How to Be Lovely
Smith’s prescription for happiness is a simple formula. To be content, you need to be loved and to be lovely. You need to be respected and respectable. You need to be praised and praiseworthy. You need to matter to other people, and you need for their image of you to be the real you—you need to earn their respect and honor and admiration honestly.
There are two ways to be loved. You can be rich and famous. Or you can be wise and virtuous. Choose the second way, Smith counsels, the way of wisdom and virtue. Be lovely. So if you want to be happy, be lovely. But what is loveliness? What is virtue? Not so simple. Smith has two answers for how to be lovely—how to be respected, admired, and worthy of praise. The first is a minimum standard, what Smith calls propriety.
Propriety is an old-fashioned word. The modern version is proper or appropriate. Proper behavior sounds stuffy, like something out of finishing school. But all Smith means by propriety or proper behavior is an idea we all understand—acting appropriately. And by appropriately, he means meeting the expectations of those around us—acting in the way that they expect and that allows them to interact with us in the way that we expect.
While I was in my early twenties, I spent a summer in Santiago, Chile, doing economics research. Toward the end of my stay, I spent a week house-sitting for an older colleague. Coming home from work the first night, I let myself in, sat on the couch, put my feet up, and started reading the newspaper, enjoying the spacious surroundings, which were a step up from my small apartment. To my utter surprise, a woman emerged from the kitchen. My colleague had neglected to tell me that his house came with a housekeeper.
She smiled and asked me something. My Spanish was very mediocre; she spoke no English. But it was clear that she wanted to know what I wanted for dinner. A stranger making dinner for me already made me uncomfortable. I certainly wasn’t going to tell her what to make. So I said whatever she wanted to make was fine. Now it was her turn to be uncomfortable. That mystified me just as much as my response had confused her. Giving her the option to make whatever she wanted was my way of trying to be nice. Instead, I had put her in a situation she wasn’t accustomed to and didn’t expect. I had acted improperly.
We somehow worked out what she was going to make for dinner, and she went into the kitchen while I returned to the couch. It seemed weird that this woman I didn’t know and who didn’t work for me was making me dinner while I relaxed in the living room. I committed another faux pas, another violation of propriety—I went into the kitchen to keep her company. That seemed thoughtful, but again I failed to reckon with her expectations. When I opened the door, she was totally taken aback to find me in her territory. She blushed. Was something wrong? she asked. No, I reassured her, and another awkward silence prevailed. I realized that I had broken some social convention, but once I was in the kitchen, talking seemed in order, so I did the best I could.
The talking didn’t go well either. I figured music was a safe topic. What kind of music did she like? Julio Iglesias and Frank Sinatra. At the time, I didn’t enjoy listening to either one, though I at least had the presence of mind to keep my views to myself. (I later became a big Sinatra fan.) I tried desperately to think of something else to say. Sports! What about soccer? Was she a fútbol fan? She was. What was her favorite team? Cola Cola, she said. She asked me for my favorite team. Universidad de Chile, I replied. My friends from the research institute where I worked, budding economists, all followed Universidad de Chile, so I did too. Later I discovered that Cola Cola was the team that the poor people of Santiago all rooted for; Universidad de Chile was the team for college graduates.
In my urge to reduce the distance between us, I had reminded her of our social differences. Ignorant and unaware, I had violated one social convention after another. The problem wasn’t my goal of interacting with this woman. The problem was that I didn’t know the proper way to do it. My intentions were honorable. My behavior was not dishonorable; but it was not proper. As a result, I made her very uncomfortable. But it was worse than that—by failing to meet the expectations and plans of the housekeeper, I had made her job more difficult. Propriety goes a long way toward making life a little easier than it otherwise would be.
In the twenty-first century we have an almost iconic respect for certain kinds of impropriety. Get on YouTube and listen to Steve Jobs read the text of his “Think Different” ad—“Here’s to the crazy ones.” It’s an homage to breaking the rules. Or consider Jobs himself, a contrarian in both his personal and professional life in so many ways. We live in an ironic age, an age when contrary behavior, spontaneous behavior, behavior that is outside the box, seems often to be viewed with more esteem than proper behavior. Think of Muhammad Ali, Madonna, and Bob Dylan. All three made immense amounts of money augmenting their skills with behavior that flouted convention. But they and those like them are the exceptions. For every Howard Stern, there are many more like Oprah Winfrey. For every Allen Iverson, there are many more like Michael Jordan.
