Watching the English

by Kate Fox

It seems to me that our home-obsession is directly related to our almost pathological need for privacy, and that this in turn is inextricably bound up with our problems of social inhibition and embarrassment – our lack of ease and skill in social interaction.

There is a distinctively English form of bland, insipid politeness, which is primarily concerned, even when paying compliments, with the avoidance of offence or embarrassment rather than with actually giving pleasure or expressing positive feelings. This reserve, which foreigners often interpret as coldness or standoffishness, must be understood in the light of the crucial distinction the English make between friends and acquaintances, and between friends and close friends. It is not that the English are cold or incapable of being open and expressive, it is just that we find it more difficult than many other cultures to be uninhibited among people we do not know well – and this reticence in turn means that it takes us longer to get to know people well enough to shed our inhibitions. A vicious circle resulting in, among many other problems, misuse of alcohol and chronic overuse of the word ‘nice’.

We use humour to deal not only with the threatening or unfamiliar but with any and every social or practical difficulty, from the most trivial problems to issues of national importance.

All cultures practise both forms of politeness, but most incline somewhat more towards one than the other. The English are a predominantly negative-politeness culture, while the Americans, for example, tend to favour the warmer, more inclusive positive-politeness mode.

The identification of England as a predominantly ‘negative-politeness’ culture – concerned mainly with the avoidance of imposition and intrusion – seems to me quite helpful. The important point here is that politeness and courtesy, as practised by the English, have very little to do with friendliness or good nature.

In the course of our many encounters with people at all levels in English companies large and small, from shop-floor and front-line workers to managing directors and chairmen, we found that the most successful people – those most likely to be promoted or given plum jobs, that is – were not the most competent, or the most hard-working, or the most ‘businesslike’ or ‘professional’, but tended to have other, less tangible, qualities, particularly the self-deprecating humour exhibited by our biscuit chief.

Spend a day in any English workplace, from a street-market to a merchant bank, and you will notice that one of the most striking features of English working life is the undercurrent of humour. I do not mean that all English workers and businessmen spend their time telling raucous, thigh-slapping jokes, or that we are ‘good-humoured’ in the sense of happy or cheerful: I am talking about the more subtle forms of humour – wit, irony, understatement, banter, teasing, pomposity-pricking – which are an integral part of almost all English social interaction.

Even now that I’ve prompted you to be conscious of it, the humour in your workplace interactions will be so familiar, so normal, so ingrained that you may find it hard to ‘stand back’ far enough to see it. Foreigners, on the other hand, tend to notice it straight away – or, rather, to notice something, not always immediately identifiable as humour, which they find baffling. In my discussions with immigrants and other foreign informants, I found that the English sense of humour, in various guises, was one of the most common causes of misunderstanding and confusion in their dealings with the English at work.

‘home is what the English have instead of social skills’.

The red tops unashamedly feature photos of topless models,

Not now!!! This dates it a lot!

The English love to complain, and the English educated classes do have a tendency to complain noisily about matters of which they have little or no knowledge.

‘IRL’,

Also Internet Resource Locator

The usual ‘three-emotions rule’ applies. English males are allowed to express three emotions: surprise, providing it is conveyed by shouting or swearing; anger, also communicated in expletives; and elation/triumph, displayed in the same manner.

That feels like complete rubbish to me! Swearing is often frowned on in mixed company anyway.

The English have a habit of inventing ‘traditions’ out of thin air, to suit the spirit of the times, and then almost immediately waxing mournfully nostalgic about them, as though they were a vital and now tragically dying part of our cultural heritage.

if we want to understand Englishness, we need to look more closely at the Englishness of English drinking.

Our need for rules has been highlighted in recent years by the ‘Dress-down Friday’ or ‘Casual Friday’ custom imported from America, whereby companies allow their employees to wear their own choice of casual clothes to the office on Fridays, rather than the usual formal business suits. A number of English companies adopted this custom, but quite a few have been obliged to abandon it, as many of their more junior staff started turning up in ludicrously inappropriate clothes – tasteless outfits more suited to the beach or a night-club than to any normal office. Others just looked unacceptably scruffy. Clients were put off, colleagues were embarrassed, and in any case most of the senior management simply ignored the Casual Friday rule, choosing, perhaps wisely, to maintain their dignity by sticking to the normal business-suit uniform. This served only to emphasise hierarchical divisions within the business – quite the opposite of the chummy, democratising effect intended by the Casual Friday policy. In short, the experiment was not a great success.

