Watching the English
Page 65
Modesty
The English are no more naturally self-effacing than other nations – in fact, we are rather arrogant – but (as with courtesy) we have strict rules about the appearance of modesty, including prohibitions on boasting and any form of self-importance, and rules actively prescribing self-deprecation and self-mockery. We place a high value on modesty, we aspire to modesty. The modesty that we actually display is often false – or, to put it more charitably, ironic. Our famous self-deprecation is a form of irony – saying the opposite of what we intend people to understand, or using deliberate understatement. It’s a kind of code: everyone knows that a self-deprecating statement probably means roughly the opposite of what is said, or involves a significant degree of understatement, and we are duly impressed, both by the speaker’s achievements or abilities and by his/her reluctance to trumpet them. Problems arise when the English try to play this rather silly game with foreigners, who do not understand the ironic code and tend to take our self-deprecating or self-mocking remarks at face value. Modesty also requires that we try to play down or deny class/wealth/status differences – polite egalitarianism involves a combination of the three ‘key values’ (courtesy, modesty, fair play) with a generous helping of hypocrisy. English modesty is often competitive – ‘one-downmanship’ – although this game may involve a lot of indirect boasting, and self-deprecation can be used as a coded insult. English displays of modesty (whether competitive, hypocritical, insulting or genuine) are distinctive for the degree of humour involved. Our modesty rules often act as a counter-balance to our natural arrogance, just as our courtesy rules protect us from our own aggressive tendencies. Key phrases include: ‘Don’t boast’; ‘Stop showing off’; ‘Don’t blow your own trumpet’; ‘Don’t be clever’; ‘Don’t be pushy’; ‘I do a bit of sport’ (meaning I’ve just won an Olympic medal); ‘Well, I suppose I know a bit about that’ (meaning I’m the acknowledged world expert on it); ‘Oh, that’s all a bit over my head, I’m afraid’ (ditto); ‘Not as hard as it looks/just lucky’ (standard response to any praise for personal achievement); and, just in case you’re starting to think we’re quite sweet, ‘Her house [or children, clothes, car, etc.] is always so pristine – makes me feel rather scruffy and hopeless’ (coded insult, meaning she’s a petit-bourgeois who cares about things being ‘pristine’ and actually makes the upper-middle/upper-class speaker feel smugly superior).
THE DIAGRAM
So. There are the defining characteristics of Englishness. They already seem to have arranged themselves into something a bit more structured than a list. We have a ‘core’ and we have identified three distinct categories – reflexes, outlooks and values – each with a ‘cluster’ of three characteristics. Diagrams are not really my strong point (for non-English readers: that is a big understatement) but it looks as though I might be able to keep my somewhat rash promise to represent all this visually in some way.127
It is impossible to show all of the individual interconnections and interactions between the characteristics. I spent several days trying, for example, to devise a visual illustration of the particularly close ‘grammatical’ links that I have described throughout the book between courtesy and hypocrisy, modesty and hypocrisy, humour and empiricism, humour and Eeyorishness, fair play and moderation, and so on, but it always ended up looking like a tangled mass of spaghetti, only less appetising. And, in any case, I realised that these connections between defining characteristics are often only relevant or even apparent in relation to specific aspects or features or rules of English behaviour. The money-talk taboo, for example, is a product of social dis-ease + modesty + hypocrisy + class-consciousness (that is, the ‘core’ plus one from each ‘cluster’). Our attitude to religion – a rather more complex matter – involves a combination of moderation + fair play + courtesy + humour + empiricism + Eeyorishness (a pick-and-mix from all the ‘clusters’, and all indirectly related to the ‘core’). Our apparent anti-intellectualism is actually empiricism + modesty + humour (specifically anti-earnestness). And so on. You can have hours of fun – if, like me, you have nothing better to do – picking random aspects of English behaviour and ‘mapping their cultural DNA’ from the defining characteristics in the List. Some stereotypes can also be dissected in this manner: so-called ‘English reserve’, for example, is primarily a symptom of our social dis-ease (the chronically embarrassed/inhibited ‘pole’ of our ‘bi-polar’ social disorder) but also involves a combination of courtesy (specifically ‘negative politeness’) + modesty (with the usual link to hypocrisy) + moderation, with maybe a dash of grumpy Eeyorishness.
But in order to show all the connections and interactions between these characteristics in a diagram, I would have to include all the minutiae of our behaviour patterns, which would effectively mean including everything in the book – clearly an impossible task.
I think we’ll just have to settle for something much simpler. Ditch the microscope, stand back and look at the big picture. This basic diagram of Englishness won’t tell us anything we don’t already know from the ‘narrative’ list above. It just shows what the defining characteristics are, how they can be classified, and that these characteristics are all linked both with each other and with the central ‘core’. But the diagram does at least convey the notion that Englishness is a dynamic system rather than a static list. And it gets the whole thing on to one convenient page. For, um, easy reference or something. Englishness at-a-glance. And it looks rather nice and pleasingly symmetrical.
