A young woman of my acquaintance once wrote to Tommy Steele. You may remember him from such films as Half a Sixpence and such chart-topping songs as “Little White Bull”. For many years, he lived in a rather grand eighteenth-century house behind a high wall on the main road between Richmond and Kingston in Surrey, near to where I grew up, and we council-estate locals were jolly pleased to have him in the neighbourhood, even though we never actually saw him. Whenever the song “ ’Old it flash bang wallop what a picture!” was played on Two-Way Family Favourites, we turned up the volume with a glow of pride. Anyway, one day, about fifteen years ago, this young woman wrote to him, but it was not a fan letter. It was an accusation, expressed in quite belligerent terms. “I have been past your house on the top deck of a bus for years and years,” she wrote, “yet I have never seen you. As a famous person, don’t you have a duty to appear for people? You’d be nobody without us, you know.” Unbelievably, she received a reply. Tommy Steele wrote to say that, if she cared to catch a bus on Sunday afternoon between two and three, he would be in the garden and would give her a wave. “Well, was he there?” I asked, when she told me about it, some months later. She snorted with laughter. “How should I know?” she said. “I didn’t go.”
When people applaud the “end of deference” in our society, they tend to evoke the old British class system, with its sepia-coloured peasants clutching cloth caps to their waistcoats and refusing to make a fuss about dying of industrial chest ailments. Words such as “servile” and “repressive” crop up, as the bad old days are given a glad good riddance. People will even resort (as I did, earlier) to the slightly dubious argument that posh people are quite unworthy of special respect, in any case, being genetically stupid from the in-breeding, laughably out of touch with popular entertainment, apt to pelt each other with bakery products in London’s club land, and absolute bastards where foxes are concerned. The end of deference is presented as politically progressive and therefore a good thing. Nobody “looks up” to anyone any more: Hooray! The media don’t allow anyone to get too big for their boots: Hooray! In the bad old days ordinary people often had to cope with feelings of inferiority, which sometimes drove them to exert themselves: Boo! But now we have relativism and entitlement: Hooray! Oh yes, everything is grandy and dandy. Hooray, hooray, hooray!
What a brave new world we have, then, that glorifies rudeness in the name of egalitarianism. The British have always enjoyed the sport of abusing public figures; we regard it as hilarious as well as cathartic. I was once at Madison Square Garden in New York, to report on a heavyweight title bout between Lennox Lewis and Evander Holyfield, and yes, I know how odd that sounds, but this isn’t the place to explain. The point is that, before the fight, the ring announcer made a fatal error: addressing a crowd with a large, rowdy British element, he listed the celebrities in the audience. He evidently thought we would be impressed. “Ladies and gentlemen, we have Paul Simon in the Garden tonight!” he said. And what happened? “Booo!” yelled the Brits. “We have John Kennedy Junior!” “BOOOO!” “We have Michael Douglas!” “BOOOO!” Only two people were given a cheer by the British contingent: Jack Nicholson and Keith Richards. I felt embarrassed by my chippy countrymen. Abuse is the weapon of the weak. But at the same time, I did feel very proud. I mean, I like Paul Simon. I have nothing against him. But nobody deserves uncritical acclaim just for filling a ringside seat at a punch-up.
This traditional weapon of the weak is, however, becoming heavier and more blunt. There seems to be an avid and self-righteous movement to make public figures pay the price for too much deference in the past. It is getting a bit bloody. The royal family is brutally cut down to size whenever the opportunity arises, and you certainly don’t have to be Jeremy Paxman any more to be rude to a politician. In fact, if you see John Prescott in a motorway service station, the accepted MO seems to be that first you insult him, then you go and get a bunch of friends in hoods with a video camera so that you can perform a “happy slap” (i.e., a filmed assault). As for famous people – well, who the hell would want to be famous any more? You’d have to be insane. People demand you appear for them in your garden, and then they don’t even show up to give you a wave. On a recent Have I Got News for You, Les Dennis told the story of a celebrity (whose name meant nothing to me) being struck in the street by a woman with an umbrella, who then said, “You see? I told you it was him!” There is a well-worn dictum that, in Britain, “they build you up and then they tear you down”, but it’s getting to the point where the tearing-down is far too much fun to hang about for. There was once a story in Private Eye about a bloodsports enthusiast so excited by the delivery of some pheasant chicks that he shot them in the box. This is, I think, a pretty good image for the way public life now works in this country.
