SUNDAY, 8 JUNE 2025

When I was young, I was generally scathing about manners. I saw them as fake, either a strategy posh people used to put you in your place or the vacuous expression of petit-bourgeois insincerity. A lot of this probably stemmed from my English upbringing, in which ‘We must meet up sometime’ is often delivered in a tone of voice which makes it clear that this will only happen over the speaker’s dead body. In all of the countries I’ve lived in as an adult, I’ve never found a people who come close to suburban south-east Englanders in their ability to turn a smile and a few choice words of politesse into a way of whispering ‘fuck off’.

Speaking of the word ‘fuck’, I was part of a generation that made it our mission that this could be spoken anywhere, at any time, and in any public space. It made front-page news when Kenneth Tynan first deliberately used the word on a TV programme in 1965, and the controversy was even more pronounced a decade later when the Sex Pistols made a notorious appearance on a prime-time chat show, except this time the outrage was greater because the words were coming from the mouths of oiks and not the Oxbridge-educated. In retrospect, it feels embarrassing how proud we all were of being able to say ‘fuck’ in public, as if this was storming the gates of the citadel and bringing freedom to the masses. We were the mirror image of all those shocked blue rinses and the right-wing commentators announcing that it marked the end of civilisation.

Not the end of civilisation, perhaps, but definitely a shift in the relationship between private and public space. The opinions I hold on this now are very different from those of my teenage self as the barriers between the private and the public have crumbled during the intervening years. Whether it’s children running amok in restaurants, sullen teenagers with their feet on seats in public transport, people in beachfront restaurants wearing little more than a thong, parents going into schools and physically attacking teachers, or the selfish lack of concern of many drivers for pedestrians, there is often no longer the feeling that we should behave with more discretion in public spaces than we do in our own homes. Perhaps we all laugh at Homer Simpson because of a shameful recognition that we have become him.

But is this anything more than yobbish selfishness, which has always existed and always will? In my opinion, it probably is. ‘An Englishman’s home is his castle’ may have been true for generations, but the gulf nowadays between the contemporary world of luxury kitchens, heated patios and DIY megastores and the boarded-up and litter-strewn wasteland of many city centres has grown too stark to deny. Whereas a hundred years ago, nouveau-riche businessmen built a public library or a municipal swimming pool or helped to renovate a town hall, today’s entrepreneurial counterparts indulge in self-centred fantasies of going up to space in a rocket or downloading their precious essence into software for all eternity. And while the rich industrialists of the past may once have built mansions, at least these were usually in the same geographical space as the people they employed. The contemporary filthy rich, on the other hand, live in gated communities policed by guards or have homes in several continents, far from any plebs except for the chosen few who have the privilege of servicing them. Private equals good, public equals bad, has become the norm.

Traditionalist thinkers like the late Roger Scruton would not have been at all surprised by this development. He would have pointed to his copy of Burke and the philosopher’s advocacy of manners as vital to the wellbeing of a good society: not just a veneer of lacquer to make the brute Hobbesian reality of social existence bearable, but an essential lubricant that makes civilised public discourse possible. At least Scruton had the geniality and courtesy of Burke’s traditional conservative and genuinely desired to preserve what he felt was best in British culture. In contrast, many of today’s self-styled conservatives are vicious iconoclasts who hate with a vengeance the society that has grown up around them with its liberal standards and values, and dream of smashing it to pieces and reverting to a world where freedom is restricted to those who share their social and political opinions and prejudices.  

Arguably, every technological development of the last fifty years has added to the erosion of the private/public divide. The first is the private car. This has created a bubble of home which we take with us every time we step outside our front door; as we drive down a street we inhabit an ambivalent space. In this space we can behave just as we do at home, shouting and squabbling, or listening to music at full blast with the windows down, or gorging snacks and then tossing the packaging out of the window into a void that belongs to no one and is therefore of no importance. Safely ensconced in our cars, we sit at a level above the sorry pedestrians who struggle through the wind and rain or the losers who take public transport, and the mini-tanks that many people drive nowadays physically accentuate this difference. The car that someone drives has replaced clothing as the most important status symbol, as we dress more and more like paupers who just got out of bed but worship our SUVs and buy the most expensive model we can afford. Our car has become an extension of our home, our Englishman’s castle, and people like me, who don’t even drive, are instantly declassé and therefore of no significance.

