On Self-Respect

Once, when I turned up to what was then my (rather disreputable) workplace in a suit and tie, my boss asked me if I was due in court. I’m still not sure what the correct answer to this should have been, for it was surely not my place to explain that office attire ought not to stretch to board shorts and plastic flip-flops. While it might be true that nothing about the professional world really depends on looking this way or that, there is surely a certain a sense of decency/appropriateness that ought to intercede before the rot sets in. It is the major way in which we signal our professionalism, after all.

Yesterday, I was talking to Anthony while receiving Barnet maintenance and, being the philosopher that he is, he was reflecting on the way in which the internet is changing the world. The man in the sharp suit but with an empty head used to be able to get along rather well, simply by looking perky when the boss was in the vicinity. The dishevelled oaf who went to Dickie Moore’s, but who had a head full of bright ideas, was never allowed to shine. Now, so says Anthony, the sharp-suited man competes unfavourably with the man who never leaves his living room and doesn’t even bother putting on his trousers. What is to become of the empty-headed sharp-suited man? And what should we make of our bare-legged house-bound go-getter of the future?

I do not know this person, but assuredly he is succeeding from home

Musing on these fragments relating to sartorial attitudes leads me to the following: while we used to have standards, looking the part often superseded being the part, and if we have made a meritocratic turn, so much the better; then again, if the meritocratic turn has come at the expense of all standards, then we have turned too far. There is, I conjecture, a balance to be struck. People can go to work in appropriate attire and be good at their jobs. And people who stay at home and make fortunes by manipulating the ether can don a collar and tie just because it feels good to look good.

Incidentally, in answer to the question posed by my former boss I pointed out that I have a certain amount of self-respect to maintain. I did not say ‘How about you?’ but it was probably understood.

On Becoming Manly, Part III

Allow me to resume this thread, with increasing trepidation. I have been uncertain whether to put the how before the why or vice versa, but decided that method should precede what may well be madness on my part. Of course, any attempt at prescription is bound hopelessly to fail, for men being men, and boys being boys, rules will be dismissed peremptorily. All I may offer, therefore, is a sketch (something sketchy?).

Unburdening responsibility upon a greater mind than mine, let us hear what Carlyle has to say (when he unburdens responsibility upon his own fictitious inventions):

In all the sports of Children, were it only in their wanton breakages and defacements, you shall discern a creative instinct: the Mankin feels that he is a born Man, that his vocation is to Work. The choicest present you can make him is a Tool; be it knife or pen-gun, for construction or for destruction; either way it is for Work, for Change. In gregarious sports of skill or strength, the Boy trains himself to Cooperation, for war or peace, as governor or governed… (Sartor Resartus).

Boys, in short, must play at being men if they are to become men. This is not to say that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, but then again, men will be incomplete without having sensed victory and pleasure, and, perhaps more importantly, defeat and pain. Furthermore, they must be given the freedom to build and fashion, to be frustrated and to bleed. We wrap our boys in cotton wool at their peril, for the adult world will not cushion their falls. The chips of life fall in much the same way in childhood as in adulthood, but the stakes are not so high. A boy needs to learn to win with magnanimity and to lose with humility (and to resolve to win the next time) before the blinds become too big.

The Playing Fields of Eton, by Edmund Bristow (1822)

What does this mean in practical terms? Nothing more than the rough-and-tumble, active life, indoors and out, that some of us took for granted. I wonder, nervously, how many boys now enjoy this kind of experience. There is so much fear, and so few playing fields, that kids are cloistered, attached umbilically to their video games and gadgetry. Perhaps the most fundamental step, therefore, is to unplug.

100 Not Out

My dear and faithful Readers,

It seems I have reached something of a traditional milestone, at least in cricketing terms, and I must take the opportunity to raise my bat to the pavilion and salute you all. I trust I shall go on to make an unprecedented innings!

For lovers of statistics, as I know cricket enthusiasts to be, my current stay at the crease began on December 16th, 2009, and has included visits from 12,750 people, who between them have read 24,618 pages of ‘Being Manly’. There are some 49 following the blog directly – I do hope for more – and a further 195 following on the facebook site, not accounting for some duplications there. You have demonstrated yourself to be a trustworthy and intelligent lot, and as such I humbly beg that you ask your esteemed peers to look in on me as well. If we are to do any good, we must share our noble thoughts widely.

With the knowledge that you will not desert me, for I shall not desert you, I re-don my helmet, take guard, and once again turn to face the bowling.

Sincerely and ever yours,

VB.

Many A True Thing...

…said in jest. I felt that after the recent onslaught of posts a little light relief might be in order. But, being unable to let go of serious intent, the levity to which I direct your attention is, in the best tradition of British comedy, funny because it’s true. Grotesque, it may be, as if in a circus mirror, but this skit on British sport, manliness, gender, and incompetence is a rather accurate portrayal of life in Blighty. Never one to shun the issues that make us shudder, Mr. Elton plays all the trump cards – race, class, sex, snobbery, and the like – to brilliant effect. I shall leave you to find subsequent parts on youtube. Do enjoy.

Honour Bound?

I have of late been reading a book about Imperial German doctors and their prescriptions with regard to honour. I shall not trouble you with the details of this tome, but merely bring to your attention one of its observations, which seems particularly pertinent in the light of my recent post on la Gloire.

Honour, so says the author, referring to some esteemed theorists, used to be thought to fall somewhere between the law and the moral conscience:

While morality was empowered by the inner voice of the individual’s conscience, the law used external, physical force. The social demands of honour… were secured by internal as well as external means. Violations of honour had subjective, inner consequences and social, externally palpable ones. In this way, correct conduct could be guaranteed in areas which could not be reached by the law and in which conscience-based morality alone was not reliable (A-H Maehle, Doctors, Honour and the Law, 2009).

Among doctors, lawyers, academics and the like, on the one hand, and among such nebulous groups as gentlemen or the aristocracy, on the other, a breach of honour damaged the whole group, whose reputation as societal leaders and upstanding citizens was called into question by the misdeeds of an individual. The importance of restoring this jointly held and esteemed sense of honour accounts for duels, specialist courts and panels of arbitration, and private clubs and societies. A man would fight a duel to restore not only his own slighted reputation, but also that of his peers; a court specific to a respected profession could censure and publicly disown dishonourable miscreants; private societies could expel undesirable elements, thereby ensuring their collective honour stayed intact. The thread of civility by which society hangs, to which I referred yesterday, was duly reinforced by an understanding of the social importance of a shared code of honour.

To be sure, this still exists in some spheres today, although it is not called honour, and is not defended by duelling. But by and large we have lost sight of this middle step between the law and the conscience, this honorific superego. In countless ways we see that the morality of individuals is insufficiently developed to prevent them from acting without inhibitions, and that the law remains rightly disinterested, even if it is not uninterested, in moral matters. There is no extra check; no sense of being bound by common interest, or the common good.