Simon Griffin - Fucking Good Manners

The hardest job kids face today is learning good manners without seeing any.

F RED A STAIRE

A book on manners wouldnt hold much credibility without beginning with a thank you for buying it. If you didnt buy it, please pass on my sincere gratitude to whoever purchased it for you. If youre just browsing through a friends toilet library, then thanks for selecting it over old copies of National Geographic and unread Christmas gifts. Please make sure you leave the room as you found it and wash your hands on the way out. If youve stolen it, well, perhaps reading it might help you see the error of your ways.

Its important to clarify straight away that this isnt a book about how to be posh. Its not something to refer to when you unexpectedly receive an invitation to Buckingham Palace or the White House. It will be of little to no use if youre looking for pointers on how much to tip, nor will it enlighten you on the correct protocol for entering into courtship with a dignitarys offspring.

Ive read numerous books that contain these gems of wisdom and quickly discovered that, as useful as they once were, weve got some slightly bigger fucking issues to deal with these days. Society on both sides of the Atlantic feels more divided than it ever has, and in among all the confusion weve let our behaviour get a little out of control.

Im in no way suggesting that lowering the volume of your music or letting someone into traffic are more important than finding a solution to reducing plastic waste or policies on national security. Just that we cant lower ourselves to the levels of screaming, shouting and stamping our feet about things, simply because we havent got our way that behaviour is reserved for humans under the age of five, the cast of TOWIE and anyone whos appeared on The Apprentice. Life isnt fucking fair, but we should be able to demonstrate our ability to get the basics right before we move on to the more complex stuff.

Its more difficult than it sounds. When dealing with such sensitive subjects its extremely likely that emotions will run high, but we need to hold our heads equally high and maintain some dignity. The quick and easy response is to speak louder and more forcefully; the harder and more time-consuming way is to listen and understand the other side of the argument (and theres always another side), and use that to come to a sensible solution.

And theres part of the fucking problem: time. Manners have nothing to do with class or wealth as so frequently demonstrated by a variety of overpaid public figures they cost nothing, after all. But they do take time, and in our busy little bubbles thats almost more valuable than money. Were cash-rich and time-poor, so who gives a fuck if we offend a few people by cutting our nails on the train or pushing to the front of the queue? Youll probably never see those individuals again anyway. Weve all got a million things to do and are constantly connected to other people doing a million other things, so the faster we can get things done the better, right? Well, wrong. The faster we get things done, the faster we get them done. The better way always takes a lot more time.

Another issue thats causing us some major fucking problems in the good manners department is our increasing connectivity with the rest of the world. Back in the hunter-gatherer days our contact with other humans would be limited to how far we could walk, but then we learned how to domesticate horses, and that number grew a little more. Fast forward a couple of thousand years and weve invented bicycles, cars, buses, trains and aeroplanes machines that have the ability to take us to new countries and cultures in the time it takes to not watch a couple of Liam Neeson films. Add the online community to this and were suddenly thrown together with thousands of people on a daily basis. Its simply not possible to be nice to all of them.

British anthropologist Robin Dunbar knows a thing or two about how many friends one person needs. Thats why he wrote a book called How Many Friends Does One Person Need? His research into primates shows a direct correspondence between the size of the brains neocortex (which deals with complex shit like high-order functions) and the number of people you can have a relationship with involving trust and obligation.

That number now known as Dunbars Number is 150. Compare that to the number of people you come into contact with on an average day on the train, in the shops, in the toilets, in the MailOnline comments section and you start to get an idea of exactly how many complete strangers our lives are filled with. Amy Alkon notes in her book Good Manners For Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck, Were experiencing more rudeness because weve lost the constraints on our behaviour that weve had in place for millions of years You can behave terribly to strangers and have a good chance of getting away with it because youll probably never see your victims again.

Our brains simply arent designed to cope with the scale of modern human interaction, so we shield ourselves away from these strangers, switch off our emotions and forget our fucking manners. As Graham Waters (Don Cheadle) says in 2004s Crash: Were always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other just so we can feel something.