Etiquette Schmetiquette?

Etiquette -- now there's a word with a certain connotation. It's hard to not picture a lady's luncheon whose guests are neat and pretty, sitting up straight, making conversational pleasantries, daintily lifting delicate china cups to tastefully made-up lips, and using the correct silverware for each course. Merriam-Webster defines etiquette as "the conduct or procedure required by good breeding or prescribed by authority to be observed in social or official life." But how many people really care about "good breeding" in this day and age? Unless you show prize Weimaraners at the Westminster Kennel Club or are due to inherit a royal crown and must align with someone of your ilk to preserve a certain bloodline, chances are that 21st century you aspires to just not make a fool out of yourself. Even Amy Vanderbilt, the etiquette expert herself, had trouble with the word. In the introduction to the 1954 edition of her classic Amy Vanderbilt's Complete Book of Etiquette, she writes,

The word "etiquette" for all the things I have tried to discuss is really inadequate, yet no other will do. It covers much more than "manners," the way in which we do things. It is considerably much more than a treatise on a code of social behavior…For we must all learn the socially acceptable ways of living with others in no matter what society we move. Even in primitive societies there are such rules, some of them as complex and inexplicable as many of our own. Their original raison d'être or purpose is lost, but their acceptance is still unquestioned.

What is Amy getting at? Why must we all learn the socially acceptable ways of living with others? Is etiquette really about which fork we use to eat poached salmon in aspic? I hold that the intrinsic reason for etiquette is so that we do not kill each other. Or, on a higher plane, to provide our human relationships with a safe place in which to grow, flourish, and carry on to the next generation. Which all boils down to the number-one basic human instinct: preservation of the species.