When someone - say, a child in the school playground - does not know the rules and loudly declares what she feels, even cries, the other children will feel embarrassed for her. And because of their embarrassment they may not rush to comfort her. Poor lonely child! you may say. Yes, this is the origin of that reputation of the English for heartlessness. But there is another side to this social training.
Nobody can decide and announce: 'You must not behave like that!' Part of our training is not to impose on other people even when we think they are behaving bizarrely or stupidly. So this explains the other observed truth about England - that we tolerate eccentrics, difficult people, nonconformists in social behaviour. Indeed we do. (A trivial example. In Russia elderly women come up to me and tell me how to dress - they insist that I put a scarf around my throat. It is inconceivable that an English elderly woman would do the same. She may think I am being foolish, but if I want to be cold, that is my affair!)
You should be able to see that this culture of emotional privacy also leads to strong resistance to leaders - or anyone else - who tells us that we are all agreed in the next steps. We learn to compromise, we may dislike but we obey the law, but we do not expect or encourage uniformity.
One example of our socially inhibited training is often commented on by foreigners. The English are not a very hospitable nation. I wish we were but I know that only a minority of us find it easy or comfortable to invite others to our homes. I believe the reason is closely allied to the previous discussion. 'If I invite someone he or she may want to refuse. How can I help him or her to avoid accepting my invitation? Well, the simplest way is not to ask in the first place.' Again, I do not think this is carefully thought-out; it is an instinctive avoidance of intimacy with others who may not want to be intimate - especially with foreigners who may not want our invitations but who will not know how to refuse them. (If you believe that this is crazy, so do I. But I understand in a way that I do not understand for example, your version of social conformity. It's a question of culture.)
Another example: Russian hosts lay the most beautiful tables. Why, they wonder, are English hosts so sloppy, so untroubled by the grand effect? The answer is that those who do invite you to their home do not feel that they are on display. Some English people enjoy showing off their tableware and crystal glass as much as you do, but that no English person feels that he (or she) has to behave just like everyone else. Many are simply informal and see no reason why they should impose on themselves an artificial formality; others will devote hours to cooking but quite forget to wipe the table, others will be offering round drinks while everyone prepares the meal. Oh yes, it happens in Russia; but it happens much more often in England. This kind of casualness is simply a manifestation of the fact that we do not see why we should copy other people or follow a formula. We like to be ourselves. It is a different aspect of our sense of privacy.
And yet - and yet - cultures do change. The stereotype of the reserved Englishman and Englishwoman is in so many ways out of date. In the 1960s (fifty years ago!) we were for a few years the most obviously demonstrative people on earth - or so we said. In more recent decades the success of much of our multi-cultural world means that we have absorbed cultural assumptions from other ethnic groups such as the splendours of street carnivals, open-air eating and drinking, greater demonstrativeness with our children, and greater public expressions of emotion - in sport, in grieving at death, and in reporting on disasters.
Mobile phones are used by the young (and not so young) in Britain all the time without embarrassment. The decision that a mobile phone user has to make is: 'Do I decide to allow incoming calls to interrupt me or do I switch my phone off?' That question is absolutely different from the one I have tried to analyse as typical of English social responses: 'If I phone I might interrupt someone who might not want to hear me at this moment - so should I do it? And should I impose my conversation on others who cannot help hearing me?' In both cases our culture used to teach us to say 'Probably not', but such obligations are no longer relevant for the young, even those who are naturally polite.
Furthermore, although our privacy is recognized in law, our own commitment to it has been seriously challenged. British people used to think of 'the-right-not-to-tell-the-authorities-about-our-private-lives' as an essential part of British civilization. We do not carry around internal passports or identity cards, we can move freely in our own country, and no policeman or other official has the right to demand personal information from us - so we are free! This was always a great claim of the British when we looked round at other countries in the world.
The situation has changed because of modern technology. Sophisticated computer programmes mean that many databases exist which will provide any enquirer with our names, addresses, and often details which we would prefer not to be public. That is a situation shared by the population of the world. What is odd is that the British have enthusiastically adopted CCTV cameras all over the country, more per head of the population than in any other country. The cameras are certainly helpful in capturing criminals, but at the same time they mean that it is possible to trace the movements of almost anyone at any time in an urban environment. Perhaps such surveillance does not matter although it worries many libertarians (people who consider that the freedom of the individual is the most valuable quality in society, more important than 'solidarity', 'authority', etc). The oddity is that our willing acceptance of CCTV cameras does not fit with our other enthusiasm for privacy and the right of the individual not to disclose information. So perhaps our culture of social behaviour is changing radically.
If you ask the English themselves what they think are typical 'English' values, they will talk, with some hesitation and embarrassment, about tolerance and fairness. These are helpful concepts. Indeed the notion of 'tolerance' shows an intriguing cultural development. I explained in previous paragraphs how our insistence that we must not impose on others leads to our willingness to accept oddities and eccentricities. When we began to receive immigrants in large numbers from different parts of the world, we complained, as people do everywhere, of the unpleasant smells of their food, of their their discordant parties, their unEnglish habits. But because of our culture of toleration, it was much easier to accustom ourselves to these oddities than it would have been in some more conformist cultures. We could not think of any reason why they should not have their own food or parties or strange habits. So we could not protest with the weight of culture behind us, as perhaps that the people of that small country mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, would have done.
(Do not think that everyone quickly learnt to be tolerant. Immigrants, as I have said elsewhere, have suffered and continue to suffer abuse and violence. But by international standards we have accepted and assimilated them quite successfully, and now enjoy those food smells, that music, those now-English habits.)
The other quality on which we pride ourselves is our desire to be fair. Throughout this book I have tried to show how fairness is embodied in our institutions. For example our decisions about financing universities, our attitude to health rationing, our worries about the presumed innocence of defendants are based on issues of fairness. Governments always justify policies by saying they are trying to be fair. (Their decisions may turn out to be very unfair or confused. My point is that in public and in private we try to be fair. Yes, people now jump queues who used not to do so - but they are resented and subject to public disapproval; the majority of people still accept that queuing is fair.)