All this would be all right if it actually served the cause of egalitarianism, but it plainly doesn’t. Look around. We don’t even have social mobility any more. Just because newspapers refer to HRH The Prince of Wales as “Chazza” (and everyone feels free to say vile things about his uncomplaining wife) does not make him the same as you and me. There seems to be an idea that the more disrespect you show towards the rich or famous (for example, squirting water in the face of Tom Cruise), the nearer you move towards achieving equality, but the effect is quite the opposite: rudeness highlights difference. In a truly egalitarian society, everyone would show respect to everyone else. It is very bad news for our society that overt disrespect is such a big game these days, because it just stirs people up without enlightening them. Mass entertainment that demeans public figures satisfies popular base instincts but leaves nobody better off. Besides, at the same time as it’s become fashionable never to look up to anyone, it has become nastily acceptable to look down.
The “end of deference” is about a lot more than the flattening of class distinctions, in any case. This is where the baby has been so thoughtlessly poured down the drain with the bath water. Respect and consideration are traditionally due to other people for all sorts of reasons, some big, some small. Here are twenty (mostly lapsed) reasons to show special politeness to other people that have nothing to do with class.
The utter bloody rudeness of the world today is about a lot of things, as we have already seen, but I think what most dismays many honourable people is the way “deference” has become a dirty little demeaning word, while its close relative “respect” has become a cool street-crime buzz-word mainly associated with paying feudal obeisance to those in possession of firearms. Both words have lost their true meaning. Deference is not about lying down and letting someone put their foot on your head. It is not about kow-tow. It is about assessing what is due to other people on all sorts of grounds. The dictionary definition of “in deference to” is: “out of respect for; in consideration of”. To show deference does not mean “I hereby declare I am inferior to you.” But that’s what people seem to think it means, so they refuse to defer to anybody, on any grounds at all. The same misunderstanding prevents people from apologising. They think that if they say “Sorry”, it means “I am 100 per cent to blame. And now that I’ve admitted it, you can sue the pants off me.”
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Contempt is the word. Although I don’t know why I bother continuing with this; most of you are too stupid to follow it, let’s be honest. All right, I suppose I’ll have to spell it out. Contempt, also known as “attitude”, is the new behavioural default mode. And what breeds contempt? Oh, come on, you muppets! I’m working with idiots here. What breeds contempt? Familiarity! Blimey, I thought you were cleverer than that, mate. Although judging by the way you’ve been moving your lips while you read this, I don’t know where I got that idea.
It goes against the grain just to sit here applauding the sagacity of a proverb, but I find that I have no choice. So here goes. What breeds contempt? Familiarity breeds contempt. I used to be confused by this saying, incidentally, because I thought it meant “familiarity” in the sense of being familiar with the lay-out of Exeter, or familiar with the problem plays of Shakespeare, and I thought, “Hang on, the more I know about Measure for Measure, the more I admire it! When Claudio pleads so eloquently for his life at the expense of his sister’s chastity, I am absolutely fit to be tied. And that Cathedral Close in Exeter is lovely. Familiarity really boosts things in one’s estimation. What on earth are these proverb-coiners talking about?”
But it isn’t that kind of familiarity. It’s the sort that has you call your maths teacher “Jeff”. It’s going up to the Prime Minister and saying, “Nice jacket; how much?” It is using someone’s loo without asking, and leaving the seat up as evidence. It is calling someone you’ve never met, on their mobile, to settle a dispute about punctuation. Few issues divide generations more than the issue of familiarity. It is one of the main rudenesses cited by older people, and it is easy to see why. People who have spent their whole lives as “Mr Webster” or “Mrs Owen” do not want to find, at the ends of their lives, that younger people who don’t know them are calling them “Alf” and “Joyce”. To them, it is sheer impertinence (and usually takes place when they are in a weakened state, which makes it all the more insensitive). Sometimes you really do have to admire the French. They would never stand for this kind of thing. An American writer-friend who is quite proficient in French once attempted to use a slang term with a record-shop owner, and the chap did not let it pass. “Have we met?” he asked, horrified at the breach of decorum.
