Watching the English

by Kate Fox

  The Core: Social Dis-ease

  The central ‘core’ of Englishness. Social dis-ease is a shorthand term for all our chronic social inhibitions and handicaps. The English social dis-ease is a congenital disorder, bordering on a sort of sub-clinical combination of autism and agoraphobia (the politically correct euphemism would be ‘socially challenged’). It is our lack of ease, discomfort and incompetence in the field (minefield) of social interaction; our embarrassment, insularity, awkwardness, perverse obliqueness, emotional constipation and general inability to engage in a direct and straightforward fashion with other human beings. When we feel uncomfortable in social situations (that is, most of the time) we become either over-polite, buttoned up, defensive, passive-aggressive and awkwardly restrained or loud, loutish, crude, violent and generally obnoxious. Both our famous ‘English reserve’ and our infamous ‘English hooliganism’ are symptoms of this social dis-ease, as is our obsession with privacy. Some of us are more severely afflicted than others. The dis-ease is treatable. Temporary alleviation/remission can be achieved using the many ingenious props and facilitators with which we self-medicate, including games, sports, pubs, clubs, weather-speak, moaning, pets, hobbies, ritual, alcohol, magic words, the internet and, above all, humour. The sheer number and constant use of these medications indicates that we have the same natural need and desire for social contact and social bonding as any other culture – we just need more help to achieve it. We are not ‘reserved’ in the sense of misanthropic, unsociable or introverted: a truly reclusive culture would not generate so many highly effective social facilitators. We also enjoy periods of ‘natural’ remission from our dis-ease in private and among intimates, but it is never entirely curable. Most peculiarities of English behaviour are traceable, either directly or indirectly, to this unfortunate affliction. Key phrases include: ‘An Englishman’s home is his castle’; ‘Nice day, isn’t it?’; ‘Oi – what you lookin’ at?’; ‘Mind your own business’; ‘I don’t like to pry, but . . .’; ‘Don’t make a fuss/scene’; ‘Don’t draw attention to yourself’; ‘Keep yourself to yourself’; ‘Come on, show us yer tits’; ‘Great night out – got completely rat-arsed!’; ‘Eng-er-land! Eng-er-land! Eng-er-land!’.

  Reflexes

  Our deeply ingrained impulses. Our automatic, unthinking ways of being/ways of doing things. Our knee-jerk responses. Our ‘default modes’. Cultural equivalents of laws of gravity.

  Humour

  Probably the most important of our three basic reflexes. Humour is our most effective built-in antidote to our social dis-ease. When God (or Something) cursed us with the English Social Dis-ease, He/She/It softened the blow by also giving us the English Sense of Humour. The English do not have any sort of global monopoly on humour, but what is distinctive is the sheer pervasiveness and supreme importance of humour in English everyday life and culture. In other cultures, there is ‘a time and a place’ for humour; among the English it is a constant, a given – there is always an undercurrent of humour. Virtually all English conversations and social interactions involve at least some degree of banter, teasing, irony, wit, mockery, wordplay, satire, understatement, humorous self-deprecation, sarcasm, pomposity-pricking or just silliness. Humour is not a special, separate kind of talk: it is our ‘default mode’; it is like breathing; we cannot function without it. English humour is a reflex, a knee-jerk response, particularly when we are feeling uncomfortable or awkward – when in doubt, joke. The taboo on earnestness is deeply embedded in the English psyche. Our response to earnestness is a distinctively English and fundamentally ‘empiricist’ blend of armchair cynicism, ironic detachment, a squeamish distaste for sentimentality, a stubborn refusal to be duped or taken in by fine rhetoric, and a mischievous delight in pricking the balloons of pretension and self-importance. English humour is not to be confused with ‘good humour’ or cheerfulness. It is often quite the opposite: much of our humour is cynical, dark, hostile, or even downright cruel. English humour is also often passive-aggressive – a cowardly, calculating, manipulative form of violence. It is said that the English have satire instead of violent revolutions and uprisings, which makes us sound fairly harmless, until you see just how vicious our satire can be. Our merciless mockery may not have actually brought down governments, but it has certainly contributed significantly to the downfall of many political leaders. On a more positive note, humour is also our primary means of expressing affection, and achieving social bonding and intimacy. Key phrases include: ‘Oh, come off it!’ and the cynical ‘Yeah, right!’ (runners-up to ‘Typical!’ as our national catchphrase). Others impossible to list – all conversation involves humour, and English humour is all in the context, e.g. understatement: ‘Not bad’ (meaning outstandingly brilliant); ‘A bit of a nuisance’ (meaning disastrous, traumatic, horrible); ‘Not very friendly’ (meaning abominably cruel); ‘I may be some time’ (meaning ‘I’m going to die’ – although, come to think of it, that one was possibly not intended to be funny).

