Talk to the Hand

by Lynne Truss

  However, what Elias does argue is that, working outwards from a courtly nucleus, standards of behaviour developed under the influence of two evolving “fears”: shame and repugnance. It seems that once the rigidities of feudal society have given way to complex and diverse social networks, the Freudian super-ego inside each one of us becomes responsible for us having manners. Thus, the individual judges his own actions against a standard set by his own super-ego, and feels shame; he judges other people’s actions against the same super-ego, and feels repugnance. W. B. Yeats once said that we make rhetoric out of the quarrels with others, but poetry out of the quarrels with ourselves. What Elias sees in the history of manners is a similarly creative internal wrestling match between a person’s natural savagery and his own psychological organ of self-restraint:

  A major part of the tensions which were earlier discharged directly in conflicts with other people must be resolved as an inner tension in the struggle of the individual with himself . . . In a sense, the danger zone now passes through the self of every individual.

  I promise this is the most boring part of this book (I certainly hope it is). But I feel it’s important to establish that reeling in horror at other people’s everyday impoliteness may just go with the territory of being civilised. Concern over the collapse of public behaviour is not a minor niggling thing. Nor is it new. The manners books quoted by Elias unwittingly tell two stories at once: their very existence proves that concern over the state of manners has followed the same upward graph, over time, as the civilizing process itself. If one takes the view that modern-day manners are superior to the cheerful spit-and-stamp of olden times, a paradox begins to emerge: while standards have been set ever higher, people have become all the more concerned that standards are actually dropping. Basically, people have been complaining about the state of manners since at least the fifteenth century. The discomfiting behaviour of others is one of humanity’s largest preoccupations, and is incidentally the basis of quite a lot of literature. Blame the damn super-ego. If we feel doomed and miserable when we consider the rudeness of our world, we are not the first to feel this way, and we certainly won’t be the last.

  However, we exist at a particular moment, and there can be no harm in analysing what is happening to manners right now, at the start of the twenty-first century. Theory is all very well, I hear you cry, but I’m still holding this door open and beginning to realise I could die here before anybody thanked me for doing it. So let’s just take the holding-the-door example for a moment and see what can be learned from it about the function of courtesy words. Let’s imagine that you hold the door open and everything goes to plan: the person says, “Thank you” and you say, “You’re welcome” and the whole episode is successfully closed. When that perfect scene unfolds, how do you feel? Well, (1) relieved that they weren’t rude, of course. On the personal level, you feel (2) vindicated, (3) validated, and (4) virtuous. On a social or political level, you feel (5) safe. What is quite interesting is that you also feel (6) completely indifferent to the individual who has thanked you, because no personal relationship has been established between you. It is very, very rare for lifelong friendships to be built on a holding-the-door incident. Addresses are not often exchanged. All that happens is that a small obligation is raised, then swiftly cancelled, and normal life is immediately resumed.

  So, what happens when the “thank you” does not come? The reverse reactions apply.

  In place of feeling relieved, you are exasperated – but, crucially, not surprised. Oh no, you are definitely not surprised. “Typical!” you say. As Kate Fox points out, “Typical!” is one of our default modes, along with making jokes instead of complaining, claiming to prefer everything in moderation, and prizing modesty above all other social gifts. The “Typical!” response is actually quite self-flattering, of course. It suggests that fate can never wrong-foot us because we are always prepared for the worst or most unlikely event. “So then my sister-in-law had a sex change and went off to live in Krakatoa. Typical!” we exclaim. “So then they started bombing Baghdad. Typical!” “The cat turned out to be a reincarnation of a seventh-century Chinese prophet. Typical!”

  Instead of feeling vindicated, you are dismayed by the rejection of your kindness. Your dignity is wounded. You feel that the world is laughing at you for holding this door open.

  Far from feeling validated, you feel obliterated. Are you invisible, then? Have you disappeared? Do doors hold themselves open these days? Do I look like a doorman? Would they like to pay me as a doorman? (You are bound to wax weakly sarcastic at this point.)

  Instead of feeling coolly virtuous, you feel a flame of righteous indignation. A good deed has been thrown back in your face! Ha! “Did you see what that woman did? I held the door and she walked right through! I was doing the right thing, and she did the wrong thing!” The sensation of being morally superior to everyone else in the world is, of course, secretly the best bit about the whole experience, but beware. What it brings out is not the most attractive aspect of your personality.

  Instead of feeling safe, you are frightened. You succumb to accelerated moral reasoning. This person has no consideration for others, therefore has no imagination, therefore is a sociopath representative of a world packed with sociopaths. When someone is rude to you, the following logic kicks in: “I have no point of connection with this person . . . A person who wouldn’t say thank you is also a person who would cut your throat . . . Oh my God, society is in meltdown and soon it won’t be safe to come out.”

  Finally, you HATE the person who did not say thank you. Indifference is no longer an option. The whole incident has now become intensely personal, although you daren’t say anything for fear of reprisal (see chapter four). This person has, through casual and ignorant discourtesy, made you seethe with a mixture of virtuous affront, fury, and fear – and don’t forget, you are STILL holding the door open. No wonder we shout after people, “A thank-you wouldn’t kill you!” It’s amazing we don’t wrench doors from their hinges, run after people, and say, “Here! Open it yourself next time, OK?”

