Why everyone’s talking about... busybodies
WE ALL know the sort who loves sticking their nose into other people’s business, picking fault in a supercilious manner and getting a power trip from wearing a high-vis jacket. Now that behaviour has got official sanction, thanks to Boris Johnson’s army of Covid marshals charged with ensuring people obey social distancing rules and wear masks. Inevitably, though, the wardens, who’ll have no legal power, have been ridiculed as ‘Covid Wombles’ and busybodies.
But surely being a sneak is one of the many characteristics that make us human?
Possibly. In the Bible, the apostle Paul railed against ‘busybodies, speaking things which they ought not’.
The notion was cemented in 1709 by the English poet Susanna Centlivre in her play, The Busie Body, that was so popular that the main character’s name, Marplot, became a term for such a meddler. Covid has already made us a nation of curtain-twitchers and tell-tales. In a survey, 41 per cent of Britons admitted to keeping a closer eye on their neighbours’ movements since the pandemic struck.
But isn’t it for the greater good?
Depends on your point of view. Prince Charles has proudly called himself an ‘interfering busybody’, but Theresa May’s government warned against community orders being used by ‘busybody’ councils for trivial matters such as dogs being off the leash. There’s even an anti-meddler doctrine in English law, which, years ago, ‘people’s judge’ Lord Denning clarified that ‘the court will not listen to a busybody who is interfering in things which do not concern him.’ After all, Chronicles Of Narnia author CS Lewis said: ‘It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies…who torment us for our own good.’
So what drives people to poke their noses into the lives of others?
Probably because it’s easier to pass judgment on someone else’s life than fix your own problems. It also stokes a sense of moral superiority. John Lachs, an American professor of philosophy, says such meddling is also a power play – ‘putting down the other person by saying, in effect, I’m the one who knows what’s what’ – and should be discouraged.
Who’s he to tell us to stop being busybodies? That’s busybodyish itself!
Exactly.