Most of us, in our daily lives, encourage proper and appropriate behavior. Telling our children that some behavior or other is inappropriate is the modern mantra of parental disapproval. And we raise our kids that way because we understand how important it is to meet the expectations of the people around us. We teach our children to say “please” and “thank you.” We teach them the difference between an indoor voice and an outdoor voice. We teach them to eat somewhat graciously. The propriety of chewing with your mouth closed is timeless.
As adults, we have a similar set of rules about what is proper that we rarely think about consciously. When a friend comes back from vacation, you ask her about her trip. When a friend has a worried look on his face, you ask him if anything is wrong. When a stranger on the subway has a worried look, you don’t say anything. But if a stranger looks lost and disoriented, it’s OK to offer to help. When you’re in Rome, do as the Romans do. When you’re in Santiago, learn the expectations of your housekeeper and try to meet them.
We live in rings of intimacy. We don’t treat those closest to us the same way we treat people who are further away. And among those who are closest to us, there are expectations of reciprocity and sometimes no expectations at all. Flowers for my wife on a random Tuesday are sometimes better than flowers on her birthday.
Meeting expectations of what is proper allows those around us to interact with us effectively and, more than that, with grace and style and pleasure. Propriety is about playing your part in the human symphony. There can be solos and improvisation, but these novelties work best when they take place in expected ways.
Our age is less formal than Smith’s. In 2014, it’s proper for a waiter to introduce himself to you by his first name. A man can campaign for the leadership of his country wearing jeans. A woman can ask a man out on a date and pursue him aggressively. None of these things were proper in 1759. It’s proper today to walk around with a weird object sticking out of your ear, murmuring into the ether. In 1759, that was a sign of social dysfunction, perhaps madness. Today it means you’re talking on your cell phone. But despite these differences, what hasn’t changed is that some things are appropriate in various social settings, and some things are inappropriate.
Smith’s discussion of propriety is less about fashion and etiquette and more about our emotions and our reactions to the emotions of others—our ability to be sympathetic or unsympathetic to the emotions and experiences of those around us. His book, after all, is about our moral sentiments. Smith focuses on how we approve or disapprove of other people’s behavior depending on whether their reactions match ours. So if you roar at a joke that I also find hilarious, I approve of your laughter. If you cry at a tragedy that also breaks my heart, I approve. You’re crazy about that new pop song and I can’t get it out of my head either—that’s perfect. But in other cases, our reactions may not match:
If my animosity goes beyond what the indignation of my friend can correspond to; if my grief exceeds what his most tender compassion can go along with; if my admiration is either too high or too low to tally with his own; if I laugh loud and heartily when he only smiles, or, on the contrary, only smile when he laughs loud and heartily; . . .
In those cases, when our responses are so out of sync, says Smith, we disapprove. Propriety is about matching our responses to those around us.
This seems rather harsh. Are we that judgmental? If the death of my cat leaves me sobbing and cats leave you cold, will you really disapprove of my reaction? If I laud George Jones’s classic “He Stopped Loving Her Today” as one of the greatest songs of all time because it almost always brings me near to tears, but you find it trite and predictable, shouldn’t we both just shrug and say there’s no disputing tastes? You like the Three Stooges; I prefer the Marx Brothers. You like Charlie Chaplin; I like Buster Keaton. You like Dumb & Dumber, and I like Groundhog Day. What’s the big deal? Live and let live. Do we really disapprove of the reactions of others and base our disapproval on our own reactions?
The social pressure to be tolerant of other people’s behavior and certainly their choices seems to disprove Smith’s claim. Tolerance is the great religion of modern times; we all bow to it in ways that Smith would have found surprising. Yet despite the pressure to live and let live, our inner emotions often mirror the examples Smith provides. His insights help explain the strange phenomenon of people trying to convince others to like the same movie or song that they do. Excessive grief or inadequate grief embarrasses us and makes us uncomfortable. When a political scandal is in the news and our friends take a different perspective, it makes us uneasy and sometimes angry.
And the greater the gap between my sentiments and yours, the more you and I will disapprove of each other’s reactions, seeing them as improper. We prefer harmony in our mutual sentiments to disharmony. This idea of harmony—of the matching of my reactions to yours, and vice versa—runs through Smith’s discussion of emotions and social interactions.
