Simon Says
Transcript Export
https://simonsays.ai

My New Project
Created on: 2017-12-21 11:30:34
Length: 00:28:23
Account Holder: Matt Webb

File Name: InOurTime-20040930-Politeness.mp3


BOOKMARKS

No bookmarks selected.

ANNOTATIONS

No annotations created.


SPEAKERS

M1 - M1
M7 - M7
M1 - M12
M1 - M10
F2 - F2
M4 - M4
M1 - M13
M2 - M2
M9 - M9
M5 - M5
M3 - M3
F1 - F1
M6 - M6
M8 - M8
M1 - M11


FULL TRANSCRIPT (with timecode)

00:00:00;10 - 00:00:11;27 | M1
Thanks for downloading the nighttime podcast. For more details about in our time and for our Terms of Use please go to BBC doco UK forward slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello.

00:00:11;27 - 00:00:51;13 | M7
At the start of the eighteenth century more precisely in 1711 a new idea took wing it was complete with the philosophy literature and very soon society was in its thrall. The idea was politeness. When Queen Anne was on the throne in the Spectator it was in the coffeehouses politeness surprising as it may seem to us now was part of a social revolution. So how did the idea of politeness challenge accepted norms of behaviour. And how did the notion of how to behave affect the wealth of 18th century culture with me to discuss politeness or David wouldn Professor of History at the University of York John Mullan Senior Lecturer in English at University College London and Amanda Vickrey Reader in History at Royal Holloway University of London.

00:00:51;24 - 00:00:58;09 | M1
Amanda Vickrey at the end of the 17th century before we come to that great 1711 day what was the.

00:00:58;09 - 00:01:01;11 | M1
What were the guidelines for best behaviour.

00:01:02;25 - 00:02:08;07 | F2
I think there's really a Cortney model of behaviour which has been well established in the 17th century but at the end of the 17th century there are three major political events which changed the map of culture and redraw the map of politics 16 88 the so-called glorious revolution. When Parliament invites William of Orange to the throne rejecting the incumbent King James the Second. The acts of toleration of 16 89 which acknowledges Protestant dissent and tries to draw a line under a century of religious strife. And finally the lapse of the Licensing Act of 60 95 which ends political censorship effectively and unleashes a tide of print. And those three things together recreate wealth recreate politics recreate culture and establish what came to be called the Whig supremacy. And that changed world means that it's a world of debate and a world of public life particularly in London a world of socializing and it needs a new model of behaviour and politeness comes forth.

00:02:08;18 - 00:02:16;03 | M4
But until then you would say that the model had been dictated by the court and not had happened for many centuries and it was court circles that set the pace.

00:02:16;03 - 00:02:57;19 | F2
I think that court models of stability had been dominant since at least the Renaissance. But even before the Renaissance you could go back as far as Aristotle's idea of moderation and the main stoicism. Epictetus many people in the 17th and 18th century were embraced stoicism to the full and all of this together was absorbed into Renaissance humanist ideas of courtly behavior and I suppose that the best expression of that was Castiglione book of the courtier which is read in the Italian calls so casually I brought in Aristotle's idea of moderation in the Ciceros idea of decorum and the idea of stoicism.

00:02:57;19 - 00:03:07;18 | M4
Can we go into the kind of decorum a little bit more and then say why Castilian was important for the renaissance of the 16th century and how that might have carried on to what we're going to talk about.

00:03:07;29 - 00:03:44;01 | F2
The idea of decorum is is the notion that everybody's supposed to behave according to their place in society according to their age. Their rank and their sex and that certain sorts of behavior is appropriate for each station and so a few are so excessive dignity in the Yoe would be indecorous Amazonian masculinity and women would be indecorous. And if a servant behaves like a lord that would be indecorous so it's a hierarchical system which it seems that everybody is going to behave according to their place.

00:03:44;01 - 00:04:08;24 | M1
David what is Amanda's pointed out the change at the end of the seventeenth century being in this new idea. I think it's quite difficult for me when I was reading about and people to think that politeness was a really big idea. But we are talking about John Locke writing the law of opinion and his people the other Shastri writing that book characteristics of men manners opinions times. It had a philosophical basis can you give us a summary of that.

