Adhering to Washington’s ‘Rules of Civility’ would probably solve a good deal of our cultural problems.
Adhering to Washington’s ‘Rules of Civility’ would probably solve a good deal of our cultural problems.
T o read and heed George Washington’s “Rules of Civility & Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation” seems like a good solution to 80 percent of the problems in public life.
“Associate yourself with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation,” #56 reads, “for ’tis better to be alone than in bad company.”
MIT Professor emeritus Noam Chomsky, fired U.K. Ambassador to the U.S. Peter Mandelson, former Paul Weiss chairman Brad Karp, and Hollywood talent agent Casey Wasserman all strike as figures better served if they had bothered to ponder, prior to their associations with Jeffrey Epstein, that and other admonitions that Washington wrote down as a teenager.
Admirers of George Washington celebrate the 294th anniversary of his birth this Sunday (others less enthusiastic about the first president remembered him alongside Millard Fillmore, Chester Arthur, Gerald Ford, and 41 other men last Monday). The three-century gap between then and now gradually and then suddenly builds with cotton gins, railroads, automobiles, airplanes, radios, televisions, computers, smartphones, AI, and much else that indicates technological progress. One finds character and civility increasing as one spans this chasm in reverse.
These rules that Washington derived from French Jesuits first came upon my radar while reading Richard Brookhiser’s Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington during the mid-1990s.
“All modern manners in the western world were originally aristocratic,” Brookhiser therein points out. “‘Courtesy’ meant behavior appropriate to a court; ‘chivalry’ comes from ‘chevalier’ — a knight. Yet Washington was to dedicate himself to freeing America from a court’s control. Could manners survive the operation?”
The verdict, upon mere experience and observation, comes without need for much deliberation: no. Or, perhaps more accurately, one rules negatively not on whether they could or could not survive the operation but instead whether they did or did not. This, as everyone from Prince Andrew to Bill Gates suggests, pertained little to the differences, real and imagined, between the aristocracy and plebeians.
Shortly after encountering these rules in the Brookhiser book, I read all 110 of them in the Library of America’s 1997 collection of Washington’s writings. They feel so relevant today precisely because they go so unheeded.
“In the presence of others sing not to yourself with a humming noise,” Washington noted to himself, “nor drum with your fingers or feet.”
Did the father of our country anticipate the practice of blaring smartphone audio in public places, particularly in public places playing their own competing music or televisions?
Number 22 recalls the Oxford Union president-elect’s gleeful “let’s f***ing go” reaction, or the celebratory “I’m glad I’m still alive at 47 while he is dead at 31” response from 2025 MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellow Evan Urquhart to the murder of Charlie Kirk. “Show not yourself glad at the misfortune of another,” it instructs, “though he were your enemy.”
“Use no reproachful language against any one,” #49 advises, “neither curse nor revile.”
One cannot, therefore, picture Washington speaking of political pests or rivals as “Crooked Hillary,” “Sleepy Joe,” “Horseface,” or “Governor Newscum.” Similarly, the strange phenomenon of curse words, often applied to the president, appearing on Democrat teleprompters — remember last year’s “sh** that ain’t true” or the spate of f-bombs in campaign announcements? — reveals a coarseness and incivility foreign to the father of our country.
Representative Nancy Pelosi’s ripping up Donald Trump’s State of the Union address, Trump attributing Rob Reiner’s murder to Trump Derangement Syndrome, and Representative Jasmine Crockett’s mocking paralyzed Texas Governor Greg Abbott as “Governor Hot Wheels” all indicate our distance from George Washington and the rules by which he conducted himself.
Much of our culture, particularly the political culture, is indecent. Washington was not. This hints at why he remains so popular 294 years after his birth and why Americans view every current major political leader more negatively than positively.
WWGWD? His “Rules of Civility & Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation” offer the best place to start. And his birthday weekend offers the perfect opportunity to read or reread them.