by Lynne Truss
However, it does sometimes go wrong. I recently had a rather instructive friendly cold call from my gas supplier – instructive because it turned out to be extremely complicated, from the familiarity point of view. First of all, you see, the chap was very polite. He apologised for calling me at home, and addressed me as “Miss Truss” throughout. This kept me in a state of placation, obviously. He explained that he was calling about domestic appliance insurance, and asked if this was a good time to talk. Here are the bare bones of what happened next. I said no, sorry, writing book, can’t talk. If you must ring back, give it month.
HIM: OK, fair enough.
ME: Bye.
HIM: Writing book, you say?
ME: Yes.
HIM: Mm. Well, Miss Truss, that’s v. interesting. I’m bit of writer myself.
ME: Really? (Thinks) Oh no.
HIM: Written rather good story, wondering how to proceed. Any ideas? me (incredulous, thinks): Didn’t I just say v. busy?
ME: Er, quite busy.
HIM: Appreciate anything. V. tough starting out. me (deep breath; save document; turn attention): OK, buster, here’s deal. Get latest Writer’s Handbook. Blah blah. Maybe join writing group. Send to agent. Blah blah. Copyright first? Ha ha, are you kidding, you must be kidding. Right. Not kidding. OK, send part of it, précis rest. Blah blah. Send to magazine. How long story? Well, too long BBC. Two thousand two hundred tops. Shorten it poss? Course not. Not poss. That’s it. Sorry. Blah blah. Good luck. Blah blah. Hope it helps. Bye.
HIM: That’s very helpful, Miss Truss. Thank you. What’s your book then? me (big sigh; growing impatient): About rudeness. Big rant. Short. No discernible value. Oh, look at time. Must rush. Still on chap five.
HIM: That sounds very interesting, Miss Truss. Now, would it be rude if I point out that for as little as 38 pence a week, which is less than the price of a Yorkie bar, you could insure all your domestic appliances with us this afternoon?
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A bulldozer has knocked down a myriad fine distinctions that used to pertain. I deliberately omitted gender from my list of twenty (“they are a member of the weaker sex”), but it’s clear that many men are particularly upset that when they show traditional politeness to women nowadays, it’s a form of Gallantry Russian Roulette. One time in six, their courtesy makes someone’s day. Four times out of six, they get a lecture in gender politics. And one in six, they get their heads blown off. “Are you holding that door open because I’m a woman?” they are asked, aggressively. And the clever ones respond, “No, I’m doing it because I am a gentleman.” The problem is, many of the old forms of politeness (such as addressing slaves by their first names) are better abandoned, because they were designed to serve inequality. I was outraged recently when a bill was divided after a rather jolly group dinner, and I was told, “Only the men need pay.” While I’m sure there were good intentions behind this, I was furious and made quite a noise, which was awkward for everybody – especially, I have to say, for the more easy-going women who had already said, “Great! Thanks!” and put their bags back on the floor.
In some ways it’s quite proper that we should all walk permanently on egg-shells. But it is still tiresomely hard to do the right thing. Give up your seat to a pregnant woman and she will thank you. Give up your seat to a woman who just looks pregnant, and she may punch you on the nose. I have started agonising on the train because I happen to know that people sitting in first-class compartments without first-class tickets run the risk of being fined on the spot. There are ugly scenes when this happens. The fine is large, and there ought to be a warning notice, but there isn’t. I am thinking of writing to a problem page. How can I inform my fellow passengers of this without giving offence? My inference would be too obvious. “Excuse me, you look like a hard-up person/scoundrel/fare dodger/idiot. Allow me to give you a tip.”
Thus our good intentions are often thwarted by fear in today’s politically sensitive world. Offence is so easily given. And where the “minority” issue is involved, the rules seem to shift about: most of the time, a person who is female/black/disabled/gay wants this not to be their defining characteristic; you are supposed to be blind to it. But then, on other occasions, you are supposed to observe special sensitivity, or show special respect. I was recently given a lift by a friend who thoughtfully reversed at a road junction to allow a motorised wheelchair to cross. But having done this highly decent thing, for which he was smilingly thanked, he worried about it. “I shouldn’t have done that,” he said. “Why, was there someone behind you?” I asked, confused. “No,” he said, “but I wouldn’t have done that for someone who wasn’t disabled, would I?”
I mention all this because “political correctness” is sometimes confused with respect, but it operates quite differently. It is not about paying due regard to other people for their individual qualities, needs, or virtues; it’s mainly about covering oneself and avoiding prosecution in a world of hair-trigger sensitivity. Hence the escalation of euphemism, and the moral panic that breaks out when a public figure uses the word “niggardly” in a perfectly correct way. In a hundred years’ time, anyone wanting to know the moral contortions necessary to well-intentioned and intelligent people in the first years of the twenty-first century should just buy a DVD set of Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm – and I hope they will laugh, but there’s no guarantee that things won’t be a whole lot worse by then. Robert Hughes, in his 1993 book Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America, writes, “It’s as though all human encounter were one big sore spot, inflamed with opportunities to unwittingly give, and truculently receive, offence . . . We want to create a sort of linguistic Lourdes, where evil and misfortune are dispelled by a dip in the waters of euphemism.” And I would say, “Amen” to that, if it didn’t potentially offend people of other faiths who employ a different form of holy affirmation.