00:04:09;02 - 00:05:41;02 | M1
I think it's just we have been taught by Locke and the whole of his philosophy in a way as a response to North and he does two things I think with regard to look the first thing he does is he takes up from Locke the idea of self-consciousness and Locke had invented the word self-consciousness. He presented people as having a reflective understanding of themselves. But he had seen itself as essentially passive the result of experience molded by external factors and what be wants to do is present the self as having an internal vitality a capacity to reflect on itself and change itself so that shines through when he talks about conversation is talking about conversation between people but also an internal conversation an internal conversation whereby you modify and develop yourself. That's the respect in which Chavez was developing Locke at the same time Shatha is very hostile to Locke because Locke says that in the end right and wrong are simply questions of divine law that are associated with pleasure and pain with punishment. Sharp 3 wants to detach virtue from punishment and advice from punishment and he wants to say that there is something that is intrinsically good and human beings have the capacity to recognize it and respond to it. And human beings are naturally benevolent and this is a quite new notion of human nature to insist on man's capacity to love each other and to feel sympathy for each other and to respond empathetically to each other and politeness is partly about feeding other people's feelings recognizing how they respond in circumstances traveling alongside with them in conversation and.

00:05:41;04 - 00:05:49;02 | M2
I spoke very clearly about shooting at age 16 99 and the release of the Licensing Act.

00:05:49;09 - 00:05:57;19 | M1
But is there a sense in which this was a final reaction to the Civil War to the country being torn apart is that it does not come into the mix of thinking at all.

00:05:57;24 - 00:06:46;21 | M1
Absolutely. I mean it's reaction to because I was only 50 years previously. That's right. Reaction to a continuing pattern of conflict around the issues of the Civil War the two parties that you have in the late 70s for the 18th century the weak and the Tories are essentially the parties that fought the Civil War. What's happening is that the Whig Party which had fought the Civil War had in the end lost the restoration or its precursors are now becoming the party of government and you have to change what had been opposition party into a ruling party and change its values along with that. But throughout English societies Riverland in the early 18th century by the rage of party by party conflict point this is about trying to moderate party conflict moderate religious conflict and this issue remains important right through until 70 45 because of Jacobite ism. The whole question of where legitimate authority lies is contentious.

00:06:46;22 - 00:07:00;04 | M1
Before I go to John just one final brief question. So we are bringing in a new philosophy. This is not just how to raise a teacup it is a philosophy of how to live your life that's coming in strongly and is felt to be such by thinking people don't.

00:07:00;06 - 00:07:06;29 | M1
That's right and what's fundamental to this philosophy is it's a secular philosophy. It's a view of morality which leaves got out of the picture.

00:07:07;00 - 00:07:23;11 | M2
Journalist 1711 we have this book published by Shaftesbury but we also have the spectator launched. And that too had a extraordinary effect launched by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. Could you tell us about that launch and what how that fits into the picture.

00:07:23;11 - 00:09:17;22 | M9
Right well actually the contrast with Shastri is quite sort of useful in a way because Charbray may provide a philosophy of politeness but actually if you were to read it listening to or try reading shops now they would find it really remarkably so lofty and and and and it's very kind of tone and form actually perhaps rather ill suited to the the amicable coalitions as he called them of urban life that he seems to be sort of laying the foundations for and indeed Shakspere itself with sort of trained up to be one of these kind of new public men. But he had such bad asthma as to spend his time in the countryside so he could actually sort of practice a lot of the vanity that he seems to recommend. But what the spectator is is it's a new kind of publication which in its very form embodies the politeness that it recommends. So Amanda mentioned at the beginning of the program this extraordinary kind of is actually a cockup a fable to renew the Licensing Act in 60 97. And so that's journalism as we would call it now is of unbleached and most of that journalism is incredibly political of two party parties and the spectator seems to be part of this flight. But he's also separate from it. And one of the big plays at The Spectator is to say here is a genre it's and it's an essay which comes out every day. And many of the essays are set in the Coffee House but also the spectator is laid out in the coffee house for people to read. And it's above the kind of squabbling world of rivalries that that characterizes most of the journalism of its age.

