Ideas
Manners: Moral authority
Published 21 May 2007
Good manners don't occur naturally - they are about rules.
Everyone is talking about manners in Britain. Naturally, there should be a queue. You might even be reading this on National Courtesy Day (21 May). I want to talk about manners. After you, of course. Everyone wants them. But everyone is scared to enforce them. And they do need enforcing; they don't just come about through natural grace. Manners work because there is a social sanction, even if it's not spoken. Despite the evident benefit to general well-being and self-interest in getting what we want a great deal more easily if we are polite, we do not seem to behave in a graceful and generous way to each other freely. At the same time, we have a crisis of authority. We've outsourced it to Asbos, police, teachers, the council - anybody but us. We've become scared of enforcing rules. The left has gone all wibbly-woo about cultural relativism and how you can't impose values on others.
The trouble is that those to whom we have outsourced it have sacrificed our admiration. The police took refuge in bombast and authoritarianism a long time ago. Teachers went the other way and became feeble negotiators rather than guides. In different ways, they lost our respect. Bobbies refused to deal with their reputation for bullying and racism until the Lords Scarman and Macpherson pointed out that they had to change, or sacrifice their effectiveness for ever. Teachers, meanwhile, began to fear the children in their care (or retribution from parents) and, instead of exercising firmness, started to bargain.
But it is parents who have to give children a sense that there are rules: that there are manners. And I know your liberal heart is huffing and puffing about what an old fart I have become. But many parents refuse to draw boundaries. We feel strongly that democracy matters and that tyranny is bad. We want to be seen as accommodating people. So the way people parent is more about how they want to feel about themselves than the good of the child. Parents negotiate with three-year-olds. They ask them what they want for supper. But if parents abrogate responsibility when their children are that young, what chance do kids have when they are teenagers and need to rebel to find their, and your, boundaries?
There is a mistaken belief that manners are the natural attribute of the gracefully born. They are not. They stem from a value system that has within it ideas of right and wrong ways to behave. This is not about how you hold your knife and fork. (That's etiquette and was designed as a tripwire for the working class.) Manners are the respect you pay others by treating them with thoughtfulness. They are a form of mutual obligation. Without the sense that there are rules justifiably enforced by our own authority, how can there be agreement about decent behaviour? Without our preparedness to take responsibility for other people's behaviour and our own, how will courtesy become national? Even for a day?
Simon Fanshawe's "The Done Thing: negotiating the minefield of modern manners" is published by Arrow (£8.99)
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