The cult of the reasonable is also expressed in the English notion of fair play, which is less about real fairness (fairness to all) than about my getting what I think is mine. The words fair and fairness, distinct from just and justness (or justice), do not have direct equivalents in other languages. The strong association between fair and play hints at the English-speaker’s tendency to think of interactions as if they are games.6 Reasonableness and fairness form a trio with the notion of ‘good faith’, which has a particular sense in law but which we tend to come across when someone is protesting (or professing) that a colossal balls-up was achieved without malice.
My use of we illustrates the slippery nature of the first person plural: a writer or orator will use it to suggest, if not universals, at least broad similarities of feelings, interests and experiences, but the affinity it implies is really a fiction. Throughout this book I speak of we and us for the sake of convenience, rather than because I think I can be sure of your views or because I am trying to conscript you in my arguments. When I speak of the English and their manners, it is not because I want to dissociate myself from Englishness or manners, but because I want to maintain a degree of dispassionate distance. Still, I can say with confidence that we care about manners. Why else would you – or we – be here?
When the Daily Mail in 2008 reported the study claiming that bad manners were the biggest problem facing society, one theme was the reduced use of please and thank you. It is striking that the report homed in on language. Complaints about manners often come down to just this: the absence of these so-called magic words. Their alleged disappearance is today used as an index of social decline. Certain media commentators revel in stories of such decline, and plenty of those who respond to their comments fantasize about painful ways of underscoring the words’ importance.
In childhood we are taught that giving and receiving are fundamental features of life, and that, as the five-year-old Bertrand Russell found out, receiving must be accompanied by gratitude. This behaviour has to be instilled; small children do not spontaneously express gratitude. Thanking people is a form of mindfulness. Its expression can be full of humility. We are grateful to people and for things; thanks are directional, and tell us about the source of the things for which we are grateful. The words gratitude and ingratitude emerged when feudal loyalties were replaced by chosen loyalties. Ingratitude is found in the thirteenth century, but with a highly specific sense, to do with forgetting God and his gifts; its current sense caught on in the sixteenth century (Shakespeare uses the word in twelve of his plays), at the same time that gratitude became common.
I remember that when I was a child my mother read me a book called The Elephant and the Bad Baby.7 It depicts an elephant, which is out for a walk one day and meets a baby; together they embark on a shoplifting spree, with the elephant going ‘rumpeta-rumpeta-rumpeta’ an awful lot. Eventually the elephant, noticing that the baby isn’t polite, sits down suddenly and tumbles him from his back. Never mind the shoplifting, the baby’s offence lies in not saying ‘please’.
The use of please as an adverb (‘Please do not feed the right-wing commentators’) is more recent than we might imagine. The first citation in the OED is from 1771. Its use as an interjection (‘Oh, please, the right-wing commentators can look after themselves’) seems to be a twentieth-century development; the OED’s first citation is from E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View, published in 1908. Thank you is older than please, but the OED has only one citation – an obscure one – earlier than 1631. It is not as if politeness in framing requests and courteous acknowledgement of their being met were invented after the Renaissance; rather, these things were expressed in different ways. Today we can be hung up on whether please and thank you are being said, at the expense of a more thoughtful attention to the ways in which we ask and acknowledge. Please and thank you are useful, and people who omit them appear guilty of an ugly sense of entitlement, but there is a lot more to manners than these not-so-magic words, just as there is a lot more to love than saying ‘I love you’.
Many performances of gratitude are hollow. It is not always possible or indeed wise to infuse our words of thanks with sensuous originality, and saying ‘thank you’ may often be a way of acknowledging another person’s presence rather than an expression of profound appreciation – a nod, not a bow. Still, words of thanks can be uttered with a reflexivity that is graceless, and they can be received with similar numbness. In Britain there is no standard equivalent for the Italian prego or the German bitte, routine responses to thanks; although ‘You’re welcome’ has gained ground, it is still viewed as an Americanism and even a sham. Traditionally, silence has sufficed. However, in the last couple of decades it has become common for shop assistants and waiting staff to respond to the words ‘Thank you’ with ‘No problem’. This causes offence to some, because it presents service as the avoidance of nuisance rather than as a pleasure.
‘It’s only words,’ says a barista at my favourite coffee shop, when I ask why he has responded to my request for a black filter coffee with a clipped ‘Don’t worry about it’. But because we use language to project ourselves into the world, and because we use other people’s language to inform judgements about their character, it’s never ‘only’ words. We attach great importance to them; they seem to act as summaries of attitudes. Where the language of thanks is concerned, the attitude we look for is one that preserves the fiction of solidarity.
