What Manners Actually Do
- Shawn A. Stack
- Jun 19
- 5 min read
Notes on Being#04
We live in a world of marvel and imagination.
Artificial Intelligence not only can drive our cars for us, it can create, review, and accelerate workflow and productivity in unprecedented ways.
I’m of the generation in which the microwave as a new home appliance was mind-blowing.
I am also of the generation that saw the first home computers.
And I’ll tell you what:
I was not impressed by them at all.
In fact, I found them very frustrating.
The microwave was intuitive and easy.
The computer, not so much.
Whenever I used a computer I would get that same iconic message when I entered a command:
“SYNTAX ERROR.”
Syntax refers to the set of rules that dictate how words and phrases are arranged to create meaningful, appropriately structured sentences.
A syntax error message on the computer meant that there was something wrong in the code that was input.
And that meant nothing would happen.
Very frustrating.
It’s hard to believe that I grew up in that world of early home computing and now live in a world where I can speak my grocery order aloud and have the items shipped directly to my home later that day.
Progress, for sure.
Difficult tasks made easier through creativity and technology is one of the cornerstones of humanity.
Think of something as simple as a rope and a knot allowing multiple people to combine their physical effort to move an object.
Then introduce a pulley, which adds mechanical strength, and all of a sudden humanity is moving ever greater weight and creating ever greater structures.
Archimedes once declared:
“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”
Technology, properly understood and deployed, moves the world.
But at bottom, just as computers were fond of reminding users in the 1980s:
syntax matters when creating meaning and executing change.
Consider the syntactical arrangement of the following seven words:
Mark only has eyes for his sweetheart.
versus
Only Mark has eyes for his sweetheart.
The first sentence conveys a deep attraction that Mark feels for his sweetheart and no one else.
While the second implies that Mark’s sweetheart is not attractive to anyone else but him.
The idea being introduced in both sentences is beauty—
but the relationship to beauty is inverted by the syntax.
Syntax matters because form matters.
Not merely output.
Not merely efficiency.
The arrangement itself changes the meaning of the experience.
And this matters profoundly when discussing beauty, because after all:
“Beauty is the promise of happiness.”
Technology does not promise happiness.
It promises efficiency.
Efficiency does not promise happiness.
It promises greater productivity.
Productivity does not promise happiness.
It promises more output.
And more output promises only more consumption.
But beauty, like happiness, is not consumed.
It is experienced.
And yet, in the name of progress and efficiency, we increasingly sacrifice beauty in favour of output.
The productivity heuristic necessitates that the destination take precedence over the journey itself.
Beauty—and with it happiness—is subordinated to conclusion, to output, to measurable production.
We seem to have unknowingly accepted the premise that happiness is something postponed until the end.
But the end of what?
The end of work?
The end of production?
The end of life?
We are promised a beautiful future afterlife provided that we sacrifice the beauty of our lives now.
Beauty, we are implicitly told, is secondary to productivity.
And nowhere is this more visible than in the way we increasingly treat manners.
Children are now often raised to believe that what matters is not how something is said, but whether the intended action occurs.
“Please,” “thank you,” and “excuse me” are increasingly treated as superfluous syntax.
Additional words that do not alter the functional outcome.
And because they appear unnecessary to the output, they are treated as unnecessary to the child.
But this misunderstands what manners actually are.
Manners are not merely functional instructions attached to language.
Manners are the syntax of beautiful human exchange.
They create beauty in relationships.
And people are not merely passive observers of beauty.
People are the architects of beauty.
There is the beauty of the natural world,
and there is the beauty humanity creates within the world.
The beauty of nature is sublime and indifferent.
It does not need to be taught.
Nature arrests us with its majesty and its cruelty.
Left alone in nature, its beauty would consume and destroy us.
And so humanity creates:
shelter,
clothing,
ritual,
art,
music,
meaning.
It is this creation of meaning within the necessity of survival that constitutes humanity’s beauty.
And this beauty is increasingly being traded away in the name of greater output and greater consumption.
Art creates beauty in space.
Music creates beauty in time.
And manners create beauty in relationships.
Manners belong to the same category of human formation as art and music.
They are not merely functional outputs.
They are participatory disciplines through which human beings learn how to relate beautifully to one another.
And like all forms of beauty, they require effort, repetition, patience, and participation.
Which is precisely why a culture organized primarily around efficiency increasingly treats them as unnecessary.
In the early 2000s, music itself began increasingly to be treated instrumentally.
Parents were sold CDs and DVDs promising that exposing babies to classical music and curated imagery would unlock dormant intellectual potential.
Music was no longer being presented primarily as beauty to be experienced.
It was being marketed as a productivity enhancement tool.
A developmental shortcut.
A way to optimize the child.
Now, however, professionals increasingly discourage exposing babies to such media, recommending instead that parents talk, sing, smile, read, and play directly with their children—
you know,
human interaction.
And if you think that was bad, believe me, it is getting worse.
Today we have AI “musicians” with millions of monthly listeners on streaming platforms.
We have outsourced the musician while preserving the product of music.
And increasingly, even the experience of learning music itself is being treated as an unnecessary inefficiency.
The CEO of Suno AI, a company that allows users to generate songs through text prompts, remarked that:
“It’s not really enjoyable to make music now,”
because of the steep learning curve associated with instruments.
Let that sink in.
The experience of learning an instrument is not separate from the beauty of music.
It is integral to it.
The effort required.
The discipline.
The frustration.
The solitary practice.
The gradual transcendence of one’s own limitations.
This is the scaffolding upon which the beauty of music grows.
Musicianship creates a simpatico relationship between performer and audience because both intuitively understand that something deeply human has occurred:
effort,
practice,
vulnerability,
participation,
becoming.
Learning an instrument calls a person toward greater capability.
Toward greater beauty.
Toward greater participation in human creation.
Not faster.
Not more productive.
Not more efficient.
More beautiful.
More alive within the experience itself.
Whereas in the early 2000s entrepreneurs sold music as a tool for increasing future production in children,
today they increasingly sell the elimination of the formative process altogether.
But both impulses ultimately seek the same thing:
greater output with less lived experience.
Neuroscience increasingly suggests that pleasure is not found merely in obtaining the reward itself, but in the pursuit.
That is:
beauty, the promise of happiness, is not merely an object to behold.
It is an experience to participate in.
And this is why manners matter more now than perhaps ever before.
Manners slow us down.
They interrupt pure utility.
They force us to acknowledge that another human being is not merely an obstacle, a function, or a means to an end.
They transform exchange into relationship.
They introduce beauty into ordinary life through voluntary restraint, attention, and consideration.
And in a culture increasingly organized around speed, output, optimization, and frictionless consumption, these small acts begin to matter even more.
Because what is being lost is not merely etiquette.
It is the experience of participating in the creation of human beauty itself.
So what do manners actually do?
They make us human.
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