We used the rack ... but in the nicest possible way
HISTORY IN PURSUIT OF CIVILITY by Keith Thomas (Yale £25)
Oddly enough, in this fascinating but disquieting book about the history of English civility, the words ‘barbarian’ and ‘barbarous’ crop up just as many times as the words ‘civil’ and ‘civilised’.
The English, it seems, have for centuries liked to pride ourselves on our marvellous manners, and we’ve done so by boasting (rather uncivilly) about how much more civil we are than the cruel Turks, the slothful Irish, the barbarous Scythians, the boorish Chinese, the savage Native Americans and the wild Welsh.
Keith Thomas, a fellow of All Souls, Oxford, and a walking library, has amassed thousands of quotes from thinkers on the subject of civility through the ages.
Civility, he tells us, is the essential ingredient in any polished and commercial society that makes it possible ‘to decide every contest without tumult’.
Since the end of the Middle Ages, the English have been writing and devouring guides about how to stand correctly, never give the impression of being in a hurry, sign off letters with the correct words, address our servants, control our bodily emissions and laugh with our mouths shut in order to avoid what lord Chesterfield called ‘the shocking distortion of the face’ caused by laughing with the mouth open.
But just as you’re getting comfortable with all this lovely stuff about the enlightened English, Thomas reminds us that this was also the England that arranged the forcible transportation of 3.4 million black Africans to slavery.
Cutting right through all that gentlemanliness was a seam of racism, snobbery — and, some would say, barbarism.
The nice, ‘civilised’ England, the England that signed off letters with the superficially charming words, ‘I am honoured to remain, sir, your obedient servant,’ was also the England whose army in the 18th century had a plan to eliminate hostile Native Indian tribes by distributing blankets infected by smallpox: they openly intended to ‘extirpate this execrable race’.
When Oliver Cromwell brutally subjugated the ‘savage’ Irish in 1649 — which caused the deaths of 618,000 Irish out of a total population of 1.5 million — John Milton defended this as ‘a civilising conquest’ that would teach the natives to ‘wax more civil’. One feels that a bit of selfexamination might have come in useful.
Thomas writes that the honey-tongued English have also been experts at dressing up our cruelty in the language of Christianity and good intentions. The Elizabethans, as they tortured people for
heresy, claimed that they ‘used the rack in as charitable a manner as could be’.
Elizabeth I was so shocked when she heard that Catholic plotters had been castrated and disembowelled while still alive that she ordered the next batch should simply be hanged. How very considerate!
It was not until the late 18th century, when travellers started going to other countries and taking a closer look at the locals, that the news gradually trickled back to us that the world in fact contained good- natured Siberians, kind Aborigines, ingenious Africans, civil Tongans, polite Maoris and honest Native Americans.
Travel, Thomas writes, ‘dispelled the prejudices disseminated by armchair geographers’.
There’s a theory that all civilisations are capable of falling back into barbarism: it happened in Ancient Rome and modern Germany. ‘ The irony,’ Thomas points out, ‘is that the Holocaust would have been impossible without the technological and bureaucratic expertise to be found only in a highly civilised society.
‘Many of those who devised and executed it were perfectly capable of courtesy and civility in their ordinary lives.’
That’s the thing for all civilised countries to beware of. If we put too much emphasis on being outwardly civil, Thomas suggests, we can find ourselves trapped in a society where every polite exchange is camouflage for cynical self-advancement.
So, having read this stimulating book, I might start signing off my business emails with the bald truth: ‘I am bored rigid to have to remain your reluctant acquaintance.’