Where are your manners?

One can always tell when one has begun to grow older. Birthdays stop being days of fun and happiness and gradually take on a pervading sense of creeping doom. Christmas becomes the one day of the year you’re not allowed to sleep off your hangover. You start to have to CHOOSE between Friday or Saturday for your big night out. And ones unguarded thoughts and reactions begin to resemble the front page of the Daily Mail.

Take, for example, take my reaction yesterday to a couple of students with no comprehension of “personal space”, “manners” or “blimey, that bloke is starting to look really really pissed off”. I was sat with my wife at a concert hall (and just the beginning of that sentence alone makes me feel like my dad…), and the 4 gentlemen sat in front of me recognised the one sat behind me. So the first one in front leaned across me to shake the hand of the one behind. A little irritating of course, but nothing too troubling. His friend chose to go one step further. The little shit leant across me and offered a very urban hand slap to his friend. Right next to my fucking ear. It sounded like a fleshy gunshot, and my brain immediately clicked into the “young people today, no manners, no manners at all” gear that one seems to get issued with upon hitting 30.

Anyway, after a couple of minutes of silent fuming (another feature of the over 30s, particularly the English I think), I caught myself and realised that my thoughts were churning over in exactly the same way as the blue-rinsed cockwasps that I despise. The main focus of my ire centred around manners. And it does seem these days that we’re subjected to an endless litany of complaints that the manners of people in general today are not nearly as good as the manners of those in the past. And that got me thinking, is this true? Or is it rose-tinted nostalgia? And if it is true, why is this?

I suppose that if we look at things like doffing ones cap to a lady, opening doors for someone, calling a man “sir” as a mode of address, and simple things like “please”, “thank you”, and “excuse me” then our manners compared to, say, 100 years ago are sorely lacking. But on the other hand, when it comes to mortality rates, life expectancy, and instances of repressed men visiting child brothels, we’re somewhat in advance of our forebears.

So whilst the bigger things (lifespan, general health, standard of living) have improved in the UK, it would seem that the smaller things, manners, have taken a hammering. Is there a reason for this? I would say that there is. I think that the use of what we understand as manners has began to decay in this country for a couple of reasons, and the most obvious one of these is fear.

Fear always, always, re-enforced the use of manners. It used to start at school with the liberal use of corporal punishment. Didn’t call your elders “sir” at school? Then you can win, free of charge, a beating from your teacher. Displayed insolence to one of your peers? Then it’s an all-expenses paid beating for you! Didn’t stand whenever a lady (be a teacher, a nurse, or one of the teachers wives) entered the room? Then allow us to present you with the free gift of a beating.

It continued in ones working and social environment (which, being as many children didn’t even get to school, meant that the same social conditioning to good manners occurred no matter where one grew up). Complaining about poor working conditions and wages? Say goodbye to your job and HELLO to destitution and even more abject poverty. Posterity abounds with tales of the lower classes being treated appallingly by the growing middle classes. And if one goes back further, and we look to times when a Lord literally had the power of life and death over his serfs...well, one is much less likely to be singled out for rough treatment if one is unfailingly polite to the Lord and his representatives.

Even if we look at the societies today that are praised for their excellent manners, they are as well mannered due to fear. Singapore and Malaysia are two nations that are routinely praised by tiresome and reactionary old fucks for having beautifully polite young men and women who don’t spit, don’t chew gum, and don’t listen to loud music in public whilst wearing hoodies. And this is true; they don’t. Mainly because of the Draconian laws that fine, imprison, and generally threaten everyone who deviates from these standards of good manners.

(I should interject on my own behalf here; I’m not trying to say that they people should be free to act and behave like Junior Clockwork Oranges. I feel very strongly that manners have a place in society, and an important place at that. However, when I hear all these reedy-voiced horsefuckers saying that we “need to instil some manners into people!”, I can’t help thinking “what, so you want to make people afraid of you? Wow…how very grown up of you.”)

I guess that a big part of the reason that we don’t feel the sense of fear that gave us our manners is the class system, or lack thereof. We no longer feel that we automatically have to show manners to someone for no reason other than they come from a higher social class than us. The class structure of Britain informed a huge part of British life, and whilst I’m not naïve enough to think that it’s died altogether, its stranglehold has gone and with it have gone the good manners and fear so beloved of wrinkled moaners.

(Another brief interjection; I’m inclined to think that the Internet has also contributed to the death of manners. It would be hypocritical in the extreme of me to lament poor manners without acknowledging that I regularly get involved in the kind of petty, vicious, pointless, and hugely satisfying arguments over the internet that would make polite society shit it’s collective nappy in horror. I’m not sure whether the bitchiness that the anonymity of the net has brought about is also affecting the rest of society, but I know that the Internet is no respecter of status or class, and that this equality tends to mean that everyone is fair game in an argument. Despite the efforts of those few laughable brain donors who try to threaten physical violence to the writer of words on a screen.)

So where does that leave us? Well, I do want to see a better mannered society, but I don’t want it to be done by means of keeping the masses afraid of the few. It strikes me that manners should be about mutual respect. Having enough respect for ones fellow man that one automatically treats them with good manners unless one is given reason not to. What’s more, a society where people respect one another would mean that we’d see less crime, fewer headlines claiming that immigrants are going to ruin the country, and a greater sense of personal happiness and sense of security.

As to how this sense of mutual respect can be created…well, I don’t claim to know exactly how that can be done. All I do know is that as long as we have media headlines encouraging us to fear whichever group in society currently have pariah status, and as long as Governments keep trying to maintain their own personal position at the expense of any genuine advances, and as long as war is waged and then justified using religion, and as long as we all remain totally unwilling to take any responsibility for our own lives and actually try to make a difference, then this society will be either scared or ill-mannered or both.