Damn You! Politeness IS a Virtue

Nobody seems to give a damn about politeness. Until, that is, they are treated rudely, ignored, made to feel ignorant or displaced, or pushed aside in a queue. Then, suddenly, we see all too clearly how much we appreciate polite society.

Those moments do not translate into the world of ideas, where “polite society” is a sneer and the polite person treated as a cipher or worse. So, I was delighted to see this most denigrated of virtues given a place in Comte-Sponville’s A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues. Politeness a great virtue? Indeed. Yet even Comte-Sponville gives politeness rather short shrift.

After all, A Small Treatise includes a robust 18 different virtues of which politeness is given the least priority. I’m okay with that. There’s no denying that for an individual, politeness is a second-rate virtue. Give me kindness and courage any day. But while it’s good to see it enshrined in a list of virtues and not treated as a façade designed to cloak our true intentions or hide the malevolent workings of class and social structure, it’s hardly exalted in A Small Treatise.

Here’s how Comte-Sponville describes politeness:

“It is the first virtue, and the origin perhaps of all the others. It is also the poorest, the most superficial, and the most debatable of the virtues, and possibly something other than a…