Sorry!

by Henry Hitchings

  The internet creates myriad new ways to be rude. It is a carnival. We try on alternative personalities. Anonymity makes it possible to insult people without their knowing who’s insulting them; often a troll abuses someone he does not know. A different sort of impoliteness is spam. I am thinking not just about the oddly phrased blandishments (promises of sexual enhancement or invitations to have your bank account emptied), but also about the communications you receive from acquaintances and associates who think you might want to sponsor them to run to the end of the road or might care to know that they’re really looking forward to post-work drinks on Friday (LOL, ROFL, BRB).

  Spam is noise in your inbox. And in the modern world noise, which we might define as ‘unwanted sound’, is everywhere. One person’s unwanted sound is another person’s source of pleasure, sounds often being associated with the cherished items that produce them (a mobile phone, a stereo system, a TV, a car, a dog, a child). As the novelist Andrew Martin observed in his 2012 BBC radio essay ‘The Sound and the Fury’, it is much easier to make a noise than to get someone else to stop doing so, and ‘we cannot close our ears’.

  Modern communications technologies have turned up the noise in our lives. The mobile phone exemplifies this best. The novelist Jonathan Franzen, a brilliant if grumpy cultural commentator, suggests that the device came of age on 11 September 2001. Before that the world was ‘not yet fully conquered by yak’ – and he’s not talking about the Himalayan bovines. Now yak is everywhere. The one positive consequence of this is that while the notion of ‘civilized public spaces, as rare resources worth defending, may be all but dead … there’s still consolation to be found in the momentary ad hoc microcommunities of fellow sufferers which bad behavior creates’.4 You know how that moment looks and feels: the shared gawps of distress as Trendster McFuckpig blurts once again into his tiny electronic conch. Yet the moment soon passes, and the digital toys beep and whirr, and their owners belch and snipe. Rather than freeing us, these technologies risk making us bored commuters, dissociated from everything except our febrile and inconsistent self-love.

  But here’s a different way of looking at this. Advertising barrages us with unwanted information: we have been spammed since the day we were born, and most of us have grown up in a world where rudeness and interruption glare from a multitude of surfaces (billboards, walls, screens) and pollute the airwaves. To the extent that we now make choices about how we circulate messages, from ourselves and others, we are able to set filters, and in doing so we challenge the centralized dissemination of ideas and images. We are thus in a position – perhaps – to teach the corporations that govern us some manners.

  In this snapshot of the battle between the individual and the corporation, we see one of the leading motifs of our age. Corporate values, which have such a pervasive influence on our society, do a lot to frame our choices and channel our desires. I am thinking not of the values that are officially espoused as visions or missions (the guff about delivering exceptional customer experiences), but of the prevailing attitudes and convictions of corporate life. Among these is an idea of what people are like and how they behave: we at all times resemble shoppers, making choices as if comparing brands of energy drink, and are intent on maximizing our pleasure, which is narrowly defined. Masses of data are crunched in order to map our habits and preferences as consumers. But as the data multiply – retained, regurgitated, augmented – so it appears as if nothing else matters: whatever cannot be quantified and entered into a spreadsheet is insignificant. The world is arranged in such a way that we no longer have to experience it.5

  25

  ‘Are we there yet?’

  manners now

  Worrying about the end of manners is not a uniquely English affliction. In America there is a special class of commentator who makes a living out of declinism, and there is a sub-class within it that consists of writers who like to explain that the real decline is happening in places where most of us aren’t looking.