What is left of pure deference? In Britain, I think the last thing we do well (and beautifully) is pay respects to the war dead. “When this goes, it all goes,” I have started to think. The controlled emotion of Armistice Day tugs at conscience, swells the commonality of sorrow, and swivels the historical telescope to a proper angle, so that we see, however briefly, that we are not self-made: we owe an absolute debt to other people; a debt that our most solemn respect may acknowledge but can never repay. We stop and we silently remember. Personally, I sob. I am sobbing now. It is a miracle that some sort of political relativism has not contaminated this ceremony of public grief, a full sixty years after the end of the Second World War. The first cannon fires at 11am, and one is overwhelmed by a sense of sheer humility, sheer perspective. We are particles of suffering humanity. For two minutes a year, it’s not a bad thing to remember that. If we looked inside ourselves and remembered how insignificant we are, just for a couple of minutes a day, respect for other people would be an automatic result.
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Of the many reasons for retaining a little bit of deference and respect, the most compelling, I think, must be this common-sense appeal to self-interest. It is a well-observed fact that people are happier when they have some idea of where they stand and what the rules are. It’s a basic-instinct, primal-chimp thing that is the basis of many vivid behavioural experiments. Tell an orang-utan that he answers to no one and in a couple of weeks he’s lost all idea of himself. His eyes roll back, he bangs his head against trees, he eats his own deposits and wears his hair just any old how. Similarly, when people have no “boundaries” or discipline, they can’t relax and it drives them nuts. Every so often, a television experiment will place ungovernable modern schoolchildren in a mocked up old-fashioned school with bells and a merit system, and they not only visibly flourish and calm down, they even learn the capital of Iceland and a bit of Latin grammar. Virtually every day on television, unruly toddlers undergo miraculous transformations when their parents are taught to stop ingratiating themselves and start imposing discipline. Not having respect for other people is clearly incredibly tiring and
alienating, if only because the ego never gets a rest.
Of course, with “knowing one’s place”, we are flirting with class issues again. One of the traditional functions of manners was, obviously, to identify an individual with his own social group. The way you crooked your little finger when raising a tea-cup betokened either your solidarity with other people who crooked their little finger in precisely the same way, or your superiority over those who tipped the tea in the saucer and slurped happily from that. According to the famous “U” and “Non-U” system (coined by Professor Alan Ross to identify upper-class usage and popularised by Nancy Mitford), people who said “lavatory” were better than those who said “toilet”. People who had fish-knives were beneath contempt. It was ever so common to say “ever so”. This has largely passed, of course. In a very short time, snobbery based on vocabulary and the milk-first/milk-second issue has virtually disappeared. Honestly, you can say “serviette” at me all day until you are blue in the face, and I promise I won’t even flinch.
But something useful got lost with all this. Surely one of the reasons that rudeness is such a huge issue for people today is that we worry about it more; it is a source of anxiety. We recount situations to each other, just to check our own reactions. “Was that rude? I thought that was rude. Do you think that’s rude? Oh thank goodness you agree with me, because I thought it was rude but then I thought maybe I was being over-sensitive.” I mentioned Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm earlier, because every episode entails anxiety over what’s acceptable in a world where people are free to disagree, but still hold fiercely to their own rules. There is a whole episode, for example, about “cut-off time”. Someone tells Larry you can’t call people at home after 10pm. Is that true? It can’t be true. How can that be a rule? He tries it and gets into trouble. The next night he calls someone before 10pm and gets into trouble because their cut-off time is 9.30. Rules exist, it seems, but there are no rules about the rules. This, in a nutshell, is the insanity of the modern condition.
But how can we go back? As Mark Caldwell points out, in his Short History of Rudeness, many rules of etiquette are mere conventions with no moral content or usefulness – which is the sort of thing we don’t put up with these days. The reason table manners always played such a large part in etiquette guides was that so many of the intricate rules of eating had no other function than to trip the ignorant. Piling peas on the back of the fork is the usual example given of an etiquette rule that was contrived from the start as pure class-indicator, being otherwise daft, strange, counter-intuitive, and instrumental in letting your dinner get cold. Knives and forks were for a long time the main concern of manners guides, not to mention of posh people. There is an excellent clerihew on this subject about the Duke of Fife:
It looked bad when the Duke of Fife Left off using a knife; But people began to talk When he left off using a fork.
Caldwell cites a rather extreme example of sheer class-solidarity etiquette from a sixteenth-century German chronicle: an old aristocratic Christmas tradition in which dinner companions “festively pelted each other with dog turds”. No doubt this tradition arose out of one of those tragic mistranslations from scripture one is always hearing about (scholars will one day discover that the Aramaic for “dog turd” is very close to the word for “season’s greetings”), but the point remains: if everyone’s doing it, do it. You will be accepted by your peers. You can relax.
