Pardon one: how are your manners？The decline of civility and good manners may be worrying

Pardon one: how are your manners？

The decline of civility and good manners may be worrying people more than crime, according to Gentility Recalled, edited by Digby Anderson, which laments the breakdown of traditional codes that once regulated social conduct. It criticizes the fact that "manners" are scorned us repressive and outdated.

The result, according to Mr. Anderson-director of the Social Affairs Unit, an independent think-tank—is a society characterized by rudeness: loutish behaviour on the streets, jostling in crowds, impolite shop assistants and bad-tempered drivers.

Mr. Anderson says the cumulative effect of these—apparently trivial, but often offensive—is to make everyday life uneasy, unpredictable and unpleasant. As they are encountered far more often than crime, they can cause more anxiety than crime.

When people lament the disintegration of law and order, he argues, what they generally mean is order, as manifested by courteous forms of social contact. Meanwhile, attempts to re-establish restraint and self-control through "politically correct" rules are artificial.

The book has contributions from 12 academic in disciplines ranging from medicine to sociology and charts what it calls the "coarsening" of Britain. Old- fashioned terms such as "gentleman" and "lady" have lost all meaningful resonance and need to be re-evaluated, it says. Rachel Trickett, honorary fellow and former principal of St Hugh' s College, Oxford, says that the notion of a "lady" protects women rather than demeaning them.

Feminism and demands for equality have blurred the distinctions between the sexes, creating situations where men are able to dominate women because of their more aggressive and forceful natures, she says. "Women, without some code of deference or respect, become increasingly victims."

Caroline Moore, the first woman fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, points out that "gentleman" is now used only with irony or derision.

"The popular view of a gentleman is poised somewhere between the imbecile parasite and the villainous one: between Woosteresque chinless wonders, and those heartless capitalist toffs who are the stock-in-trade of television."

She argues that the concept is neither class-bound nor rigid; conventions of gentlemanly behavior enable a man to act naturally as and individual within shared assumptions while taking his place in society.

"Politeness is no constraint, precisely because the manners are no ' code' but a language, rich, flexible, restrained and infinitely subtle."

For Anthony O' Hear, professor of philosophy at the University of Bradford, manners are closely associated with the different forms of behavior. appropriate to age and status. They curb both the impetuosity of youth and the bitterness of old age. Egalitarianism, he says, has led to people failing to act their age. "We have vice-chancellors with earrings, aristocrats as hippies the trendy vicar on his motorbike."

Dr. Athena Leoussi, sociology lecturer at Reading University, bemoans the deliberate neglect by people of their sartorial appearance.

Dress, she says, is the outward expression of attitudes and aspirations. The ubiquitousness of jeans "displays a utilitarian attitude" that has "led to the cultural impoverishment of everyday life". Dr. Leoussi says that while clothes used to be seen as a means of concealing taboo forces of sexuality and violence, certain fashions—such as leather jackets--have the opposite effect.

Dr. Bruce Charlton, a lecturer in public health medicine in Newcastle upon Tyne, takes issue with the excessive informality of relations between professionals such as doctors and bank managers, and their clients. He says this has eroded the distance and respect necessary in such relationships. For Tristarn

A．it leads to more crime in society

B．people view manners as old-fashioned

C．rudeness on the street cannot be stemmed out

D．it can seriously affect our daily life