The gap between my sentiments and yours is much more consequential, says Smith, when it’s a personal example, as opposed to your feelings about a poem, a song, or a work of art. It’s much more important to me that you like my friends than my favorite poems. I want you to like my friends and dislike my enemies. But I can live with the fact that you don’t like my friends as much as I do or even that you don’t befriend them at all. I care more, says Smith, that you dislike my enemies.
But what we care most strongly about is not harmony of taste about art, or harmony of taste about our friends and enemies. What I really want, says Smith, is that your emotions harmonize with my own as I face tragedy or triumph. If I am trying to cope with a tragedy, I want you to enter into my grief. Smith argues that if you share some of my grief, I will be consoled; by empathizing with my situation in harmony with my own response, something extraordinary happens—you take some of my grief away.
You can only imagine my grief; you cannot match it. You can’t put yourself in my emotional shoes. You aren’t me. You can only imagine what it would be like to go through what I’m going through. Your own situation, your own problems, your own fears, even your own pleasures, intrude. So we do the best we can.
Sticking with the musical metaphor, if my singing voice is louder than yours, our duet won’t sound very nice. I drown you out, and your singing fails to enhance mine. Because I know you can’t feel my pain the way I feel it, I soften my grief in your presence. Rather than expecting you to sing as loudly as I do, I lower my voice instead. You, in turn, try to sing a little louder. I calibrate my emotional response to what I think is your potential level of sympathy. This explains why I can cry more easily in front of my family than in front of friends. And I can cry more comfortably around friends than in front of strangers.
Emotional interaction is a duet in which we are constantly fine-tuning our volume to match that of our fellow. When I am suffering, you imagine being in my situation and feel some of my sadness. I see you striving to match my grief. But, Smith notes, this can’t be done as perfectly with emotions as it can be done in song. We’re human. If I suffer a tragedy, there is a limit to how much you can feel my pain and a limit to how much I can temper my reaction. But the closer the intensity of our reactions, the more comfort I will feel. That encourages me to lower the intensity of my response and for you to increase yours:
To see the emotions of their hearts, in every respect, beat time to his own, in the violent and disagreeable passions, constitutes his sole consolation. But he can only hope to obtain this by lowering his passion to that pitch, in which the spectators are capable of going along with him.
To capture this idea of the mutual matching of emotional intensity, Smith uses a musical metaphor—the flattening of the sharpness of a musical note to create harmony. He asks the reader’s permission to use the metaphor:
He must flatten, if I may be allowed to say so, the sharpness of its natural tone, in order to reduce it to harmony and concord with the emotions of those who are about him.
Thus the sufferer strives to dampen his passion. The bystanders, through compassion, try to feel the pain of the sufferer and cannot. The experiences are simply not the same:
What they feel, will, indeed, always be, in some respects, different from what he feels, and compassion can never be exactly the same with original sorrow; because the secret consciousness that the change of situations, from which the sympathetic sentiment arises, is but imaginary, not only lowers it in degree, but, in some measure, varies it in kind, and gives it a quite different modification.
But a match isn’t necessary for the sufferer to be comforted. Smith again uses a musical metaphor:
These two sentiments, however, may, it is evident, have such a correspondence with one another, as is sufficient for the harmony of society. Though they will never be unisons, they may be concords, and this is all that is wanted or required.
In music, a unison occurs when two notes are exactly the same. If they are different yet still sound good together, the notes are said to be concordant. Concordance is the best we can hope for. The result is harmony, in which the sufferer is consoled and the consolers have reduced the sufferer’s suffering.
Smith’s analysis of the music of suffering explains why our grief around strangers or even acquaintances and some friends is so tempered. If you don’t know me well or if you don’t know me at all, your ability to feel my pain is much weaker than if we are friends or family. So I bring the level of my grief way down, knowing that your ability to empathize with me is so limited.
In Smith’s view, my friend’s company can dissipate my grief:
The mind, therefore, is rarely so disturbed, but that the company of a friend will restore it to some degree of tranquillity and sedateness. The breast is, in some measure, calmed and composed the moment we come into his presence.
How this happens is rather extraordinary:
We are immediately put in mind of the light in which he will view our situation, and we begin to view it ourselves in the same light; for the effect of sympathy is instantaneous.