TV does the reverse, bringing the entertainment of the outside world into our cosy homes, where we can control and domesticate it. The collective experience of attending events such as music hall, theatre, and concerts which happen in front of live audiences has largely been replaced by the insularity of watching everything unfold on a screen as we slouch on our sofas and scoff popcorn. The big wide world out there is reduced to a magic lantern show in our living room, there for our personal delectation. Even the firmanent of stars who once graced the silver screen have been domesticated and no longer inhabit a different galaxy from ourselves, and in the UK soap opera reigns supreme as we watch people as dull as we are doing the same tedious things that we do in daily life. Meanwhile, reality TV turns us into Roman emperors who can vote people off the screen, and woe betide any celebrity who dares to leave her house with a single hair out of place and without her lipstick and mascara.

Then there are the plethora of electronic devices like i-pads, tablets, laptops, walkmans, and especially the mobile phone. This last item may possibly have done more to dissolve the concept of public space than any other, even the car. Like the car, it has taken what used to be private – in this case, ordinary personal life – and thrust it into the public domain. So nowadays it is perfectly normal to witness someone holding a conversation in public, not at all bothered if other people can hear it, or see them walking down the street, nose pressed against the screen, oblivious to the real world happening around them. And slowly this blurring of private and public is leading to a world where the two realities are merging, and many of us seem willing, or even eager, to shatter this distinction altogether, not only posting pictures of our lunch on Facebook but going as far as launching naked photos of ourselves into cyberspace. Even sex, once shrouded in secrecy and confined to the bedroom or behind the bikesheds, has become semi-public. What next – videos of ourselves in the bathroom taking a dump?

The overall, long-term effect of the trends I have outlined in this essay is the increased atomisation of our society. Although technology in theory can help to bring us together – for example, I now have more friends scattered around the world than I do in my immediate environment, and would live a very isolated life without this option – in so many other ways it distances us from each other, and this distance is increasing day by day. For example, TV performed a social function when I was young because there were only a handful of channels so we all watched the same programmes and discussed them the next day at school or in the office. Now there are thousands of channels and we can program when to watch them, so the social function of television has been totally lost. Families which would once have eaten together eat alone while they interact with strangers online. Everyday relationships which grew gradually through routine physical contact have become hollowed out. Those closest to us are boring compared to the magic ping of a smartphone.

But does any of this really matter? Was Burke right to place such a high value on manners and recognising and maintaining the gap between public and private and the different rules that apply in these two spheres? Does a public space that is tawdry and neglected and litter-strewn and no longer valued mark the beginning of the collapse of our society? The broken windows theory which was popular at the turn of the century has since been questioned in terms of its efficacy in reducing crime but I still believe it is essential to build and sustain and respect welcoming public spaces which belong to us all rather than the mausoleum of a shopping mall that is locked up at 10pm, and that the abandoned dystopian townscapes of many of our cities reflect a society that is cracking under stress.

Several years ago, I read about an experiment undertaken by a group of young people who decided to live together in a house where no private space was allowed. (I have done my best to find this again online but sadly I can’t, so everything I say in this paragraph depends on my memory.) There was one basic rule – everyone had to be visible all of the time – so cameras were put up everywhere. The motivation for this was idealistic: a desire to create an openness where nobody told lies or needed to pretend because everything was transparent and so honesty could rule supreme. But almost at once cracks appeared in this utopian vision and soon some of its participants were starting to experience psychological breakdown. They needed private space to keep them sane.

If Scruton had ever read this essay, I imagine the committed Christian would have given a wry smile: more rejoicing in heaven about the sinner who has repented and seen the folly of his ways. And if my twenty-year-old self could read what I have written here, I imagine he would feel shocked and perhaps betrayed. How can the future me have developed such fusty, old-fart views? Have I gone all hoity-toity in my dotage and joined the petit-bourgeois with their net curtains and postage-stamp lawns? Has the boy that I once was come to value the fake exterior more than the inner truth? But I’d counter that maybe the inner truth depends on the social veneer and we need both the private spaces where we can reflect and relax and be ourselves and a public space that is warm and welcoming and friendly, a space that we collectively construct and where different rules apply, and which is not a hostile environment which we need to navigate occasionally. Perhaps manners don’t maketh the man, but without them life becomes less pleasant and much more stressful, and a society and civilisation which forgets this may be edging towards collapse.