The tragedy is that we have swept away class snobbery largely without grasping the opportunity to respect different things. So now, in place of a hierarchy of class, or a system of respect for other people, we mainly have stuff. The glory of stuff has swept most other considerations aside. I would say that respect is now allowable in very few fields: we respect sportsmen (but only when they are playing sport), and we respect charisma, but mainly we respect anyone who’s got the latest iPod. Manners guides have actually reflected this shift. Look at modern ones and you will find that instead of teaching you to consider the feelings of others, they tell you what gift to take to a dinner party, how much to spend on flowers for a wedding, and what range of social stationery to buy. In other words, how you act is less important, in terms of status, than what you have. But is this ultimately satisfying? There is a New Yorker cartoon that says it all. Dog says to dog: “I’ve got the bowl, the bone, the big yard. I know I should be happy.”
It’s not just children or members of shaven-headed bling-bling street gangs who are infected with this stuff-anxiety, either. I have sophisticated, left-leaning friends who visibly cheer up when the subject turns to designer clothes, and I have long been aware that my refusal to care about clothes as status symbols gives them actual pain. How proud I was when, a few years ago, an unpolitically correct boyfriend of mine had the following conversation with a leftie journalist friend.
LEFTIE FRIEND: Is that a Paul Smith shirt?
BOYFRIEND: Yes.
LEFTIE FRIEND: That’s the same Paul Smith shirt you wore last time I met you, isn’t it?
BOYFRIEND: Yes, it must be.
LEFTIE FRIEND: This skirt is by Issey Miyake.
BOYFRIEND: Really? (Pause) Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t it usually aspiring gangsta rappers who set such store by designer labels? Leftie friend’s jaw drops; end of conversation
It has been amusing to note, of course, while writing this book, that the government has drawn up a “Respect Agenda”. It will be interesting to see how they sell this optimistic document to the British people. Have you ever noticed how many role models there are in popular culture for rudeness, crassness, laddishness, and nastiness? “Ooh, Anne Robinson! She so rude!” “Oh, Jonathan Ross! He’s so rude!” “Oh, Graham Norton! He’s so rude!” “Oh, Ali G! He’s so rude!” “Oh, Jeremy Paxman! He’s so rude!” Count the role models for respectfulness, on the other hand, and after a couple of hours you will have to admit there is only one: Babe. That’s it. Just one small sturdy imaginary sheep-pig stands between us and total moral decay. “Excuse me,” he says, gently tilting his little snout upwards. “I wonder if you’d care to follow me this way towards the hillside of enlightenment?” At which point a passer-by tragically fells him with a blow to the head with an umbrella and shouts, “You see? I told you it was him!”
THE SIXTH GOOD REASON
THE SIXTH GOOD REASON Someone Else Will Clean It Up
Theodore Dalrymple has been called “the best doctor-writer since William Carlos Williams”. He recently stopped working as a psychiatrist in a hospital and prison in the Midlands. As a writer and columnist, he is noted for his savage anti-claptrappery, his unpopular but irrefutable ground-level reports of the poor and the criminal, his sublime prose, and the tremendous quality of his anecdotes. In his collection of essays Life at the Bottom, he quotes time and again from anti-social offenders. And time and again, he establishes – through his patients’ unconscious “locutions of passivity” – that they have no concept whatever of accountability. “The beer went mad,” they say. “Heroin’s everywhere.” “The knife went in.” “Something must have made me do it.”
“I have come to see the uncovering of this dishonesty and self-deception as an essential part of my work,” he writes. “When a man tells me, in explanation of his anti-social behaviour, that he is easily led, I ask him whether he was ever easily led to study mathematics or the subjunctives of French verbs.” One man said that he had beaten up his pregnant girlfriend because of his low self-esteem, and was quite confused when Dalrymple suggested to him that surely the feeling of low self-esteem ought to be the result of the assault, rather than the cause of it. “My trouble came on again,” said another (this man’s “trouble” turned out to be breaking into churches, stealing their portable silver, then burning them down to destroy the evidence). However, nothing can surpass the conversation he had with a noncriminal patient, when he asked, “How would you describe your own character?” After thinking about it for a moment, the chap replied, “I take people as they come. I’m very non
-judgemental.”
Crime is not the subject of this book, thank goodness. I am depressed enough already. But the prevailing psychology of non-accountability is certainly one of the six reasons that the world seems a more rude and dangerous place. George Orwell once wrote that society has always seemed to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice. He may have been right. The trouble is, locating the concept of “society” isn’t as easy as it once was. As for knowing what society “demands” – well, that’s not easy, either. Most of us wish we didn’t find graffiti and litter all over the place. We wish the pavements weren’t regarded as chewing-gum repositories. We wish men wouldn’t urinate in doorways and telephone boxes, sometimes in the hours of daylight. We wish skateboarders didn’t come trundling like juggernauts along the pavement and expect us to jump for safety from their path. We wish cyclists didn’t ignore traffic lights at pedestrian crossings. When we wish these things, we do it on behalf of “society”. Yes, there is a whole lot of impotent communal wishing going on.
