I would have to wait until he served his next customer (whenever that might be), because he didn’t have a password for the till. While we were discussing the likelihood of another customer ever happening along, another till was opened, a few yards away. I asked if he could get me my change from the other till, and he said, with a look of panic, “Oh no, it has to come from this one.” Now, this was not some callow, under-educated youth. This was a trained pharmacist; a chap with a brain. I suggested that he could repay the other till later – and it was as though I had explained the theory of relativity. He was actually excited by such a clever solution, which would never have occurred to him. Lateral thinking on behalf of the customer’s convenience simply wasn’t part of his job.
3 My Bubble, My Rules
This is the issue of “personal space”, about which we are growing increasingly touchy. One of the great principles of manners, especially in Britain, is respecting someone else’s right to be left alone, unmolested, undisturbed. The sociolinguists P. Brown and S. C. Levinson, in their book Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage (1987), coined the useful term “negative politeness” for this. The British are known to take this principle to extremes, because it chimes with our natural reticence and social awkwardness, and we are therefore simply outraged when other people don’t distinguish sufficiently between public and private space. The advent of the mobile phone was a disaster for fans of negative politeness. We are forced to listen, openmouthed, to other people’s intimate conversations, property transactions, business arrangements, and even criminal deals. We dream up revenges, and fantasise about pitching phones out of the window of a moving train. Meanwhile, legislation on smoking in public places has skewed our expectations of negative politeness, so that if a person now lights a cigarette in our presence anywhere, we cough and gag and mutter, and furiously fan the air in front of our faces.
There is an episode of The Simpsons in which Bart has a contagious mosquito bite, and is encased in an isolation bubble, and when he is told off for slurping his soup, invokes the memorable constitutional right: “Hey, my bubble, my rules.” Increasingly, we are all in our own virtual bubbles when we are out in public, whether we are texting, listening to iPods, reading, or just staring dangerously at other people. Concomitantly, and even more alarmingly, our real private spaces (our homes; even our brains) have become encased in a larger bubble that we can’t escape: a communications network which respects no boundaries. Our computers are fair game for other computers to communicate with at all times. Meanwhile, people call us at home to sell us things, whatever the time of day. I had a call recently from a London department store at 8pm to arrange a delivery, and when I objected to the hour, the reply was, “Well, we’re here until nine.” There is no escape. In a Miami hotel room last year, I retrieved the message flashing on my phone, and found that it was from a cold caller. I was incensed. Someone in reception was trying to sell me a time share. In my hotel room! No wonder people are becoming so self-important, solipsistic, and rude. It used to be just CIA agents with ear-pieces who walked round with preoccupied, faraway expressions, and consequently regarded all the little people as irrelevant scum. Now, understandably, it’s nearly everybody.
4 The Universal Eff-Off Reflex
It ought to be clear by now that manners fulfil a number of roles in social life. Arguably, their chief role is to make us feel safe in the company of strangers. In his book The English (1998) Jeremy Paxman says that manners seem to have been developed by the English “to protect themselves from themselves”; there is an attractive theory that, back in the mists of time, language evolved in humans simply as a less ghastly alternative to picking fleas off each other. We placate with good manners, especially when we apologise. Erving Goffman, in his Relations in Public (1971), wrote that an apology is a gesture through which an individual splits himself into two parts: the part that is guilty of the offence, and the part that dissociates itself from the crime and says, “I know why this was considered wrong. In fact, I think it’s wrong myself.” Goffman also explains what is going on when a person tells off a naughty child or dog in public: he is signalling to other people that while he loves the child/dog, he is also responsible for the child/dog, and since he clearly shares the general view of how the child/dog has just behaved, the matter is in hand and everyone can calm down.
Increasingly, it seems, this splitting does not occur – and to those who expect this traditional nod towards shared standards, the new behaviour can be profoundly scary. Point out bad manners to anyone younger than thirty-five, and you risk a lash-back reflex response of shocking disproportion. “Excuse me, I think your child dropped this sweet wrapper.” “Why don’t you Eff Off, you fat cow,” comes the automatic reply. A man on a London bus recently told off a gang of boys, and was set on fire. Another was stabbed to death when he objected to someone throwing food at his girlfriend. How many of us dare to cry, “Get off that skateboard, you hooligan!” in such a moral climate? In the old days, when the splitting occurred, a person would apply a bit of moral honesty to a situation and admit that he deserved to be told off. Not any more. Criticism is treated (and reacted to) as simple aggression. And this is very frightening. As Stephen L. Carter points out in his book Civility (1998), people now think that “I have a right to do X” is equal to “I am beyond censure when I do X.” The comedian Jack Dee tells the true story of a health visitor friend who was appalled to find a quite large child still suckling from his mother. “I wonder whether we should be putting a stop to this?” she said. At which, the boy detached himself from the breast, told her to Eff Off, and then went back to his dinner.
One hesitates to blame television for all this because that’s such an obvious thing to do. But, come on. Just because it’s obvious doesn’t mean it’s not true. Popular culture is fully implicated in the all-out plummeting of social standards. Abuse is the currency of all reality shows. People being vulgar and rude to each other in contrived, stressful situations is TV’s bread and butter. Meanwhile the encouragement of competitive, material self-interest is virtually its only other theme. The message and content of a vast amount of popular television can be summed up in the words, “And you can Eff right Off, too.” No wonder people’s aspirations are getting so limited, and their attitude to other people so cavalier. I got in a taxi recently and the driver said, “Do you know what I’d do if I had a lot of money?” I thought, well, take a holiday, buy a smallholding, give it to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds? He said, “I’d crash the car through the wall of that pub, drive right up to the bar, wind down the window and say, ‘Mine’s a pint, landlord, and you can Eff Off if you don’t like it coz I’m buying the place.’”
5 Booing the Judges
The timing was significant. Emerging, bruised and a bit horrified, from encounters with the uppity British public in the 2005 election campaign, the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, launched a campaign for the restoration of “respect”. “A bit late,” some of us muttered, when we heard. Respect was surely already a huge area for public concern. The humblest lip-reading TV viewer can spot a labio-dental fricative (or “F”) being formed on the lips of a footballer, with the result that when a permanently livid chap such as Wayne Rooney, with his veins sticking out on his neck, and his jug-ears burning with indignation, hurls seventeen assorted labio-dental fricatives at the referee, there is no interpreting this as, “Actually, it was a bit of a dive, sir, but now I’ve learned my lesson and I shan’t be doing it again.” Sport is supposed to be character-forming, but people are turning out like Wayne Rooney, and we are in deep trouble. Blaming the parents is an attractive option here, by the way. In 2002, the American research unit Public Agenda published Aggravating Circumstances: A Status Report on Rudeness in America, in which only 9 per cent of those questioned thought that children behaved respectfully towards adults, and 71 per cent reported seeing parents at sports events “screaming” at coaches, referees, and players.
Disrespect for older people; disrespect for
