Ignore the small niceties and what happens? There is a splendid passage in Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit, when Martin is appalled (as Dickens himself had been) by the brutish manners in 1840s America, and is told that America has better things to do than “acquire forms”. He is enraged – and warns what tolerance of bad manners can lead to:
“The mass of your countrymen begin by stubbornly neglecting little social observances, which have nothing to do with gentility, custom, usage, government, or country, but are acts of common, decent, natural, human politeness. You abet them in this, by resenting all attacks upon their social offences as if they were a beautiful national feature. From disregarding small obligations they come in course to disregard great ones; and so refuse to pay their debts. What they may do, or what they may refuse to do next, I don’t know; but any man may see if he will, that it will be something following in natural succession, and a part of one great growth, which is rotten at the root.”
Substitute modern relativist values for pioneering American ones, and the point is quite well made. Bad manners lead to other kinds of badness. If we each let the “FOR THE COMMON GOOD” bit of our brains shrivel on the vine, the ultimate result is crime, alienation and moral hell. Manners are easy to dismiss from discussions of morality because they seem to be trivial; the words “moral panic” were invented to belittle those of us who burst into tears at the news that 300,000 bits of chewing-gum sit, newly spat, on the pavements of Oxford Street at any one time. But if we can’t talk about the morality of manners, we can’t talk about the morality of anything. As Mark Caldwell puts it, in his Short History of Rudeness, “Manners are what is left when serious issues of human relations are removed from consideration, yet without manners serious human relations are impossible.”
The problem is that it has become politically awkward to draw attention to absolutes of bad and good. In place of manners, we now have doctrines of political correctness, against which one offends at one’s peril: by means of a considerable circular logic, such offences mark you as reactionary and therefore a bad person. Therefore if you say people are bad, you are bad. And to state that a well-mannered person is superior to an ill-mannered one – well, it is to invite total ignominy. Yet I can’t not say this. I believe it. Manners are about showing consideration, and using empathy. But they are also about being connected to the common good; they are about being better. Every time a person asks himself, “What would the world be like if everyone did this?” or “I’m not going to calculate the cost to me on this occasion. I’m just going to do the right thing”, or “Someone seems to need this seat more than I do”, the world becomes a better place. It is ennobled. The crying shame about modern rudeness is that it’s such a terrible missed opportunity for a different kind of manners – manners based, for the first time, not on class and snobbery, but on a kind of voluntary charity that dignifies both the giver and the receiver by being a system of mutual, civil respect.
Instead of which, sadly, we have people who say, “The beer went mad” when what they mean is, “I drank too much and then I got violent.” Far from taking moral responsibility for other people, we have started refusing to take moral responsibility even for ourselves. I once heard someone say, in all seriousness, “If I contract salmonella from eating this runny egg, they’ll be sorry.” Someone else is always the repository for blame. Someone else will clear it up. Someone else will pay for this. Even when we are offended, we don’t feel comfortable saying, “This offends me.” Instead, we say, “This could offend people more sensitive to this kind of thing.” There was recently a hoo-ha about a TV advertisement for Kentucky Fried Chicken in which call-centre staff sang, with their mouths full, about how great the new KFC chicken salad was – with subtitles, because their words were so unclear. Now, the Advertising Standards Authority received over a thousand complaints in two weeks, and the complaints were that:
It set a bad example to children.
It encouraged dangerous behaviour because of the risk of choking.
It presented emergency call-centre staff in a bad light.
It mocked people with speech impediments.
Evidently the true reaction, the true objection – that watching people talk with their mouths full is something you perhaps shouldn’t be subjected to in your own home – simply could not be voiced, because such a point would be judgemental and therefore inadmissible.
I mentioned, in the introduction to this book, a tiny flame of hope, and here it is. Let’s try pretending to be polite, and see what happens. Old Aristotle might have been right all those centuries ago: that if you practise being good in small things (I’m paraphrasing again), it can lead to the improvement of general morality. I promise I will stop shouting at boys on skateboards, if that will help. Being friendly and familiar with strangers is not the same as being polite (as we have seen), but if it helps us overcome our normal reticence, all right, be friendly. Yes, we live in an aggressive “Talk to the hand” world. Yes, we are systematically alienated and have no sense of community. Yes, we swear a lot more than we used to, and we prefer to be inside our own individual Bart Simpson bubbles. But just because these are the conditions that promote rudeness does not mean that we can’t choose to improve our happiness by deciding to be polite to one another. Just as enough people going around correcting apostrophes may ultimately lead to some restoration of respect for the English language, so enough people demonstrating kindness and good manners may ultimately have an impact on social morality. Evelyn Waugh wrote that, historically, ceremony and etiquette were the signs of an advancing civilisation; but he went on, rather wonderfully: “They can also be the protection of [civilisations] in decline; strong defences behind which the delicate and the valuable are preserved.” Or, if we can’t go quite that far, let’s just remember to put the empty beer can in the bin while we’re down there . . .
Bibliography
Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, Simon and Schuster, 1987
P. Brown and S.C. Levinson, Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage, Cambridge University Press, 1987
Mark Caldwell, A Short History of Rudeness: Manners, Morals and Misbehavior in Modern America, Picador USA, 1999
Stephen L. Carter, Civility: Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy, 1998
Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass, Ivan R. Dee, 2001
Barbara Ehrenreich, “The Civility Glut”, The Progressive, vol. 64, issue 12, December 2000
Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations (1939), Blackwell, 1994; rev. edn 2000
Norbert Elias, The Society of Individuals (1983), Blackwell, 1991
Kate Fox, Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour, Hodder and Stoughton Ltd, 2004
Michael Frayn, “A Pleasure Shared”, from Listen to This: Sketches and Monologues, Methuen, 1990
Erving Goffman, Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings, Free Press, 1963
Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior, Pantheon, 1967 (Aldine Transaction, 2005)
Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Anchor Books, 1959 (Penguin, 2005)
Erving Goffman, Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order, Allen Lane, 1971
Robert Hughes, Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America, Oxford University Press USA, 1993 (Harvill Press, 1994)
Steven Johnson, Everything Bad is Good for You, Allen Lane, 2005
Richard Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, Allen Lane, 2005
Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century, Oxford University Press USA, 1988
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ple, Michael Joseph, 1998 (Penguin 1999)
Stuart Prebble, Grumpy Old Men, BBC, 2004
Public Agenda, Aggravating Circumstances: A Status Report on Rudeness in America, 2002
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