Watching the English

THE MONEY-TALK TABOO

'But why?' asked another mystified foreigner - an Iranian immigrant with whom I was discussing the 'polite procrastination' rituals. 'You are right, this is exactly how they behave. It takes forever. It drives me crazy. But why do they do this? What is the matter with them? Why are they so reluctant to get down to business?'

Good question - to which I'm afraid there is no rational answer. The English find 'doing business' awkward and embarrassing at least partly because of a deep-seated but utterly irrational distaste for money-talk of any kind. At some stage, business-talk inevitably involves money-talk. We are comfortable enough, allowing for our usual social inhibitions, with most of the other aspects of business discussions. As long as boasting or earnestness are not required, we'll talk reasonably happily about the details of the product or project, and pragmatic issues such as objectives, what needs to be done, how, where, by whom and so on. But when it comes to what we call 'the sordid subject of money', we tend to become tongue-tied and uncomfortable. Some cover their embarrassment by joking, some by adopting a blustering, forthright, even aggressive manner; some become flustered and hurried, others may be over-polite and apologetic, or prickly and defensive. You will not often see an English person entirely at ease when obliged to engage in money-talk. Some may appear brash and bullish, but this is often as much a symptom of dis-ease as the nervous joking or apologetic manner.

A frustrated American immigrant told me that she had 'finally figured out that it is best to do all the financial negotiating in letters or emails. The English just can't talk about money face to face, you have to do it in writing. In writing they're fine - they don't have to look you in the eye and they don't have to say all those dirty words out loud'. As soon as she said this, I realised that this is exactly how I have always managed to get round the problem myself. I am typically, squeamishly English about money, and when negotiating fees for consultancy work or trying to get research funding I will always try to put all those dirty words - money, cost, price, fees, payment, etc. - in writing rather than say them face to face or even on the telephone. (To be honest, I don't even like writing them, and usually try to cajole my long-suffering co-director into doing all the negotiating for me - with the feeble excuse that I am useless at maths.)

Being English, I had always rather taken it for granted that this avoidance of money-talk was normal, that everyone found it easier to discuss the taboo subject in writing, but my well-travelled informants were adamant that this is a peculiarly English problem. 'I never get this anywhere else in Europe,' said one. 'Everywhere else you can be up-front about money. They're not ashamed or embarrassed about it; you just talk normally, they don't try to skirt round it or feel they have to apologise or make a joke out of it - that's it, with the English you always get that sort of nervous laughter, someone always tries to make a joke out of it.'

The joking is of course another coping mechanism, our favourite way of dealing with anything we find frightening or uncomfortable or embarrassing. Even high-powered City bankers and brokers - people who have to talk about money all day long - are affected by the money-talk taboo. One merchant banker told me that some types of dealing and negotiating are OK because 'it's not real money', but that when negotiating over his own fees he suffers from the same squeamish embarrassment as everyone else. Other City financiers echoed this, and explained that, like everyone else, money-men cope with embarrassment about money-talk by joking. When things go wrong, one of them told me, 'you'll say, "So, are we still on your Christmas-card list?"'

To be honest, I am somewhat puzzled by the money-talk taboo, despite my own instinctive adherence to it. Introspection does not really help me to figure out the origins of the English squeamishness about money-talk at work. Our distaste for money-talk in everyday social life is well established: you never ask what someone earns, or disclose your own income; you never ask what price someone paid for anything, nor do you announce the cost of any of your own possessions. In social contexts, there is a sort of 'internal logic' to the money-talk taboo, in that it can be explained, to some extent, with reference to other basic 'rules of Englishness' to do with modesty, privacy, polite egalitarianism and other forms of hypocrisy. But to extend the money-talk taboo to the world of work and business seems, to put it mildly, perverse. Surely this should be an exception to the rule - the one arena in which, for obvious practical reasons, we set aside or suspend our prissy distaste and 'talk turkey' like everyone else? But then, that would be expecting the English to behave rationally.