The Stoic philosopher Seneca, active in the first century AD, discussed in his De beneficiis (‘On favours’) how and why we express gratitude. He argued that acts of generosity deserve no thanks if they have to be screwed out of their givers or just fall from them casually: ‘A gift is much more welcome from a ready than from a full hand.’ He also believed that ‘The mind is frayed and crushed by continual reminders of service rendered … Your service, if I recall it at my pleasure, is life to me. If I do so at yours, it is death.’8 Gratitude, he thought, can only be properly expressed when gifts and benefits are properly conveyed. The trouble with ‘No problem’ is that it raises the possibility that we have in fact caused a problem; it makes our thanks seem misplaced, as if they should have been framed as an apology, and hollows out the experience of gratefulness.
12
Spectators and stratagems
the polite, commercial eighteenth century
In 1709 Richard Steele founded the Tatler, a thrice-weekly magazine intended ‘to expose the false arts of life, to pull off the disguises of cunning, vanity, and affectation, and to recommend a general simplicity in our dress, our discourse, and our behaviour’. When it folded, he launched another magazine, the Spectator, with Joseph Addison.
The Tatler and the Spectator were two of the many new papers and journals to emerge in the early part of the eighteenth century. As print culture burgeoned, there developed a public space in which it was possible to exchange arguments and opinions. Newspapers and magazines provoked debate. They invited questions from readers, who were able to air thoughts for which they would previously have found only a small audience. A great range of views found their way into print; the norms of conduct were up for discussion, and writers set themselves up as arbiters of behaviour. Publications such as the Athenian Mercury raised certain issues repeatedly: could a man and a woman simply be friends, and was adultery ever justifiable? Questions of virtue were dealt with in secular terms.1
From its debut in 1711, the Spectator aimed to bring ‘philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea tables and in coffee houses’. It promoted an idea of politeness that consisted mainly of gracious conversation and sociability. This had to appear smooth and natural, yet was cultivated. Addison noticed a change from the ceremonial encumbrances of the Restoration period. ‘Our manners sit more loose upon us,’ he wrote in an issue dating from July of that year. ‘Nothing is so modish as an agreeable negligence,’ he claimed, and ‘good breeding shows itself most where to an or
dinary eye it appears the least.’2
Addison and Steele were presenting, in a quirky way, the notion that the world could be improved through a greater openness, a less showy personal style. They announced their distance from the frivolity and wastefulness of the reign of Charles II, and argued instead for a model of society embodied in Steele’s dictum that ‘equality is the life of conversation.’
In fact, the previous century had seen a new recognition, among scholars in particular, of the need for just this kind of equal conversation. Harmonious, genial talk was a feature of the Royal Society, founded in 1660; genteel debate replaced the quibbling of previous generations as learned men pursued what they called natural philosophy (we would call it science) in a manner that avoided confrontation and instead favoured diligence and agreement. Fellows of the society assumed that those with whom they conversed were competent and sincere, and that their reports of what they had seen and heard could be relied on. At the same time, it was considered proper to make claims (scientific or otherwise) in a manner that was modest and not pedantic.3 In the eighteenth century, this civil approach became more common.
The authors of the Spectator also argued that society was inherently a good thing: that to be sociable was a virtue (and a secular virtue), and that cultural refinement was a mark of politeness, which could be discerned in a person’s devotion to reading, though this should never seem overly fastidious. A balance had to be struck between seriousness and a too urgent fervour, between friendliness and over-familiarity. The Spectator celebrated variety, curiosity, imagination, commerce and new ideas. Unsurprisingly, given the recent political upheavals, it also quietly commended social cohesion. Its authors saw knowledge as something to be shared, rather than as something to be cloaked in exclusivity, and the fluent, conversational style in which the Spectator was written embodied the qualities that Addison and Steele applauded.
In the 1770s Samuel Johnson approvingly mentioned a proposed edition of the Spectator that was to include explanatory notes. He apparently observed that ‘all works which describe manners, require notes in sixty or seventy years, or less.’4 While it is true that a lot of the Spectator must have seemed dated by the 1770s, it is an indication of the essays’ lasting influence that they were still being cited, commended and imitated, as well as being deprecated, in the early decades of the nineteenth century. In 1945 C. S. Lewis felt able to claim that the code of manners under which he and his contemporaries lived was to a large degree a legacy of the Tatler and the Spectator.5 Lewis’s conviction might be mistaken for mouldy traditionalism, but really it was an honest assessment of the long perspectives that manners afford us – links to worlds that for the most part seem lost.
The Spectator did not have a large circulation; each issue sold about 3,000 copies. But copies were read aloud, often in places far removed from fashionable London. Urging the widest possible consumption, Addison recommended that the Spectator be served to its readers at teatime, ‘as a part of the tea equipage’.6 The magazine benefited from the social circumstances it diagnosed. One of Richard Steele’s subjects was the recent growth of nightlife. Street lighting arrived in London in the 1680s; Paris had had it since 1667, Amsterdam since 1669. There was also better domestic lighting. The development of coffee houses, which were hubs of sociability by day but came into their own once night fell, meant that there was an increase in nocturnal activity.
