Samuel touches on an important subject here. The move towards greater gender equality began before the twentieth century, and the suffragettes achieved significant progress, especially after becoming more militant in the years just before the First World War. In the 1960s a fresh wave of activism, partly inspired by the writer Betty Friedan, addressed issues in law as well as in culture. Friedan wrote powerfully about the need for women to turn away from investing in domesticity, which made a woman ‘an anonymous biological robot’ who ‘looks for security in things’ and ‘lives a vicarious life through mass daydreams and through her husband and children’. Long after Friedan’s disavowal of female servitude, iniquities remain, but there have been palpable improvements in women’s political, educational and legal opportunities. As Theodore Zeldin has written: ‘There are two types of women in the world today of whom there were very few in the past: the educated and the divorced.’9
The rhetoric that has accompanied the improvement of women’s rights has complicated many men’s understanding of how they should behave towards women – or rather, towards individual women they encounter. The questions that result are often small but fraught with serious implications. Is a man on a bus or train who gives up his seat for a woman an example of sensitivity or a patronizing patriarchy? If he does not give up his seat, is he failing to be chivalrous or renouncing what he sees as an outmoded practice?
As a child growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, I was encouraged to believe that I ought to hold doors open for others, especially if they were encumbered. But I can remember, when I was no more than nine, holding the door of a bakery for a heavily laden woman and being berated as ‘a bloody sexist’. About twenty years later I was surprised, as I helped an elderly woman with her heavy shopping bags, to be abused by a woman cycling past: ‘Don’t think you’re something you’re not, you sexist prick.’
Fundamentally, sexism is the belief that one sex is superior to the other. Yet it is a many-headed monster. Clearly my behaviour in the two cases just mentioned was not hostile missionary sexism, but it would be construed by some as benign sexism – an act of differentiation, though not of discrimination, seen as paternalistic and condescending, though many people of both sexes might regard it as charming, honourable or simply human.
We are a long way here from the large history of sexual injustice and the mainly peaceful revolution that, over the past 200 years, has transformed the lives and expectations of women. We are a long way, too, from the salient fact that in the western world the key ideas of feminism have circulated as books (The Second Sex, The Female Eunuch, The Feminine Mystique, Sisterhood is Powerful, The Beauty Myth), in magazines and on television.
It is worth taking note of the positive effects of television – as a chronicle of our times, an educational stimulus and a means of augmenting existing pleasures – because so much of the comment about television is negative, dwelling on its alleged distortion of reality, its role as an insidious instrument of consumerism or its capacity for turning us from careful watchers into careless glancers.
Criticism of television often targets what is on (the violence of drama, the fatuous nature of game shows), but the very existence of television has changed patterns of sociability. If you spend your evenings slumped in front of the box, rather than going out for your entertainment, you are very likely avoiding other kinds of activity that would demand greater participation. Watching TV can be a social event, but typically it is isolating. Once upon a time you would have given the hours you now spend watching TV to voluntary groups or hobbies that were likely to involve others. ‘I don’t watch TV,’ you may say, ‘or only PBS.’ Perhaps you are not even addicted to HBO box sets. But you know exactly what I am talking about.
Watching TV reduces our engagement with people. In his lament Anyone for England? (1997) Clive Aslet writes of ‘privatization … taking place in the home’, of ‘individuals and groups … splintering off from the collective mass of principles and activities that form a community … Now habits, manners, morals, codes of conduct, ways of life … have similarly been privatized. In deciding which to adopt, the individual has never been more on his own.’10 Although you may find the language hyperbolic, Aslet has a point: TV is a domestic medium and asks little of its consumers, while the now ubiquitous remote control, though it enables grazing, seems to leave its users in a state of being both entranced and inattentive.
As the rhythms of communal life have grown fainter, so they have become something to nurse or cherish. Yet could the phenomenon identified as collapse really just be a reflection of the multifariousness of our interests? Is the much mythologized communal sociability a way of putting off the need to take charge of one’s own well-being? Is there a case for saying that the mechanisms of communal living, which create webs of dependence and reciprocity, exist (or existed) only so as to dampen the threat of our crude animal drives? That in a highly technologized society, which is also a heavily medicated one, this threat can be – and is – dampened in other ways?