  Moderation

  Another deep-seated, unconscious reflex or ‘default mode’. I’m using the term ‘moderation’ as shorthand for a whole set of related qualities. Our avoidance of extremes, excess and intensity. Our fear of fuss. Our cautiousness and our preference for comfortable domesticity, familiarity, security and convenience. Our ambivalence, apathy, woolliness, middlingness, fence-sitting and conservatism – and to some extent our tolerance, which tends to be at least partly a matter of benign indifference. Our moderate industriousness and moderate hedonism (the ‘work moderately, play moderately’ principle most of us really live by, rather than the ‘work hard, play hard’ one we like to quote). Our penchant for order and our special brand of ‘orderly disorder’, with its choreographed shedding of designated inhibitions. Our tendency to compromise. Our sheer ordinariness. With some notable exceptions, even our alleged and much-vaunted eccentricities are mostly ‘collective’ and conformist. We do everything in moderation, except moderation, which we take to ludicrous extremes. Far from being wild and reckless, the English ‘youth of today’ are even more moderate, cautious and unadventurous than their parents’ generation. (Only about 14 per cent do not suffer from this moderation-abuse – we must rely on these rare risk-seekers for future innovation and progress.) Key phrases include: ‘Don’t rock the boat’; ‘Don’t go overboard’; ‘Don’t overdo it’; ‘Can’t be bothered’; ‘It’ll do’; ‘For the sake of peace and quiet’; ‘Live and let live’; ‘As long as they don’t bother us’; ‘All very well, in moderation’; ‘Safe and sound’; ‘Order! Order!’; ‘A nice cup of tea’; ‘If it were like this all the time, we wouldn’t appreciate it’; ‘Over-egging the pudding’; ‘Too much of a good thing’; ‘Happy medium’; ‘What do we want? GRADUAL CHANGE! When do we want it? IN DUE COURSE!’ (OK, that last one is my own jokey invention, not an actual chant, but you get the point.)

  Hypocrisy

  Another unthinking ‘default mode’. One of the stereotypes I tried to ‘get inside’. The English are rightly renowned for their hypocrisy. This is an omnipresent trait, insidiously infecting almost all of our behaviour – and even the ‘ideals’ we most prize, such as modesty, courtesy and fair play. But under the special microscope I used for this project, English hypocrisy emerged as somewhat less odious than it might appear to the naked eye. It depends on how you look at it. You could say that most of our politeness/modesty/fairness is hypocritical, but also that much of our hypocrisy is a form of politeness – concealment of real opinions and feelings to avoid causing offence or embarrassment (or just to avoid ‘rocking the boat’ – our hypocrisy is closely linked to our moderation). English hypocrisy often seems to be mainly a matter of unconscious, collective self-deception – collusion in an unspoken agreement to delude ourselves – rather than a deliberate, cynical, calculated attempt to deceive others. (Our ‘polite egalitarianism’ is perhaps the best example – an elaborate charade of courteous modesty and fairness, a severe case of what a psychotherapist would call ‘denial’
of our acute class-consciousness.) Hypocrisy comes easily to us not because we are by nature vile and perfidious (or no more so than any other culture) but because our social dis-ease makes us naturally cautious, oblique, indirect, passive-aggressive – disinclined to say what we mean or mean what we say, prone to polite pretence rather than honest assertiveness. (When we drop the hypocritical pretence, we tend to become incoherently aggressive, rather than calmly assertive.) Our hypocrisies also reveal our values. We are no more naturally modest, courteous or fair than any other culture, but we have more unwritten rules prescribing the appearance of these qualities, which are clearly very important to us. Key phrases: too numerous to list – English conversation is littered with polite euphemisms and other disguises, deceptions and denials – but, on average, at least every other ‘please’, ‘thank-you’, ‘sorry’, ‘nice’, ‘lovely’ (plus smiles, nods, etc.) is hypocritical.

  Outlooks

  Our world view. Our way of looking at, thinking about, structuring and understanding things. Our sociocultural ‘cosmology’.

