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 out of hand, the principle of civil reciprocity is a solid one, for which reason it is an occasion for total, staggering dismay that it appears to be on its way out. The air hums with unspoken courtesy words, these days. You hold a door open for someone and he just walks through it. You let a car join traffic, and its driver fails to wave. People who want you to move your bag from a seat just stare at you until you move it; or sometimes they sit on it, to make the point more forcibly. As for the demise of “please”, you may overhear a child demanding in a supermarket at the top of its voice, “I want THAT ONE!” Hope briefly flares when the harassed mother bellows back, “You want that one, WHAT?” But you might have known how this would turn out. “I want that one, YOU EFFING BITCH!” shouts the kid in response.
Please, thank you, excuse me, sorry – little words, but how much they mean. Last week, a young woman sitting opposite me on a train picked up my discarded Guardian and just started reading it, and I realised afterwards that, had I wanted to do something similar, I would have used the maximum of politeness words (“Excuse me, sorry, may I? Thank you”) instead of none at all. The near extinction of the word “sorry” is a large subject we will treat elsewhere, but it seems appropriate to repeat here the story of the Independent’s Janet Street-Porter, who, while filming a documentary about modern education last year, tried to prompt the children at a school assembly to grasp the importance of apology. “Children,” she said, “in every family home, there’s a word which people find it really hard to say to each other. It ends in ‘y’. Can anyone tell me what it is?” There was a pause while everyone racked their brains, and then someone called out, “Buggery?”
As this book progresses, we will be dealing with sources of true, eye-watering horror and alienation, but the decline of courtesy words seems a good, gentle place to start because the saying of such words appears quite a simple matter. Unfortunately, however, it is not quite as simple as it looks. Besides being the sine qua non of good manners, what do these words really do? Well, they are a ritual necessary to life’s transactions, and also magic passwords, guaranteed to earn us other people’s good opinion and smooth the path to our own desires. Politeness is itself a complicated matter. When it works, does it draw people comfortably together, or does it actually keep them safely apart? And what of its moral content? Surely if we hold doors open, we are acting altruistically? Yet our furious, outraged, jumping-up-and-down reaction when we are not thanked would indicate that we hold doors open principally to procure the reward of a public pat on the back. Why is it so important to us that everyone should affirm a belief in the same codes of behaviour? Why is it so scary when someone doesn’t? Should we get out more? Or is going