The Modern Gentleman's Code: How Should We Handle Traditional Rules and Fashion Trends, and How Should We Treat Women?

This is the second piece in our Decency series. We use the “gentleman” as a vessel for going one step further into what it takes to be a decent person.

In medieval England, the gentry was a social class, and the men of that class were called gentlemen — what we usually mean by the word. It first referred to men from privileged families, and only later came to describe men of refined manners.

Gentlemanly conduct back then was less an expression of some lofty humanitarian belief than a threshold the upper class set to keep everyone else out. The code of gentlemanly conduct was closer to a set of standards you had to learn in order to preserve the purity of your class: which hand held the knife and which the fork, how many buttons a suit should have, how many centimeters of shirt should show — all strictly fixed. Gentlemen believed their standing as a cultural elite represented the ideal for people in general, a model the lower classes should copy, and they were very proud of being gentlemen.

After the American Civil War, the lower and middle classes got a chance at a redistribution of wealth, and a man who had mastered a new technology had more ways to get rich than a man fluent in Greek. As higher education spread and society grew more equal, the old cultural elite's gentlemanly manner started to look stiff, old-fashioned and affected instead, and gentlemanly culture faded.

Now, in an age when feminist thinking prevails, many of the gentleman's rules of behavior look out of step with the times (ladies first, for instance), and many people see the word “gentleman” itself as a cage for men.

But some of the gentleman's core has not gone out of date. Dressing well and treating others well are both qualities today's mainstream values admire. In an earlier article on decency from the QDaily Research Lab, we said that “being a gentleman means any action that conveys ‘I am aware you exist,’” and we took “respect other people, mind their feelings, don't cause them trouble” as the principle of decency.

Now we want to go further. If the other person we respect is “wrong / bad / stupid,” should we respect their right to be stupid? And how can we be sure we ourselves are not “wrong / bad / stupid”?

Say an artist tells you that, to complete a piece of performance art, he is going to throw a brick at an innocent child. Should we stop him?

Three parties are involved here: the artist, the child, and the art. We have to judge whether the value of the art outweighs the harm the brick does to the child, and decide from that whether to interfere with the artist.

Defining art is complicated. If we were the ones being hit by the brick, we could set the standard for our own value and say, “this art is worth more than I am, go ahead and throw it,” or we could sneer at this act of harm dressed up as art and refuse to give an inch. But we cannot decide the value of that child, or of the art, on anyone else's behalf.

When we cannot judge clearly whether the act is right or wrong, and the artist knows exactly what consequences it will bring and how the law and public morality will treat him, then, by the gentleman's principle of altruism, we should respect the artist's “right to create.” That is: we should neither stop the artist nor deny the value of the art — but we should protect the child.

The paradox is this: protect the child and we destroy the art. Respect the art and we harm the child.

We will run into many dilemmas like this, and whatever the situation, we still have to choose. In the end, what we decide to do is a personal choice. What we hope to do here is use the idea of the “modern gentleman” to show you one such choice.

We call anyone who “exists for the sake of other people, and keeps examining and correcting his own conduct” a modern gentleman.

Being a modern gentleman is a demanding standard. To give ourselves something to steer by, we try to discuss the modern gentleman's code of conduct in three areas.

How to Approach Rules

In the 18th century, Americans wrote many pamphlets that read like codes of gentlemanly conduct. At 15, George Washington set down 110 rules of behavior for himself, running from concrete instructions like “don't spit seeds onto your plate” to lessons for the conscience like “labour to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience.” Time magazine once said of those 110 rules that “every parent leaving the hospital with a newborn should be handed a copy.” Even now there is no shortage of guides that define what a gentleman is, with detailed rules for speech, conduct and dress.

The world runs on a series of rules — gentlemen's guides, public morality, regulations, contracts, laws — and all of them exist so that more people can live better.

