by Lynne Truss
Now, obviously, we must take a zero tolerance attitude to this shocking state of affairs. It is quite proper that anti-social behaviour is being criminalised, since most of it is technically crime. But, annoyingly, I find I have a problem perching on this particular spot of moral high ground. It seems to be a bit prickly. My hat keeps getting blown off. It has started raining. Something tells me that I don’t belong here. It is all very well to write “IMP” and “YES INDEED” and “ABSOLUTELY” in pencil next to sympathetic passages in erudite books and articles about our “network of dependencies” and “tissues of mobile relationships”, and “bands of association and mutual commitment”, but I find myself nevertheless secretly thinking, “What bands of association? Do I belong to any bands? What networks of dependencies? Am I involved in any networks? What tissues of relationships? Surely I would notice if I were caught up in some tissues?” Norbert Elias, in his book The Society of Individuals (1939), writes:
The idea that in “reality” there is no such thing as a society, only a lot of individuals, says about as much as the statement that there is in “reality” no such thing as a house, only a lot of individual bricks, a heap of stones.
(Next to this passage, incidentally, I have written the word “USE”.)
My problem is, you see, that I honestly don’t feel like a brick in the house of society. I don’t even feel like a chimney pot, a roof tile, or a glazed porch. I am self-reliance personified, a bricky brick without a trace of mortar, and my proudest contribution to society is that I don’t take anything away from it. I quite fervently believe in leaving things how you found them, placing litter in the bins provided (or carrying it until you find one), and never causing another motorist to brake or swerve. In other words, I aspire to be a zero impact member of society. But does this qualify me as the opposite of an anti-social person? Quite honestly, I don’t think it does, because that would be pro-social, which would involve acting on society’s behalf, and I don’t do that. “Nothing to do with me,” I think, when I observe a sea of litter. And then I bugger off home. “That’s a big job for somebody.” “Someone really ought to do something about this.”
Who dares to be public-spirited these days? The very term “public-spirited” is so outmoded that it actually took me a couple of days to remember it. There was a character called Martha Woodford in The Archers years ago who, rather eccentrically, used to dust and polish inside the telephone box on the village green and leave a little vase of flowers in it, but she is long dead; in her place, the heart of Ambridge significantly now has a webcam. I can think of only one example of a real-life person who is altruistically pro-social: a friend who collects the litter blowing about her street in Brighton and puts it in the bins. Evidently she has as little faith as me in the “While you’re down there . . .” anti-litter campaign I mentioned in the introduction. Anyway, it pains me to admit that I generally try to dissuade her from performing this selfless litter-bagging, on the grounds that:
It is not her responsibility, so why should she?
It is someone else’s job, so why aren’t they doing it?
It looks a bit obsessive/eccentric/Martha Wood-fordish.
She actually hates and resents doing it, so it makes her grumpy.
It makes me feel guilty and worthless.
As a general rule you should never volunteer for anything.
Ugh! That’s other people’s litter!
Actually, there is one other example. For his 2004 Channel 4 documentary Where’s Your ****ing Manners? the disc jockey Nihal Arthanayake discovered a small group of well-spoken young people in London who spent their lunchtimes in the City committing “Random Acts of Kindness”, often by feeding other people’s parking meters. Of course, ours is too cynical an age not to shudder and mutter at such uncalled-for goody-goodiness. Some of us did not enjoy the film Amélie, after all, and have never been able to look a crème brûlée in the face again, let alone listen to warm-hearted accordion music. We are suspicious of people who do good things for no reason. Anyone who departs from the principle of overt self-interest is simply weird. I recently told a story to a couple in a check-in queue, and I think the conversation was quite instructive. The thing is, we were queuing for the chance of extra leg-room on a charter flight, so I explained how, at the start of a previous holiday, I had managed to secure just one seat with leg-room and had valiantly insisted that my companion take it. And what do you know? During the flight, my friend had a rotten time. Someone fell on her. Someone else poured orange juice on her nice suede shoes. The point of my story, of course, was of the just-my-luck variety: you see how good intentions can backfire? No good deed goes unpunished, and so on. But the other people found quite a different moral to my tale. “Bet you were glad you chose the other seat!” they laughed. “Ha ha. Clever you! Well done! Good story!”