Several of my Daily Telegraph correspondents objected to being called “mate” or “love” by strangers, and one particularly loathed being served in restaurants with the words “There you go.” Which for some reason, always makes me laugh, because I can picture the scene: man waiting for roast dinner to be served, pouring wine for wife, practising deep breathing. “He might not say it, dear,” whispers the wife, patting his hand. “I know. Don’t go on about it,” says the man, biting his lip. Along come two plates of dinner. “There you go!” says the waiter. “Aaaagh!” yells the man. I would include “No problem” alongside “There you go” under the heading “Unacceptable Insouciance”, incidentally. I always want to administer a clip round the ear to people who accept my thanks with “No problem”. The “There you go” man and I ought to go out together, I realise. We could spend most of our time jumping up and down, ranting. “Where do I go? Just tell me, where do I go? Did I ask whether it was a problem? Was a problem ever mentioned?”
It is tempting to blame the parents and the teachers for this end-of-deference state of affairs, and do you know what? I am not going to resist that temptation. As a non-parent, I naturally feel I am writing with one hand tied behind my back: after all, many of my best friends are parents, and I know they have done their best. But if I had both hands tied behind my back, I would be obliged to type this with my nose: those damned breeders know they should carry the can, so why pretend otherwise? They have let their kids manipulate, insult and bully them. They have taught them to demand respect, but not to show it. And by doing this, they have failed the kids as much as they have failed the rest of us. There is a great exchange in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman when Willy says proudly of his sons, “Two fearless characters!” and Charley dryly remarks, “The jails are full of fearless characters.” Many parents nowadays seem to share Willy’s view – that if a child has reached maturity and is not intimidated by anyone or anything, a fine job of parenting has been done. Who cares if the result is a generation of unhappy sociopaths? Just so long as the unhappy sociopaths regard their parents as their pals.
However, there is a big plus side to the breakdown of formality. Every day I have an encounter of some kind that is friendlier than it would have been ten years ago. The painter who decorated my living room chatted to me about his cats, which was nice. At the station, the person selling tickets says, “That’s a nice bag.” Not standing on ceremony softens the edges of a sharp world, perhaps? As someone who sits at home all day, banging a keyboard, I am quite grateful for a bit of friendly contact on the phone, even if the chumminess is ultimately empty of meaning, and even if I leap on it with disproportionate gratitude. For example, I give my address to a ticket agency man and he says, “Hey, I know that street. I used to live just round the corner in Buckingham Place!” and I say, “Were you at University down here?” and he says, “No, actually, I worked at the dog track” and I say, “That’s really interesting” and he says, “That’ll be £88 including the booking fee” and I say, “What’s it like at the dog track? I’ve never been,” and he says, “These tickets are non-refundable, and your booking reference is 127565,” and I say, “Great. Well, nice to talk to you. And if you ever find yourself in Buckingham Place on a visit to old friends, or just to see the sea, ha ha, there’ll be a cup of tea waiting for you at my house, absolutely, just quote booking reference 127565, hello, hello, oh he’s gone, oh well.” And I’m not making it up; that’s the sort of fleeting human contact that can really make my day.
However, it does sometimes go wrong. I recently had a rather instructive friendly cold call from my gas supplier – instructive because it turned out to be extremely complicated, from the familiarity point of view. First of all, you see, the chap was very polite. He apologised for calling me at home, and addressed me as “Miss Truss” throughout. This kept me in a state of placation, obviously. He explained that he was calling about domestic appliance insurance, and asked if this was a good time to talk. Here are the bare bones of what happened next. I said no, sorry, writing book, can’t talk. If you must ring back, give it month.
HIM: OK, fair enough.
ME: Bye.
HIM: Writing book, you say?