But put plainly, the rights and duties under these rules are only compromises people struck in the course of production and politics; nothing about them is truly sacred or untouchable. When we fit ourselves into these rules the way you plug numbers into a formula, we hand over part of ourselves and attach ourselves to a stronger power. As Foucault argued in Discipline and Punish, everything we take to be self-evident, something we were born with, has in fact been shaped and produced by power. Those rules, anonymous authorities disguised as common sense, public opinion and ideals, govern us, and make us feel, think and consume the way they require.

So why should we obey rules other people made?

A Western restaurant, a sushi bar, a live-music club — each has its own settled set of civilized conventions. A Brazilian and a Korean going to hear a Bach concert may, without any discussion, both put on formal suits, stay quiet and leave their phones alone. This shared convention sets a kind of norm. It isn't compulsory, but it spares people a great deal of unease about not knowing what to do. Walk into a room called a “concert hall” anywhere in the world and you won't feel jittery just because you have never been there before; you know no one around you, but you know they won't hurt you, and you aren't afraid of these strangers. But if you saw two middle-aged men in a symphony hall in beach shorts, bellies half out, a bottle of Tsingtao in hand and two heads of cabbage under their arms, you would feel something strangely out of place. The man becomes an unknown quantity outside the rules, and that makes everyone else uneasy.

Of course, that unease is the product of the concert hall's culture of “discipline.” But what we want to talk about isn't how to escape that discipline and win back our freedom — it's the fact that “other people feel uneasy.” In other words, if we were one of those two men, pleased with ourselves, convinced we were hurting no one and that the others are making a fuss only because the concert hall has disciplined them into intolerance, then we would not be respecting this culture or the people around us.

And “respecting this culture” means respecting the people at home in it — not only the audience, but the musicians in the concert hall, the waiters and chefs at the Western restaurant, the sushi masters, the dealers at the casino.

But how can we be sure the rules that keep our lives running are reasonable?

Take love. Anyone can fall in love with someone else, again and again — that is a fact. Yet the prevailing rule in modern love is a “one-to-one contract of fidelity.” Is monogamy a rational choice by human civilization, or just the habit of one stage of it? Is being unable to accept an “open relationship” a stereotype that only needs time to change, the way being unable to accept homosexuality once was? Is marriage necessary — must two people who love each other end up married?

Once we start reexamining the rules around us that keep society running, doubt doesn't necessarily produce an answer; an answer doesn't necessarily mean we agree with it; and disagreeing without finding anything better leaves us anxious, so we go back to the original rules and feel safe again. But if we accept that “the gentleman exists for the sake of a better other,” then doubt is the first step toward becoming better, and the modern gentleman should be aware of the world he lives in in these ways:

1. Understand where a norm came from and why it survives, and decide from that whether to follow it

Since we define the modern gentleman as someone who “exists for the sake of other people, and keeps examining and correcting his own conduct,” then “why do we do this” should be the modern gentleman's motto. Take the traditional gentleman's habit of leaving the bottom button of a suit jacket undone. Look into the reason and you find that in the early 20th century Britain's King Edward VII once undid his bottom button to relieve the pressure on his expanding stomach. Aristocrats made the trends of the day, so courtiers rushed to imitate him, and the open bottom button became fashionable. Leaving it undone also keeps the fabric at the waist from pulling tight and creasing. It is both custom and function — so we can accept the habit gladly.

2. Don't impose your values on other people; don't hold them to your moral standards.

Law exists to prevent harm to others and to keep people from getting worse. Morality urges altruism and helps people get better. Law binds others; morality applies only to yourself — that much is common sense. So even if a man believes “women are just baby machines,” as long as he doesn't force the people around him to agree, and instead finds a partner who thinks the same way, then the two of them have broken no law and harmed no one, and we cannot demand that they live an egalitarian life.

3. Know the basics of the law, and stay open to discussing whether better rules are possible.

But when we discuss whether a person has the right to choose an “ignorant life” — treating women as baby machines, say — and whether we should respect that right to ignorance, we should ask whether the choice is really a choice at all.