  Empiricism

  The most fundamental of this ‘outlook’ cluster. Empiricism is another shorthand term into which I am packing a large collection of English attitudes. Strictly speaking, empiricism is a philosophical doctrine holding that all knowledge is derived from sense-experience – and its close relation ‘realism’ should technically only be used to mean the tenet that matter exists independently of our perception of it. Englishness is deeply rooted in these philosophical principles, but I am also using these terms in a much broader, more informal sense, to include both the anti-theory, anti-abstraction, anti-dogma elements of our philosophical tradition (particularly our mistrust of obscurantist, airy-fairy ‘Continental’ theorising and rhetoric) and our stolid, stubborn preference for the factual, concrete and common-sense. ‘Empiricism’ is shorthand for our down-to-earthness; our matter-of-factness; our pragmatism; our cynical, no-nonsense groundedness; our gritty realism; our distaste for artifice and pretension (yes, I realise that last bit rather contradicts what I said about our hypocrisy, polite euphemisms, etc., but I never claimed that we were consistent). Key phrases include: ‘Oh, come off it!’/‘Yeah, right!’ (overlap with ‘Humour’ – English humour is very empiricist); ‘At the end of the day’; ‘As a matter of fact’; ‘In plain English’; ‘I’ll believe it when I see it’; ‘Typical!’ (overlap with ‘Eeyorishness’, also very empiricist); ‘I refute it thus!’ (No, we don’t actually go around kicking stones and quoting Johnson, but his famous line encapsulates our mindset.)

  Eeyorishness

  More than just our incessant moaning. Quite apart from the sheer quantity of it, which is staggering, there is something qualitatively distinctive about English moaning. It is utterly ineffectual: we never complain to or confront the source of our discontent, but only whinge endlessly to each other, and proposing practical solutions is forbidden by the moaning rules. But it is socially therapeutic – highly effective as a facilitator of social interaction and bonding. Moaning is also highly enjoyable (there is nothing the English love so much as a good moan – it really is a pleasure to watch) and an opportunity for displays of wit. Almost all ‘social’ moaning is humorous mock-moaning. Real, tearful despair is not allowed, except among intimates. Even if you are feeling truly desperate, you must pretend to be only pretending to feel desperate (the unbearable lightness of being English). By ‘Eeyorishness’ I mean the mindset/outlook exemplified by our national catchphrase ‘Typical!’: our chronic pessimism, our assumption that it is in the nature of things to go wrong and be disappointing, but also our perverse satisfaction at seeing our gloomy predictions fulfilled – simultaneously peeved, stoically resigned and smugly omniscient. Our special brand of fatalism – a sort of curiously sunny pessimism. Key phrases include: ‘Typical!’; ‘Huh! Typical!’; ‘Bloody typical!’ (and many other variations on this theme); ‘What did you expect?’; ‘I could have told you’; ‘As per usual’; ‘The country’s going to the dogs’; ‘There’s always something’; ‘Sod’s Law!’; ‘That’ll never work’; ‘Bound to rain: it’s a bank holiday’; ‘Mustn’t grumble’; ‘Better make the best of it’; ‘Never mind’; ‘Blessed are they who expect nothing, for they shall not be disappointed.’

  Class-consciousness

  All human societies have a social hierarchy and methods of indicating social status. What is distinctive about the English class system is (a) the fact that class is not judged at all on wealth, and very little on occupation, but purely on non-economic indicators such as speech, manner, taste and lifestyle choices; (b) the degree to which our class (and/or class-anxiety) determines our taste, behaviour and judgements; (c) the acute sensitivity of our on-board class-radar systems; and (d) our denial of all this and coy squeamishness about class: the hidden, indirect, unspoken, hypocritical/self-delusional nature of English class-consciousness (particularly among the middle classes)126. Our ‘polite egalitarianism’. The vestigial prejudice against ‘trade’. The minutiae and sheer mind-boggling silliness of our class indicators and class anxieties. Our sense of humour about all this. Key phrases include: ‘It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate him or despise him’; ‘That sort of background’; ‘Nice chap, but not really PLU’; ‘Don’t say “serviette”, dear: we call it a napkin’; ‘Mondeo Man’; ‘S/he is a bit naff/common/nouveau/flashy/vulgar/unsmart/yobby/plebby/chavvy/suburban-semi/mock-Tudor . . .’; ‘Stuck-up posh tart (hooray/upper-class twit/old-school-tie/snob/public-school yah-yah/green-wellie . . .) thinks s/he’s better than us’; ‘What do you expect from a jumped-up grocer’s daughter?’; ‘That nice little man from the shop.’