  Of course, what we want is for everyone to be as polite as us. The reason I have begun with “please” and “thank you” is that nothing could be simpler than to learn these words. That’s what we say to ourselves every day. They are only words! They cost nothing! Also, they are in limitless supply and are miraculously immune to the dangers of over-use. I have recently started playing badminton in the evenings, and last Thursday I managed to say, “Sorry” nearly 500 times in a two-hour period, but here’s the marvellous thing: I can still say it any time I want. Obviously, I wish I were as skilful at foot-work and bat-work as I am at apologising – but that’s another story. What is so interesting, of course, is that we all apologise to each other; even the really good players. So quite a lot of energy that might be usefully diverted to running and hitting goes into consoling and exonerating, as well. “No, not your fault! That shot was mine! I should have gone for that! You are completely in the clear! You really shouldn’t apologise!” Every so often, we try to ban apology from the court, but we can’t manage without it. We implode from the effort of swallowing all the “sorry”s. So the soundtrack of our matches goes sorry-sorry-sorry-sorry-SORRY-sorry-SORRY-sorry-sorry, interrupted by the occasional brisk “Yours!” (from my partner) and the responding “Oh no!” (from me), followed by another bout of sorry-sorry-sorry-sorry-sorry.

  But the world is changing. Those of us who automatically deal out politeness words in suitable contexts are becoming uncomfortably aware that we earn less credit for it than we used to. It is becoming obvious that we are the exception rather than the rule, and that our beautiful manners fall on stony ground. People who serve the public are becoming impervious to rudeness, either because they are young and don’t care, or because they are older and have learned to toughen up or suffer a nervous breakdown. Either way, if you attempt to sympathise with a shop-worker who has just served a rude customer, the response is rarely the o
ne you expect. Mainly you will get a blank shrug, which carries the worrying implication: this person doesn’t care whether customers are polite or not. This makes it quite hard to go through the ensuing politeness display without feeling self-conscious, or even quaint. “May I please have it wrapped separately?” you ask, with your smile fading. “Thank you, that’s perfect, how kind you are.” The ground starts to slip from under you, as no validating response comes your way, yet you are powerless to stop being polite and old-fashioned. “And what a fine morning, forsooth!” you exclaim. “Ha. By God’s breath, thou hast a cunning way with yon mechanical abacus! Hast thou a quill-pen prithee? Or mayhap I must digitate upon yon artful keypad?”

  At least we are generally spared the enforced perkiness of American service workers, for whom a positive attitude and excessive civility are nonnegotiable. Trawling the internet, I discovered an article from 2000 intriguingly titled “The Civility Glut”, in which Barbara Ehrenreich paints a grim picture of life under the system of “Have a nice day”, “Have a great day”, and “Have a really great day”. She reveals that Wal-Mart workers are subjected to video-training in the art of “aggressive hospitality” and complains that call-centre workers have started to exclaim, “Perfect!” and “Great!” when she gives them her account number and home address. She has to remind herself not to get too big-headed about how great and perfect her zip code appears to be, in the admiring eyes of others. Meanwhile, she has started to feel embarrassed by her own ritual “Goodbye”, because it has begun to sound a bit terse and dismissive in the context of “Have a really wonderful special day with knobs on.” What struck me was the example, “I sure don’t!”, which is evidently the cheerful response you can get if you ask, “Do you have any seats on that flight?” Imagine where this “cruel new locution” could lead. “May I sit here?” “You sure can’t!” “Excuse me, officer, is my house still standing?” “It sure isn’t!” “Will I ever see you again, my darling?” “You sure won’t!” “Doctor, did he leave me one final message?” “He sure didn’t!”

  However, any effort is better than none. So what is to be done? In terms of making the world go round, these words used to mean a lot. Courtesy words are our most elementary way of indicating that we are aware of the presence of other people, and of the impact we may be having on them. Consideration for others being the foundation of manners, children ought to be taught to use the courtesy words because they thereby learn an important social habit: to remember there are other people in the world. I think it is right to say, “Excuse me” when answering one’s phone on the train. I think it is right to say, “Thank you” to the driver when alighting from a bus. We are not invisible to one another. Attention must be paid. The problem, as I hope to explore later, is that people are increasingly unwilling to admit, when they are out in public, that they are not nevertheless – through sheer force of will – actually in private. When they are on trains, or in the street, or in a queue for taxis, they can’t say the courtesy words because to do so would explode their idea of the entire experience, which is that they are alone and that nobody else exists. They are, I believe, afraid to speak to other people. Hence the astonishing aggression that is unleashed if you challenge them. If you speak to them, you scare them.