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So is it true that people who need people are the luckiest people in the world? Mm. I suppose there are several profound-sounding axioms thrown up by popular culture that I consider completely inane, and this is one of them. Here is a short list of the worst offenders:
People who need people are the luckiest people in the world.
Love means never having to say you’re sorry.
Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.
Taking these in reverse order, life can certainly be full of possibilities and surprises, but the analogy between life and a box of chocolates breaks down almost immediately because you do know what you’re going to get with a box of chocolates, actually, if you can be bothered to consult the diagrams that are either supplied on a handy loose sheet or printed inside the lid. By rights, Forrest Gump’s catch line should have been, “Life is like a box of chocolates, and if you’re sensible you will avoid the cracknels or anything with a bit of candied peel on top.” Meanwhile, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry” is the counsel of a scoundrel, to say the least. And as for people who need people – can you imagine a condition less fortunate? “I need people!” they must cry aloud at street corners. “Tough cheese!” comes the general reply. Perhaps the lyric actually means that the desperately lonely have a good winning record at the blackjack table or the race track. Perhaps croupiers are taught to spot the tell-tale signs of people-who-need-people during their basic training (sighing, weeping, yearning, etc.), and to deal to them automatically from the bottom of the deck. In poker games on Mississippi river boats, everyone scatters at the warning, “People-who-need-people boarded at Baton Rouge!” “Dang, they are the luckiest people in the whole danged world,” says a chap in a fancy waistcoat, quickly scooping his chips into his hat and then putting it on his head. “Deal me out, Miss Cora! If ’n you hear a splash, it’s me a-swimmin’ to safety.”
Forgive the flight of fancy. The issue is whether we can claim to have a society any more, against which “anti-social” behaviour offends. Much as I hate to subscribe to any relativist argument, I am aware that there is a kind of paradox: that the less we engage with each other as a society, the more we are self-righteously outraged on “society’s” behalf. I keep thinking about attitudes to smoking, and how they have changed during my own lifetime. Smoking in the presence of non-smokers (or in the house of a non-smoker) is now considered excessively rude, and this is only partly because of the medical evidence that shows it is also both dangerous and stupid. There is a marvellous radio monologue by Michael Frayn called “A Pleasure Shared” that sums up how a lot of people feel about second-hand smoke. The “Khhghm” noise is throat-clearing. The “thpp!” is a spit:
Do you spit? No? You don’t mind if I do, though? Khhghm . . . Hold on, can you see a spittoon on the table anywhere? Never mind. Sit down, sit down! I can use my empty soup bowl. Khhghm – thpp! My God, that’s better. I’ve been sitting here all the way through the first course just dying for one.
Personally, I hate smoking, and am largely safe from it, but I have to be honest: I do remember a time when it ju
st didn’t bother me. I grew up in a house full of smoke; I worked in offices full of smoke; I chose the upper deck on buses because I wanted the view and didn’t mind the smoke. I once actually shared a desk and a chair with a chain smoker during a very busy time at the office, and did not complain except about the strain to my bottom. It’s not that I wasn’t affected by smoke all this time, either. It nearly did me in. At the age of twelve, I had to spend the whole summer holiday in bed with respiratory problems, and I continued to cough phlegm into hankies until I left home aged eighteen. I had chest X-rays and pointless antibiotics. I couldn’t run the length of a netball court without seeing stars. My family talked darkly about Beth in Little Women and sometimes actually cried at the thought of my inevitable early tubercular demise. Meanwhile they each (four adults) lit small poisonous fires in an unventilated house between twenty and forty times a day, and had to redecorate the living room on a continuous, Forth Rail Bridge basis because of the build-up of orange nicotine tar on the ceiling.