Ah but Dress Down Friday had its own rules and structures! It remains to this day in large organizations and, indeed, the wearing of ties for men with business dress has become less prevalent than it was. Customer-facing staff remain suited and booted, smart and the face of the business. Back office staff tend to be more relaxed.

That’s the way things are. Cars are ‘temperamental’; boilers are ‘a bit unpredictable’; washing machines ‘have off days’; toasters, kettles and doorknobs ‘have a bit of a tendency to play up’; flush mechanisms ‘only work if you pump it twice and hold it down the second time – there’s a bit of a knack to it’; computers can be guaranteed to ‘go on the blink’ at the wrong moment and wipe out your files; you always choose the slowest queue; deliveries are always late; builders never finish a job properly; you always wait ages for a bus and then three come along at once; nothing ever works properly; something always goes wrong, and on top of that it’s bound to rain. To the English, these are established, incontrovertible facts; they are on a par with two-plus-two-is-four and the laws of physics. We start learning these mantras in our cradles, and by the time we are adults this Eeyorish view of the world is part of our nature.

Unless you fully appreciate this peculiar mindset and its implications you will never truly understand the English. Try repeating the above mantras to yourself every day for about twenty years, and you’ll get the idea. Recite them in a resignedly humorous tone, adding the odd ‘mustn’t grumble’ or ‘never mind’ or ‘better make the best of it’, and you will be well on your way to becoming English. Learn to greet every problem, from a piece of burnt toast to World War Three, with ‘Typical!’, somehow managing to sound simultaneously peeved, stoical and smugly omniscient, and you will qualify as a fully acculturated English person.

I sort of agree with this and yet don't, at all! Yes, that trait is there and runs through many of us but.......I think when life is less easy for people, they get more forthright. People get fed up and when they feel someone is 'taking the piss' , thats it! There will be trouble and things will be said that need saying!!!

chip butties (a mainly northern tradition; even if you call it a chip sandwich rather than a butty, it is about as working class as food can get).

It depends where you think 'northern' is! Londoners think it starts at Watford, Midlanders have a fine tradition of chip butties or sarnies....go to football or rugby matches and everyone eats them....of all classes....male & female. I'm sure there will be something about sport and class somewhere in this book but some of the poshest people I knowgo to matches.... especially rugby....union or league!

Class-indicator rules are not about eating with any degree of ease, speed, efficiency or practicality. Quite the opposite: they are designed to slow us down, to make things deliberately difficult, to ensure that we eat the smallest possible mouthfuls in the most time-consuming, laborious manner. Now that we’ve identified the pattern and the principle behind it, the purpose becomes clear. What it all boils down to is not appearing to be greedy and, more specifically, not appearing to give food too high a priority. Greed of any sort is a breach of the all-important fair-play rule. Letting one’s desire for food take priority over making conversation with one’s companions involves giving physical pleasure or gratification a higher value than words. In polite society, this is frowned upon as un-English and highly embarrassing. Over-eagerness about anything is undignified; over-eagerness about food is disgusting and even somehow faintly obscene. Eating small mouthfuls, with plenty of pauses in between them, shows a more restrained, unemotional, English approach to food.

Port-passing Rules Another way you can set off English class-radar bleepers is to pass the port the wrong way. Port is served at the end of a dinner – sometimes, among the upper classes, to men only, as the women follow the old-fashioned practice of ‘withdrawing’ to another room to drink coffee and talk girl-talk, leaving the men to their male bonding. Port must always travel round the table clockwise (if it were to go anti-clockwise, the world would end), so you must always pass the bottle or decanter to your left.

Olf-fasioned! Something yiu only see in films and I have never been at a meal where port is served anyway in my whole life. Probably says something about my class, according to this book!!!

Looking closely at food-related behaviour has also helped us to refine our analysis of the ‘Typical!’ rule and what it tells us about Englishness. More than just ‘grumpy stoicism’, this rule is a reflection of our cynically low expectations of the world, our chronic pessimism, our assumption that it is in the nature of things to go wrong and thwart us and generally be disappointing. Perhaps even more important is the discovery of our perverse sense of satisfaction, even pleasure, at seeing our gloomy predictions fulfilled. Understanding this peculiar, Eeyorish mindset will, I think, prove critical to our understanding of Englishness. It is worth noting that the theme of English empiricism also came up again, in the somewhat unlikely context of our relationship with the chip.

