Good manners appear to be in short supply right now.
It seems appropriate that after the recent passing of my 86 year old mother that I once again revisit another adage which she oft repeated to me at an earlier age,
Manners maketh the Man
Sometimes she would adopt it to, “It costs nothing to be polite, Michael.”
It is fair to state that Truth is the highest beauty and without it a man will fall into a pit of his own creation, one in which he is ever mindful of the pendulum that swings over him as he languishes in a confusion of lies.
It is easier to be truthful than to be a liar for the latter had better possess a good memory on the simple basis that one lie leads to another, and then more and more are required in a vain attempt to prop up the original lie.
A man who possesses good manners is, by definition, one who is reasonable. After all, he cannot be polite when consumed by some fiery anger, for in such moments, he has, quite literally, lost his a ability to reason.
Reasoning will wither on the vine when passion is present.
Good manners or politeness are based on reason. If a man is to be a man, then he has to be able to reason. Maybe the phenomenon of transvestism and all the rest of the ‘trans-rights’ brigade of blokes who flounce about pretending to be women is best explained by stating that such men have lost their ability to reason: that they are being unreasonable.
Unreasonableness may afflict anyone but it mostly to be found in women for they are, in essence, emotional beings and when one is emotional, then one is simply succumbing to a feminity which has no place in a man.
A man’s ability to reason is Divine – God-given, after all is Man not created in the image of God? Are we not blessed essences of his being, who, as such, are truly loved, regardless of the codswallop that may come our way from women and those men who cannot control and direct their emotions?
Do we not betray that love when we veer from the Truth and allow empty rhetoric to hold sway?
Maxims are Truths and that is why they resonate so beautifully with us – when expressed, a truth resonates with the reader or listener to the very pit of his stomach: it is to be felt and known in an instant.
As previously stated, I have no time for those who shoot off their mouths without the data or reason to support their emotional outpourings.
In this epoch, in these times and in this realm, there are many in the shape of men but few real men but so it is and, for all those readers who instantly know the tenure of these words to be true, I salute you.
As I have written and spoken on many times, the construct of this realm has been inverted by those who are liars and perverts and, it is to be noted, it may well have always been thus, by which I mean there never was a paradise or a golden age. Edmund Spenser wrote this some 500 years ago and it is as pertinent now as it was then,
“For that which all men then did virtue call, Is now called vice; and that which vice was hight, Is now hight virtue, and so used of all: Right now is wrong, and wrong that was is right.”
To conclude: politeness in the face of rudeness and irritability is divine because it is always reasonable. It is the constant application of reason in a world of unreason and empty rhetoric that will inevitably triumph. Bluntly put, without his innate common sense – the Trivium – a man is not a man.
This essay is dedicated to my brother from another mother, Michael of Bernicia, a man whose nobility, love of the Truth and honour remain intact in the face of all attacks on his good name.
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