As a boy, I was an eager reader of what were then still known as the funny papers. These comic strips provided, like the movies, a way for children to learn about some of the mysteries of the adult world hidden from them by their parents. In the funny papers of those days there was one cartoon, drawn for the Hearst papers’ King Features Syndicate by one Jimmy Hatlo, called They’ll Do It Every Time. Hatlo asked readers to send him suggestions about everyday encounters with other people that made them frustrated or angry, and he would draw them up in comic-book fashion, often with a tiny figure in the corner of the panel meant to represent Jimmy himself in a fit of temper, under a superscription reading “Urge to kill.”
So far as I know, nobody ever accused Jimmy Hatlo of “hate speech,” let alone of incitement to murder. In those days, the people who read his cartoons clearly understood the difference between an “urge to kill” and actual killing. That urge, along with a host of others involving more or less strong but more or less antisocial instincts, was instantly recognized as a feeling that basic decency made it incumbent on everyone to suppress. This suppression was what, in their innocence, people used to call “good manners.”
In the October issue of The New Criterion, there is an essay by me, written before the murder of Charlie Kirk, in which I attempted to explain how the politicization of our culture since the days of Jimmy Hatlo (d. 1963) has all but destroyed this sense of decency and good manners among the cultural elite. All remaining delicacy of feeling and respect for our common humanity became prey to the kind of people who exult, as we now clearly see them doing, in the murder of someone with whom they disagree politically.
Back in those days it was usual (I’ve seen it done) for men to take their hats off out of respect for perfect strangers whose funeral procession was passing in the street. I don’t think that happens anymore, but in the intervening half century and more the culturally dominant revolutionaries have still not quite succeeded in breaking down the surprisingly stubborn bourgeois sense of decorum inherited from our ancestors.
See how, for instance, the dismissal of Matthew Dowd and the cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel on network television demonstrate that, at some level, even many incurably self-righteous progressives know that the good manners of not blaming people for their own murders still apply. Or at least that the bad manners of doing so are bad for business. We remaining sticks-in-the-mud must take what we can get.
The people for whom They’ll Do It Every Time was intended never doubted the need, in the words of one of Hatlo’s imitators, to Grin and Bear It—when the “it” involved the words and deeds of people they didn’t like or disagreed with. Another imitator’s comics were called There Oughta Be a Law!. But that was a joke too. Everybody who read it knew that you couldn’t pass a law against the people who annoyed you or their wrong opinions. It was probably in the Constitution somewhere, right alongside the First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of speech.
Today, as I don’t have to tell you, we live in a society rife with people, including lawyers, judges, and politicians, who think that there “oughta” be a law against opinions that they hate. Ironically, these same people call such laws “hate speech” laws, but these are no joke. They’re wreaking cultural havoc in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Europe right now. But occasionally you catch a glimpse of why they might not be such a bad idea: after the banishment of decency and good manners from the dominant culture, law is all that we have left with which to restrain the urge to kill.
The attorney general of the United States herself caught such a glimpse the other day. “There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech, and there is no place—especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie—in our society [for the latter] . . . We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech,” she said.
Pam Bondi quickly corrected herself, after a torrent of hate speech “targeting” her, but the legal problem of where to draw the line between free but hateful speech and incitement to murder remains. Perhaps, then, it is just worth pointing out to all concerned that what our society is dealing with here is not really a problem of law but of manners—which are “the domain of obedience to the unenforceable,” as the British jurist Lord Moulton (1844–1921) put it. The obedience, that is, “of a man to that which he cannot be forced to obey. He is the enforcer of the law upon himself.”
Yet everyone also understood that this did not mean there was no penalty for failure to enforce the law upon himself. Bad manners, as most parents taught their children, meant social disgrace and ostracism. “Decent society” might cut you dead if your offense against good manners were grave enough. Nowadays we call it “cancellation,” and, up until the day before yesterday, it was reserved for offenses against decency as understood by our revolutionary elites.
These are the same people now crying out against the cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel as an assault upon “free speech.” I would like to suggest that maybe what they are objecting to has really nothing to do with constitutional freedoms but with an incipient counterrevolution in manners that would, if the woke Left does not succeed in crushing it first, re-redefine decency as respect for those with whom we disagree—and for everybody in misfortune. For there, but for the grace of God, go all of us.