00:09:17;22 - 00:09:31;09 | M4
Now according to an I've read in preparation of history and this had a tremendous effect it ran for two years as you say daily except on Sundays mainly about these two men. Who is it getting to. And what effect does it having on them.

00:09:31;09 - 00:11:18;23 | M5
I mean I suppose the fundamental idea is the idea that the world can be and we the citizens of it can be improved. So the spectator although it's very droll and ironical and often self mocking periodical does have quite a strong reformist agenda. We can make ourselves more polite it says to its readers but also it teaches what what Johnson is much admired it later called the elegance of knowledge. So the modern world is a world in which people can behave in a polished way that they didn't behave before. And so for instance one thing that spectator around its precursor the Tatlow which was mostly written by steel really set out to do was to reject the previous world of the restoration and rake the restoration of liberty and the restoration court. So for instance it mounted a campaign against Restoration comedy which it took as exhibiting the essential amoral frippery of that culture. This was a culture which was going to be open now open in a way that we might think not open to every kind of working person in the street. But it's a model for how we should enjoy life was conversation. That was where we met people. Well that's where you met people where you learned politeness and Steel said the life of conversation is equality. So it's the opposite of what the opposite is different from this idea of decorum where people behave according to their station in the Spectator and literally in numbers that the Spectator which record conversations and debates between characters people can meet on equal terms.

00:11:18;23 - 00:11:39;12 | M2
David what's coming in the beginning of the 18th century. Rhodri improving a bit out of it and people are coming to London. Is the pressure from a different group one much a class of people helping to push this forward. Do they need a place in society in which this provides them with one of the key things that the spectators for us to tell you if you arrived in the city how you're supposed to behave.

00:11:39;12 - 00:12:28;12 | M3
It's partly about educating country bumpkins and city pace of life. It's also about telling people whom upwardly socially immobile about how to behave. How do you enter the polite society and the whole fact about polite society is extending itself into new social groups or acquiring new luxuries dressing better moving among people who before had been their superiors who now they're allowed to treat as their equals and then the third thing that's happening I think is new contacts between the sexes. I mean chancelleries world may be essentially a masculine world but the home of the spectator is a world in which men and women meet and talk to each other just as the originally had been writing about how should you be polite in a world dominated by women he was writing for court dominated by women. Politeness is always about politeness between the sexes and therefore it's always about men and women being able to adopt similar modes of speech.

00:12:28;12 - 00:13:00;15 | M4
And that's quite alarming and certainly a point that you Umit to take it on from from John. JOHN MULLEN You said about you contrasted the politeness with the decorum that I mentioned earlier and politeness as I understand it one of the facts in its favor. I saw it was that you could speak to anyone within limits not who could speak back to regardless of rank who did not have to be. And this went alongside or even bred public places coffeehouses or assembly. Can you talk about the growth of the public space that is happening right.

00:13:00;15 - 00:14:17;17 | M5
Right well the coffeehouses is so important because it is both a real place and a sort of metaphorical place I suppose it's a real place where I mean there were hundreds of coffeehouses in London in the early 18th century they'd been around for half a century or more but they acquire this new importance with this kind of release of opinion and conversation. And most importantly perhaps this release of sort of publications which are there they are on the clock as you go into the coffeehouse quite often you pay a small charge to go in which isn't prohibitive. Bart sort of signals that no anybody can just walk in off the street and the one thing you would do there apart from drinking coffee and talking is you would read off and read aloud. These publications. So the spectator actually for the coffee but it's of a mansion itself being read in the copy has one of the extraordinary things about this publication is that very soon became disseminated throughout the nation. And so in a way the coffee house became somewhere that you could inhabit the London coffee house if you are somewhere. I mean we have extraordinary records of people in Spalding meeting to read the spectator to each other and this spectator recommended itself to be read aloud.

