If you just follow the American media's
propaganda about public morality and religiosity and ethics, you will
certainly resist the phrase I am about to use: 'sophisticated moral
intelligence.'
According to the Christian Right and
the pharisee tradition of the modern American-style media, morality
has to be plain dumb, and anything different to that is likely to be
the 'work of the devil.' Thus to add the word 'sophisticated' to
'morality' is almost to qualify it with something evil.
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| Cuissage... |
Yet I have often wondered why it is
that everything that is said to be to do with this very popular
fellow (i.e. 'the devil') has this touch of the inherently
exciting, even whilst it is also
most assuredly bad and dark and horrid. And everything, by
comparison, that is numinous, is rather dull and boring.
We
watch movies like The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
and become glued by the sections of utter vicious violence; well, at
least I did when I watched it!
Admittedly this
particular movie is not completely gratuitous in its inclusion of
extreme violence as a theme.
However
I must warn that I am intending to proceed from the immediate prior
post about 'values,' and move the subject along to the idea of the
application of values in the hands of wealthy adults.
Now I say 'wealthy' adults very deliberately because I wanted to
suggest that unless one is not careful, it is all too easy to become
dissolute when a lot of time and money falls into one's hands. And
this is largely because of a habit that tends to be formed when one
is not necessarily so very very facilely um, loaded. The discipline
that enforces itself onto spending habits and lifestyle habits due to
modest means, is in many ways, a good thing; but it is a 'false'
discipline...
One finds so many
instances in which commentary regarding some fashionable place, or
tourist destination, or upscale (we say 'up-market' among the British
over here...) restaurant – splashes criticism around lavishly. The
food was overpriced/the service was pushy/you were tried to be 'sold'
on stuff/you were not respected/something or other was
'over-rated...'
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| The very beautiful - Plaza Athenee entrance |
And so
let me say something now about going out to a Michelin Three Star
table in the context of having anything at
all to do with the receipt of service.
Servants, are not
things you have; they are participants in your lifestyle and they are
part of a set of relationships. And your part, as the receiver of
service, is that you are performing a role. Literally.
I see
people who speak of these things saying that the droit de
cuissage (the right over the
thigh), is but a myth that some French aristocrats propagated. But it
is not. Nevertheless, it entails, as I say, a high and a
sophisticated moral intelligence. On the surface of it, a lord of
some estate or other, is supposed at some point in the distant past,
to have possessed the right to have sex with any of his serf's virgin
daughters. Or some such thing along those lines. I know my father
often spoke of our family's tendency to have infused itself with
'good peasant stock' from time to time.
But you must
understand the impoverished humour of the aristocrats of my ken.
You
see these things are not true in the way the words are employed to
talk about them. But they are true
in very much more sophisticated ways than the common popular media
will be able to understand or explain to you.
Here's what I mean:
perhaps you go to the Plaza Athenee in Paris, and have read a review
in which they go on at length about how over-priced, and how
over-serviced, and how unmemorable, the food was...
Ah but you see, for
me to go there at all is a performance – by me. At least as much as
I expect it to be a performance by the staff there.
And,
they will comprehend,
if not others, the allusion to cuissage
that I make, if I subject my companion to having to wear the thing
you see in the picture here. It's a Dior outfit, on the actress
Jennifer Lawrence, and I understand all, or most, of the media and
entertainment critics carried on at length about her wardroom
malfunction, sufficient to make Dior put out a statement.
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| Jennifer Lawrence, Also 'Cuissage' but by Dior |
But it is not a
malfunction.
If you
go to, let's say, some Michelin Three Star establishment that you
have heard be less than celestial in its service and substance, and
offer this Dior'd get-up on your arm, as you alight from your taxi or
Rolls Royce, to the doorman, and thence on to the Maitre d' and so
on, I am reasonably sure that the placement of her dinner cloth onto
her lap, either by the staff or without stares from them when she
does it, will break all the rules about dining.
And I
am reasonably sure, that you will have a very pleasant evening, and
completely forget all about criticisms of the service that you were
not 'getting' for your money,
because as I have said before, money is not the be all and end all of
it. As Karl Lagerfeld says, 'yes it is true; if you are cheap,
nothing helps.' But if you are sophisticated, you do not need to be
violent, or obviously armed with money, to get your way.
And
getting your way, may I remind you, leads us right to the money
afterall. The art of
getting your way, qualifies the meaning of moral intelligence in ways
that only the sophisticated may know about. And I don't think, the
devil, is as sophisticated, as an English gentleman – not that I
have come across an English gentleman, for many a good long year, and
the only real person that I can think of in living existence right
now who can fit into the mold, is Hugo Jacomet, and he is French. As
far as I know.
