[The following is from "Rude Britannia" by Michael Elliot in the May issue of Prospect, a look at the recent rise of incivility in British society.]
... Orwell's world is not ours. The evidence he cited to support his ideas--like that famous passage on "the clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill-towns...the old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of an autumn morning"--is about another time and place. Just as removed from our experience are the judgments he drew. "The gentleness of the English civilisation is perhaps its most marked characteristic," he wrote. "It is a land where the bus conductors are good-tempered and the policemen carry no revolvers." The spread of middle-class ideas and habits to the working class, Orwell thought, had led to a "general softening of manners... In tastes, habits, and outlook, the working class and the middle class are drawing closer together."
Think about that claim. Orwell, a man of the left, was describing a process of levelling up with obvious approval. And it's not hard to think of real-life examples: Roy Jenkins, the son of a Welsh miner, became chancellor of Oxford University with an accent as fruity as a summer pudding. The idea that there was something reprehensible about this--that Jenkins and others had lost something by turning their backs on a world of "collarless, unshaven men, with their muscles warped by heavy labour"--would have struck Orwell as absurd. Softened manners were better manners; this was progress. Yet sometime in the post-war years--between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP?--this received wisdom was turned on its head, at least by the left. For the working class to aspire to middle-class manners now became a betrayal. Middle-class children--Mick Jagger, for example--consciously aped working-class habits. I know; I did it myself. My brother, born in 1944, educated at the local grammar school, left for university in 1963 with perfect received pronunciation (which he still has). I left the same school in 1969 with an affected Scouse accent (traces of which I still have.) God knows what our parents, who had gratefully left the two-up-two-downs of Anfield for a semidetached in the Wirral, thought of it all.
Unlike those conservatives who appropriate him for their own purposes, Orwell found no unbroken line of civil conduct stretching back to Anglo-Saxon times. "The prevailing gentleness of manners," he wrote, "is a recent thing. Within living memory it was impossible for a smartly dressed person to walk down Ratcliff Highway without being assaulted, and an eminent jurist, asked to name a typically English crime, could answer: 'Kicking your wife to death.'"
So the "prevailing gentleness" had not been of long standing. But it was there then--and now it is not. (Try saying "The gentleness of the English civilisation is its most marked characteristic" with a straight face today.) Why did civility go into decline?
The central reason, I think, is the success of consumer capitalism. Civility is one of the Roman virtues, along with restraint, thrift, honour, selflessness and so on. But modern capitalism is far from Roman; the sheer abundance of consumer goods, the boundless pleasures available to us, when coupled with a decline in religious observance, have changed patterns of behaviour all over the developed world. Daniel Bell's The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1978) remains the classic analysis of the shift. American capitalism, Bell argued, had once taken its moral compass from the small-town Protestant ethic, which prized the values of thrift, effort, and restraint, and which held in check the hedonistic impulse of capitalism--the urge to get and enjoy more things, now. But the link between capitalism and a moral ethic was broken by metropolitanism and modernity. "The Protestant ethic served to limit sumptuary (though not capital) accumulation," wrote Bell. But by the 1960s, "the Protestant ethic was sundered from bourgeois society, only the hedonism remained, and the capitalist system lost its transcendental ethic... The cultural, if not moral, justification for capitalism has become hedonism... pleasure as a way of life."
Britain never had the American folk-memory of small-town virtues. But in a brilliant essay last year in the Times Literary Supplement, Ferdinand Mount argued that, in effect, Britain had something whose impact on expected patterns of behaviour was rather similar: the empire. Britain, Mount argued, "underwent a uniquely intense experience of empire, with all its restraints and impassivities and deprivations. It was the empire that taught our ancestors to keep their chins up and their upper lips stiff, and to put public duty before private satisfaction." Some of Mount's imperial virtues--self-denial, fortitude, loyalty--are precisely those which Bell identified with the American protestant ethic. Just as metropolitanism crushed that ethical sense in America, one might argue, so did the end of empire in Britain.
[Full text: http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/highlights/essay_elliot_may01/index.html]
Carl
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