If a country's citizens live under systematic discrimination in education, employment, housing and marriage, we cannot say that their becoming street thugs is “their own choice.” So-called “free choice” depends to a large extent on the support of many policies. Human history is full of stupid public policies, and when we find ourselves inside one, we should ask whether the machinery running the world is reasonable at all.

4. Understand that cultures differ, and try to understand and accommodate the cultures of other countries, regions and peoples.

Understanding and accommodation means this: if a Sri Lankan used to eating with his hands comes to your home in China as a guest, you don't laugh at his clumsy chopsticks, and you don't forbid him from eating with his hands as he always has. And when you order a steak at a Western restaurant, you respect their way of grading doneness in odd numbers.

5. Understand that history is not singular, and be willing to learn about and accept different views of history and different “historical truths.”

History is always tied to truth, and truth is always relative — whether it is the political filter added when history is written down or the historian's selective, judging brushwork. We should treat the past the way we treat the present: with openness and vigilance.

How to Approach Fashion Trends and Taste

For 19th-century Europeans, the thing to do after making a fortune was to raise your moral cultivation, your level of culture and your taste in art as fast as you could, in preparation for entering high society and becoming a gentleman. Under 20th-century consumerism, people who got rich went straight for fashion, decorating themselves with luxury cars, designer bags and other luxury goods. Today, chasing fashion is no longer copying the aristocracy for many people; it is copying “celebrities / fashion bloggers / magazine editors / designers.” People chase fashion so eagerly for one reason: they want to locate themselves in the world through some kind of symbol. The traditional gentleman's style of dress changes only once every few decades, yet its place in fashion has always been secure, because the people who wear it are located so clearly.

Georg Simmel argued in The Philosophy of Fashion that “fashion is accepted by only a part of a given group, while the majority are on their way to accepting it. Once a fashion is widely accepted, we no longer call it fashion.” Fashion exists to set people apart. The modern gentleman pays attention to fashion but does not chase it. The reason is that fashion exists to display uniqueness, to separate you from other people, whereas the modern gentleman acts for others but draws his own value from himself, not from them.

But he should pursue good taste.

Taste is defined in different ways. The writer Edith Wharton held that “the essence of taste lies in fitness; strip the word of its arrogance and you can see that it really expresses a mysterious human need — visual and spiritual — for harmony, symmetry and order.” The pianist Reynaldo Hahn felt that “taste does not mean having superior aesthetic ability — it means a broad intuition, an ability to perceive the faintest flaw, a sensitivity of spirit that makes us instinctively recoil from any flaw we notice in any situation. In that sense, good taste must include a certain sensitivity of spirit, abundant feeling and a fear of being laughed at.”

Following the principle that “the modern gentleman exists for the sake of a better other,” let's look at taste again. When A says B “has taste,” he is not saying B's aesthetic judgment is good; he is saying B's aesthetic judgment matches A's own pleasure — it “looks comfortable, feels pleasant,” so it is beautiful, so it is tasteful. In a society where everyone admires bound feet, three-inch “golden lotus” feet are considered delicate, elegant, tasteful; in an era that champions natural beauty, those same three-inch feet might be considered diseased, foolish, a blight on the eye. If we call a pleasing visual sensation beauty, then the modern gentleman's good taste is nothing more than deferring to human sensory preference and shifting standards of beauty, trying as far as possible to make people comfortable and to spare them the shock of the unexpected.

Because taste is different by nature — your taste and my taste are not the same — arguing over whose is better easily breeds hierarchies of contempt, superiority and inferiority. The modern gentleman should keep these in mind:

1. Don't attack other people's “bad taste” — outlandish clothes or an outdated hairstyle, for instance

For the modern gentleman, good and bad taste apply only to himself; other people have neither, because “good taste” exists to help you enjoy the good things this era offers, not to compete with anyone.

2. Don't use famous people to advertise your taste

The modern gentleman pursues the best; he doesn't hope people will believe he is connected to the best.