The Meaning of Chips rules indicate that our apparent lack of passion about food, and perhaps our apathy in other areas as well, such as patriotism, may be more a matter of observing anti-earnestness rules than the natural indifference to which they are often attributed. We can be emotional and even sometimes quite passionate about things. Well, about chips, anyway. It is just that we normally suppress these impulses, in our efforts to comply with the earnestness taboo.

At the beginning, I set out to discover the ‘defining characteristics of Englishness’ by closely observing distinctive regularities in English behaviour, identifying the specific hidden rules governing these behaviour patterns, and then figuring out what these rules reveal about our national character. A sort of semi-scientific procedure, I suppose. Well, systematic, at least. But despite all the confident-sounding noises I was making in the Introduction, I had no idea whether or not it would work, as this approach to understanding a national character had not been tried before.

‘gemeingeist’

Community spirit

This means that if you think I’ve got the final answer to the ‘What is Englishness?’ question wrong, at least you can see exactly where I made my mistakes. It also means that, at this point, you know at least as much as I do about the defining characteristics of Englishness we’ve been trying to identify. I don’t have anything up my sleeve to pull out for a grand finale. You could write this final chapter yourself if you felt like it.

social dis-ease’,

Still don't really like this label but have to admit, it does work.

The central ‘core’ of Englishness. Social dis-ease is a shorthand term for all our chronic social inhibitions and handicaps.

‘socially challenged’).

Better but dont assume this is universal amongst every English person.

Reflexes Our deeply ingrained impulses. Our automatic, unthinking ways of being/ways of doing things. Our knee-jerk responses. Our ‘default modes’. Cultural equivalents of laws of gravity.

Humour Probably the most important of our three basic reflexes. Humour is our most effective built-in antidote to our social dis-ease. When God (or Something) cursed us with the English Social Dis-ease, He/She/It softened the blow by also giving us the English Sense of Humour. The English do not have any sort of global monopoly on humour, but what is distinctive is the sheer pervasiveness and supreme importance of humour in English everyday life and culture.

Our response to earnestness is a distinctively English and fundamentally ‘empiricist’ blend of armchair cynicism, ironic detachment, a squeamish distaste for sentimentality, a stubborn refusal to be duped or taken in by fine rhetoric, and a mischievous delight in pricking the balloons of pretension and self-importance.

Moderation Another deep-seated, unconscious reflex or ‘default mode’. I’m using the term ‘moderation’ as shorthand for a whole set of related qualities. Our avoidance of extremes, excess and intensity. Our fear of fuss. Our cautiousness and our preference for comfortable domesticity, familiarity, security and convenience. Our ambivalence, apathy, woolliness, middlingness, fence-sitting and conservatism – and to some extent our tolerance, which tends to be at least partly a matter of benign indifference. Our moderate industriousness and moderate hedonism (the ‘work moderately, play moderately’ principle most of us really live by, rather than the ‘work hard, play hard’ one we like to quote). Our penchant for order and our special brand of ‘orderly disorder’, with its choreographed shedding of designated inhibitions. Our tendency to compromise. Our sheer ordinariness. With some notable exceptions, even our alleged and much-vaunted eccentricities are mostly ‘collective’ and conformist. We do everything in moderation, except moderation, which we take to ludicrous extremes.

Hypocrisy Another unthinking ‘default mode’. One of the stereotypes I tried to ‘get inside’. The English are rightly renowned for their hypocrisy. This is an omnipresent trait, insidiously infecting almost all of our behaviour – and even the ‘ideals’ we most prize, such as modesty, courtesy and fair play. But under the special microscope I used for this project, English hypocrisy emerged as somewhat less odious than it might appear to the naked eye. It depends on how you look at it. You could say that most of our politeness/modesty/fairness is hypocritical, but also that much of our hypocrisy is a form of politeness – concealment of real opinions and feelings to avoid causing offence or embarrassment (or just to avoid ‘rocking the boat’ – our hypocrisy is closely linked to our moderation). English hypocrisy often seems to be mainly a matter of unconscious, collective self-deception – collusion in an unspoken agreement to delude ourselves – rather than a deliberate, cynical, calculated attempt to deceive others.