00:14:17;21 - 00:14:39;24 | M2
And the idea of space goes along with it. We've got lots of things going on one of them is a sort the architecture as it were made way for the conversation that most people will know most about bath which became a place of assemblage. And there was a man who controlled the master of ceremonies Bo Nash. Can you tell us Ambassador Bo donation why that was important it happened at Brighton and BUKs and all those other places. Let's stick with bass.

00:14:40;12 - 00:15:15;21 | F1
Well to start with what you said about the Bain town and John Woods said the town is the theater of politeness and I think most people would know most about bath and the master of ceremonies that the man sort of gave out the rules and said how people should behave and who should dance with him was Bonacci he's got this kind of almost total so in histories of politeness and what he's supposed to what he's famous for doing is that he laid out a set of rules for how people should behave when they came into the Assembly Rooms. So men had to leave off the dirty boots they had to leave off their swords.

00:15:15;22 - 00:15:21;14 | M2
Yes boss becomes a wild west doesn't it. And I mean imagine him taking off that sort of thing.

00:15:21;17 - 00:16:30;06 | F1
Well it all. But it's also more significant than that because the sword is the symbol of kind of martial honor and you know the women used to complain that it would tear their dresses or they'd be frightened of the men in their swords. And when you leave off the sword is effectively saying that politeness is the modern form of honor not this ancient warlike kind of martial and aristocratic code. And also what you Bonacci is famous for is not letting the nobles only dance with each other. And what Oliver Goldsmith said in his history of Nashe was that before Nashe general society most people of fortune was by no means established. So it was Nashe who made the nobles and the great vast masses of the gentry socialize. He talked before about that was the implication of a rising middle class. I think what's far more significant in this period is the massive expansion of the gentry the nobility is only about 160 families at this period where there are tens of thousands of gentry and little gentleman and everybody socializing together under a set of strict rules is what's supposed to be kind of naches great achievement and he died a pauper but was bowed in birth.

00:16:30;18 - 00:16:40;05 | M2
As I read it what does this mean to you. There's these open spaces these assembly places these not only confirms what went on in this glassbox the idea of places to meet and talk.

00:16:40;07 - 00:17:31;21 | M3
Well I are two things going on. One is a new one new public spaces which are enormously important and where precisely you've got this new range of interaction. The other thing that's coming alongside this paradoxically is the emergence of new private spaces. People reading on their own not only reading aloud as John said but also reading silently to themselves. Everybody who has a copy the spectator can in their mind be in a coffeehouse encouraging conversation with other people. So the architecture there also takes that off if you think of the houses of. What you've got as drawing rooms that you can retire in to close the door. People won't be walking through the room in 17th century houses they're laid up so that everyone has a room that other people walk through all the time. For the first time you've got private space where you close the door open a book and enter a world of your own and corridors come in the corridors come in staircases and car doors change the shape of private buildings and give people private spaces so the public space and the private space developed simultaneously hand in hand.

00:17:31;27 - 00:17:56;05 | M2
But still there's still a gentlemanly hangovers and that when you polite Europe in polite society the gentleman is still hangs on. It is not polite to know too much. It is not to be too much of a militant scholar. It is not polite to know too much but it is not polite to do the job professionally. So the gentleman in the country Leonia and the gentleman the notion so you talk about it.

00:17:56;13 - 00:18:51;08 | F1
Well it's an I think as you rightly said. I mean one of the things the gentleman is always defined against is the pedant. And one of the quickest ways to end polite conversation is to be too magisterial to be to know it or to bore on about history to bore on about literature. And you say you've got to sprinkle it with a kind of liveliness. I mean we said before about the road. That's why women are supposed to be important. Platt conversation because the natural gift of women is supposed to be vivacity whereas the natural gift of men is supposed to be gravity. Now each sex is supposed to police its natural bias but together you get lively entertaining conversation. And women are particularly good for academics. It's said that women's space day they rub the rest of the academic and force him to be entertaining with this knowledge. So the true taste is often said to inhabit the place halfway between the world and the cell.

