A Matter of Manners

In today's Sunday Times, Niall Ferguson refers to the current pushback against sexual harassment as a 'revolution in manners' (he has well-founded reservations about its potential to 'overshoot', as revolutions do).  Ferguson is surely right to identify the whole business as a matter of manners – manners in need of reform – and he's the third person I've noticed so far making this identification (the others were an unlikely pair – Jacob Rees Mogg and Petronella Wyatt).
 These days the word 'manners' tends to be narrowly defined in terms of such things as table manners and the fatuous rules of etiquette, but it represents something far bigger and more important than any of that. Manners are the basic lubricant of society, the conventions of behaviour that enable us to live together with minimal friction. The aim of manners, properly understood, is to avoid causing discomfort to other people – discomfort ranging all the way from awkwardness and embarrassment to real pain and distress. It is indeed a matter of convention, and therefore liable to evolve over time, but that doesn't mean it is any less real, important or 'authentic'.
 Instead of taking a forensic view of the whole sexual harassment brouhaha as a matter of infringed rights and criminal (or proto-criminal) offences, it might be more illuminating to consider it as being, at least in part, the product of an evolution of manners, of the ways men and women interact with each other. There is clearly criminality in cases where underaged children are involved (though this doesn't seem to apply to the rock stars who thrived in the Seventies) and in the activities of the more thuggish sexual predators (one of whom once occupied the White House). But much of the rest is down to a movement in the barriers of offence. It is no doubt regrettable, but it is a fact that, back in the Seventies, women and girls took a degree of what we would now call sexual harassment as an everyday nuisance, one that most of them were perfectly capable of dealing with. Now we tend to find such behaviour unacceptable – quite right too – but then it was, just, within the boundaries of the acceptable. It was, however, outside the bounds of mannerly behaviour. Such behaviour was, among other things, bad manners – inconsiderate, crude and likely to cause distress.
 The English were once famed for their manners – not elaborate displays of fake courtesy but a basic decent concern not to discomfit or pain the other person, to rub along (rubbing along being one of the great English talents, along with muddling through). These manners were closely related to English self-effacement and respect for fair play. Of course they were by no means universal, but they were enough in evidence for the stereotype to gain traction and persist. It is in decline now, in an age of coarsening manners and strident self-assertion, but it does survive (especially away from the urban scrum). We should cherish and encourage it; manners, in this broad humane sense, really matter. They make us what we are. As William of Wykeham put it centuries ago, 'Manners makyth man'.