(Our ‘polite egalitarianism’ is perhaps the best example – an elaborate charade of courteous modesty and fairness, a severe case of what a psychotherapist would call ‘denial’ of our acute class-consciousness.) Hypocrisy comes easily to us not because we are by nature vile and perfidious (or no more so than any other culture) but because our social dis-ease makes us naturally cautious, oblique, indirect, passive-aggressive – disinclined to say what we mean or mean what we say, prone to polite pretence rather than honest assertiveness. (When we drop the hypocritical pretence, we tend to become incoherently aggressive, rather than calmly assertive.) Our hypocrisies also reveal our values. We are no more naturally modest, courteous or fair than any other culture, but we have more unwritten rules prescribing the appearance of these qualities, which are clearly very important to us. Key phrases: too numerous to list – English conversation is littered with polite euphemisms and other disguises, deceptions and denials – but, on average, at least every other ‘please’, ‘thank-you’, ‘sorry’, ‘nice’, ‘lovely’ (plus smiles, nods, etc.) is hypocritical.

Outlooks Our world view. Our way of looking at, thinking about, structuring and understanding things. ...

Empiricism The most fundamental of this ‘outlook’ cluster. Empiricism is another shorthand term into which I am packing a large collection of English attitudes. Strictly speaking, empiricism is a philosophical doctrine holding that all knowledge is derived from sense-experience – and its close relation ‘realism’ should technically only be used to mean the tenet that matter exists independently of our perception of it. Englishness is deeply rooted in these philosophical principles, but I am also using these terms in a much broader, more informal sense, to include both the anti-theory, anti-abstraction, anti-dogma elements of our philosophical tradition (particularly our mistrust of obscurantist, airy-fairy ‘Continental’ theorising and rhetoric) and our stolid, stubborn preference for the factual, concrete and common-sense. ‘Empiricism’ is shorthand for our down-to-earthness; our matter-of-factness; our pragmatism; our cynical, ...

Eeyorishness More than just our incessant moaning. Quite apart from the sheer quantity of it, which is staggering, there is something qualitatively distinctive about English moaning. It is utterly ineffectual: we never complain to or confront the source of our discontent, but only whinge endlessly to each other, and proposing practical solutions is forbidden by the moaning rules. But it is socially therapeutic – highly effective as a facilitator of social interaction and bonding. Moaning is also highly enjoyable (there is nothing the English love so much as a good moan – it really is a pleasure to watch) and an opportunity for displays of wit. Almost all ‘social’ moaning is humorous mock-moaning. Real, tearful despair is not allowed, except among intimates. Even if you are feeling truly desperate, you must pretend to be only pretending to feel desperate (the unbearable lightness of being English). By ‘Eeyorishness’ I mean the mindset/outlook exemplified by our national catchphrase ‘Typical!’: our chronic pessimism, our assumption that it is in the nature of things to go wrong and be disappointing, but also our perverse satisfaction at seeing our gloomy predictions fulfilled – simultaneously peeved, stoically resigned and smugly omniscient. Our special brand of fatalism – a sort of curiously sunny pessimism.

Class-consciousness All human societies have a social hierarchy and methods of indicating social status. What is distinctive about the English class system is (a) the fact that class is not judged at all on wealth, and very little on occupation, but purely on non-economic indicators such as speech, manner, taste and lifestyle choices; (b) the degree to which our class (and/or class-anxiety) determines our taste, behaviour and judgements; (c) the acute sensitivity of our on-board class-radar systems; and (d) our denial of all this and coy squeamishness about class: the hidden, indirect, unspoken, hypocritical/self-delusional nature of English class-consciousness (particularly among the middle classes)126.. Our ‘polite egalitarianism’. The vestigial prejudice against ‘trade’. The minutiae and sheer mind-boggling silliness of our class indicators and class anxieties. Our sense of humour about all this.

Values Our ideals. Our norms. Our fundamental guiding principles. The moral standards to which we subscribe and aspire, even if we do not live up to them – ‘moral mythology’ might be a better term.