While I'm being ruthlessly honest, I have to admit that saying there is an 'internal logic' to the money-talk taboo is a bit of a cop out. Yes, the taboo is clearly related, in a 'grammatical' sort of way, to the rules of privacy, modesty and polite egalitarianism, but this is how anthropologists always try to explain the more outlandishly irrational beliefs or grotesque practices of the tribes and societies they study. A belief or practice may seem irrational (or in some cases downright stupid or cruel), but, we argue, it makes sense in relation to other elements of the cultural system of beliefs and practices and values of the tribe or community in question. Using this clever little trick, we can find an 'internal logic' for all sorts of daft and apparently unintelligible notions and customs, from witchcraft and rain-dances to female circumcision. And yes, it does help to make them more intelligible, and it is important to understand why people do these things. But it doesn't make them any less daft.

Not that I'm putting the English money-talk taboo on a par with female circumcision: I'm just saying that sometimes anthropologists should come clean and acknowledge that a particular native belief or practice is pretty bloody weird, and perhaps not entirely in the natives' own best interest. At least in this case I can't be accused of being ethnocentric or colonial or patronising (anthropological equivalents of blasphemy, for which one can be excommunicated) as the daft taboo I am denigrating is an unwritten rule of my own native culture, and one that I blindly and slavishly obey.

Variations and the Yorkshire Inversion

The money-talk taboo is a distinctively English behaviour code, but it is not universally observed. There are significant variations: southerners are generally more uncomfortable with money-talk than northerners, and the middle- and upper-classes tend to be more squeamish about it than the working classes. Indeed middle-class and upper-class children are often brought up to regard talking about money as 'vulgar' or 'common'.

In the world of business, observance of the taboo increases with seniority: whatever their individual class or regional origins, higher-ranking people in English companies are more likely to be squeamish about money-talk. Those from working-class and/or northern backgrounds may start out with little or no 'natural' embarrassment about money-talk, but as they rise through the ranks they learn to be awkward and uncomfortable, to make apologetic jokes, to procrastinate and avoid the issue.

There are, however, pockets of stronger resistance to the money-talk taboo, particularly in Yorkshire, a county that prides itself on being forthright, blunt and plain-spoken, especially on matters that mincing, hesitant southerners find embarrassing, such as money. To illustrate this no-nonsense, no-frills attitude, Yorkshiremen describe a standard conversation between a Yorkshire travelling salesman and a Yorkshire shopkeeper as follows:

Salesman, entering shop: 'Owt?'

Shopkeeper: 'Nowt.'42

Salesman leaves.

This is a caricature, of course - most Yorkshire people are probably no more blunt than any other northerners - but it is a caricature with which a great many people from this area identify, and some actively do their best to live up to it. Far from beating about the bush, dithering and euphemising about money in the usual English manner, the proud-to-be-Yorkshire businessman will take a perverse pleasure in blatantly flouting the money-talk taboo - saying, directly and without jokes or preamble: 'Right, and what's all that going to cost me, then?'

But this is not an exception that invalidates or even questions the rule. It is a deliberate, dramatic inversion of the rule - something that can only occur where a rule is well established and understood. It is the flip side of the same coin, not a different and separate coin. Blunt Yorkshiremen know that they are turning the rules upside-down: they do it on purpose, they make jokes about it, they take pride in their maverick, iconoclastic status within English culture. In most other cultures, their directness about money would pass without notice: it would simply be normal behaviour. In England, it is remarked upon, joked about, recognized as an aberration.

Class and the Vestigial Trade-prejudice Rule

Without attempting to defend or justify the money-talk taboo, I can see that there might be historical explanations for this peculiar practice, as well as the rather circular 'grammatical' ones. I mentioned earlier that we still suffer from vestigial traces of a prejudice against 'trade', left over from the days when the aristocracy and landed gentry - and indeed anyone wishing to call himself a gentleman - lived off the rents from their land and estates, and did not engage in anything so vulgar as the making and selling of goods. Trade was low-class, and those who made their fortune by commerce were always quick to purchase a country estate and attempt to conceal all evidence of their former undesirable 'connections'. In other words, the upper-class prejudice against trade was in fact shared by the lower social ranks, including those who were themselves engaged in trade.