My point is not that I was harmed by all this, and that we were all blind to the obvious. My point is that I used to accept something I truly don’t accept any more: that being with other people involved a bit of compromise. When you were not alone, you suspended a portion of yourself. You became a member of a crowd. You didn’t judge people by your own standards. I believe we have simply become a lot more sensitive to other people’s behaviour in a climate of basic fearful alienation. Instead of a little vase of flowers inside the telephone box, there is a webcam keeping an eye on it. There was recently a news story that ostensibly proved that the world is now one big caring community, in which a webcam led to an exciting rescue: a woman in a stables in Charlotte, Iowa, was kicked by a foaling horse and was unable to move; people who had been watching her on their computers in England and Australia alerted the local rescue services and saved her life. Now, is this heart-warming to you, or just unbelievably worrying?
The breakdown of “community” has, of course, been well noted already by political scientists, both here and in America: Robert D. Putnam’s powerful (and wonderfully titled) book Bowling Alone (2000) was a bestseller, despite the rather depressing cover illustration of an Edward Hopper-ish loner at a yellow bowling alley, with head bowed and no visible mates. Putnam sees a broad pattern that resonates in Britain as much as in America: for the first two thirds of the twentieth century, a tide bore Americans deeper into the life of their communities, but a few decades ago, the tide changed and “a treacherous rip current” started to pull everything back. “Without at first noticing, we have been pulled apart from one another and from our communities over the last third of the century.”
Some will counter-argue that they have a lot more friends these days, too many to keep up with; and may even belong to more clubs and reading groups. But Putnam distinguishes usefully between two basic types of “social capital” – bridging and bonding – to rather sobering effect. Bridging is inclusive; bonding is exclusive. The ultimate bridging group would be the Civil Rights Movement; the ultimate bonding group would be the Ku Klux Klan. Bridging is a lubricant; bonding is an adhesive. Bridging obliges you to adapt and compromise (it generates “broader identities and reciprocity”); bonding confirms you are perfectly all right defining yourself by your existing desires and connections (it “bolsters our narrower selves”). And guess which type is doing quite well at the moment? Here’s a clue: think pointy hats and flaming crosses. Think Loctite superglue. Think like-minded nutcases gratefully locating each other on the internet and secretly watching women getting kicked by horses in faraway Charlotte, Iowa.
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In the introduction to this book, I quoted Benjamin Rush from 1786, to the effect that a schoolboy should learn that “he does not belong to himself, but that he is public property”. Is there any chance of a general return to the idea that the individual just owes something to the world around him? I have just remembered, incidentally, that in the absence of adequate street-lighting near my house, I do keep an outside light constantly burning in a spirit of general helpfulness, so maybe I am a modern saint after all. Phew. When they make lists of heroines in the future, this outside-light thing will doubtless ensure me a place alongside women who rowed lifeboats in tempests and tended the gangrenous in the Crimea. They can put it on my gravestone: “She lit the way for others.” And underneath, “On the other hand, she was a shockingly bad recycler.”
I tend to think in terms of bits of the brain. I once got interested in phrenology and dabbled in primitive neuro-science, and now I can’t sort things out any other way. So here’s how I see the present situation vis-à-vis our instinct for civic responsibility. I think we all have, hard-wired, a bit of the brain that makes a moral calculation on behalf of the common good and decides to act on it. This bit of the brain has, however, been through some tough, attenuating times recently. It has not been much called upon, and has therefore shrunk and dwindled and dried out. In fact, if I can get technical for a moment, our prevailing mode of selfishness has sucked all the juice out of that bit of the brain, and it is now just a tragic handful of dust, like that old sibyl in ancient times who asked Apollo for everlasting life and forgot to ask for everlasting youth – condemned to exist eternally, without hope, thirsty, in pain and loneliness and everlasting dark.