3. Don't raise yourself by belittling, blaming or correcting others, and don't show off your taste by being unlike everyone else

Joseph Epstein argues in Snobbery that “all snobbery originates in the wish to be better than other people.” People locate themselves through others. Because of the principle of altruism, the modern gentleman drops out of the comparison, so he neither shows off nor gives up on himself.

4. Respect the authentic, the orthodox, the standard answer — but don't be proud of knowing it.

Once we have mastered the “authentic” way to taste wine, the “orthodox” etiquette of Japanese tea, the “correct” pronunciation of a foreign language, we often develop an odd sense of superiority and wait impatiently for other people to get it wrong. We follow the rules and etiquette of wine culture in order to enjoy wine better; we master correct pronunciation in order to communicate better. In the modern gentleman's code, no one else is there to be measured against you.

5. Don't try too hard with your clothes, and don't be too slovenly either

The essence of dressing decently is fitness: clothes should suit the time, the place and the occasion. But now, when personal freedom and individuality are so admired, how much room does fitness really have? Free speech has limits; where are the limits of free dress?

Say a fashion blogger decides that riding the subway in a bikini is free, brave and fashionable, and a crowd of followers agrees and copies her. At first a bikini on the subway harms no one; it is a matter of freedom of dress. Then more and more people join in, until not wearing a bikini on the subway gets you looked down on as conservative and rigid, and the bikini becomes politically correct. Later still, people can no longer bear the sight of anyone on the subway without a bikini — they panic, scream and faint on the spot — and so the law starts requiring bikinis on the subway. At that point, people have no freedom to wear anything but a bikini.

The gentleman dresses well because both rags and dazzle can provoke other people's rejection, and so a low-key, safe style of dress is the modern gentleman's choice.

How to Treat Women

Now, when the movement for equal rights prevails, the very subject of “how to treat women” can look biased, because women are still being treated here as an object. But it should be said that when we look for some basis and standard for our own behavior, we are the only object of those standards. When we say “men are on the whole stronger than women, so men should protect women,” that does not mean “women should be protected by men.”

Getting along with other people, whatever their gender, comes down to mutual respect. But in a society still run on male power, a man is a potential danger to a woman. On a road at night where a man and a woman who don't know each other are alone, if the man believes in equality between the sexes and thinks the woman's worry that he means her harm is uncalled for, he is as absurd as the husky owner who says “my dog doesn't bite, don't be scared” and lets it off the leash.

We have put together some workable rules. Note that in applying them, what matters may be less the differences between men and women than the differences between individuals.

1. Check that your presence is welcome. Ask if it's a good time when you call; ask “may I sit here?” before you sit down.

2. Don't treat a woman as an object; don't look her up and down in front of her.

3. Express affection clearly but not abruptly; don't talk past her and force her to accept it.

4. Once you have been clearly turned down, stop pushing — and don't turn around and insult her.

5. Don't brag about your sexual experience everywhere, and don't tell dirty jokes to women you don't know well.

6. Get consent before any intimate act — a kiss does not grant permission for sex.

7. Don't impose your own ideas on her — there is no such thing as “a girl should act like a girl.”

8. Offer help. If she is cold, lend her your coat; if she declines, you can insist once (some women decline out of shyness), but if she still refuses, don't press.

9. Be considerate selectively. Opening doors for women, carrying heavy things, picking up the check, letting her walk on the inside of the sidewalk — if these traditional gestures make her uncomfortable, stop.

10. Protect women in moderation. Walk her home or see her into a car when you part at night, but if she declines, don't insist.

11. Don't turn your private life with your girlfriend into gossip; don't badmouth her to your friends.

12. If a woman takes care of you, don't take it as a humiliation. In that moment you are simply a person who needs care, and you should thank her as much as the occasion calls for — and in doing so you complete the fine distinction between this and “blindly performing masculinity.”

Illustrations by Zheng Shuya