Part of the comfort we receive from a friend comes from experiencing our pain through the friend’s eyes. Because the friend is less pained than we can be, we are less pained. We watch our friend watching us, and seeing ourselves through our friend’s eyes lessens the tragedy. That’s a friend; at the next level is an acquaintance, and then finally a stranger. As we move further and further away from a friend or loved one, we realize that those around us have only modest sympathy for our situation:
We expect less sympathy from a common acquaintance than from a friend: we cannot open to the former all those little circumstances which we can unfold to the latter: we assume, therefore, more tranquillity before him, and endeavour to fix our thoughts upon those general outlines of our situation which he is willing to consider. We expect still less sympathy from an assembly of strangers, and we assume, therefore, still more tranquillity before them, and always endeavour to bring down our passion to that pitch, which the particular company we are in may be expected to go along with.
Smith then makes the rather extraordinary claim that because strangers feel our pain less intensely than an acquaintance who in turn feels our pain less intensely than a friend or loved one, being around strangers helps us regain our emotional equilibrium even more effectively than being with a friend.
Nor is this only an assumed appearance: for if we are at all masters of ourselves, the presence of a mere acquaintance will really compose us, still more than that of a friend; and that of an assembly of strangers still more than that of an acquaintance.
In other words, after some emotional challenge, when we pull ourselves together in front of a group of strangers we’re not just putting up a brave front. We actually feel better. The relative calm of the stranger, transmitted to us because of the stranger’s inability to fully sympathize with our situation, actually has a beneficial effect.
You can see this effect in action in modern life if you’re having an argument with a family member. The argument starts to get heated and you can feel yourself starting to get really angry. The other person gets more heated as well. Then your cell phone rings. You look at the caller ID. It’s a co-worker with a tight deadline whom you promised to help. When you say hello, your voice is normal. All the anger you had from the argument disappears. How is that possible? It’s not conscious, but the phone call from the relative stranger turns your anger off. You weren’t faking the anger before. And you’re not faking being calm once you answer the phone. You’ve actually calmed down.
My great-great-grandmother, who must have been born around 1870, told my father that if he was ever down or depressed he should go outside and tell his troubles to a rock. Abraham Lincoln used to write angry letters of recrimination to his generals and put them away, unsent, in a drawer. Sometimes it’s good to get something out of your system without anyone other than yourself knowing about it. One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever received is to hold your anger for a day before you think of acting on it. The mere passage of time softens the emotion and can prevent you from saying or doing something stupid—or, worse, destructive—that you will inevitably regret.
Smith’s claims about our emotions create another way to understand these ideas. Talking to a rock or writing a letter to someone who will never see it is a way of tapping into Smith’s insight about strangers. What is less empathetic than a rock? Or the file drawer that receives the unsent letter? Or, in modern times, when you send an e-mail into the “Drafts” folder? Maybe the value of these exercises isn’t just the expression of the emotion but the expressing of it to someone or some thing that isn’t empathetic at all.
Just as it is proper to express our anger or grief differently across the spectrum of intimacy from stranger to close friend, we do the same thing with joy. You get a promotion or a raise or a great evaluation, or your proposal is accepted. You can’t wait to get home and tell your husband. As you get off the subway, you run into a neighbor, a friend you see from time to time at school events. You enjoy talking to her, sharing the latest events in your lives. She asks what’s going on. You want to burst into song. My proposal was accepted! I won the competition! But you don’t. That would be an example of impropriety. You don’t know your neighbor well enough. Instead, you try to calm the exuberance showing on your face. You keep your song to yourself. You just smile and say, things are good, how are you doing? But when you see your husband, the good news bursts out of you and you embrace each other, beaming with the joy of it. You share the biggest successes and happinesses in your life with your spouse, your parents, and your closest friends. And even your closest friends may have trouble feeling your joy in the same way that you do.
Smith notes a number of differences between how we react to grief and joy that is felt by others:
There is, however, this difference between grief and joy, that we are generally most disposed to sympathize with small joys and great sorrows.
So I am happy when you have some success. But if you have great and sudden success, I may have trouble being happy for you. Envy can raise its ugly head.
The man who, by some sudden revolution of fortune, is lifted up all at once into a condition of life, greatly above what he had formerly lived in, may be assured that the congratulations of his best friends are not all of them perfectly sincere.