I’m afraid my little diagram of Englishness hasn’t come out looking much like a ‘genome’, and it will no doubt be disappointing for those who were expecting something more complex and difficult and scientific-looking. But those genomes and so on were only metaphors, and much as I love to stretch, labour and generally abuse a metaphor, Englishness just would not be shoehorned into any existing scientific models, so I’ve had to make up my own rather crude and over-simplified structure. But it does look a bit sort of molecular – don’t you think? – which is quite scientific enough for me. And anyway, the point was not to have a grandly impressive diagram, just something that would help us to understand and make sense of the peculiarities of ordinary English behaviour.
CAUSES
In our search for this understanding of Englishness, one question remains. If our unfortunate social dis-ease is indeed the central ‘core’ of Englishness, then we have to ask: what causes this dis-ease?
It is as though, throughout the book, I have been a sort of ethnological psychiatrist, examining a patient (‘The English’) who has ‘presented with’ a complex, apparently incoherent and unrelated set of odd behaviours, bizarre beliefs and strange, compulsive habits. After a long period of close observation and a lot of embarrassing questions, I can see the recurring patterns and themes, and eventually arrive at a diagnosis: the condition I am calling the English Social Dis-ease. It is not a severely debilitating disorder: the patient self-medicates quite effectively in various ways, has developed a range of coping mechanisms, manages to lead a relatively normal life and regards his/her behaviour as perfectly reasonable (often claiming that it is the rest of the world that is odd and out of step). But others find the patient weird and often rather tiresomely anti-social, if sometimes quite charming. Although I cannot provide a cure, my diagnosis may in itself be of some help, at least in understanding the condition and its management.
But the aetiology of this dis-ease still remains something of a mystery. As with many psychological disorders, no one really knows what causes it. This is not for want of speculation on the subject. Although I believe this book is the first to identify the dis-ease properly – in the sense of giving a name to the odd collection of troubling symptoms that characterise the condition – I am certainly not the first to notice and comment on the symptoms themselves. Every attempt to describe our national character makes at least some mention of ‘English reserve’, and many also puzzle over its apparent opposite, English loutishness, hooliganism and o
ther anti-social behaviours. My only contribution has been to suggest that these seemingly contradictory Jekyll-and-Hyde tendencies are part of the same syndrome (a bit like the manic and depressive elements of what is now called bi-polar disorder). This diagnosis may be helpful in understanding the English, but identifying and naming a disorder tells us nothing about its cause.
Several possible causes have been proposed by other writers. Many are inclined to blame the English climate. While our weather may indeed be a factor, I’m a bit sceptical about this explanation, as our climate is not really all that different from that of many other northern European countries – not to mention Scotland, Ireland and Wales – whose inhabitants do not exhibit the same sociopathic tendencies.128 This does not rule out the weather as a cause (a lot of smokers do not get lung cancer), but it does suggest that other factors must be involved.
A number of writers point the finger at our history, but there seems to be little consensus on what parts of English history might be responsible for our current dis-ease. We had and lost an empire – well, so did the Romans, the Spanish, the French, the Russians, the Dutch, the Austrians, the Portuguese and a number of others, and they didn’t all turn out like us. Some suggest that the tendencies I am concerned with are of relatively recent origin. G. J. Renier (author of The English: Are They Human?), for example, blamed public schools for the ludicrous excesses of English reserve; I have already discussed Harry Mount’s attempts to attribute related social handicaps to gender-segregated state schools (when he’s not blaming the weather); the anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer traced certain aspects of our national character, particularly our self-restraint and orderliness, to the establishment of our police force – and so on). Some even seem to believe that all of our loutish, yobbish, anti-social traits began, along with sex, in 1963, and that things were different and people knew how to behave back when they were a lad. Historians, however, provide evidence of both English ‘reserve’ and English loutishness dating back at least to the seventeenth century, and I have already mentioned reports of our medieval football violence. I am not a historian, so I may not be qualified to judge but as far as I can gather from reading the accounts of those who are, we would seem to have suffered from this social dis-ease for quite some time, perhaps in somewhat varying forms, and its onset or emergence cannot be attributed to any particular historical event or process.
