Authority is largely perceived as a kind of personal insult which must be challenged. On TV competitions, judges are booed and abused for saying, “Look, I’m sorry, he can’t dance!”, because it has become a modern tenet that success should have only a loose connection with merit, and that when “the people” speak, they are incontestably right. Meanwhile, old people are addressed by their first names, teachers are brusquely informed, “That’s none of your business!” by small children, judges are abused in court by mouthy teenagers, and it turns out that even if you’ve got the exact money, you can’t buy this jumper because Jason’s got the key to the till and he’s a muppet, he’s out the back at the moment, texting his girlfriend who’s just come back from Rhodes which was all right but she wouldn’t go again, she’s more of a Spain person, if you know what I mean, I like Spain, I’ve been there twelve times, but then I’m a bit of an iconoclast.
The most extreme form of non-deference, of course, is to be treated as actually absent or invisible. People talk across you on planes, or chat between themselves when they are serving customers. Nothing – nothing – makes me more angry than this. I get sarcastic. I wave in people’s faces. I say aloud, “I’m sure I’m standing here. Can you see me standing here? Why don’t you just catch my eye for a second to acknowledge that I am standing here?” For some time now, I have been carrying a Sooty glove-puppet on shopping expeditions, so that I can at least have a decent conversation when buying stuff in Ryman’s. “What’s that, Sooty? That will be £3.99? What’s that, Sooty? Thank you very much? What’s that, Sooty? Goodbye?”
6 Someone Else Will Clean It Up
Of all forms of rudeness, the hardest for a lot of people to understand is the offence against everybody. The once-prevalent idea that, as individuals, we have a relationship with something bigger than ourselves, or bigger than our immediate circle, has become virtually obsolete. For this reason, many people simply cannot see why they shouldn’t chuck their empty burger box out of the car window. They also don’t see any reason to abide by traffic laws unless there is a speed camera advertised. “That’s so selfish!” is a cry that has no judgemental content for such people, and little other meaning either. Yes, we have come a long way from Benjamin Rush, in 1786, writing, “Let our pupil be taught that he does not belong to himself, but that he is public property.” These days, of course, the child is taught to believe quite the opposite: that public property, in the natural way of things, belongs to him.
The interesting thing is that, cut free from any sense of community, we are miserable and lonely as well as rude. This is an age of social autism, in which people just can’t see the value of imagining their impact on others, and in which responsibility is always conveniently laid at other people’s doors. People are trapped in a kind of blind, brute state of materialism. “There is no such thing as society,” Mrs Thatcher said. Well, there certainly isn’t now. The latest Keep Britain Tidy campaign has thrown up an interesting moral puzzler for traditionalists by targeting the obvious self-interest of teenage litterers. It trades on – well, what else? Oral sex. Ingenious, or what? “While you’re down there…” runs the slogan, over the sort of come-and-get-it-big-boy pictures you normally see on little cards in phone booths before they are removed by the police. The idea is that, while you’re down there, you will also place empty beer cans in the bins provided.
I have to report that my reaction to the “While you’re down there…” posters is, to say the least, mixed. I am actually revolted by their cynicism, disgusted by the explicitness, concerned that teenage promiscuity might be a high price to pay for less litter, but on the other hand relieved and pleased that, in a poster aimed at young people, the ellipsis has been used correctly and that there is an apostrophe in the “you’re”. In other words, it actually could have been worse.
This book is, obviously, a big, systematic moan about modern life. And the expression “Talk to the hand” sort of yokes it all together. “Talk to the hand” specifically alludes to a response of staggering rudeness best known from The Jerry Springer Show – “Talk to the hand, coz the face ain’t listening”, accompanied by an aggressive palm held out at arm’s length. I chose it for the title because it’s the way I’ve started to see the world. Nearly sixty years ago, George Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four that the future was a boot stamping on a human face for ever. I see it as a forest of belligerent and dismissive palms held up to the human face instead. Thank you for choosing to hold for an assistant. There’s no one here to help you at this time. Nobody asked you to hold the Effing door open. An error of type 506 has occurred. Please disconnect, check your preferences, then go off and die. Do NOT type PIN until requested. Please continue to hold, your call is important to us. Sharon’s in charge of envelopes and she isn’t in on Fridays. You need to go to the other till. Have you considered on-line banking? Eff Off, fat cow. If you would like to speak to an assistant, please have your account details ready and call back in 200 years.
People tell me, by the way, that it is possible to get terribly rude service in France, and that I’ve just had a lot of unusually nice experiences. Ho hum. I also hear from Americans that Britain is friendly and ever so polite, to which I reply, “Surely America is friendly and ever so polite (except at immigration)?” and they say, oh no, we’re the rudest country on earth. In her book about the English, Kate Fox conducted field experiments, such as bumping into people to see if they would say “Sorry” – which 80 per cent of them duly did. She concluded that manners have not declined, and that when we exclaim at the standards of courtesy on the roads, we ought to remember what it’s like to drive in Italy. We still queue up nicely, maintain a belief in fair play, and when we don’t like something, we make an ironic joke about it (because we don’t like to make a scene). And yet, if you ask people, they will mostly report with vehemence that the world has become a ruder place. They are at breaking point. They feel like blokes in films who just. Can’t. Take. Any. More. So what on earth is going on?
THE FIRST GOOD REASON Was That So Hard to Say?
The trouble with traditional good manners, as any fool knows, is judging where to draw the line. Politeness is, after all, a ritual of tennis-like exchange and reciprocity, of back-and-forth pick and pock, and unfortunately there is rarely an umpire on hand to stop play when the tie-break has been going on for four hours already and it’s got so dark you can no longer see the net. “Thank you,” says one polite person to another.
“No, thank YOU,” comes the response.
“No, thank YOU.”
“No, really, the gratitude is all mine.”
“Look, take it, you swine.”
“No, please: I insist.”
“After you, I said.”
“No, please: after YOU.”
“Look, I said after you, fatso.”
“No, please, after you.”
“After YOU.”
“After YOU.”
Did they ever discover perpetual motion in physics? In manners, it has been around for aeons. In 1966, Evelyn Waugh famously issued a warning to Lady Mosley that, if she wrote to him, she would always receive an answer. “My father spent the last twenty years of his life answering letters,” he wrote. “If someone thanked him for a wedding present, he thanked them for thanking him, and there was no end to the exchange but death.”
But although it can get
