Sorry!

by Henry Hitchings

  From time to time the young are the target of phobic political policies. The Anti-social Behaviour Orders, introduced by Tony Blair’s Labour government in 1998 and now scrapped, are a recent example. ASBOs criminalized what might previously have been classified as nuisance or rudeness. While they were not designed to police the behaviour of a specific age group, attention focused on their being applied to young people, and the media seized on stories like that of a ten-year-old in Middlesbrough ‘banned from throwing things’, an eleven-year-old in Manchester prevented from riding his bicycle on footpaths, and a four-foot-five-inch twelve-year-old from near Bolton whose offences including stealing beer from a liquor store.10 An instrument for dealing with problems as disparate as spitting, loitering, joyriding and drug-dealing, the ASBO tapped into the ‘broken windows’ theory advanced by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling in the 1980s: that fixing smallish problems is a means of averting graver ones. It appealed to a large and anxious section of society which felt that civic order was crumbling, not because they had been victims of violence or other extreme forms of crime, but because of their daily experience of small abuses. The high percentage of breached ASBOs suggested their ineffectiveness. But the principle behind the ASBO has a lengthy history. As long ago as 1599 Alexander Goozey, a Salisbury man, was prosecuted for behaving ‘barbarously’ and ‘uncivilly’, his gravest offence having been to yank his wife’s hat off during a church service.11 ASBOs were civil orders, not criminal ones. As such, they could be handed out in response to hearsay. Their name may have sounded modern, but their temper was medieval.

  In 2012 the novelist Martin Amis published Lionel Asbo, described by one critic as ‘a full-on indictment of a debased culture’.12 Early on in this satire, which has the subtitle State of England, we learn that the protagonist, a generic yob who works as a debt collector, changed his name when he reached eighteen. The decision to switch from Lionel Pepperdine to Lionel Asbo may not quite ring true, but the desire to brandish one’s name as a badge of dishonour suggests the mood of the ASBO age. Among the many quirks of modern manners is an appetite for parading one’s lack of them.

  We hear a lot about modern manners – their complexity, their absence, the difficulty of documenting them. It is a field densely populated with experts, again mostly American: some are hucksters, others perceptive and helpful. Richie Frieman, a one-time professional wrestler now billed as Modern Manners Guy, offers ‘quick and dirty tips for a more polite life’ on his website (http://manners.quickanddirtytips.com/). Modern he certainly is, confronting issues such as ‘What is proper karaoke etiquette?’ and ‘How to politely handle a negative tweet’. Elsewhere, Steven Petrow at http://www.gaymanners.com focuses on questions of gay and lesbian manners, such as ‘If I’m not sure my new neighbours are a gay couple, may I ask?’ At http://www.slate.com Emily Yoffe deals with problems of every hue: ‘I’ve been offered a scholarship for Hispanic students, but it turns out I may not even be Hispanic. Does it matter?’, ‘My husband’s brain injury ended our romance. Should I take a lover?’, ‘My boss walked in on me touching myself, and now he won’t stop flirting. What do I do?’ A British slant on the subject is provided by Debrett’s A–Z of Modern Manners, which sets out rules such as ‘if you are leaving a voicemail message don’t ramble’ and ‘wear … deodorant when working out … [and] wipe equipment down when you have finished with it’. Some of the advice is whimsical: if you pass wind, ‘blame the dog, even if there isn’t one’.13

  In the late 1990s John Morgan regularly answered questions from concerned readers of The Times about ‘modern manners’, some of them in truth not so unaccustomed. For instance: ‘Should widows continue wearing their wedding rings?… Would it be suitable to wear the ring on my right hand?’, ‘How should one address a letter to a person of unknown gender who is known only by surname and initials?’, ‘What is good form when reclining one’s seat on a commercial flight?’ The answers Morgan provided were as follows: ‘No … as this could be interpreted as your being committed to Christ in a relationship analogous to marriage’, ‘The only safe solution is to use the styleless, sexless, but increasingly prevalent form, i.e. “Dear N. V. Bloggs”’, ‘There is no reason to ask permission as seat-reclining is an accepted convention shared by all air passengers.’14 The confidence of the prescriptions is striking, but perhaps misplaced.

  A less recent volume, by Anne de Courcy, suggests that ‘Much of modern manners is moulded by issues first made fashionable in the Sixties – racism, the right to free contraception, a vague and benevolent Socialism.’ I fancy the 1960s ‘made fashionable’ racial sensitivity rather than racism, but de Courcy speaks aptly when she notes the prevalence today of attempts to reconcile affluence with ‘an anguished liberal conscience’.15

  People have been talking about ‘modern manners’ since the eighteenth century. A reviewer of a book on the subject complains that ‘Modern Manners are, in general, so trifling and insipid, with so little either instructive or entertaining in them’ – this in 1782.16 Depending on whom you talk to, modern manners are either something that desperately need codifying (we must have a new system of manners to take account of the peculiar textures of the world in which we now live) or the final insult, a flimsy travesty of older and more rigid codes of behaviour.

