A plea for modesty By Anne Karpf The Guardian | February 28, 2004 http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1158388,00.html People released after decades in jail are cultural historians: their world has been frozen, so they're surprised by things to which the rest of us have become habituated. If I were emerging from the clanger today, what would shock me most isn't the proliferation of reality TV shows or level of personal debt. No, what would make Britain unrecognisable is the extent of self-promotion. When Muhammad Ali said, "I am the greatest", his vainglorious boast seemed almost comic: brazen bombast indulged as black pride. When John Lennon said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus, his remarks caused outrage not only because they seemed blasphemous, but also because they sounded more swagger than description. Today, both statements would pass without comment. In between, we've had Chris Evans, Julie Burchill, Anne Robinson and disciples, who have helped turn us into a land of braggers and boasters. How did Britain become so gabby and in-your-face? We're still a nation of shopkeepers, but today what we're selling is ourselves. In the process, a constellation of personal qualities has been derided and devalued, and is in the process of vanishing altogether. Modesty, stoicism, self-restraint and resilience: these are endangered virtues, and I want to hymn them. I can't believe that I wrote those words - me, who doesn't do decorum and has chafed against gentility. Who, like my peer group, bristled in a Britain of Celia Johnsons and Trevor Howards, and frothed in the face of deference and self-effacement. Now I'm turning elegiacal and wondering if, in our contempt for traditional values, we missed what was valuable about them. I'm not doing a midlife recant. I haven't just had an epiphany revealing that a woman's place is making the cricket tea. And, of course, it's just possible that my emerging nostalgia is entirely a function of age. Where once I strode into university tutorials in my purple velvet hotpants pour �pater le professeur , now it's the professor I identify with. It was the death of one of those tutors that got me re-evaluating. A Christian and spinster, she stood for thoughtfulness, modesty, everything that isn't meretricious. I responded by bringing to tutorial a book on St Augustine and sex. And yet, reading her obituary, I was surprised to find myself feeling that hers was a life lived with integrity and unostentatiousness. I also noticed how often, in the past year or so, I've found myself admiring a person's modesty. When someone insists there's "nothing special about me: I'm very ordinary", I am instinctively curious and drawn. These are the new nonconformists. Often, these people subsume their own needs into looking after others, so contravening perhaps the central tenet of modern life - self-advancement. Indeed, modesty is now almost invariably preceded by the word "false". It's seen as a defect, a sign of insufficient self-belief, marking you down as in dire need of a makeover to bring out your inner peacock. Better to inflate your abilities than underrate them. There are no librarians in glasses who need to be told they're beautiful any more: they all have their own website, agent and brand of bottled chutzpah. Along with modesty, that other quintessentially British characteristic, self-deprecation, is on the wane - it doesn't work in a culture of swank and bravado. It lends politicians a fatal air of diffidence, too, as in the case of Charles Kennedy, who lacks the ranting gene and self-deprecates nicely. Lord Bell, the Tory peer and advertising maven, argues that all the classic British television ads - for Hovis, Heineken and Hamlet - rested on the notion of self-deprecation. But he adds that stalwart markers of Britishness such as modesty and stoicism are disappearing because no one knows what Britishness is any more. Ironically, immigrant communities are among the last bastions of those qualities. There have been gains, too, of course: as Britain has become less demure, it has also become in many ways more exciting. While I've come to value the way generations coped with horrible experiences without pathologising themselves or exhibiting the kind of emotional incontinence that's now ubiquitous, I don't mourn the demise of denial, that all-too-British way of dismissing psychic pain as a figment of a foreigner's imagination. On the return of the repressed, I'm with Freud. Yet, viewing modern Britain, he'd have diagnosed a nation of narcissists and exhibitionists, a case of arrested infantilism. Hooked on applause, we're toddlers living in a world of one, our every achievement magnified and celebrated. The modest, by contrast, realise that, in the sum of history and geography, they're but a tiny, passing crater, and the stoics know that human pain has to be suffered and can't just be railed against. In short, they're adults. David Brent is the grotesque apotheosis of self-promotion, a gauge of how far we've travelled since the time when one of the worst accusations you could level at a person was that of having a big head. Yet the success of The Office may mark the beginnings of a backlash against amour-propre, even if we chuckled at Brent because we recognise him in others but never fingered ourselves. It may be too late to bring modesty back into favour. Perhaps we need a trade union of the self-effacing, an Oscar for tentativeness and diffidence. Only, thank the Lord, they'd never join the one or accept the other. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> In low income neighborhoods, 84% do not own computers. At Network for Good, help bridge the Digital Divide! http://us.click.yahoo.com/S.QlOD/3MnJAA/Zx0JAA/uTGrlB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> -- This is ZESTGlobal. Post articles on international affairs to [email protected] If you got this mail as a forward, subscribe to ZESTGlobal by sending a blank mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] OR, if you have a Yahoo! ID, by visiting http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTGlobal/join/ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTGlobal/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
