In villages, individual houses are given names - how else could the postman know where to deliver the letters? Rose Cottage, Sea View, Sunny Heights announce proudly, This is what is special about our home.
We give our schools and hospitals names too. School No.37, for example, sounds heartlessly official to British ears. We wonder how a number can inspire pride. We do not say 'School Number 15 named after Pushkin' which is a Russian habit in which Pushkin gets forgotten. We say Wordsworth School or St Peter's School or Ashwood School. Big office buildings or blocks of flats have names - Nelson House or Daffodil Buildings. Our instinct is to make our place of work homely, comfortable and at the same time distinctive. Our home, we are saying, is not the same as your home - even if they are actually rather similar.
To return to English values. We are sometimes described as a nation of amateurs - and this description is intended as a criticism. It means that we do not take professional commitment seriously enough, and where other nations are proud of their qualifications and diplomas, we enjoy ourselves by simply doing things without attention to the level at which they should be done. That may have some truth. But the English have no objection to being amateurs; consider our enthusiasm for creating and enjoying small groups. [See Part 6, Chapters 2 and 3.] I do not want to suggest that the members of such groups always work in harmony; they don't! Frequently they dispute, quarrel, resign, re-make their friendships, and learn to compromise. They are human. What they do not accept is the notion that one person must be the leader to tell them what their attitude must be. People do not feel pressure to respond alike, as Russians claim they do. 'We Russians feel/think/believe such-and-such!' The English simply would not say that. They decide for themselves how to compromise and work alongside each other - or to leave if such arrangements are not satisfactory. If someone says, 'Comrades, we are all agreed...' the reaction of everyone in the room will be to say, 7 don't agree!' So, since widespread revolt is not what we want, people, even leaders, do not say, 'We all agree'. They are careful to do nothing so silly.
This leads me to another point. The English (and the Scots) are culturally pragmatic. To understand this discussion you have to realise that 'pragmatic' has different meanings in English and Russian. For you, a pragmatic person is someone who makes choices on the basis of money or other gain; someone who is not very principled. For us 'being pragmatic' means recognising the real complications of a situation, and working out the best way of dealing with them. Throughout this book I have given you hundreds of 'examples' of the way we think pragmatically. We know that what is good for someone is often bad for someone else; that policy-making emerges from struggles of different interests; that solving problems is best done not using theories but taking account of evidence of what actually works. And in life, what works in one case will often not work in another. For this reason we are suspicious of overarching theories, whether they be theories of revolution, theories of cultural definition, theories of the responses of the human psyche or theories of translation. We want to see evidence, examples, analogies. 'How do you know?' seems to us a very sensible question. It is typical of this culture that our great scientist is Darwin who constructed his theory of evolution out of thousands of little pieces of evidence that we can all examine. In a curious way, Darwin's colossal explanation of the origins of species was an amateur activity to which many amateurs have happily contributed - and continue to contribute.
Our love for the specific, for what actually works, means that we are not made comfortable by emphatic and assertive language about our individual rights. After all, the notion of 'the individual' can be as theoretical as the notion of 'the people'. If you compare us with Americans, you will find that they are taught daily to speak of 'the American people' in a public language that is positive, and to talk of themselves as individuals in language which is quite lacking in irony. In England, we find it unfriendly and rude to say anything directly. Circumlocutions, often ironic circumlocutions are almost essential.
For example: Foreign students learn that you must not use a simple imperative when you are in England. 'Sit down' sounds very rude. But strangely, 'Sit down please,' does not sound much better! Both of them are orders, and we resist orders just as we resist trying to order other people to do things. So I might say, 'Would you like to sit down?' or 'Why don't you try that chair which is more comfortable than it looks'. Each sentence is shaped to allow the other person to say, 'Thank you but I don't want to sit down' or 'I would prefer a more comfortable chair'. In other words, my conversation, at a subconscious level is always taking into account the fact that the other person may not wish to do what I suggest and that therefore that person should be offered a polite way to refuse my proposal.
Such speech is not worked out deliberately. It is how we have learned to speak and understand each other from childhood. But to foreigners, including other native speakers of English such as Americans or Australians, the speech of the English sounds long-winded, insincere and hypocritical. In fact it is extremely difficult for us to speak or write in any other way. If I write emails to foreigners who are struggling with the language I have to go through the message cutting out all those 'woulds' and 'mights' and 'perhapses'. At the end I feel as if I have written a very rude message, even if it is clear and unambiguous. Why do we use language in this way?
The answer - and here we are getting to the heart of the matter - is because the English are trained from an early age to judge and assess social responses. This is perhaps the most difficult characteristic to explain because it is so deep-rooted as to be instinctive. Russians who are feeling unhappy or bad-tempered or confused do not hesitate to tell people what they feel. They are comfortable communicating their private worlds to others. And when their mood changes, what they say changes too. From the Russian point of view this is being emotionally honest. Humans beings are changeable creatures, so why should they try to disguise their emotions? Such openness co-exists with that Russian willingness to accept social conformity when told what to do by their leaders. In England, the opposite happens.
From babyhood, English children are taught that other people want their privacy. 'Other people do not want to hear about your plans or your unhappiness, or about what happened to you at nursery or school or with your friends. It is fine for the family to know, but you should not 'impose' yourself on other people.' (Parents are rarely conscious that they are teaching these rules, because the rules have been deeply internalised.) So the English hesitate to talk to people whom we do not know until we are sure that they want to talk to us. If two or three people with this rule somewhere deep in their minds meet and do not know each other, they may be silent or unwelcoming for a long, long time! Even if each of them individually would love to talk to the others, they would need one of those three to be unusually bold in order to get the conversation started. (Personally, I enjoy the culture of Russian trains where people who do not know each other readily exchange life stories, opinions and confessions. Most English people would be much more wary of engaging the attention of a stranger because they would be forcing him to answer politely in return.)