The writer Gore Vidal said it a little more bluntly, “Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.” Smith suggests that the man who has had some large and sudden success will realize that envy makes it difficult for others to share in his joy. The successful man will mute his trumpeting of his good fortune. He will affect humility, probably unsuccessfully. But he will at least try.
Little day-to-day joys, says Smith—good humor and people in good spirits generally—bring out in us a good mood and a general feeling of happiness. So we share those easily with our friends and acquaintances, and they in turn bounce good feelings back to us. We share our big successes only with our best friends and family.
But with grief the ease of sharing is in the other direction. We can share tragedies with strangers more easily than what Smith calls “small vexations.” We don’t sympathize with someone who is annoyed by those small vexations. Smith makes a fabulous list of the whiner’s catalog of grievances, the man who complains about his cook’s performance, the impoliteness of a colleague, travel woes, inadequate sunshine on a visit to the country, and my favorite, the family member who fails to pay complete attention when being told a story:
The man who is made uneasy by every little disagreeable incident, who is hurt if either the cook or the butler have failed in the least article of their duty, who feels every defect in the highest ceremonial of politeness, whether it be shewn to himself or to any other person, who takes it amiss that his intimate friend did not bid him good-morrow when they met in the forenoon, and that his brother hummed a tune all the time he himself was telling a story; who is put out of humour by the badness of the weather when in the country, by the badness of the roads when upon a journey, and by the want of company, and dulness of all public diversions when in town; such a person, I say, though he should have some reason, will seldom meet with much sympathy.
And it’s a little worse than that, says Smith. Not only do we have trouble sympathizing with those small vexations—what we might call inconveniences—but we are likely to see them as humorous and entertaining.
There is, besides, a malice in mankind, which not only prevents all sympathy with little uneasinesses, but renders them in some measure diverting.
Because of our lack of sympathy, Smith says it’s common for people to hide their vexation or annoyance at small inconveniences or even to make fun of themselves over what they’ve endured. We don’t look for sympathy in those situations. We make light of what we’ve experienced, beating our friends to the punch and showing that such “uneasinesses” are no big deal to us. We’re made of sterner stuff. Some of my favorite stories are the ones my brother tells me about his travel troubles. He doesn’t complain about them. He turns them into comedy routines.
But what Smith calls the “deep distress” of our neighbor brings out strong and sincere sympathy. To make his point, Smith notes that we can weep over a book or play (or movie) even though we know the tragedy is fictional. A great work of art (and sometimes even a cheesy one) can tap into the natural sympathy we have for true tragedy. Real tragedy brings out an even stronger response, especially when it visits our loved ones. Sharing grief yields sympathy and comfort. But if you’re jilted by your mistress, says Smith, laugh it off. Give your friends a little diversion with the story of your modest misfortune.
Smith’s example of how to deal with a friend jilted by his mistress highlights just how different propriety is at different times and in different cultures. Smith would find our informal culture bewildering. But I can’t imagine a buddy publicly complaining about being jilted by his mistress. We live in tolerant times, but at least in the circles in which I travel, mistresses, rebellious or otherwise, don’t make for water-cooler conversation.
While the first asymmetry Smith identifies is that we find it easier to sympathize with small joys and great sorrows, our emotional response to joy and sorrow is also unequal. Smith says we generally sympathize more with joy than with grief. Our joy at a wedding is much greater than our sorrow at a funeral. At a funeral, our sorrow “amounts to no more than an affected gravity,” says Smith. But at a wedding we are genuinely joyous for the participants. We are even, says Smith, as happy as they are, at least for the moment:
Whenever we cordially congratulate our friends, which, however, to the disgrace of human nature, we do but seldom, their joy literally becomes our joy: we are, for the moment, as happy as they are: our heart swells and overflows with real pleasure: joy and complacency sparkle from our eyes, and animate every feature of our countenance, and every gesture of our body.
However, when we offer our condolences to our friends, we cannot match their emotions:
But, on the contrary, when we condole with our friends in their afflictions, how little do we feel, in comparison of what they feel? We sit down by them, we look at them, and while they relate to us the circumstances of their misfortune, we listen to them with gravity and attention.
When a friend has a broken heart, we cannot match the feeling. Smith says we feel bad that we can’t sympathize effectively, and so we try to artificially create a feeling of sympathy. Even if we succeed, the feeling disappears quickly.
