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 out the problem, and we should actually stay in?

Any study of the history of the subject of manners begins with Norbert Elias's pioneering work The Civilizing Process, which began life as two volumes, The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization, in 1939. It is not, sadly, the easiest of books to read, and I have gone quite pale and cross-eyed in the attempt, but it famously includes a section on the advance of etiquette in the early modern period which has been plundered by historians of society ever since it was first translated into English in the 1960s. Taking such etiquette issues as urinating, nose-blowing and spitting, Elias traces the norms for these activities in western Europe over several hundred years. For example, in the Middle Ages, "Do not spit into the bowl when washing your hands" becomes, by the time of Erasmus' De civilitate morum puerilium (On Good Manners for Boys) in 1530, "Turn away when spitting, lest your saliva fall on someone . . . It is unmannerly to suck back saliva." By 1714, we find in a French manual the excellent advice: don't spit such a great distance that you have to hunt for the saliva to put your foot on it.

Obviously, a modern person is hoping, sooner or later, for the plain injunction, "Look, just stop spitting! What is it with all this spitting?" – but that's quite a long time coming. For hundreds of years, people were advised that saliva (not phlegm, which is odd) was better out than in, and that placing your foot over your own little pool of spittle marked you out as a toff with finer feelings. What a relief when, at last (in 1774), it becomes the mark of a gent not to spit on the walls or the furniture. Only in 1859, however, does a book called The Habits of Good Society flip the whole subject to a modern perspective. You might even say that it overturns expectorations (ho ho). "Spitting is at all times a disgusting habit . . . Besides being coarse and atrocious, it is very bad for the health."

Of course, it's no surprise that over a period of hundreds of years standards of behaviour should change and (from the perspective of a modern sensibility) improve. But some less obvious, and very intriguing, points arise from even a cross-eyed and incompetent reading of The Civilizing Process, because it's not just about people gradually doing fewer revolting things in public. It deals also with two related shifts: in politics, the inexorable centralising of power; and in society, the flattening and broadening of social differentiations ("diminishing contrasts, increasing varieties"). Not being a sociologist or historian, I am on very thin ice here, but I think I can see why manners might have risen in importance over a period marked by that kind of change. After all, the individual is subject to two opposing tides here, both pulling his feet from under him. When traditional class and power structures break down, people are apt to study each other feverishly for clues, and attach all kinds of judgement to forms of behaviour. Somewhere in the course of this paragraph, by the way, I let go of Norbert and struck out on my own. I couldn't even tell you where it happened.

However, what Elias does argue is that, working outwards from a courtly nucleus, standards of behaviour developed under the influence of two evolving "fears": shame and repugnance. It seems that once the rigidities of feudal society have given way to complex and diverse social networks, the Freudian super-ego inside each one of us becomes responsible for us having manners. Thus, the individual judges his own actions against a standard set by his own super-ego, and feels shame; he judges other people's actions against the same super-ego, and feels repugnance. W. B. Yeats once said that we make rhetoric out of the quarrels with others, but poetry out of the quarrels with ourselves. What Elias sees in the history of manners is a similarly creative internal wrestling match between a person's natural savagery and his own psychological organ of self-restraint:

A major part of the tensions which were earlier discharged directly in conflicts with other people must be resolved as an inner tension in the struggle of the individual with himself . . . In a sense, the danger zone now passes through the self of every individual.

I promise this is the most boring part of this book (I certainly hope it is). But I feel it's important to establish that reeling in horror at other people's everyday impoliteness may just go with the territory of being civilised. Concern over the collapse of public behaviour is not a minor niggling thing. Nor is it new. The manners books quoted by Elias unwittingly tell two stories at once: their very existence proves that concern over the state of manners has followed the same upward graph, over time, as the civilizing process itself. If one takes the view that modern-day manners are superior to the cheerful spit-and-stamp of olden times, a paradox begins to emerge: while standards have been set ever higher, people have become all the more concerned that standards are actually dropping. Basically, people have been complaining about the state of manners since at least the fifteenth century. The discomfiting behaviour of others is one of humanity's largest preoccupations, and is incidentally the basis of quite a lot of literature. Blame the damn super-ego. If we feel doomed and miserable when we consider the rudeness of our world, we are not the first to feel this way, and we certainly won't be the last.

Copyright © 2005 by Miraculous Panda Ltd.