ME: Yes.
HIM: Mm. Well, Miss Truss, that’s v. interesting. I’m bit of writer myself.
ME: Really? (Thinks) Oh no.
HIM: Written rather good story, wondering how to proceed. Any ideas? me (incredulous, thinks): Didn’t I just say v. busy?
ME: Er, quite busy.
HIM: Appreciate anything. V. tough starting out. me (deep breath; save document; turn attention): OK, buster, here’s deal. Get latest Writer’s Handbook. Blah blah. Maybe join writing group. Send to agent. Blah blah. Copyright first? Ha ha, are you kidding, you must be kidding. Right. Not kidding. OK, send part of it, précis rest. Blah blah. Send to magazine. How long story? Well, too long BBC. Two thousand two hundred tops. Shorten it poss? Course not. Not poss. That’s it. Sorry. Blah blah. Good luck. Blah blah. Hope it helps. Bye.
HIM: That’s very helpful, Miss Truss. Thank you. What’s your book then? me (big sigh; growing impatient): About rudeness. Big rant. Short. No discernible value. Oh, look at time. Must rush. Still on chap five.
HIM: That sounds very interesting, Miss Truss. Now, would it be rude if I point out that for as little as 38 pence a week, which is less than the price of a Yorkie bar, you could insure all your domestic appliances with us this afternoon?
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A bulldozer has knocked down a myriad fine distinctions that used to pertain. I deliberately omitted gender from my list of twenty (“they are a member of the weaker sex”), but it’s clear that many men are particularly upset that when they show traditional politeness to women nowadays, it’s a form of Gallantry Russian Roulette. One time in six, their courtesy makes someone’s day. Four times out of six, they get a lecture in gender politics. And one in six, they get their heads blown off. “Are you holding that door open because I’m a woman?” they are asked, aggressively. And the clever ones respond, “No, I’m doing it because I am a gentleman.” The problem is, many of the old forms of politeness (such as addressing slaves by their first names) are better abandoned, because they were designed to serve inequality. I was outraged recently when a bill was divided after a rather jolly group dinner, and I was told, “Only the men need pay.” While I’m sure there were good intentions behind this, I was furious and made quite a noise, which was awkward for everybody – especially, I have to say, for the more easy-going women who had already said, “Great! Thanks!” and put their bags back on the floor.
In some ways it’s quite proper that we should all walk permanently on egg-shells. But it is still tiresomely hard to do the right thing. Give up your seat to a pregnant woman and she will thank you. Give up your seat to a woman who just looks pregnant, and she may punch you on the nose. I have started agonising on the train because I happen to know that people sitting in first-class compartments without first-class tickets run the risk of being fined on the spot. There are ugly scenes when this happens. The fine is large, and there ought to be a warning notice, but there isn’t. I am thinking of writing to a problem page. How can I inform my fellow passengers of this without giving offence? My inference would be too obvious. “Excuse me, you look like a hard-up person/scoundrel/fare dodger/idiot. Allow me to give you a tip.”
Thus our good intentions are often thwarted by fear in today’s politically sensitive world. Offence is so easily given. And where the “minority” issue is involved, the rules seem to shift about: most of the time, a person who is female/black/disabled/gay wants this not to be their defining characteristic; you are supposed to be blind to it. But then, on other occasions, you are supposed to observe special sensitivity, or show special respect. I was recently given a lift by a friend who thoughtfully reversed at a road junction to allow a motorised wheelchair to cross. But having done this highly decent thing, for which he was smilingly thanked, he worried about it. “I shouldn’t have done that,” he said. “Why, was there someone behind you?” I asked, confused. “No,” he said, “but I wouldn’t have done that for someone who wasn’t disabled, would I?”
