Manners maketh man

By John Craig 'Manners maketh man' was the motto of the boarding-school-on-steroids where I studied for my degree, and my feelings about it have twice shifted.  Arriving as a chippy nineteen-year-old to rituals of matriculation and passing the port, it seemed to sum up their surface-over-substance perversity.  Then I learnt that 'manners' refers not to table manners but to the manner in which a man lives his life.  Suddenly, as a fourteenth-century quotation, it started to seem prescient, almost democratic.  However, now my view of it is changing again; it is starting to feel like an enlightenment sense of ourselves that is receding. The source of this recent shift can be seen in journalism, a profession of interest because - as I have argued before - it is ahead of the curve in the effects of the information age, a belle weather for teachers and doctors.  There has been a great deal of comment about Wikileaks, best of all from John Lloyd in the FT.  The primary question is whether radical transparency and the supposed elimination of privacy won't in practice shift debate and decision-making further from public scrutiny and accountability. While this debate about the utility of changes in journalism is important, it risks obscuring another about our own self-understanding.  From the throw-away comments of ambassadors to those of Business Secretaries, the implication is that we are most ourselves in those private, unguarded moments when we do or say the first thing that comes into our head.  Our true self is not to be strived for in public life - and the responsibilities and commitments it brings - it emerges from deep inside us late at night.  Growing up is a process of of self-discovery not self-creation. As Weber and Sennett might argue, where 'manners maketh man' seems to anticipate an empowering existentialism, this Calvinist view sees trivial slip-ups as evidence of the destiny written in our heart.  To me that's crazy - we should hold ourselves and others to account for what we do. One account of schizophrenia is not that sufferers are not good enough at weaving a narrative for their life but that they are too good, identifying so many differences and contradictions to be resolved that they over power themselves.  If we forget that manners maketh man, we and our public discourse risk the same collective fate.