So, if neither climate nor history can entirely account for our disease, what about geography? The fact that we are ‘an island race’ has occasionally been put forward as an explanation for some aspects of our national character – such as our insularity. While there may well be some truth in this, I do not think that inhabiting an island can in itself account for much – there are, after all, plenty of other island peoples with very different national characters, although we may have some traits in common. But if we get a bit more specific, and take into account the size of our island and the density of its population, then the geographical argument starts to look a bit more promising. This is not just an island, but a relatively small, or at least very overcrowded island, and it is not too hard to see how such conditions might produce an inhibited, privacy-obsessed, socially wary, uneasy and sometimes obnoxiously anti-social people; a negative-politeness culture, whose courtesy is primarily concerned with the avoidance of intrusion and imposition; an acutely class-conscious culture, preoccupied with status and boundaries and demarcations; a society characterised by awkwardness, embarrassment, obliqueness, fear of intimacy/emotion/fuss – veering between buttoned-up over-politeness and aggressive belligerence . . . Although we are in many ways very different, I have noted a number of important similarities between the English and the Japanese, and wondered whether the smallish-overcrowded-island factor might be significant.
But this crude geographical determinism is not really much more convincing than the climatic or historical arguments. If geography is so important in determining national character, why are the Danes so different from other Scandinavian nations? Why are the French and Germans so distinctively French and German, even when they live immediately either side of the arbitrary border between these two countries? Ditto Alpine French and Alpine Italians? I lived on that particular border for four years, and we would often cross into Italy purely to enjoy being in a very different culture for a bit, as the landscape was exactly the same. And what about Texans and Mexicans? Finns and Russians? And so on. No – geography may well play a part, but it clearly can’t be the final answer.
Our social dis-ease, and indeed other key aspects of our national culture, did not come out of thin air, and so must presumably be due to our particular combination of climate, history and geography – which at least could be said to be unique. But as I have noted here and throughout the book, more detailed ‘casual’ explanations – attempts to attribute specific aspects of Englishness to our climate or geography, or to particular historical events or processes – simply do not stand up to close scrutiny or cross-cultural comparison. And one could even legitimately quibble that there is a ‘chicken or egg’ problem with the notion that our national character/culture is a ‘product’ of our unique climate/geography/history combination. Although we may be at the mercy of our weather and some immutable aspects of geography, our environment is largely man-made, and our history entirely so.
I’m sorry, but I just don’t think there is a simple ‘casual’ answer, and I’m not going to insult your intelligence with speculative ‘Just So Stories’ about ‘How the English Got Their Social Handicaps’. To be honest, I can’t really explain why the English are the way we are – and neither, if they are being honest, can anyone else. This does not invalidate my diagnosis of ‘social dis-ease’: I can pronounce the English to be a bit autistic or agoraphobic (or bi-polar for that matter), or just socially challenged, without knowing the causes of these disorders. Psychiatrists do this all the time, so I don’t see why self-appointed national ethno-shrinks should not have the same privilege. And you can challenge my diagnosis or offer a second opinion if you disagree.
But before I stop (or get sectioned for metaphor-abuse), I should just issue a health warning: Englishness can be rather contagious. Some people are more susceptible than others, but if you hang around us long enough, you may find yourself greeting every misfortune, from a delayed train to an international disaster, with ‘Typical!’, any hint of earnestness or pomposity with ‘Oh, come off it!’, and new people with embarrassed, stilted incompetence. You may find yourself believing that large quantities of alcohol will help you to shed these inhibitions, allowing you to greet people with ‘Oi, what you lookin’ at?’ or ‘C’mon, show us yer tits’ instead. You may, however, be one of the many more fortunate visitors and immigrants whose strong cultural immune systems protect them from our dis-ease. If you still want to fit in, or just have a laugh at our expense, I suppose this book might help you to fake the symptoms.
The important point, which I hope is now clear, is that Englishness is not a matter of birth, race, colour or creed: it is a mindset, an ethos, a behavioural ‘grammar’ – a set of unwritten codes that might seem enigmatic, but that anyone can decipher and apply, now that we have the key.
126. For those still in denial, and who assume that class must be some personal obsession of mine: it is not. In discussions about Englishness, the issue of class/class-consciousness/preoccupation with class was raised by almost all of my English informants, and almost all of SIRC’s English focus-group participants, and this characteristic came top of the list, by some distance, when we asked national survey respondents to identify the core features of our culture.
127. If I sound a bit reluctant and grudging about this, it is because I know that (a) people tend to expect rather a lot from diagrams, and may see them as an alternative to the effort of actually reading the book; and (b) it is much easier to spot flaws and failings in a simple diagram than in 500-odd pages of text, or even in the List above, with all its caveats and qualifications. A diagram is thus an
easy target for cavillers and nit-pickers.
128. Harry Mount attributes much of our social awkwardness to the English climate, but England has the same average hours of sunshine per year as Ireland, and almost identical average temperatures, rainfall, etc. We may have some traits in common with the Irish (as we do with many other cultures) but social dis-ease is clearly not one of them.
EPILOGUE
I’m back at Paddington station. No brandy this time, as I don’t have to do any more bumping or queue-jumping. Just a nice cup of tea and a biscuit – which strikes me as an appropriately moderate and understated way to mark the completion of my Englishness project.