I mention all this because “political correctness” is sometimes confused with respect, but it operates quite differently. It is not about paying due regard to other people for their individual qualities, needs, or virtues; it’s mainly about covering oneself and avoiding prosecution in a world of hair-trigger sensitivity. Hence the escalation of euphemism, and the moral panic that breaks out when a public figure uses the word “niggardly” in a perfectly correct way. In a hundred years’ time, anyone wanting to know the moral contortions necessary to well-intentioned and intelligent people in the first years of the twenty-first century should just buy a DVD set of Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm – and I hope they will laugh, but there’s no guarantee that things won’t be a whole lot worse by then. Robert Hughes, in his 1993 book Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America, writes, “It’s as though all human encounter were one big sore spot, inflamed with opportunities to unwittingly give, and truculently receive, offence . . . We want to create a sort of linguistic Lourdes, where evil and misfortune are dispelled by a dip in the waters of euphemism.” And I would say, “Amen” to that, if it didn’t potentially offend people of other faiths who employ a different form of holy affirmation.
What is left of pure deference? In Britain, I think the last thing we do well (and beautifully) is pay respects to the war dead. “When this goes, it all goes,” I have started to think. The controlled emotion of Armistice Day tugs at conscience, swells the commonality of sorrow, and swivels the historical telescope to a proper angle, so that we see, however briefly, that we are not self-made: we owe an absolute debt to other people; a debt that our most solemn respect may acknowledge but can never repay. We stop and we silently remember. Personally, I sob. I am sobbing now. It is a miracle that some sort of political relativism has not contaminated this ceremony of public grief, a full sixty years after the end of the Second World War. The first cannon fires at 11am, and one is overwhelmed by a sense of sheer humility, sheer perspective. We are particles of suffering humanity. For two minutes a year, it’s not a bad thing to remember that. If we looked inside ourselves and remembered how insignificant we are, just for a couple of minutes a day, respect for other people would be an automatic result.
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Of the many reasons for retaining a little bit of deference and respect, the most compelling, I think, must be this common-sense appeal to self-interest. It is a well-observed fact that people are happier when they have some idea of where they stand and what the rules are. It’s a basic-instinct, primal-chimp thing that is the basis of many vivid behavioural experiments. Tell an orang-utan that he answers to no one and in a couple of weeks he’s lost all idea of himself. His eyes roll back, he bangs his head against trees, he eats his own deposits and wears his hair just any old how. Similarly, when people have no “boundaries” or discipline, they can’t relax and it drives them nuts. Every so often, a television experiment will place ungovernable modern schoolchildren in a mocked up old-fashioned school with bells and a merit system, and they not only visibly flourish and calm down, they even learn the capital of Iceland and a bit of Latin grammar. Virtually every day on television, unruly toddlers undergo miraculous transformations when their parents are taught to stop ingratiating themselves and start imposing discipline. Not having respect for other people is clearly incredibly tiring and alienating, if only because the ego never gets a rest.
Of course, with “knowing one’s place”, we are flirting with class issues again. One of the traditional functions of manners was, obviously, to identify an individual with his own social group. The way you crooked your little finger when raising a tea-cup betokened either your solidarity with other people who crooked their little finger in precisely the same way, or your superiority over those who tipped the tea in the saucer and slurped happily from that. According to the famous “U” and “Non-U” system (coined by Professor Alan Ross to identify upper-class usage and popularised by Nancy Mitford), people who said “lavatory” were better than those who said “toilet”. People who had fish-knives were beneath contempt. It was ever so common to say “ever so”. This has largely passed, of course. In a very short time, snobbery based on vocabulary and the milk-first/milk-second issue has virtually disappeared. Honestly, you can say “serviette” at me all day until you are blue in the face, and I promise I won’t even flinch.
But something useful got lost with all this. Surely one of the reasons that rudeness is such a huge issue for people today is that we worry about it more; it is a source of anxiety. We recount situations to each other, just to check our own reactions. “Was that rude? I thought that was rude. Do you think that’s rude? Oh thank goodness you agree with me, because I thought it was rude but then I thought maybe I was being over-sensitive.” I mentioned Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm earlier, because every episode entails anxiety over what’s acceptable in a world where people are free to disagree, but still hold fiercely to their own rules. There is a whole episode, for example, about “cut-off time”. Someone tells Larry you can’t call people at home after 10pm. Is that true? It can’t be true. How can that be a rule? He tries it and gets into trouble. The next night he calls someone before 10pm and gets into trouble because their cut-off time is 9.30. Rules exist, it seems, but there are no rules about the rules. This, in a nutshell, is the insanity of the modern condition.
