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 professional people; disrespect for property – every day we are newly shocked at the prevalence of this kind of rudeness. Egalitarianism was a noble aim, as was enlightened parenting, but both have ploughed up a lot of worms. 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