But it does still live! You see a vestige of it (oddly enough) in the way we drive: we sometimes calculate that, if we drop back a bit in the middle lane, it will allow someone in the slow lane to move out, which will allow someone else on the slip-road to join later – and no one will have to slow down and everyone will be safer and happier. In cars hurtling at 70 miles per hour, such calculations have quite a large element of self-preservation in them, admittedly; but I do uphold that they employ the bit of the brain marked “FOR THE COMMON GOOD”, nevertheless. For the split second of that decision, we acknowledge that we are part of a bigger picture, and that we have a duty to improve the bigger picture if we can. We have absolutely no personal feelings about the people in the other cars. Their right to share the road with us is incontestable. They have our respect. We are all equal in the sight of the Highway Code.
According to some analysts, we can’t extend this sense of civic duty to individuals, because we feel we have to be friends with people – or at least know them – in order to be decent towards them. “Civility is not the same as affection,” writes Stephen L. Carter in his book Civility. Richard Sennett likewise argues that the desire for some sort of intimacy in all our relationships is the enemy of civility. Our eagerness to make friends with the plumber and chat about dog tracks with the man at the booking agency is based on the idea that, once you know someone, you can respect them. But it reinforces the corollary idea: that if you don’t know someone, you needn’t have any time for them at all. Sennett, in The Fall of Public Man (1977), warns that we can’t relate to each other as a polity until we rediscover the value of “bands of association and mutual commitment . . . between people who are not joined by ties of family or intimate association”.
Kindness is still in the world, of course. Morality is still in the world, too. But the old connection between manners and morality has been demolished. Many people now believe that it is harmful, unhelpful and simply wrong to judge a person by the way he behaves. To demand consideration from others is to offend against a kind of modern propriety which understands that each of us has a personal morality, but is under no obligation to prove it. We regard our morality less as a guide to action or conscience, more a hidden jewel – enshrined within, inviolable, and nobody else’s business. There is a line in the new Batman film which I can’t quote exactly but is, in other words: “It’s not who you are deep inside that matters, Bruce Wayne; it’s what you do that defines you.” Morally speaking, however, Batman Begins is a bit confused and should not be taken as a model for good living. For one thing, the morally squalid city of Gotham does not appear to be worth saving from obliteration; in fact, the obliteration of Gotham looks li
ke a dandy idea. And for another, the myth of the lone superhero who swoops down and saves everybody with his bat-cunning and bat-ability may provide vicarious moral bat-pleasure (especially when he spreads his wings with a wonderful Wump!), but let’s face it, it also lets us off the bat-hook. It is, after all, the ultimate confirmation of the view, “Someone else will clean it up.”
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What can be done? Well, ha ha, search me. All I know is that I am sick of hearing mothers tell their children, “That was a bad thing to do, Timmy, but you are not bad for doing it.” I am also horrified by scenes in gritty TV dramas (presumably based on some sort of middle-class family reality beyond my own experience) where solemn, self-possessed children sit down at kitchen tables with their parents and tick them off for the rotten job they are doing. “It’s time you treated us with respect, Alan,” they say to their Dad. Or, “Shape up, John. Floy and I have decided you’re disgusting.” And the Dad hangs his head and mumbles an apology. Something seems to have gone seriously awry here. Topsy-turvy is the word. A few years ago, a friend of mine, with a difficult two-year-old, explained to me, “She didn’t ask to be born, did she? Therefore I have to spend my whole life making it up to her.” It took me quite a while to pin down what was odd about this statement, but I finally nailed it. It was the contrast to the old days, when the parental attitude was, “We didn’t ask to have this child, did we? Therefore she had better spend her whole life making it up to us.”
We all knew from the very start that this book would end up as a moral homily. I have used every angle I could think of before reaching this point; I have even experimented with a bit of relativism, which probably didn’t fool anybody. However, it is time to be plain at last. Rudeness is bad. Manners are good. It feels very daring to come out and say it, but I’ve done it and I feel better. I have used the words “bad” and “good”, and thereby committed the ultimate political fuddy-duddiness, and doubtless undermined all my good work. Modern people are impatient with the bad – good distinction; they consider it intellectually primitive. But rudeness is a moral issue and it always has been. The way people behave towards each other, even in minor things, is a measure of their value as human beings. Henry James wrote: “Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.”
