Dialogue: Please pardon my little hypocrisies

Evelyn Waugh said that only ugly people needed manners. "The pretty," said Waugh, "can get away with anything."

Now I am generally well-mannered and, true to Waugh's dictum, I am not a pretty thing. Ruggedly distinctive? Well, I thank you, you are most polite, but whatever you or Waugh may say, it is not my appearance that has made me courteous.

It is fear. I am afraid of offending people. I am afraid of their aggression. Thus I am normally nice to people's faces and nasty to their backs.

My manners are little hypocrisies. To be well-mannered is to deceive. We say "how nice to have met you" when we mean the opposite and we thank people for things we don't want. We applaud speakers who have sent us into coma and we write "wish you were here" on postcards to people whom we have travelled to avoid.

Other of our manners exist to hide our bestiality. When we eat we close our mouths, when we sneeze we use a handkerchief and when we fart we blame the dog. Manners also hide selfishness. My interest in myself is greater than my interest in you by a distance best measured in light-years, but my manners suggest the opposite.

Manners used to be and probably still are most common in the country. Because the spaces between people are larger and contact is, therefore, rarer, rural drivers wave to each other and walkers say good morning.

Robert Graves compared such courtesy to the tweeting of blackbirds. I am fond of Graves but I doubt him on this one. Blackbirds tweet to establish territory or to find a mate. The tractor driver who waved to me the other day was not, I am confident, warning me off his property, nor was he making a pass at me. He was simply acknowledging a fellow member of the species.

Children, being honest and selfish creatures, have always been instinctively ill-mannered. They need to be badgered to say please and thank you and not to ask the questions which interest them.

If children are ever polite to adults, it is for one of two reasons. Either they fear they will be punished for being impolite or they have learned that politeness pleases adults and adults have money and pleased adults are more likely to part with it.

But the one constant truth about manners is that they are always in decline.

On my classroom wall I used to have a quotation saying more or less that the young no longer respected their elders, nor valued learning, nor stood up on buses. And that they lived for hedonism and hamburgers. The quotation was dated 476 BC. The Ancient Greek who said those words was, of course, an ancient ancient Greek. For it is always the old who see manners in decline. And it is always the young who are doing the declining.

But we live in a better-mannered society than any that has gone before. And the credit is due to an unlikely source. I wish to applaud the large corporations.

For these rapacious fleecers of our pockets, these dastardly global powerbrokers, have realised what present-hungry children have always known: good manners bring in the dosh.

Take a plane anywhere in New Zealand and the employees you deal with will be nothing but courteous. They will smile, they will put themselves out on your behalf and they will appear to show a genuine concern for your welfare.

Ring a telephone operator and they will be efficient and polite. Commercial courtesy is far more common than its opposite and far more common that it was when I was a child. Where now are the sullen shop assistants or the remote and condescending undermanagers at the bank? And where now is the arrogantly unctuous servility of the old department stores? Gone.

The people who now smile at me from behind counters or checkouts have been trained to do so, but that artificiality is no crime. All manners are learned whether as children or as employees we have them imposed upon us. They are, as I have said, hypocritical and superficial. But as they become ingrained, so we discover their virtues. Because if you appear to take an interest in me, I feel good. If I feel good, you feel good for making me feel good. The result is that everyone feels better and the sum of human happiness has swollen.

Friends can dispense with manners, but strangers can't. The word "polite" derives ultimately from the Greek polis meaning city, because for strangers to live together in peace in a city, they need to learn to be polite.

Let the pretty do as they wish, but it is the courteous ugly hypocrites who build civilisations.