  Values

  Our ideals. Our norms. Our fundamental guiding principles. The moral standards to which we subscribe and aspire, even if we do not live up to them – ‘moral mythology’ might be a better term.

  Fair play

  A national quasi-religious obsession. Much of English morality is essentially about fair play. Although we may often fail to live up to this ideal, breaches of the fair-play principle provoke more righteous indignation than any other sin. English ‘fair play’ is not a rigidly or unrealistically egalitarian concept – we accept that there will be winners and losers, but feel that everyone should be given a fair chance, providing they observe the rules (the unwritten social rules, I mean, not necessarily the official/legal ones, which may often be dismissed as ‘unfair’) and don’t cheat or shirk their responsibilities. Fair play is an underlying theme in most aspects of our unwritten etiquette, not just the games and sports with which it is most famously associated: queuing is all about fair play; round-buying, table manners, ‘orderly disorder’, driving etiquette, flirting codes, business etiquette, polite egalitarianism, etc. are all influenced by this principle. Polite egalitarianism is hypocritical, concerned with the appearance of fairness, the concealment of embarrassing inequalities and inequities – but at least we care enough about these things to be embarrassed. Our penchant for compromise, our constant balancing and weighing up of ‘on the one hand’ and ‘on the other hand’ – often seen as woolliness, perhaps more kindly as tolerance – are a product of fair play + moderation. Our tendency to support the underdog – and to be wary of too much success – is also about fair play. Our acute sense of fairness is often mistaken for other things – including both socialism and conservatism, and even Christianity. What Julian Baggini calls English ‘conservative communitarianism’ is essentially moderation + fair play (plus the ‘tribalism’ that is a human universal, not peculiar to the English). Key phrases include: ‘Well, to be fair . . .’; ‘In all fairness . . .’; ‘Given a fair chance’; ‘Do your fair share’; ‘Get your fair share’; ‘Come on, it’s only fair’; ‘Fair’s fair’; ‘Fair enough’; ‘Firm but fair’; ‘Fair and square’; ‘Wait your turn’; ‘Take turns’; ‘Be fair’; ‘Fair cop’; ‘Fair play to you/him/her!’; ‘That’s not cricket/not on/out of order!’; ‘Level playin
g-field’; ‘Don’t be greedy’; ‘Live and let live’; ‘On the other hand’; ‘There’s always two sides’; ‘On balance’; ‘Let’s just agree to disagree, shall we?’

  Courtesy

  A powerful ideal. Some of our politenesses are so deeply ingrained as to be almost involuntary, and thus fairly meaningless (the ‘sorry’ reflex, for example, is a knee-jerk response for most of us) but many require conscious or indeed acutely self-conscious effort. The English are often admired for our courtesy but condemned for our ‘reserve’, which is seen as arrogant, cold and unfriendly. Although our reserve is certainly a symptom of our social dis-ease, it is also, at least in part, a form of courtesy – the kind sociolinguists call ‘negative politeness’, which is concerned with other people’s need not to be intruded or imposed upon (as opposed to ‘positive politeness’, which is concerned with their need for inclusion and social approval). We judge others by ourselves, and assume that everyone shares our obsessive need for privacy – so we mind our own business and politely ignore them. But our polite sorries, pleases and thank-yous are not heartfelt or sincere – there is nothing particularly warm or friendly about them. Politeness by definition involves a degree of artifice and hypocrisy, but English courtesy seems to be almost entirely a matter of form, of obedience to a set of rules rather than expression of genuine feelings. So when we do break our own courtesy rules, we tend if anything to be more obnoxious and unpleasant than other less ‘polite’ nations. We need all these rules to protect us from ourselves. Key phrases include: ‘Sorry’; ‘Please’; ‘Thank you/Cheers/Ta/Thanks’ (every culture has these words, but we use them more); ‘I’m afraid that . . .’; ‘I’m sorry, but . . .’; ‘Would you mind . . .?’; ‘Could you possibly . . .?’; ‘I don’t suppose . . .’; ‘How do you do?’; ‘Nice day, isn’t it?’; ‘Yes, isn’t it?’; ‘Excuse me, sorry, but you couldn’t possibly pass the marmalade, could you?’; ‘Excuse me, I’m terribly sorry but you seem to be standing on my foot’; ‘With all due respect, the right honourable gentleman is being a bit economical with the truth’; ‘Sorry, but I’m not going to apologise for that.’