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Tuesday 14 February 2023

Feeding their vanity



“There’s too much good manners,” he said on the way back to Gstaad in the smooth sleigh.

“Well, I think that’s nice,” said Baby.

“No, it isn’t,” he insisted to the anonymous bundle of fur. “Good manners are an admission that everybody is so tender that they have to be handled with gloves. Now, human respect — you don’t call a man a coward or a liar lightly, but if you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t distinguish what should be respected in them.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald - Tender Is the Night (1933)

Vanity - it’s another feature of cancel culture and woke culture generally. There is vanity behind a refusal to be contradicted.

2 comments:

Sam Vega said...

Chicken and egg: did we get soft and vain and therefore had to become polite, or did new forms of polite language and conduct lead to us becoming vain?

A K Haart said...

Sam - or maybe the emancipation of women has shifted things in a double-edged way.