But while their narration is every moment interrupted by those natural bursts of passion which often seem almost to choak them in the midst of it; how far are the languid emotions of our hearts from keeping time to the transports of theirs? We may be sensible, at the same time, that their passion is natural, and no greater than what we ourselves might feel upon the like occasion. We may even inwardly reproach ourselves with our own want of sensibility, and perhaps, on that account, work ourselves up into an artificial sympathy, which, however, when it is raised, is always the slightest and most transitory imaginable; and generally, as soon as we have left the room, vanishes, and is gone for ever.
Despite the transitory nature of our sympathy with the suffering of others, Smith concludes that we have just the right amount of concern for others. If we had more, we would find life difficult to bear. Less, and we would be unable to comfort our friends in hard times:
Nature, it seems, when she loaded us with our own sorrows, thought that they were enough, and therefore did not command us to take any further share in those of others, than what was necessary to prompt us to relieve them.
We have enough troubles of our own. Taking on the suffering of others in full measure would be too hard. Our ability to sympathize with others is limited. But that limited amount is enough to bring them consolation.
A few days before I wrote this chapter, a good friend told me that a beloved cousin of his was dying. They were very close, and the cousin was one of the last members of that generation whom he knew well. I could tell how sad my friend was, and I sympathized with his sadness. I’m sure my face was solemn. I put my hand on his shoulder and told him how bad I felt for him. I asked him to keep me posted on his cousin’s health. I was truly sad for my friend. I felt some of his pain, but not enough to bring down my spirits for more than the briefest time. I was sad for him, but not actually sad. Just as Smith suggests, I quickly forgot about my friend’s sadness and distress other than to mention it to my wife. A few weeks earlier, the same friend had had a great success that he shared with me. I was happy for him. In that case, his success actually put me in a good mood. I wasn’t just happy for him. I was happy, period.
This asymmetry of joy and sorrow—the ease with which we sympathize with success relative to failure—is Smith’s explanation for why the rich and famous receive more attention and create more happiness than the poor and forgotten. We enjoy the successes of the rich and famous. The poor and forgotten move us briefly and not deeply. For Smith, this explains why rich people flaunt their wealth and poor people hide what they are missing:
It is because mankind are disposed to sympathize more entirely with our joy than with our sorrow, that we make parade of our riches, and conceal our poverty. Nothing is so mortifying as to be obliged to expose our distress to the view of the public, and to feel, that though our situation is open to the eyes of all mankind, no mortal conceives for us the half of what we suffer. Nay, it is chiefly from this regard to the sentiments of mankind, that we pursue riches and avoid poverty.
Smith’s observations on how we interact with others in grief and in joy are mainly about how we are made—the nature of human nature—and not so much about how we should behave. He is saying that there are fundamental differences in how we can sympathize with those around us. There are limits to sympathy as we go from experiencing the emotions of close friends compared with those of strangers. We don’t experience great grief the same way we experience great joy. The joy of others can make us happy, as long as we are not envious. The grief of others has a much more limited effect, even for close friends.
How do these lessons translate into propriety? We all differ in how well we process social signals. Some people do it effortlessly, others struggle. To return to Smith’s musical metaphor, some people have perfect pitch, while others are tone-deaf. When we have some great success, do we share it with someone who cannot enjoy it because it reminds them of some success they missed? They won’t be able to enjoy your success. It will bring them pain. When someone is in pain, do you overcome your natural indifference to show them that you are hearing their sadness? When you’re in pain, do you share too much emotion with someone who simply can’t handle it?
Smith is telling us what others can handle, what others can share and what is appropriate to share, what is appropriate to say in response to those around us. He is sensitizing us to our own imperfection and what we might do to overcome the shortcomings in our emotional interactions. Few of us have perfect pitch. Smith is helping us find the right tone to strike when we listen to our friends and when they listen to us. He is telling us what is proper in our emotional interactions with close friends, casual acquaintances, and strangers.
Behaving with propriety is the ability to conform to the expectations of those around us, and they in turn conform to our expectations. When we conform to such expectations, we allow those around us to trust us. That trust allows us to share our emotions with each other at the right level of intensity for the different rings of intimacy we inhabit. That’s the beginning of loveliness, of earning the respect of those around us, along with self-respect.
Acting with propriety is one measure of what Smith would call a gentleman. Propriety—that is, acting properly—gains you the approval of those around you, says Smith. But it is not admired or celebrated. For admiration and celebration, you need virtue.