Make sure that your bank has a list of the birthdays of your relatives and friends, and that these people notify the bank of any births, graduations, household moves, marriages, divorces and deaths. That is the only way to be sure that the correct amount you owe them for getting from one milestone to the next will be deducted from your account and credited to theirs.
Do not keep beepers waiting. Electronic callers take precedence over people who have nothing better to do than be with you.
Avoid overcharging your guests for using your residence to eat the food you assign them to bring. A gracious host expects to come out even when giving a party, but not to make a profit.
Do not allow family duties to interfere with your social obligations to your co-workers. Children can learn basic life skills from their peers, but only parents can teach them the value of networking, encountering, drinking and traveling with colleagues.
Always address people by their first names. Surnames are not only old-fashioned but rudely imply that you are not on intimate terms with the person so designated and, worse, that he or she is a grown-up.
When performing perfectly natural functions in public space, clean up after yourself. The fastidious lady or gentleman carries a scoop for this purpose. In the case of natural functions that involve two people, they should take turns cleaning up. If they are strangers who do not expect to have a second encounter, the responsibility is that of the person who initiated the function.
Such rules would have the distinction of ancient tradition. At the beginning of the last millennium, most of our ancestors had no surnames, rarely changed their clothes, expected their children to fend for themselves, spent all their time eking out a living with no concept of a purely pleasurable social life and lacked privacy even for the most intimate functions. Nevertheless, this is probably not what 20th-century opponents of etiquette had in mind. In declaring their freedom from obligations they found tiresome, they never intended others to cease recognizing obligations to them. They hoped to stop writing thank-you letters without discouraging generosity, to enjoy hospitality without reciprocating and to inspire loyalty in those with whom they networked.
Nor did they foresee that when people do not recognize etiquette’s demands that they stop annoying others, the annoyed turn to the law to mandate polite behavior by force.
It is therefore fortunate that current trends will not continue on to their logical conclusions; they never do. The history of etiquette shows us that not only too much strictness, but also too much laxness, eventually creates a public demand for the opposite approach. In times of elaborate etiquette, people complain, “Why can’t we just be natural?” and in times of loosely observed etiquette, people complain, “Why is everybody (else) so selfish and disgusting?”
In addition to these cycles, we have the occasional etiquette innovator who contributes to lasting change. In this millennium, we had Erasmus, with his idea that students who want to influence the power structure should behave agreeably to those in it; Machiavelli, with his shocking revelation that one could behave more agreeably than one sincerely felt; Louis XIV, with his realization that constantly changing the rules keeps people so busy and worried that they are less likely to start trouble; Benjamin Franklin, with his demonstration that reverse snobbery is even more chic than the usual kind, and Queen Victoria, with her demand that the upper classes show themselves to be so hampered by middle-class rules that the lower classes will have no desire to overthrow them.
Etiquette thus develops as a spiral, going round and round but nevertheless in a generally forward direction. Although recent decades were characterized by an exaggerated sense of the nobility of untutored behavior, they also brought strict rules about showing respect and not expressing bigotry.
So here is what we can really expect at the beginning of the millennium:
An increased demand for civility, matched with an internationalism that makes it difficult to claim that bad behavior is merely an authentic expression of one’s culture.
The standardization of the simple routines of everyday life (how to address people, what a married woman’s name should be, when to shake hands in greeting and when to kiss, who gets the seat in the bus, what clothing is worn on what occasion) so that nobody can misinterpret well-meant commonplaces for the sake of feeling insulted.
Being unreachable as a sign of high status–once the novelty wears off all that technology for tracking people down–and a reversion to the old-fashioned idea that being constantly at other people’s beck and call is a sign of subservience.
Restructuring the workplace so that holding a good job will not preclude having time for families, disinterested friendship, philanthropy, and culture and community service. Right now, the spheres of working life and private life that were once divided between male and female still retain the male pattern, much as the school year retains its connection to the agricultural calendar.
Identifying a new area for prudery, having moved on, in the last century, from coyness about sex to frankness about sex but coyness about money, and from that to frankness about money but coyness about the fact of life that everybody ages.