Steven Pinker shows the present state of manners in a different light. He has written about how, if we review the history of violence, we will be struck by the peacefulness of the modern world, even though it is conventional to speak of the twentieth century as a period of exceptional destruction. ‘The decline of violence,’ he argues, ‘may be the most significant and least appreciated development in the history of our species.’ When he narrows his focus to look at the very recent past, he identifies in the 1990s what he dubs the Great Crime Decline, ‘part of a change in sensibilities that can fairly be called a recivilizing process’. In his view, society has become so peaceful that we can relax the mannerly inhibitions that were once necessary to curb violence. Lots of people look edgy and bohemian, rebellious and dysfunctional, but really they are just experimenting with styles and roles; on investigation, they turn out to lead pretty conventional lives. What pessimists see as evidence of a deep social malaise can instead be interpreted as evidence of society’s comfortableness: ‘the fact that women show a lot of skin or that men curse in public is not a sign of cultural decay … [but] a sign that they live in a society that is so civilized that they don’t have to fear being harassed or assaulted in response.’11
To return to a theme from my opening chapter, never quite out of sight since: decline is something we are always noticing. Long historical perspectives are not usually available to us; we see what is in front of our noses, rather than slow processes of the kind described by Pinker or Norbert Elias. The comparisons we make are confident but historically dubious. We regard ourselves as good at identifying excess and deficit: someone drinking or eating too much, not getting out enough, working too hard or too little, spending too little time with family or too little effort on personal grooming, being too loud or failing to make enough noise to be heard. Evidently we fancy that we know what the right amount of these things is. Yet the right amount is something we establish by reacting to our experience of what feels like the wrong amount; it is rarely appreciated when present. Something similar occurs when we talk about decline: we praise a state of affairs for which we would never have expected to feel such affection. Declinism is the dark side of nostalgia, homesickness for a place we never really loved.
Even in today’s fluid society there are still enclaves of old-fashioned ceremony, which satisfy the desire for a connection to a more pristine world. Weddings and funerals are two examples; another is interacting with royalty. Ideas today of the significance of marriage are very different from those that prevailed in the 1950s or the 1850s. But the wedding itself is a rite of passage and a public declaration with public repercussions. The English think of privacy as essential to matrimonial ease, but before that privacy is possible there must be a glare of public scrutiny. From the moment of proposal onward, the process is steeped in tradition: the reading of the banns, to check for legal impediments to the marriage; the rectangular invitations with their formulaic wording; the presence at the ceremony of a b
est man, ushers and bridesmaids, all with their defined roles; the bride wearing white, and her father giving her away; the signing of the register; the reception with its toasts and speeches, the first dance, the cutting of the cake; and then the honeymoon, a practice known to the French as a lune de miel but also as a voyage à la façon anglaise. True, it isn’t always like that, but even a fairly inventive secular wedding or civil partnership will incorporate elements of this blueprint. Whereas Victorian guides suggested that the pageantry should be limited, the modern wedding is a gluttonous and expensive affair. Nevertheless, it remains a very formal way of affirming private feelings. Sacred or not, it is a ritual of transformation that resonates with solemn imagery of pledges and covenants.
The funeral is the most solemn example of a durable ceremony. In other cultures there may be sacrifice, ritual washing of the deceased, rending of garments or of symbolic ribbons, and later exhumation and reburial. Some communities in Britain maintain these practices. But the English funeral is a confined occasion, a family gathering marked by sobriety rather than festivity. Extravagant displays of grief and lamentation are taboo; the norm is quiet tribute. The funeral sermon includes some testimony, however meagre in its information, about the character of the person who has died. For all its poignancy, this eulogy is an appeal to the communal and the acknowledged; it is not the place for revelation or confession, drama or evaluation. The most modern funeral rites seem conservative when compared with other parts of the lives of those in attendance. But technology is changing the parameters of mourning and commemoration.
In the final decades of the nineteenth century, a popular guide to conduct was Manners and Rules of Good Society. Presented as the work of ‘a member of the aristocracy’, it contained a wealth of instructions such as ‘A gentleman should not take his stick or umbrella with him into the drawing-room, but leave it in the hall’ and ‘Ladies and gentlemen, whether related or not, should never walk arm-in-arm, unless the lady is an elderly one, or an invalid, and requires the support.’ Especially striking to us now are the stipulations about acceptable periods of mourning for the deceased: for an uncle or aunt the correct period is said to be between six weeks and three months, and for a second cousin it is three weeks, though ‘Mourning for a second cousin is not obligatory.’12
The rituals of bereavement, once so precise (with conventions about social seclusion and the wearing of hat-bands), are now relaxed. An article in the New York Times in April 2006 quoted messages left on a young woman’s Myspace page after her death in a car accident: one of these was ‘Hey Lee! It’s been a LONG time. I know that you will be able to read this from Heaven, where I’m sure you are in charge of the parties.’ Social networking has made grief a much less private matter. Peter Hitchens, writing in the Daily Mail in December 2011 about the death of his brother Christopher, reflected that ‘Much of civilization rests on the proper response to death, simple unalloyed kindness, the desire to show sympathy for irrecoverable loss, the understanding that a unique and irreplaceable something has been lost to us.’13 The ‘proper response’ now has, even for a traditionalist such as Peter Hitchens, a latitude few Victorians could have imagined.
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Technology and the revenge effect
As we have seen, manners typically used to filter from the top down – not least from the old and experienced to the young and callow. But modern communications technology has changed that. Online, and throughout electronic culture, the young dictate the mood, and the rest of society learns from them or gets left out. In Talk to the Hand Lynne Truss writes: ‘Just as the rise of the internet sealed the doom of grammar, so modern communications technology contributes to the end of manners.’1 Not everyone will nod assent. But while I don’t believe that grammar is doomed or that manners are finished, I know what Truss means.