  Today’s world poses challenges not countenanced by traditional etiquette books, with their resolute guidance on how to respond to a wedding invitation or set a table. At what age should my daughter be required to cover the upper half of her body at a public swimming pool? How should my sister react when people see her mixed-race son and, observing their very different looks, assume she is his nanny? In a restaurant, can you order something that’s not on the menu – an egg-white omelette, for instance – or request alterations to a dish? Is it acceptable to rebuke another person’s child? Can I ask you to remove your high heels when you come into my apartment, which has wooden floors that are easily scratched? If you do remove your high heels, is it polite to offer you my slippers (much loved, comfortable)? Can I insist, when you ask to smoke in my apartment, that you go outside to do so? On a crowded train, is it okay to read a newspaper over another person’s shoulder, and what about reading someone else’s Kindle?17

  One answer that covers most of these questions is ‘Do what you like’. The I-do-what-I-like crowd is always keen to add to its numbers. Its message is one of solipsism rather than tolerance, and it is especially disdainful of English reserve. That fabled reserve could be summed up thus: just because you have a feeling doesn’t mean you need to express it. But now we are taught that expressing feelings is authentic, and we are taught to believe that there is a true self that we can recover from the clutches of our false self – the latter the creation of a society that has supposedly blunted our sensitivities or smothered them. According to this view, the true self is one without inhibitions; anything that creates inhibitions, as manners do, is false. Nevertheless, many of us are deeply afraid of causing offence. Characters in the novels of Jane Austen and Fanny Burney were afraid of this, too, but look how much there now is to cause offence about. Observe, too, the shamanistic susceptibility of the people who get offended, frequently on behalf of others who have not yet learned to be so touchy.

  I dispute the claim that manners are in decline across the board. It is normal, in comparing the past and the present, to conclude that a great deal has been lost. It is also normal to exaggerate feelings of discomfort in the present. But manners are today more complex than ever before. As I have suggested, new social relationships entail new social codes. The intricacy of modern relationships and the wealth of channels through which we pursue them are reflected in the convoluted nature of modern manners. Rather than there being no manners, there are multitudes of conflicting manners, fraught with ambiguity. In the words of David Brooks, ‘technological and social revolution … put greater and greater demands on human cognition. People are now compelled to absorb and process a much more complicated array of information
streams. They are compelled to navigate much more complicated social environments.’18

  In some areas of life, there is a glut of manners, or rather of the empty pleasantries that have taken the place of real courtesy – and of discretion, incisiveness and practicality. At work, we may well be judged according to technical criteria rather than on personal qualities; accordingly, we play roles that illustrate our competence, or have such roles imposed on us. Think, for instance, of those scripted phone conversations you have with ‘customer service providers’, in which the courtesies appear to be full of beans but smell of soap: ‘Thank you for your continued interest in our range of services, Mr Hitchings. Please enjoy the rest of your day.’

  Fake politeness is all around us, a meaningless hum. Lynne Truss provides a nice list of reasons (‘mostly lapsed’, she says) to show real politeness to others. Among them: they know more than you do, they got here first, they have educational qualifications in the subject under discussion, you are in their house, you work for them, they work for you, they paid for the tickets, you phoned them, they are less fortunate than you.19 Reading this list, I realize that, in addition to having been on the receiving end of behaviour that violates this homely set of principles, I have perpetrated such behaviour – many times.

  Truss’s list accuses us of a failure to stand back from the immediacy of our own experience and fathom other people’s perspectives. We live in an age of narcissistic self-absorption; we are addicted to immediate rewards and short-term gains. Unrestrained individualism is rife. Evelyn Waugh once made the piquant claim that ‘manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.’20 The trouble is, we all think we’re pretty now – or deserve to be. We gorge on advertisements and other images that encourage us to believe that the way we look is our most important feature; they sap our self-worth, and we react with a paroxysm of exaggerated confidence or a noisy sense of entitlement. Who needs to be empathetic when you can be omnipotent? But behind this apparent shamelessness are flickers of self-disgust and boredom, as well as a persistent feeling of being unfulfilled.

  Ours is also a fearful age. The last few decades of the twentieth century saw the concern with familiar threats to physical existence replaced in part by nebulous anxieties: the belief that changes, in every area of life, are speeding up, and that threats are all around us, in the food we eat, the air we breathe, the sun and the soil.21 The language of risk is everywhere, too: it is a plastic idiom, capable of being used to justify both intuitive, personal decisiveness and a deliberate, highly technical caution. At least as inescapable is the language of therapy, which does away with moral categories and gives priority to causal explanations, while also positing an adversarial model of human relations, full of conflict, secret motives, suppressed desires and defensiveness. Terms such as anxiety, trauma, stress and addiction, once the vocabulary of the specialist, are at the heart of a worldview in which feelings matter more than beliefs – and in which we are urged, even coerced, into feeling vulnerable. One of the results is the increasingly common notion that criticism is a form of violence.22 Accordingly, we perform rituals of respect and sensitivity, for fear of prosecution or losing our jobs, rather than out of a genuine concern for others’ well-being. Forget enlightenment, the scaremongers insinuate: your goal should just be to survive.