00:18:51;16 - 00:19:22;04 | M6
This is a kind of constant emphasis as Addison says I. My ambition is to bring philosophy out of the closet to the tea table and he doesn't. It's not just he who says I am the great great great Scottish philosopher David Hume when he's writing about what he's trying to do. Half a century later says philosophy needs to be brought into what he calls the conversa world. Otherwise the philosophy of philosophy is a bit bonkers writes about things which have nothing to do with common life and philosophy has to be made polite.

00:19:22;06 - 00:19:45;04 | M2
Can we just give a list of a few instances of what this turns into. I mean what do you do at the dinner table what do you do about this that and the other. Can we just have a few specific instances because we are talking about something absolutely fascinating a philosophy a new idea of the way that we are turning itself into social behaviour and then turning itself further into actually knives and forks it well.

00:19:45;06 - 00:21:22;10 | F1
Relaxed modern politeness is not supposed to be over formal and over so modern in the 18th century. I mean to be Martin you know what everybody was after. Modern elegant and easy. That's how they would describe themselves in this polite and commercial society. So at the dinner table. First off you'd get straight to it. There's a mocking and rather gentle and satire in I can't remember the title role the Spectator about a country gentleman who comes to town and he spends so long bowing that the soup's gone cold. So you're not supposed to have this very old fashioned civility is supposed to be relaxed and easy. Now we might not see it as a formality but they did. But then at the table you're supposed to be able to govern yourself. Well actually before you even came in a man should be able to handle a sword is came his hat and all these clothes. So he's got to be able to get the table disrobe get the right things and then sit down space to handle the knife and fork. Well supposed to handle his handkerchief. Well there are some books which give you actual little kind of rules of do's and don'ts and so we would recognize today you know you're not supposed to put your fingers in your nose or your ears if you blow your nose in that space and look into your handkerchief. And then there are all sorts of rules of conversation. You're not supposed to talk about politics. Certainly not supposed to talk about yourself you not supposed to be pedantic. You're not supposed to digress on that. Is somebody at the table quite obviously lacks endless rules and it's not surprising at the end of all this that when people comment on you know the insipidity a polite conversation and people are left really thinking about the only safe topics of food whether in the literature.

00:21:22;15 - 00:21:55;01 | M5
I mean it's sort of legitimate rights and still says something quite interesting actually that there are two great enemies to polite conversation and he says one is fractiousness and and and and disagreements about religion and politics but he says the other is familiarity. Actually one of the things about politeness is you mustn't be too familiar. You mustn't tease people too much. You mustn't wind people. We would say you mustn't say things which are directed as it were only them and which other people around the table can't share.

00:21:55;05 - 00:22:22;01 | M8
But this is the difficulty in getting the tone right. You've got to be light and easy gently mocking but you mustn't tease and wind people up. You've got to touch on serious subjects you've got to have moral seriousness but at the same time you mustn't become theologically honest and chancery and Addison and steel and everybody like that is trying to get a notion of tone what the most serious subjects can be touched on gently and lightly without provoking.

00:22:22;06 - 00:22:52;27 | F1
But it had its critics that it was thought of as hypocritical as effeminate and the word then uses of Frenchified there's always a risk from the very first people recognise that if you've got a theory of manners which is supposed to be based on morality that there's always a chance that it can come adrift from its ethical moorings and that it could just be a kind of cynical veneer. It could be a set of manners which you use to get your own way and has no relationship to a kind of inner goodwill.

00:22:53;03 - 00:23:44;17 | M3
And so there's a lot of ink spilled on the different stream false politeness and true politeness and always fear that it could be hypocritical but it's supposed to be they're supposed to be a synthesis between manners and morals and it's supposed to be infused with inner goodwill but within a few years of publishing mandibles fable of the bees is setting out to show that human beings are fundamentally so selfish and incapable of consigning themselves to the welfare of others that the lubricant of society is not politeness but hypocrisy and hypocrisy is not make society possible. So you've got two entirely contrasting views about human nature is in direct conflict from the very beginning and one looks back to Hobbes and is in many ways taken up by Rousseau he wants to argue that contemporary society is riddled with corruption and hypocrisy and the other insists that human beings are capable of a natural concern for the welfare of others and that politeness is a reflection of a genuine interior.