Technological evangelists claim that the internet is forging a better world, converting us from couch potatoes addicted to passive consumption into creators and sharers who collaborate on projects. Some of these are worthwhile, others admittedly less so; of the former, the most staggering have been the Twitter revolutions, achieved in countries such as Iran and Egypt, which made use of the microblogging service to co-ordinate protests and relay news.
Instead of squandering our lives inhaling opiate entertainment – such as vacuous TV shows – we now split our time between making things, disseminating them and consuming them. Such, at least, is the new received wisdom. An alternative view, articulated best by the contrarian computer scientist Jaron Lanier, is that technology, while it can and should be used to enrich our interactions, tends to deplete our relationships, encouraging shallowness and a hollow obsession with diffusing information – a culture in which human understanding, even as we believe we are enlarging it, becomes dwarfish. The writer Sherry Turkle used to celebrate the capacity of technology to liberate us, but has recently cast doubt on this. ‘Technology proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies,’ she observes, but these days our networked existence ‘allows us to hide from each other, even as we are tethered to each other’.2 Oppressed by busy-ness, we use technology in the hope of clawing back some time for our discretionary use, but instead it makes us feel more overwhelmed. The playwright Richard Foreman, in the online magazine Edge, has spoken of the emergence of ‘a new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance as we all become “pancake people”, spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button’.3
Pancake people cover a lot of territory, as readers and writers. But they tend to share themselves before there is anything much to share. In my experience, one is most likely to be a pancake person when using social networks. While there is something rather beautiful about a complex network of sentient nodes, social networks can also provide ugly examples of the ways in which contagion works. Amid the swarm of information, there is increasing uncertainty about concepts such as ownership, copyright, privacy and free speech.
The vulnerability of our personal information online creates opportunities for people we know and people we don’t know to jeopardize our privacy and security. One of the things many of us love about the internet is that it makes it possible to broadcast ideas and images that might otherwise get no notice. But it also allows others to broadcast our ideas and images, for their own benefit or merely to our detriment.
A practice that is apparently trivial yet actually intrusive is the photographing or filming of our everyday activities (and their less humdrum moments: the time you danced in just your underwear or cracked a regrettable joke about your best friend). The camera, from the moment of its development, posed a threat to privacy. Now many of us have a camera on our person all the time, on our increasingly sophisticated phones. We can be filmed at any moment, and the footage can be shared with ease. Having had a stand-off on a train with a man who was trying to use his phone to film under – and up – my girlfriend’s skirt, I am alert to the potential for this to turn sour. I don’t think those pictures were merely for furtive private consultation, not that it would have been all right if they had been. Yet my reaction to this man’s behaviour surprised him, and he argued that because we were in public we were at his mercy: ‘If you want to be private, stay at home.’
Using the internet prompts a host of other concerns, mostly small but not paltry. Is it prudent to announce your new relationship on Facebook? What about a bereavement? Is it okay for your avatar on a networking site to be a logo rather than a picture of you? Can you reject a ‘friend request’ from your own parent or child? Do you have to follow your friends on Twitter? Can you tell someone he’s exposing too much of himself in his updates (be it his boringness or his appetite for random sex)? How perfunctory can you be in your response to an email? When do you use ‘Reply to All’ rather than ‘Reply’, and, more importantly, when shouldn’t you? Are emoticons tacky or charming? Is looking at pornography on the internet somehow ‘more okay�
�� than looking at it on film or the printed page? (Clue: No.) Where do you draw the line between researching the personal history of new acquaintances and snooping on them? Can you use your phone to check your email under the table during dinner? Are goods you buy online more likely to be faulty or counterfeit, and what can you do if they are? Exactly how secure are your credit card details? What information is your web browser sequestering for future use? How, if at all, can you massage your online reputation? What are the dangers of digital technology’s everlasting memory?
Where social networks are concerned, several principles of etiquette have emerged: promote others more than you promote yourself; if you are trying to sell something, disclose the fact that you are doing so; don’t voice your resentment of other people’s reluctance to back your cause; if you are recycling something you were directed to by another person (let’s say a lovely YouTube clip), acknowledge who alerted you to it; be aware that in correcting other people’s ‘netiquette’ (or their grammar), you are at high risk of committing offences every bit as bad as those you are choosing to condemn; don’t be a troll, dishing out rancour from behind a mask; and don’t use sockpuppets to praise yourself.
There are issues here that go far beyond the realm of etiquette. Across social media there are users keen to avoid generic interactions and instead engage with others personally, sensitive to the need for concision and visual appeal, mindful of others’ vulnerability, and respectful of the sources of ideas and information. Their practices are the ingredients of a new civility. But this is not far past its infancy, and it has grown out of users’ unhappy experiences, a familiarity with those parts of life online that seem scrappy, immodest, churlish, sadistic, corrupt or degraded.
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