There was thus a new polite and enlightened nightlife, based around clubs, salons and theatres. The historian Craig Koslofsky has written incisively of the expansion of the social uses of the night, a revolution he calls ‘nocturnalization’. Night was seen as a time for leisure rather than inertia, and traditional fears of the night diminished. Criminals, though they did not disappear from the urban streets, had fewer dark corners in which to lurk. In towns, the authorities concerned themselves less with bad smells and infections and more with getting rid of obstacles; by the middle of the eighteenth century the aesthetics of urban space were being urgently and intelligently debated.7 But while the night became a new scene of consumer activity in towns and the boundary between the private and public spheres became less clear, in rural communities the night remained dark and impenetrable. The question of whether one lived in the town or in the country significantly influenced what time one rose, ate and slept.
The new nocturnal, urban sociability was at once exciting and problematic. The city authorities found that the night became an opportunity for the limits of their control to be tested. This meant that they ended up imposing restraints on the very phenomenon they had made possible.8 The character of this sociability was reflective: you didn’t go hunting at night; instead you played cards or exchanged refined chat. The preferred activities were less physical and more accessible to women. In retrospect, the changes that came about would look like a process of ‘feminization’. The people one met in the new urban spaces could not be placed immediately; as society became more fluid, social rank was less immediately discernible, and politeness became an important marker of one’s personal qualities, while also moderating extremes of political opinion.
All this was prime material for satire. A leading exponent of the form was Ned Ward, whose targets included bent lawyers, maladroit doctors, astrologers and cheating wine merchants. He mocked the cult of politesse, especially as developed within private clubs. Politesse was defined by Abel Boyer, a journalist and lexicographer active around 1700, as ‘a dextrous management of our words and actions, whereby we make other people have better opinion of us and themselves’. Boyer’s definition suggests the lubriciousness of this simulated felicity. Ward for his part emphasized fakery and emptiness. In The History of the London Clubs (1709) he depicted fashionable men who ‘fancy themselves women’ and mimic female behaviour, as well as a group of fine gentlemen who get together each week for a farting contest – a noxious variant on the hot air that was apt to circulate in such places.
Politeness was effeminate, hypocritical and theatrical. The satirist Nicholas Amhurst in Terrae-filius, a collection of essays begun in 1721, gave an account of the manners of students and scholars at Oxford University. At first this work could not be bought in Oxford, and those interested in reading it – of whom there were many – had to obtain it from an ironmonger’s shop in nearby Abingdon. The world Amhurst depicted was shallow, corrupt and politically hazardous. He made much of the special privileges accorded to the richest students, who frittered away their time by drinking and womanizing, and he noted the extent to which superficial punctiliousness prevailed at the expense of real decency.
At the same time as politesse was proliferating in ways that lent themselves to satire, there was a different kind of politeness, not just in the mould of Addison and Steele, but with a philosophical foundation. This owed a good deal to John Locke, the previous century’s pre-eminent British philosopher. For those who mocked the trumpery of contemporary conduct, his consideration of human error was valuable; one of the subjects Locke dealt with in detail was the potential for communication to fail, for our expressive gestures to go awry. At the core of Locke’s thinking was an understanding that knowledge is grounded in experience; individuals, rather than just accepting the views of authority, should seek the truth using their powers of reason. In the later eighteenth century Locke’s arguments played a part in revolutions on both sides of the Atlantic; more immediately, they shaped new ideas of personal responsibility.
Locke believed that conscious beings are aware of themselves as agents or actors in the world. One is a witness to one’s own thoughts and is responsible for their consequences. In the process of discussing accountability and personal identity, Locke used the word self-consciousness. He did not coin the term, but it was new and he popularized it. The Earl of Shaftesbury, who as a boy was taught by Locke, would elaborate on this in the essays collected under the title Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711). Shaftesbury’s writings promoted the idea that every individual possesses a ‘moral sense�
�. He did not think this was an innate faculty. Rather, it was through education and sociability that one’s potential for moral thinking was activated. Shaftesbury believed that politeness, essentially the deft management of one’s words and deeds, stemmed from the ability to socialize freely, and that all people were improved by contact with others: ‘All politeness is owing to liberty. We polish one another and rub off our corners and rough sides by a sort of amicable collision.’9
Shaftesbury’s image of amicable collision is pleasing. It seems to suggest a society in perpetual, useful, gratifying motion. His view of man struck many of his contemporaries as refreshingly positive. Yet negativity persisted, and among his notable antagonists was Bernard Mandeville, a doctor who specialized in treating hysteria and hypochondria and had a sideline in apparently facetious yet morally trenchant literature. Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees (1714) was mainly concerned with economic ideas, but touched on ‘the doctrine of good manners’, suggesting that what passed for politeness, benevolence and sociability were really just by-products of self-interest. They were the mechanisms by which one made one’s hateful impulses more acceptable.
Sorry! Page 14