  In a much quoted essay published in 1996 in the Nation, the cultural critic Benjamin DeMott examined claims by the ‘leader classes’ that American society was suffering from ‘rampant intemperateness on the one hand … and distaste for associated living on the other’. Most citizens, it was being alleged, had ‘forgotten how to listen and respect and defer’. DeMott sniffed at this, and argued that, as they clamoured for more civility, privileged Americans were expressing their impatience with the idea that social divisions might have something to do with a lack of justice and fairness. In his view, people’s disengagement from civility was the result of a perceived ‘need for an attitude – some kind of protection against sly, sincerity-marketing politicos and boss-class crooks’. What others diagnosed as the ‘new incivility’ was according to DeMott a form of protest, a ‘justified rejection of leader-class claims to respect’.1

  DeMott’s prose may have left something to be desired, but he usefully summed up a significant difference: one person’s idea of a riot is another’s idea of protest, and what to some seem the mechanisms of a happy society seem to others the instruments of oppression. To jump from 1996 to the more recent past: after unrest flared in London in August 2011, a study by the Guardian newspaper and the London School of Economics found that many of those who had rioted felt aggrieved about what they perceived as discourteous treatment by the police.2 According to this view, rioting was not a form of incivility but an expression of discontent with the hollow norms of civility.

  In October 2011 the Young Foundation, a self-proclaimed centre for social innovation, published a report about contemporary civility. Entitled Charm Offensive, the report disclosed that interviewees, though often unfamiliar with the word civility, understood what it denoted; they regarded it as central to shaping their lives, and in many cases felt that there was nothing that contributed more to quality of life.3 Although few would go so far as to support David Cameron’s assertion (before becoming Prime Minister) that ‘Rudeness is just as bad as racism’, it was common to think that rudeness damaged the sense of community whereas civility improved it.

  Though hardly a revelation, this was an eye-catchingly conservative, traditional view. It was based on research done in three places: the borough of Newham in London; Cambourne, a new town in Cambridgeshire; and the Wiltshire communities of Salisbury, Trowbridge and Devizes. So, not ‘Cultivating Civility in 21st Century Britain’, but ‘Cultivating Civility in 21st Century England’. The report did not gloss over the frequency with which incivility is encountered. Yet it noted that, rather than there being a crisis of civility, there was in fact an impressive persistence of faith in it.

  The report’s title is a phrase we associate with politicians and psychopaths. Charm is used as an instrument of enchantment; its attractions are skin-deep. Though often applauded, it is essentially a substitute for competence. The things that charm us and the things that irritate us are not as divergent as we tend to imagine. To put it another way, the capacity to be charming and the capacity to irritate occupy the same space in people. Both give them power over others and specifically over others’ moods. We are all familiar with the idea that what one person finds charming can seem exasperating to someone else. More than this, though, charm and irritation work in the same way, by teasing the sweet fibres of our narcissism.

  Whatever its title may suggest, the focus of the Young Foundation’s report is not charm, but civility. Seeing these two words side by side, though, highlights both how readily they are confused and how fundamentally different they are. Charm is a power to fascinate and delight, which comes easily to some and is impossible for others; civility has none of charm’s talismanic attractiveness, but it is altogether more robust and is something everyone can achieve. In the sober words of the sociologist Edward Shils: ‘Civility is a belief which affirms the possibility of the common good … [and] recommends that consensus about the maintenance of the order of society should exist alongside the conflicts of interests and ideals.’4 I am reminded here,
I know incongruously, of the story of the porcupines that huddle together in order to avoid freezing, but stand far enough apart to ensure that none of them is impaled on another’s quill.

  Among the key statements of Charm Offensive is the idea that civility, although partly ‘a matter of individual disposition’, needs to be cultivated. Developing civility involves mastering ‘a learned grammar of sociability’, and it is underpinned by an expectation of reciprocity. Thus a taxi driver in Newham: ‘Civility? We give out and we get back.’5 Erving Goffman has written about ‘supportive interchanges’, the little rituals through which we acknowledge that we are connected to others, even if only by our shared humanity: we signal our awareness of the connection, and its receipt and appreciation are signalled back – all of this briefly, with no great ceremony.

