothing, and it is not much better to wipe it with one’s hand, if you then smear the discharge on your clothing” (274).
“Withdraw when you are going to vomit” (276).
“Reswallowing spittle is uncouth as is the practice we observe in some people of spitting after every third word” (276).
“To repress the need to urinate is injurious to health; but propriety requires it to be done in private” (277).
The second category included the following:
“The person who opens his mouth wide in a rictus, with wrinkled cheeks and exposed teeth, is . . . impolite” (276).
“When sitting down [at a banquet,] have both hands on the table, not clasped together, nor on the plate” (281).
“If given a napkin, put it over either the left shoulder or the left forearm” (281).
Nichols found that the rules that concerned hygiene were statistically much more likely to still be in operation today, whereas the arbitrary conventions of the 1530s were not. So the rules of etiquette set out by Erasmus in 1530, with a disgust (and hence disease) relevance, are still recognizable today. Manners that were simply social conventions are more arbitrary, such as putting a napkin over the forearm or putting hands on the table at a meal, and have tended to disappear.
From Microbes to Manners to Morality
Without manners we are crude, rude, and uncivilized; we “gross people out,” as one contemporary manners guide for teenagers suggests.18 Without manner
s we threaten people with our unseen parasites; we drive them away from us and so deprive ourselves, and others, of the benefits of social life.
Manners have two fundamental components. The earliest (and the least recognized) content of manners is the behaviors that spare others the risk of catching parasites. As humans became more groupish, it also became advantageous to follow social conventions and to signal cooperative intent via small courtesies that implied willingness to bear the cost of putting the interests of others before one’s own. Disgust and shame operate to prevent and to punish lapses in both of these kinds of manners.
Having an ability to learn manners about hygiene was primordial, the earliest problem humans had to solve on the route to hypersociality. Manners provide a basic framework of rules for sociality and so are a kind of mini-morality, a precursor to full-blown morality—the subject of the next chapter. That’s why I place the dawn of manners as the key leap forward in human history, at least as important as the invention of fire or language. “Maners” do indeed “mayk man.”19
CHAPTER FIVE
MORAL DISGUST
Cleanliness calls to cleanliness, clean houses demand clean clothes, clean bodies and, in consequence, clean morals.
C. E. Clerget, “Du nettoyage mécanique des voies publiques,” quoted in G. Vigarello, Concepts of Cleanliness
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