Every English school pupil's essay on Jane Austen notes that while she pokes gentle fun at the snobbish prejudices against trade of her time, she does not seriously question them - but schoolchildren are not told that residual, subconscious traces of the same snobberies are still implicit in English attitudes towards work and behaviour in the workplace. These prejudices are strongest among the upper classes, the upper-middle professional classes (that's 'professional' in the old sense, meaning those belonging to one of the traditionally respectable professions, such as the law, medicine, the church or the military) and the intelligentsia or chattering classes.

These classes have a particularly ingrained distaste for the 'bourgeois businessman', but the stigmatisation of anyone involved in 'sales' is widespread. Even the makes of car associated with either wealthy businessmen (Mercedes) or sales representatives (Mondeo) are sneered at by the socially insecure of all classes - and remember the near-universal contempt for another breed of salesman, the estate agent.

These examples indicate that the English prejudice against trade, as well as being eroded (though not eradicated) has shifted slightly since Austen's time, in that the making of goods has become significantly more acceptable than the selling of them. Although of course the two are often inextricably connected, it seems to be the pushy, undignified, money-focused selling of things that we find most distasteful, and most untrustworthy. There is an unwritten rule - a truth universally acknowledged, even - to the effect that anyone selling anything is not to be trusted. Distrust of salesmen is clearly not a uniquely English trait, but our suspicion and scepticism, and above all our contemptuous distaste, seem to be more acute and more deep-seated than other cultures'. The English are less litigious than the Americans when we feel cheated or dissatisfied with what we are sold (our tendency is still to complain indignantly to each other, rather than tackling the source of our discontent) but our more marked mistrust and dislike of salesmen means that we tend to be considerably less gullible in the first place.

In other cultures, salesmen may not be trusted, but they are somehow socially accepted in a way that they are not among the English. In other parts of the world, selling things is regarded as a legitimate way of earning a living, and successful businessmen who have made their fortune by doing so are accorded a degree of respect. In England, money will buy you a lot of things, including access to power and influence, but it will not buy you any respect - quite the opposite, in fact: there seems to be almost as much of a taboo on making money as there is on talking about it. When the English describe someone as 'rich' or 'wealthy', we almost always do so with a slight sneer, and those who can be so described will rarely use these terms of themselves: they will admit, reluctantly, to being 'quite well off, I suppose'. We may well be, as Orwell said, the most class-ridden country under the sun, but I think it is safe to say that in no other country is social class so completely independent of material wealth. And social acceptability in the wider sense is if anything inversely related to financial prosperity - there may be some surface sycophancy, but 'fat cats' are objects of contempt and derision, if not to their faces, then certainly behind their backs. If you do have the misfortune to be financially successful, it is bad manners to draw attention to the fact. You must play down your success, and appear ashamed of your wealth.

It has been said that the main difference between the English system of social status based on class (that is, birth) and the American 'meritocracy' is that under the latter, because the rich and powerful believe that they deserve their wealth and power, they are more complacent, while under the former they tend to have a greater sense of social responsibility, more compassion towards those less privileged than themselves. I'm grossly oversimplifying the arguments - whole books have been written on this - but it may be that the English embarrassment about money and lack of respect for business success have something to do with this tradition.

Having said that, it is clear that much of all this English squeamishness about money is sheer hypocrisy. The English are no less naturally ambitious, greedy, selfish or avaricious than any other nation - we just have more and stricter rules requiring us to hide, deny and repress these tendencies. Our modesty rules and rules of polite egalitarianism - which I believe are the 'grammatical laws' or 'cultural DNA' behind the money-talk taboo and the prejudice against business success - are a veneer, an exercise in collective self-delusion. The modesty we display is generally false, and our apparent reluctance to emphasize status differences conceals an acute consciousness of these differences. But hey, at least we value these virtuous qualities, and obey the rules despite their often deleterious effect on our business dealings.