  But observation suggests that many people, far from confident of getting anything back, have stopped giving out little portions of civility – each of which requires a small amount of unselfishness. It has become customary for sociologists and the journalists who popularize their findings to define the decline of manners and the rise of selfish individualism in a snappy soundbite, with talk of ‘bowling alone’ or the ‘lonely crowd’. There are complaints about diminished trust, an atomized society, dwindling social attachments, and the passing of what the political scientist Robert Putnam – he of ‘bowling alone’ – has called the ‘long civic generation’ and its values. That generation, born between 1910 and 1940 (Putnam was born in 1941), exceeded their predecessors and their successors in their engagement with citizenship: ‘voting more, joining more, trusting more’.6 Thus George, a retired manual worker, born in 1934: ‘I look at the kids now and they don’t do nothing together. They’ve all got their noses in their phones – d’you know what I mean? Most of my friends, growing up, was lads I knew from the Boys’ Club, playing football. My mother – she’d have known most of their mothers. There’d have been some respect. But now, even the ones you see out with all their friends, they’re lonely-looking, trying to look like they’re not all lost. And the old? They treat us like we’re dinosaurs. They’ve no respect, not even for their own lives.’

  We hear a lot today about respect: for laws and rules, for tradition, for exemplary individuals, for ourselves. We hear about it most when it is absent. Here is the sociologist Richard Sennett: ‘Respect is an expressive performance. That is, treating others with respect doesn’t just happen, even with the best will in the world; to convey respect means finding the words and gestures which make it felt and convincing.’7 Sennett dismisses the idea that respect is a matter of combining goodwill with deft improvisation; that’s just the social equivalent of modern jazz. The alternative he describes begins with respect for oneself: a mixture of self-sufficiency, charity and self-improvement. Though widely endorsed, not least by Tony Blair’s British government with its 2006 Respect Action Plan, this seems a quiet and tentative project. In reality, respect is today formulated in terms of rights, and it is understood as a legal concept rather than as a human quality. Legislation is a blunt instrument; it reduces principles and powerful values to dry technicalities.

  Respectfulness is a theme addressed by Stephen Carter, who writes about the sense of positive duties that is the kernel of civility. His notion of these positive duties comes from Christian faith. He notes that there is a school of thought that insists that religion and civility are incompatible; members of this school claim that believers do not want to enter the marketplace of ideas, preferring instead to try to shut it down. Carter takes issue with the very notion of such a marketplace. In his view, the language of the marketplace is something to be resisted.

  The arguments advanced by Carter are widely endorsed, even if the specific terms vary. In Coming Apart (2012), a portrait of the divided nature of contemporary American society, Charles Murray makes a link between religious faith and a training in ‘important civic skills’. ‘People who are religious,’ he says, ‘account for a large proportion of the secular forms of social capital.’ These include youth groups, political clubs, professional societies and school fraternities or sororities. As society has become less religious, so the argument goes, the general sense of social affiliation has diminished. Murray perceives decline in family and community, faith and vocation. He suggests that the deterioration he sees in contemporary America resembles the disintegration of other great civilizations. Right now, among the most privileged Americans, there is ‘a rejection of the obligations of citizenship’. With this comes a ‘vulgarization of manners, the arts, and language’. Murray identifies an unsettling ‘adoption by the middle class and upper-middle class of behaviours that used to be distinctly lower class’, a ‘proletarianization of the dominant minority’ that reflects ‘the collapse of confidence in codes of honourable behaviour’.8

  Although this kind of writing is more common in America than in Britain, you need hardly be Fanny Trollope to suspect that what happens in America is a portent for what will happen in Britain – if it is not already happening. Britain used to think of America as its runaway child; now the relationship seems to have reversed, though with ‘runaway’ replaced by something less racy. Many readers will find Charles Murray’s vision alarmist, and will disagree with a lot of his contentions and provocations (including his proposal that a universal guaranteed income should replace the programmes that make up the welfare state). Still, Coming Apart and the numerous books of its kind are not just diagnoses but also symptoms of a society in which civility is under threat.