00:23:44;18 - 00:23:56;07 | M2
So and there's also the question of borderless. In the 18th century the restoration doesn't just die because the clock goes past seventeen hundred. You were good at fielding and so on. How is that not going to the maximum.

00:23:56;19 - 00:24:56;25 | F1
Well I think as you suggested politeness doesn't carry all before it. I mean some people are blissfully unaware of politeness. Some people rejoice in overturning it. And I mean I'm thinking of James Boswell who was very self-conscious in his diary about how he tried to live out politeness and he seemed to have three personality types. Sometimes he was the manly fellow who was full of gravity and dignity. Sometimes he was the pretty gentleman who please ladies but sometimes he was what he called the blackguard and when he said I am in the character of the blackguard then he would put on the dirtiest suit and the nastiest breeches it would get out his condoms for protection against VD and he would go to Westminster Bridge to it with prostitutes so he managed to get me between the three different modes and I wouldn't say that he didn't see a contradiction between all of those because he did feel very guilty. But it does suggest that people in the past like us were capable of being different things in different contexts.

00:24:56;26 - 00:26:13;18 | M6
There were situations where he thought I'll be polite in situations where he's quite happy not to be saying culture perhaps it's not an accident that the most polite century is also sort of the rudest one as well. I mean that certainly in the first half of the 18th century in literary terms what's it known for it's known for the board of fielding the satire the absolutely kind of Stygian satire of of Pope and swift and of course actually those two go together very well. You mention fielding and bawdy. The reason why it works is because it's actually the prose of his novels is extraordinarily gentlemanly and it's full of passages of Horace and Virgil and yet undercut by the way in which people really act similarly. The pope dark Pope satire which is full of order but it's written in these kind of crystalline couplets which seems formally to put into practice just the virtues poetically speaking that something like Addison recommend. So I mean for the best writers and actually other members of the culture as well it's the age of Hogarth too for some of these people. Politeness gives an opportunity for this wonderful sort of contradictory representation of the dark side of things.

00:26:13;19 - 00:27:20;26 | F1
Amanda Smith Well some also reject politeness on ideological grounds as well. I mean there are some who go for the Romans Senator mottle and think oh politeness is is too refined is thought to French because they politeness has absorbed all these French theories. Nobody's more attacked in the 18th century than the man who has lots of French manners. And if you look at any pictorial representation the Frenchman is always incredibly Wieden and very very affected. At the same time I mean I've come across lots of letters and diaries where women have a big investment in politeness and their husbands don't. So a woman whose diaries I've read a lot Elizabeth Shackleton she's read in the town in the Spectator she's trying to have this polite life but her younger husband John Shackleton kicks over the card table smashes her Tea Party and then gets incredibly drunk and she says things like never saw him so rude vulgar nor so drunk he took his horsewhipped to me or finally after one drunken episode The gentleman came home near 12:00 noon and some ceremony went snoring to a clean bed where he farted and stoked like a polecat. So no politeness.

00:27:21;05 - 00:27:35;13 | M4
John Melendez does romanticism at the end of the end of that century to 1711 the spectator. Towards the end of the century the Romantics are writing into it that does not provide the big countervailing force which has been touched on moment of budgeter finishes up the pig.

00:27:35;28 - 00:27:45;11 | M9
Well if you look at something as narrow as English literature it seems to. And yet I mean I'm not entirely convinced you know if it depends what evidence you choose.

00:27:45;11 - 00:28:02;21 | M6
If you read Jane Austen novels you would think that politeness is as important as ever although it has as it were percolated down into the bedrock so far that the code for what gentlemanliness says is almost unspoken. But being a gentleman is still the most important thing in the world.

00:28:02;22 - 00:28:11;07 | M1
Thank you very much indeed. Thank you Amanda Vicary John Mullen and David Wilson. Next week we will be attempting to talk by Jean-Paul Sartre. Thank you for listening.

00:28:11;25 - 00:28:23;04 | M1
We hope you've enjoyed this radio full podcast. You can find hundreds of other programs about history science and philosophy. A BBC doc Kodock UK forward slash Radio 4