Nature & Animals Quote by Jean Kerr

Civility, Kerr suggests, is less a noble instinct than a practiced performance that hardens into habit. The barb lands because it flips the usual moral hierarchy: hypocrisy is supposed to be the vice that corrodes character, not the training wheels that build it. By calling humans “the only animal” who learns this way, she smuggles in an evolutionary jab. Cats don’t fake manners until they feel them; they just swipe. People, trapped in social systems, rehearse virtue before they possess it.

The intent is comic but not soft. Kerr, writing from a mid-century American world thick with etiquette, gendered expectations, and workplace smoothing-over, understands politeness as theater: you adopt the mask to keep the peace, to pass, to survive the room. The subtext is that sincerity is often a luxury. We don’t wait for authentic warmth; we deploy the script because the alternative is chaos, conflict, or exclusion. “Pretends” is doing a lot of work here: it concedes the falseness while implying that falseness can be productive, even civilizing.

The line also needles a modern obsession with “authenticity.” Kerr argues that social life runs on small, strategic untruths: the smile you don’t feel yet, the restraint you don’t naturally have, the courtesy you perform because you’ve decided the other person deserves it anyway. The punchline is almost behavioral science before its time: repeated actions reshape inner states. Hypocrisy, in her telling, isn’t always corruption; sometimes it’s apprenticeship.