  Yet in truth material comfort insulates most of us from the deprivation that manners used to palliate. The most shocking rudeness is not that of the poor and downtrodden, but that of people whose lives are by comparison idyllic. Ever since the doctrine of etiquette took the marrow out of manners, replacing discretion and nuance with black and white legislation, the whole question of manners has had an image problem, tending to be represented as a set of traps for the unwary, a smirk-inducing test enabling smart folk to celebrate their privileges. Manners are associated with pretentiousness, a soulless caution, a denial of progress or even a hollow duplicity – and with conformism, drabness, the quenching of personality. But the ability to evaluate and regulate the effects we have on other people is part of a fine awareness of our selves. If we stop thinking about those effects, if we stop caring, we are not expressing the freedom and wonder of our selves, but limiting them. If we do not control our desires, they control us.

  Acknowledgements

  In the course of writing Sorry! I have incurred a number of debts of gratitude. I want to begin by thanking Eleanor Birne, who took on this project at John Murray, and Roland Philipps, who has proved a sensitive editor. I am grateful also to Nikki Barrow, James Spackman and Caroline Westmore at John Murray, and to my agents Peter Straus and Melanie Jackson.

  Further thanks, for kindnesses in some cases only loosely related to this book, go to Andrew Brooke, Alex Burghart, Jesse Coleman, Molly Crockett, Nick de Somogyi, Katie Drummond, Susan Goldfarb, Gesche Ipsen, Kwasi Kwarteng, Will le Fleming, Daniel Light, Morag Lyall, Lucy Mangan, Douglas Matthews, Edouard Métrailler, Sybil Pincus, Miranda Popkey, Aliceson Robinson, James Scudamore, Roger Stacey, Craig Taylor and Mary Wellesley. I am grateful to the staff of the British Library and the London Library for their patience. Thanks are also due to my companions on the Japan Study Tour in the summer of 2001, as well as to the strangers who agreed to be interviewed about their attitudes to manners (their names have been changed).

  My deepest thanks are reserved for Jessica Edwards, Robert Macfarlane and Leo Robson, and for my father, who provided the initial inspiration for this book.

  Notes

  I have not given individual page references for quotations from works that I cite liberally, such as Chesterfield’s letters, or for quotations from works that can very easily be located, such as Jane Austen’s novels.

  Chapter 1: The stars’ tennis balls: or, a short introduction from an unusual angle

  1. Clive James, Glued to the Box: Television Criticism from the Observer, 1979–82 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1983), 100, 140.

  2. John McEnroe, Serious (London: Time Warner, 2003), 91.

  3. See Eugene Oswald, ‘Early German Courtesy Books’, in F. J. Furnivall (ed.), Queen Elizabethes Academy, etc., 2 vols. (London: Trübner, 1869), II, 79–147.

  4. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-562464/Bad-manners-biggest-problem-facing-Britain-says-study--parents-blame.html, retrieved 29 June 2012.

  5. Howard Association, Juvenile Offenders (London: Wertheimer, Lea, 1898), 22–3. Robert Wallace, Characteristics of the Present Political State of Great Britain, 2nd edn (London: Andrew Millar, 1758), 200.

  6. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/telegraph-view/8757595/A-sorry-tally.html, retrieved 3 July 2012.

  Chapter 2: ‘I’ma get medieval on yo ass’: manners in the age of chivalry

  1. Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England (London: Vintage, 2009), 196.

  2. Aldo Scaglione, Knights at Court: Courtliness, Chivalry, and Courtesy from Ottonian Germany to the Italian Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 6.

  3. Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, trans. Robert Baldick (London: Jonathan Cape, 1962), 398.

  4. See the excellent coverage of this subject in J. A. Burrow, Gestures and Looks in Medieval Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

  5. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott, rev. edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 389, 191.

  6. Robert Muchembled, A History of Violence: From the End of the Middle Ages to the Present, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), 2.

  7. For a full evocation of this, see Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, trans. Fritz Hopman (London: Edward Arnold, 1924), 1–2.

  8. Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes (London: Penguin Allen Lane, 2011), 61, 64.

  9. Kenelm Digby, The Broad Stone of Honour: or, The True Sense and Practice of Chivalry. The First Book, Godefridus (London: Joseph Booker, 1829), 89.

  10. Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven, Connectic
ut: Yale University Press, 1984), 239.

  11. Richard Brathwait, The English Gentlewoman (London: Alsop and Fawcet, 1631), 82–94, 219.

  Chapter 3: Lubricants and filters: ‘a kind of lesser morality’

  1. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 30, 67, 80.

  2. See Paul J. Zak, The Moral Molecule: The Source of Love and Prosperity (London: Bantam, 2012).

  3. Cited in Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature (New York: Bantam, 1979), 22–3.

  4. See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 5.

  5. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, 3 vols. (New York: Pantheon, 1978–86), I, 86.

  6. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Macmillan, 1899), 47. Henri Bergson, Mélanges, ed. André Robinet (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972), 320.

  7. Jilly Cooper, Class: An Exposé of the English Class System (London: Corgi, 1999), 176, 11.

  8. George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion (London: Penguin, 2000), 5. Kate Fox, Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2004), 73.