Rudeness is bad. Manners are good. It feels very daring to come out and say it, but I’ve done it and I feel better. I have used the words “bad” and “good”, and thereby committed the ultimate political fuddy-duddiness, and doubtless undermined all my good work. Modern people are impatient with the bad-good distinction; they consider it intellectually primitive. But rudeness is a moral issue and it always has been.
The way people behave towards each other, even in minor things, is a measure of their value as human beings. Henry James wrote: “Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.”
Ignore the small niceties and what happens? There is a splendid passage in Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit, when Martin is appalled (as Dickens himself had been) by the brutish manners in 1840s America, and is told that America has better things to do than “acquire forms”. He is enraged — and warns what tolerance of bad manners can lead to:
“The mass of your countrymen begin by stubbornly neglecting little social observances, which have nothing to do with gentility, custom, usage, government or country, but are acts of common, decent, natural, human politeness. You abet them in this by resenting all attacks upon their social offences as if they were a beautiful national feature. From disregarding small obligations they come in course to disregard great ones; and so refuse to pay their debts. What they may do, or what they may refuse to do next, I don’t know; but any man may see if he will, that it will be something following in natural succession, and a part of one great growth, which is rotten at the root.”
Substitute modern relativist values for pioneering American ones, and the point is quite well made. Bad manners lead to other kinds of badness. If we each let the “for the common good” bit of our brains shrivel on the vine, the ultimate result is crime, alienation and moral hell. Manners are easy to dismiss from discussions of morality because they seem to be trivial; the words “moral panic” were invented to belittle those of us who burst into tears at the news that 300,000 bits of chewing-gum sit, newly spat, on the pavements of Oxford Street at any one time. But if we can’t talk about the morality of manners, we can’t talk about the morality of anything.
The problem is that it has become politically awkward to draw attention to absolutes of bad and good. In place of manners, we now have doctrines of political correctness, against which one offends at one’s peril: by means of a considerable circular logic such offences mark you as reactionary and therefore a bad person. Therefore if you say people are bad, you are bad. And to state that a well-mannered person is superior to an ill-mannered one — well, it is to invite total ignominy.
Yet I can’t not say this. I believe it. Manners are about showing consideration, and using empathy. But they are also about being connected to the common good; they are about being better. Every time a person says to himself, “What would the world be like if everyone did this?” or “I’m not going to calculate the cost to me on this occasion. I’m just going to do the right thing”, or “Someone seems to need this seat more than I do ”, the world becomes a better place. It is ennobled. The crying shame about modern rudeness is that it’s such a terrible missed opportunity for a different kind of manners — manners based, for the first time, not on class and snobbery, but on a kind of voluntary charity that dignifies both the giver and the receiver by being a system of mutual, civil respect.
Instead of which, sadly, we have people who say, “The beer went mad” when what they mean is, “I drank too much and then I got violent.” Far from taking moral responsibility for other people, we have started refusing to take moral responsibility even for ourselves. I once heard someone say, in all seriousness, “If I contract salmonella from eating this runny egg, they’ll be sorry.” Someone else is always the repository for blame. Someone else will clear it up. Someone else will pay for this.
Even when we are offended, we don’t feel comfortable saying, “This offends me.” Instead, we say, “This could offend people more sensitive to this kind of thing.” There was recently a hoo-ha about a TV advertisement for Kentucky Fried Chicken in which call-centre staff sang, with their mouths full, about how great the new KFC chicken salad was — with subtitles, because their words were so unclear. Now, the Advertising Standards Authority received over 1,000 complaints in two weeks, and the complaints were that:
1. It set a bad example to children.
2. It encouraged dangerous behaviour because of the risk of choking.
3. It presented emergency call-centre staff in a bad light.
4. It mocked people with speech impediments.
Evidently the true reaction, the true objection — that watching people talk with their mouths full is something you perhaps shouldn’t be subjected to in your own home — simply could not be voiced, because such a point would be judgmental and therefore inadmissible.
There is a tiny flame of hope, and here it is. Let’s try pretending to be polite, and see what happens. Old Aristotle might have been right all those centuries ago: that if you practise being good in small things (I’m paraphrasing again), it can lead to the improvement of general morality. I promise I will stop shouting at boys on skateboards, if that will help. Being friendly and familiar with strangers is not the same as being polite (as we have seen), but if it helps us to overcome our normal reticence, all right, be friendly. Yes, we live in an aggressive “Talk to the hand” world. Yes, we are systematically alienated and have no sense of community. Yes, we swear a lot more than we used to, and we prefer to be inside our own individual Bart Simpson bubbles. But just because these are the conditions that promote rudeness does not mean that we can’t choose to improve our happiness by deciding to be polite to one another.
Just as enough people going around correcting apostrophes may ultimately lead to some restoration of respect for the English language, so enough people demonstrating kindness and good manners may ultimately have an impact on social morality. Evelyn Waugh wrote that, historically, ceremony and etiquette were the signs of an advancing civilisation; but he went on, rather wonderfully: “They can also be the protection of [civilisations] in decline; strong defences behind which the delicate and the valuable are preserved.”
An edited extract from Talk to the Hand, by Lynne Truss, published by Profile Books on October 24. Available from The Times Books First for £9.49 (rrp £9.99) with free p&p by calling 0870 160 8080.
www.timesonline.co.uk/talkingpoint
Your etiquette questions answered
The art of aggressive hospitality
Trawling the internet, I discovered an article from 2000 intriguingly titled The Civility Glut, in which Barbara Ehrenreich paints a grim picture of life under the system of “Have a nice day”, “Have a great day”, and “Have a really great day”.
She reveals that Wal-Mart workers are subjected to video-training in the art of “aggressive hospitality” and complains that call-centre workers have started to exclaim “Perfect!” and “Great!” when she gives them her account number and home address. She has to remind herself not to get too big-headed about how great and perfect her zip code appears to be, in the admiring eyes of others.
Meanwhile, she has started to feel embarrassed by her own ritual “Goodbye”, because it has begun to sound a bit terse and dismissive in the context of “Have a really wonderful special day with knobs on.” What struck me was the example, “I sure don’t!”, which is evidently the cheerful response you can get if you ask, “Do you have any seats on that flight?”
Imagine where this “cruel new locution” could lead. “May I sit here?” “You sure can’t!” “Excuse me, officer, is my house still standing?” “It sure isn’t!” “Will I ever see you again, my darling?” “You sure won’t!” “Doctor, did he leave me one final message?” “He sure didn’t!”