Fair play A national quasi-religious obsession. Much of English morality is essentially about fair play. Although we may often fail to live up to this ideal, breaches of the fair-play principle provoke more righteous indignation than any other sin. English ‘fair play’ is not a rigidly or unrealistically egalitarian concept – we accept that there will be winners and losers, but feel that everyone should be given a fair chance, providing they observe the rules (the unwritten social rules, I mean, not necessarily the official/legal ones, which may often be dismissed as ‘unfair’) and don’t cheat or shirk their responsibilities. Fair play is an underlying theme in most aspects of our unwritten etiquette, not just the games and sports with which it is most famously associated: queuing is all about fair play; round-buying, table manners, ‘orderly disorder’, driving etiquette, flirting codes, business etiquette, polite egalitarianism, etc. are all influenced by this principle. Polite egalitarianism is hypocritical, concerned with the appearance of fairness, the concealment of embarrassing inequalities and inequities – but at least we care enough about these things to be embarrassed. Our penchant for compromise, our constant balancing and weighing up of ‘on the one hand’ and ‘on the other hand’ – often seen as woolliness, perhaps more kindly as tolerance – are a product of fair play + moderation. Our tendency to support the underdog – and to be wary of too much success – is also ab...

Courtesy A powerful ideal. Some of our politenesses are so deeply ingrained as to be almost involuntary, and thus fairly meaningless (the ‘sorry’ reflex, for example, is a knee-jerk response for most of us) but many require conscious or indeed acutely self-conscious effort. The English are often admired for our courtesy but condemned for our ‘reserve’, which is seen as arrogant, cold and unfriendly. Although our reserve is certainly a symptom of our social dis-ease, it is also, at least in part, a form of courtesy – the kind sociolinguists call ‘negative politeness’, which is concerned with other people’s need not to be intruded or imposed upon (as opposed to ‘positive politeness’, which is concerned with their need for inclusion and social approval). We judge others by ourselves, and assume that everyone shares our obsessive need for privacy – so we mind our own business and politely ignore them. But our polite sorries, pleases and thank-yous are not heartfelt or sincere – there is nothing particularly warm or friendly about them. Politeness by definition involves a degree of artifice and hypocrisy, but English courtesy seems to be almost entirely a matter of form, of obedience to a set of rules rather than expression of genuine feelings. So when we do break our own courtesy rules, we tend if anything to be more obnoxious and unpleasant than other less ‘polite’ nations. We need all these rules to protect us from ourselves.

Modesty The English are no more naturally self-effacing than other nations – in fact, we are rather arrogant – but (as with courtesy) we have strict rules about the appearance of modesty, including prohibitions on boasting and any form of self-importance, and rules actively prescribing self-deprecation and self-mockery. We place a high value on modesty, we aspire to modesty. The modesty that we actually display is often false – or, to put it more charitably, ironic. Our famous self-deprecation is a form of irony – saying the opposite of what we intend people to understand, or using deliberate understatement. It’s a kind of code: everyone knows that a self-deprecating statement probably means roughly the opposite of what is said, or involves a significant degree of understatement, and we are duly impressed, both by the speaker’s achievements or abilities and by his/her reluctance to trumpet them. Problems arise when the English try to play this rather silly game with foreigners, who do not understand the ironic code and tend to take our self-deprecating or self-mocking remarks at face value. Modesty also requires that we try to play down or deny class/wealth/status differences – polite egalitarianism involves a combination of the three ‘key values’ (courtesy, modesty, fair play) with a generous helping of hypocrisy. English modesty is often competitive – ‘one-downmanship’ – although this game may involve a lot of indirect boasting, and self-deprecation can be used as a code...

THE DIAGRAM

Worth looking at....

the diagram does at least convey the notion that Englishness is a dynamic system rather than a static list.

After a long period of close observation and a lot of embarrassing questions, I can see the recurring patterns and themes, and eventually arrive at a diagnosis: the condition I am calling the English Social Dis-ease.

aetiology

Worth looking up....causes put simply, I understand!

Every attempt to describe our national character makes at least some mention of ‘English reserve’, and many also puzzle over its apparent opposite, English loutishness, hooliganism and other anti-social behaviours. My only contribution has been to suggest that these seemingly contradictory Jekyll-and-Hyde tendencies are part of the same syndrome (a bit like the manic and depressive elements of what is now called bi-polar disorder). This diagnosis may be helpful in understanding the English, but identifying and naming a disorder tells us nothing about its cause.

Although we are in many ways very different, I have noted a number of important similarities between the English and the Japanese, and wondered whether the smallish-overcrowded-island factor might be significant.

I’m sorry, but I just don’t think there is a simple ‘casual’ answer, and I’m not going to insult your intelligence with speculative ‘Just So Stories’ about ‘How the English Got Their Social Handicaps’. To be honest, I can’t really explain why the English are the way we are – and neither, if they are being honest, can anyone else.