  Mining anecdote, I sense that most people believe manners are getting worse. There are familiar stories of drunkenness at office parties, off-colour speeches at weddings, the decline of thank-you notes, drivers using their car horns gratuitously, dog-owners doing nothing to clear up their mutts’ profusely deposited shit, the use of a mere ‘sorry’ to excuse sickening behaviour, sodcasting on public transport (i.e. playing loud, tinny music on a mobile device), shop assistants chatting to their friends rather than serving customers, theatregoers checking the time on their brightly illuminated phones, and others’ readiness to discuss their earnings or sex lives. I hear strident complaints about what seem pretty small things: it is the gravest faux pas to wear brown shoes ‘in town’ or after six o’clock in the evening, only children and the infirm should use napkins, and folks who hang wind chimes in their gardens should be guillotined. I gather that crisps shouldn’t be eaten on public transport, as well as that you should never offer to pour your host a drink. The inappropriate question is another bugbear. Not the kind of question that encroaches on taboo, but the hazardous query: ‘How’s business?’, ‘Have we met?’, ‘Have you been on a diet?’, ‘What are you wearing that for?’ Many voice concerns about gracelessness in electronic communication, too: writing an email entirely in upper case is shouty, using the wrong font for a document can be grotesque, and one must never use Comic Sans for anything that isn’t casual – or, according to one school of thought, for anything at all.

  In some of these areas, the lack of received wisdom seems an invitation to improvise new etiquette or at least fantasize about it. One female friend, single at the time and bored of the flirtatious attentions of married men, insisted that all people who are married should be obliged to wear wedding rings. Less surprising was another friend’s complaint about the intrusive use of mobile phones: ‘I basically think that unless someone is a doctor on call his phone should be banished during all social interactions.’ One rejoinder she had been tempted to try out – inspired, she thought, by Tom Hodgkinson, editor of the magazine the Idler – involved carrying a volume of poetry at all times and, whenever friends get their phones out, holding up a hand in the manner of a traffic policeman, intently examining a poem for a moment and then saying, ‘Sorry, carry on – where were we?’

  A recurrent theme when I discuss English manners with other people is the depravity of the young: looseness, slackness, self-indulgence, a callous malignity and coarse truculence, a desire for adult
rights and pleasures without adult responsibilities. Though occasionally celebrated for their sexual precocity, tech-savvy and resourcefulness, young people are convicted of cultural deafness and a hazy internationalism, and of being apathetic and aggressive, barbarous and hypersensitive. Can they be all these things? Generalizations – sometimes teed up with a reference to ‘the youth of today’, and sometimes prefaced with a briefly noted exception – judder along incoherently. The hiatus between childhood and adulthood, once marked with the words adolescent and teenager, is represented as a deep abyss with indistinct boundaries. One friend traced the pattern thus: ‘Manners seem to be learned in childhood, forgotten in youthful exuberance, and returned to in middle age, with plenty of tutting at those who don’t know the rules.’ There is a large gap between the learning period and the return.

  There are several points here that need teasing out. First of all, the young are likely to behave in a depraved way because they have yet to experience the consequences of such behaviour, or because they know what the consequences are and don’t consider them significant, or because the consequences are much smaller for them, or because there is a masochistic thrill to be had from inviting the consequences. The ‘forgetting’ of manners referred to by my friend is in part a wilful abandonment of manners, an expression of independence. It is also a test of the structures that manners appear to hold in place.

  Complaining about young people is part of maturity – of passing beyond the age of experiment, in which boundaries seem to exist in order to be tested, into an age of acquiescence and comfort, in which the boundaries seem reassuring and the business of testing them seems jejune. In the past fifty years, youthful groups that have been demonized have included punks, hippies, hoodies, Teddy boys, skinheads, mods, goths, emos, ravers, bikers, casuals, greasers, grungers, gamers, hipsters and skaters. Arguably, it is as if none of these subcultures has truly existed until it has been excoriated. Their members’ appearance is ‘spectacular’; they conscientiously try to look different from their parents and authority figures, acting out a ritual of resistance to social norms without actually resolving their fundamental discontents. The main objective, often tacit, is to create a social space for themselves. Marking that space is an important part of the transition from childhood to adulthood, and being troubled by the recalcitrance of youth is a sign that one has found one’s space and now wants to defend it. As Florence Bell observed with understated irony in The Minor Moralist (1903): ‘Young people do not, as a rule, write articles on the manners of older ones.’9