  However, the magical nature of these words needs to be admitted, too. There is a rather unpleasant aspect to courtesy words which we conveniently overlook because it does not reflect well upon us. As children, we were taught that saying the right words at the right moment had just one function: it was the key to gaining parental approval, which was in turn the key to getting what we wanted. From a moral point of view, this was pretty bad educational practice, but what the hey, people have been doing it for centuries, training children to be crafty hypocrites. In his play Heartbreak House (1919) George Bernard Shaw provides the great line: “If you will only take the trouble always to do the perfectly correct thing, and to say the perfectly correct thing, you can do just what you like.” None of us can deny that our attitude to courtesy words contains an element of this cynicism. Make the right noises and you get the reward. Deep in our hearts, we recognise that we are merely graduates of successful behavioural training. This does not sit well with our feelings of social virtue. However, the greater happiness gets served under this system, and we can rightly feel proud to be part of that.

  Where this magical thinking is now a bit dangerous is in the corollary lesson we learned as children: that if we make the right noises, we may deflate danger, or disarm aggression. Politeness words are not just concerned with making the world friendly and smooth-running: they are an acknowledgement that to negotiate human society we require overt appeasement strategies, such as are adopted by devious chimpanzees in wildlife documentaries. We may draw the line at grooming the alpha male or rolling over on our backs with our tummies in the air, but if we just say sorry at the exact right point, we believe that we may avoid being brained by a screeching savage wielding a bleached thigh-bone.

  Politeness is a signal of readiness to meet someone half-way; the question of whether politeness makes society cohere, or keeps other people safely at arm’s length, is actually a false opposition. Politeness does both, and that is why it’s so frightening to contemplate losing it. Suddenly, the world seems both alien and threatening – and all because someone’s mother never taught him to say, “Excuse me” or “Please”. There is an old German fable about porcupines who need to huddle together for warmth, but are in danger of hurting each other with their spines. When they find the optimum distance to share each other’s warmth without putting each other’s eyes out, their state of contrived co-operation is called good manners. Well, those old German fabulists certainly knew a thing or two. When you acknowledge other people politely, the signal goes out, “I’m here. You’re there. I’m staying here. You’re staying there. Aren’t we both glad we sorted that out?” When people don’t acknowledge each other politely, the lesson from the porcupine fable is unmistakeable. “Freeze or get stabbed, mate. It’s your choice.”

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  Two years ago, in Christiansburg, Virginia, a psychology professor came up with a technological solution to the problem of road rage. It was a little green light that could be installed at the back of a car and that could be flashed to say “please”, “thank you”, and “sorry”. I believe a patent is actually in place, which makes me somehow want to burst into tears. This academic’s reasoning was that, by means of his “Courteous Communicator”, a driver could signal “thank you” (two flashes) or “I’m sorry” (three flashes) after cutting in front of another car. Naturally, the invention was immediately quashed as unworkable and confusing, not to mention illegal and a bit daft. A spokesman for the American Automobile Association Foundation for Traffic Safety in Washington, DC, pragmatically pointed out that there already existed a courteous communicator in all cars: “It’s called a turn signal,” he said, “and some people don’t even use that.”

  But how far this chap had missed the point! This nice Virginian man thought there might be a market for his invention – that motorists were crying out for a means of apologising to other road-users and thereby defusing bad feeling. Maybe he imagined it would ultimately lead to an even more sophisticated system of five flashes for “You’re welcome” and six flashes for “Nice car, by the way!” and seven flashes for “Hey! You must come to dinner sometime!” and eight flashes for “That would be terrific!” In fact, of course, if he marketed a device for flashing, in orange neon, “Out of my way, asshole!” it would be an instant hit. No, there is one very good reason for not expecting motorists to start, suddenly, interacting with other road-users as if they are present in person. It is that the opposite is happening. When present in person, people are interacting with each other as if they are in cars.

  So, one lesson can be drawn from all this courtesy-word malarkey. “Please” and “thank you” may not be so very hard to say, but they perform any number of sophisticated functions that are of no interest
whatsoever to a growing number of people. Study the works of Erving Goffman, and you will find exquisite analysis of subtle transaction rituals between people in public – but the main effect will be to make you weep, because his wry observations of “remedial interchange” and “appeasement gestures” are built on the supposition that people are actually aware of each other, and are not concentrating all their attention on their iPods or mobile phones. Blame the conditions of modern life in any combination you prefer. I blame the parents, television, the internet, the mobile phone, the absence of war, the under-valuing of teachers, and I also blame the culture of blame. Richard Layard, in his recent book Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (2005), argues that “Our problem today is a lack of common feeling between people – the notion that life is essentially a competitive struggle.” Well, that about sums it up. As I mentioned in the introduction, the only context in which you can expect to hear a “please” or “thank you” nowadays is in recorded messages – and hey, guess what, they are not extending courtesy at all, because they are not attempting to meet you half-way. “Please have your account number ready as this will help us do our job more efficiently. Thank you for waiting. I’m sorry you are having to wait.” In a world increasingly starved of courtesy words, it’s no wonder that when we hear these messages, we want to put back our heads and scream. As Goffman points out so beautifully, traffic cops may ask you politely to get out of the car, but that doesn’t mean you have a choice.