THE WORD “respect” has changed its meaning, at least for large numbers of young people in this country. Respect used to be something that was given as recognition of the worth of another person. Now respect is something that is demanded of others, and that is received as a kind of poultice for permanently inflamed egos. For many in our meaner streets, respect has come to mean showing a craven fear of one’s aggressive demeanour.
When Tony Blair speaks of creating a culture of respect, his words will be interpreted differently by different people, not all in the way that he means. A culture of respect in the second sense is decidedly what we do not want, but what we increasingly have; perhaps civility would have been a better word.
But can respectful behaviour or civility be promoted by legislation? One thing we do not lack in this country is legislation. Is there any reason to think that we shall be better able to enforce new laws than old ones, so many of which are dead letters?
While virtue cannot be legislated for directly, a certain amount of vice can be suppressed. There is no reason why drunkenness in the street, to take a single but important example, should be permitted: plenty of other countries do not permit it. Indeed, there are some local government jurisdictions in this country that do not permit it, and punish it when it occurs. In other words, legal powers exist to deal with one of the very problems that Mr Blair wants to tackle; but these powers are seldom employed. The question is, why are they seldom employed?
There are two answers. The first is that councils have foolishly, and no doubt corruptly, allowed concentrations of extremely large bars in the centres of their towns and cities. These then become vested interests, which the council is loath to offend.
The second is that the councils have come to fear their own populations. The suppression of antisocial behaviour in the centre of our towns and cities would require the closure, or at least the strict control of, resorts of mass entertainment. Councils that attempted to do this would arouse the wrath of their own populations, or so they fear; and having created a Frankenstein’s monster in their midst, they now feel obliged to placate it.
One word is conspicuously missing in all the talk of a culture of respect: and that is respectability. No doubt the reason is that the word has bad connotations of mean-mindedness and twitching net curtains at best, and of bigotry and gross cruelty at worst. And there is no denying that horrible things have been said and done in the name of respectability.
On the other hand, the desire to be respectable in the eyes of one’s neighbours is a strong incentive to good behaviour, provided that the social code that constitutes respectability is itself reasonably humane and flexible. Not everyone can be a moral philosopher who decides on his own conduct by the application of first principles to the situation in which he finds himself; and without the notion of respectability, things (by which I mean social conduct) soon fall apart. And this is precisely what has happened in Britain.
To talk of respect without respectability is to strengthen the impression that respect is an inalienable right, and not something that is a recompense for one’s own behaviour. For respect to become generalised, therefore, it must be mutual; and for it to be mutual, there must be standards — in short, a strong notion of respectability — to which people adhere. To take a trivial example, it is hard to feel respect for someone who puts his feet up on a train seat, precisely because he makes it clear that he respects no one else.
We should not flatter ourselves that a lack of respectability is confined to the bottom quartile of the population, that there is some kind of underclass whose behaviour is completely different from that of you and me.
Of course, the problems of incivility are worse among those with relatively low incomes. But if their behaviour is worse, their mitigating circumstances as individuals are far greater. They have often grown up in a world in which fatherhood is unknown, and even the idea of eating a meal with other people around a table is completely alien. Successive governments have destroyed the incentives to marriage in the lower echelons of society, and with them the entire notion of respectability. And without this notion, they have been left without a moral compass; only egotism remains.
But we should remember also that the conduct of the middle classes has coarsened greatly over the past few decades. They too have abandoned the notion of respectability, because it acts as an unacceptable limitation of their freedom to do whatever brings them the pleasure of the moment. Mass public drunkenness is not by any means confined to the poorest section of the population; and neither is anti-social behaviour at football matches.
Last night, I went to see a production by the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was silly, crude and vulgar in every detail. Among the audience were large numbers of adolescents, who screamed and hooted their approval. I need hardly point out that they were not members of the underclass; but none of the teachers who were with them corrected their incontinent self-expression, and so they must have formed the impression that this was indeed the way to behave.
Nothing spreads faster than the notion that anything goes, because it is what so many people — reluctant to make, or tired of, the effort required to be civilised — want to hear; and in a democratic age, the middle classes cannot claim freedoms that they are unwilling to concede to those lower down the social scale.
Until we acknowledge the importance of respectability — at the risk of occasionally appearing ridiculous or intolerant — we shall never again experience a society based upon mutual respect. The poor need respectability more than the rich, of course, for the consequences of its opposite are far, far worse for them; but when the rich lack self-control, society falls apart. As the Russians say, a fish rots from the head. I’m not sure whether it’s true of fish, but it ’s certainly true of societies.
The author is an inner-city and prison doctor
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