Watching the English

WORK RULES AND ENGLISHNESS

Looking at the guiding principles identified at the beginning of this chapter, and trying to figure out what they tell us about Englishness, I am immediately struck by all the ambivalence and contradictions in English attitudes to work. The 'muddle rules' seem to be full of 'buts'. We are serious but not serious, dutiful but grudging, moaning but stoical, inventive but also stuffily set in our ways. I would not go so far as to say that we have a 'love/hate' relationship with work. That would be too passionate and extreme and un-English. It is more a sort of 'quite like/rather dislike' relationship - a somewhat uneasy compromise, rather than an angst-ridden conflict.

There is something quintessentially English, it seems to me, about all this middling, muddling and fence-sitting. English work-culture is a mess of contradictions, but our contradictions lack the sense of dramatic tension and struggle that the word normally implies: they are generally half-resolved, by means of a peculiarly English sort of grumpy, vague, unsatisfactory compromise. We can neither embrace work with wholehearted Protestant zeal, nor treat it with Latin-Mediterranean insouciant fatalism. So we sit awkwardly on the fence, somewhere in the middle ground, and grumble about it all - quietly.

The concept of compromise seems to be deeply embedded in the English psyche. Even on the rare occasions when we are roused to passionate dispute, we usually end up with a compromise. The English Civil War was fought between supporters of the monarchy and supporters of Parliament - and what did we end up with? Well, er, both. A compromise. We are not keen on dramatic change, revolutions, sudden uprisings and upheavals. A truly English protest march would see us all chanting: 'What do we want? GRADUAL CHANGE! When do we want it? IN DUE COURSE!'

When in doubt, which would seem to be much of the time, we turn to our favourite, all-purpose coping mechanism: humour. I think that the workplace humour rules have added a new dimension to our understanding of English humour and its role in our cultural codes. We already knew that the English put a high value on humour, but we had only seen this 'in operation' in purely social contexts, where there is perhaps less need for clarity, certainty and efficiency than in the workplace. We can only calculate the value of humour now that we have seen what the English are prepared to sacrifice in its honour - things like clarity, certainty and efficiency.

The workplace humour and modesty rules have also helped us to get 'inside' another stereotype, that of English anti-intellectualism, which we stuck under our microscope and broke down into its component parts - namely prohibitions on earnestness and boastfulness. Having got anti-intellectualism in my Petri dish, I've now poked away at it a bit more and tweezered out another component, which looks awfully like 'empiricism', particularly the anti-theory, anti-dogma, anti-abstraction elements of the English empiricist tradition, our stolid preference for the factual, concrete and common-sense, and deep mistrust of obscurantist, 'Continental' theorising and rhetoric. There is something fundamentally empiricist about the English 'Oh, come off it!' response. In fact, there is something essentially empiricist about most aspects of the English sense of humour. I've got a feeling we'll be coming back to this.

The modesty rule seems to be yet another consistently recurring theme - and, as with humour, the workplace provides a useful and revealing 'test' of the strength of this rule. We found that when the requirements of advertising and marketing are at odds with the English modesty rule, the rule wins, and advertising must be re-invented to comply with the prohibition on boasting.

The polite-procrastination rule highlights another familiar trait, the one I have taken to calling the English 'social dis-ease', as a shorthand way of referring to our chronic inhibitions, our perverse obliqueness, our congenital inability to engage in a direct and straightforward fashion with other human beings. The money-talk taboo, a symptom of this dis-ease, brings us back to the usual-suspect themes of class-consciousness, modesty and hypocrisy - all increasingly strong candidates for defining-characteristic status, along with our penchant for excessive moderation.

I have a hunch that fair play will also turn out to be a fundamental law of Englishness. Like humour and 'social dis-ease', the fair-play ideal seems to pervade and influence much of our behaviour, although it is often manifested as polite egalitarianism, suggesting that hypocrisy is an equally powerful element.

More familiar themes recur in the workplace moaning rules, but with some new twists. We find that even our constant Eeyorish moaning is subject to the ubiquitous humour rules, particularly the injunction against earnestness. And the 'Typical!' rule reveals what may be a modern variant of the 'stiff upper lip' - a distinctively English quality, which for the moment I am calling 'grumpy stoicism'.

Finally, the after-work-drinks and office-party rules bring us back again to the theme of English social dis-ease, in particular to our need for 'props' and facilitators - such as alcohol and special settings with special rules - to help us overcome our many social inhibitions. More of these in the next chapter.

41. A salty, dark brown spread made from the yeast by-products of the beer-brewing process.

42. For those who do not speak Yorkshire: 'Owt?' means 'Anything?' and 'Nowt' means 'Nothing'.

43. Although I've always wondered: how do we know that no two snowflakes are identical? I mean, has someone actually checked them all?

44. This is not universally the case: in many cultures, specifically those with a more healthy, 'integrated' attitude to drinking, alcohol is equally used to mark the transition from home/play to work. In France and Spain, for example, working men will often stop at a bar or cafe on their way to work for a 'fortifying' glass of wine, calvados or brandy.