Goodness and good manners

Too many people confuse goodness with good manners or, as we used to say in England, "good breeding".

I am, for the most part, a well-mannered person. I say "please" and "thank you"; I don't elbow other people out of my way at the bar; I pay my taxes on time without much complaint; and so on.

I like to associate with other well-mannered people. That's why I shop in a town twenty miles from my home, and not in the supermarket just down the road. In the shops I visit, everybody is polite. If somebody bumps into me, he apologises, even if it's my fault. The shops I patronize sell the same stuff, for the same price, as the ones down the road, but I don't normally have to walk around men fighting in the car park, or women screeching at each other about what your Baz said to our Gaz. It's an altogether nicer experience.

Some of the well-mannered people I know are well-mannered tax evaders, fraudsters, paedophiles, racists, and extortioners. You can't tell this by looking at them -- you have to get to know them quite well. A veneer of civility goes a long way towards hiding a core of corruption.

On the other hand, some of the most selfless, charitable people I've ever met are crude and aggressive. Some have been to jail for crimes of violence. I used to work with a fellow who shaved his head, and had tattoos on his face and neck. People crossed the road to avoid him. He couldn't put three words together without one of them rhyming with "sucking". And yet, it was he who dug deep into his pockets to give money to the beggars we passed in the street, not me. And I had a lot more money that he did. It was he who volunteered for the fire service and the lifeboat, while I made excuses, even though I was younger and fitter than he was.

True "goodness" isn't the same as mere good manners, and we forget that at our peril. When you see real goodness -- and I've seen it rarely -- it's like the clouds opening in autumn, to reveal a blast of golden sunlight. But it's also humbling. Being around truly good people is profoundly discomforting, if you're as dissolute and amoral as I am. Spending time with merely well-mannered people isn't like this. It doesn't make me feel so morally outclassed.

I wonder, sometimes, if the same applies to my on-line life as well. The people I interact with in the "small web" communities are politer by far than those I used to communicate with on Reddit or Discord. They're generally literate, even in languages that aren't their first, and express themselves carefully. Good manners, in other words, are on display. But goodness? I'd like to think so but, as Shakespeare's Hamlet tells us:

one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.

As much as I may try to play by Crocker's Rules in my on-line life, it's more fun to deal with people who aren't dicks. But by cutting myself off from dicks, am I actually excluding the best of us?

I don't know what an on-line "community of goodness" would look like, if such a thing were even possible. It hardly matters, though: I doubt I would be admitted.

Published 2026-03-04, updated 2026-03-04

Goodness and good manners

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