I spent the holiday weekend in the Berkshires with my mom. The visit included a trip to the Clark Art Museum in Williamstown, MA, where the current special exhibition is of Jacques-Louis David, court painter to Napoleon, among other things. It was a lovely show, but the place was crowded, and I found myself inordinately irritated by one group of particularly loud museum-goers. There were two couples--white, middle-aged (late 40s, early 50s), comfortably middle-class, as far as I could tell--but the two women were the most vocal and conspicuous of the group. As they moved from room to room, they talked loudly about the paintings and the information provided in the wall labels: “Wha-at?” “I thought it said ‘divorced and married’ but it’s ‘divorced and remarried!’” They called to each other from across the room, and generally chattered non-stop, exclaiming and extolling, and occasionally laughing and squealing like schoolchildren. At one point, the louder of the two women stood alone in front of a large painting, shaking her head and snapping her gum in emphatic admiration; then she said to no one in particular (maybe to the painting itself), “Uh! So fantastic!” before she moved on to catch up with her friends. In the small echo-y rooms of the exhibit, the noise was hard to ignore. If I hadn’t been so annoyed, I would have found the performances comical. Given my mother’s unwired, Internet-free home, I had plenty of time to mull over what might otherwise have been a fleeting experience. Why was I so annoyed? On the one hand, I recognized the problem as a clash of different senses of social etiquette. Perhaps it was snobbish of me to want everyone else around me to conform to my sense of good behavior in museums. Why shouldn’t these people enjoy the art in their own way—enthusiastically and vocally? They clearly saw nothing wrong with their behavior; they were having a good time, sharing their aesthetic experience with each other (and everyone around them). On the other hand, and in my defense, I couldn’t help but feel intruded upon by their behavior; consuming all the oxygen in the shared public space, they were interfering with my ability to enjoy the art. What would Jeremy Bentham say? It’s not that I think museums are sanctified spaces where art must be silently revered. In fact, my complaint has less to do with the specific context of a museum, or other high-culture spaces, and more to do with public spaces in general. I find loud conversations (on cell phones or not) on planes or trains or other confined public spaces equally bothersome and inconsiderate. What astounds me, and to be honest, offends my sensibilities, is the noisemakers’ seeming obliviousness to their effect on others. If they are genuinely oblivious, I’d call that a competence problem—shouldn’t they have learned by now to be a bit more socially aware? But if their obliviousness is a function of their bloated sense of privilege and entitlement, then it seems a barely disguised form of aggression, commandeering an audience and a space that’s not theirs to take. In Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America, historian John Kasson surveys the ways in which the new urban spaces of industrialized America created new anxieties about class identity and social status and new codes of behavior by which middle class subjects governed themselves in both public and private realms. In the chapter on bodily management in public, Kasson talks about the pressures to regulate “all the little gestures of bodily adjustment and self-engrossment”; to be overly concerned with oneself in public (especially with gestures drawing attention to one’s bodily functions—coughing, scratching, etc.) is a no-no, as is an “overinvolvement in the affairs of others” (staring, for example). He writes, “Forms of self-involvement that obtruded upon the attention of others aroused special ire [in etiquette book authors]—irrepressible noisemaking, for instance.” Yes, exactly. Many of these unwritten codes of conduct are still with us, and more often than not, those who do not conform to these codes seem to do so with some knowledge of the proprieties they’re flouting. In the case of my museum companions, their noisemaking seemed a self-engrossment not focused on their physical bodies, but on their own social personae—as great lovers of art, as performers of art appreciation. For a long time now, I’ve been fascinated by the world of manners, the codified social rituals and habits that produce what Lionel Trilling dubbed the “hum and buzz of social implication.” Though the two are not synonymous, nor interchangeable, manners are always tied up with the question of morals. If manners constitute a “semiotics of everyday life,” to use Kasson’s phrase, they are meant to be read with a moral message in mind (what kind of person spits in public?!). Perhaps my visceral reaction to the noisy people merely demonstrates how thoroughly I have been socialized by a specific set of bourgeois norms, habituated to certain bodily and emotional controls that I have internalized to the point of their seeming to be immutable moral laws: it’s common sense not to talk so loudly that the entire train compartment can hear about your personal problems, and if you still insist on yakking away, that’s just rude. Accusations of rudeness, of a breach of manners, are ultimately moral judgments—that you don’t know better is a character flaw. In confronting my inner curmudgeon, I recognize the dangerous implications of such moral judgments, especially when they get tied, as they so often do, to assumptions about race, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, etc. etc. At the same time, if reading another’s morals in his or her manners can sometimes bring out the worst in people, there’s another way in which a concern with manners can be implicated in a broadminded concern for the ethics of social life: how should we live together in this crowded world? How should we treat our neighbors and strangers? If the Bush administration had better manners at the cocktail parties of international affairs, would we be better off right now? I’m not saying I had any such lofty reflections at the museum. Just that if we scratch the surface of manners, and think beyond enforcing or breaking certain social codes, we very quickly get to bigger questions about what it means to be social or selfish. Or selfishly social, as the case may be.