But how can we go back? As Mark Caldwell points out, in his Short History of Rudeness, many rules of etiquette are mere conventions with no moral content or usefulness – which is the sort of thing we don’t put up with these days. The reason table manners always played such a large part in etiquette guides was that so many of the intricate rules of eating had no other function than to trip the ignorant. Piling peas on the back of the fork is the usual example given of an etiquette rule that was contrived from the start as pure class-indicator, being otherwise daft, strange, counter-intuitive, and instrumental in letting your dinner get cold. Knives and forks were for a long time the main concern of manners guides, not to mention of posh people. There is an excellent clerihew on this subject about the Duke of Fife:
It looked bad when the Duke of Fife Left off using a knife; But people began to talk When he left off using a fork.
Caldwell cites a rather extreme example of sheer class-solidarity etiquette from a sixteenth-century German chronicle: an old aristocratic Christmas tradition in which dinner companions “festively pelted each other with dog turds”. No doubt this tradition arose out of one of those tragic mistranslations from scripture one is always hearing about (scholars will one day discover that the Aramaic for “dog turd” is very close to the word for “season’s greetings”), but the point remains: if everyone’s doing it, do it. You will be accepted by your peers. You can relax.
The tragedy is that we have swept away class snobbery largely without grasping the opportunity to respect different things. So now, in place of a hierarchy of class, or a system of respect for other people, we mainly have stuff. The glory of stuff has swept most other considerations aside. I would say that respect is now allowable in very few fields: we respect sportsmen (but only when they are playing sport), and we respect charisma, but mainly we respect anyone who’s got the latest iPod. Manners guides have actually reflected this shift. Look at modern ones and you will find that instead of teaching you to consider the feelings of others, they tell you what gift to take to a dinner party, how much to spend on flowers for a wedding, and what range of social stationery to buy. In other words, how you act is less important, in terms of status, than what you have. But is this ultimately satisfying? There is a New Yorker cartoon that says it all. Dog says to dog: “I’ve got the bowl, the bone, the big yard. I know I should be happy.”
It’s not just children or members of shaven-headed bling-bling street gangs who are infected with this stuff-anxiety, either. I have sophisticated, left-leaning friends who visibly cheer up when the subject turns to designer clothes, and I have long been aware that my refusal to care about clothes as status symbols gives them actual pain. How proud I was when, a few years ago, an unpolitically correct boyfriend of mine had the following conversation with a leftie journalist friend.
LEFTIE FRIEND: Is that a Paul Smith shirt?
BOYFRIEND: Yes.
LEFTIE FRIEND: That’s the same Paul Smith shirt you wore last time I met you, isn’t it?
BOYFRIEND: Yes, it must be.
LEFTIE FRIEND: This skirt is by Issey Miyake.
BOYFRIEND: Really? (Pause) Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t it usually aspiring gangsta rappers who set such store by designer labels? Leftie friend’s jaw drops; end of conversation
It has been amusing to note, of course, while writing this book, that the government has drawn up a “Respect Agenda”. It will be interesting to see how they sell this optimistic document to the British people. Have you ever noticed how many role models there are in popular culture for rudeness, crassness, laddishness, and nastiness? “Ooh, Anne Robinson! She so rude!” “Oh, Jonathan Ross! He’s so rude!” “Oh, Graham Norton! He’s so rude!” “Oh, Ali G! He’s so rude!” “Oh, Jeremy Paxman! He’s so rude!” Count the role models for respectfulness, on the other hand, and after a couple of hours you will have to admit there is only one: Babe. That’s it. Just one small sturdy imaginary sheep-pig stands between us and total moral decay. “Excuse me,” he says, gently tilting his little snout upwards. “I wonder if you’d care to follow me this way towards the hillside of enlightenment?” At which point a passer-by tragically fells him with a blow to the head with an umbrella and shouts, “You see? I told you it was him!”