"Yet norms of civility also had another, more positive function. In an age in which religious, cultural and political passions were even more extreme than in our own, they enabled people to overcome deeply rooted and potentially dangerous differences, to live harmoniously side by side, and to discourse with one another without rancour, violence or abuse. Ultimately for Thomas this is their more important and enduring purpose, as “restraint, tolerance and mutual understanding” are the necessary preconditions for humans to coexist and flourish."
I don't think the UK (for one) is especially hierarchical. For instance, people in the modern UK (as opposed to in Agatha Christie novels) are usually referred to by their first names. And still a Chinese friend of mine told me he found English people to be unusually polite, moreso than Americans or Chinese. The way I understand English manners is that they're based on expressing sensitivity for other people, not hierarchy.
And in English, you don't have the T/V distinction. In languages which do have one, it's impossible to talk to someone without implying something about their relative social status.
> My hypothesis on manners is that the strictness of norms are proportional to hierarchicalness...
There is some truth to this, and the article touches on it in passing (of course, it's The Guardian, how could they miss the opportunity?)
But there's more to it than that. Certainly manners were circumscribed as a way of denoting hierarchy, and as a result those not on the top mocked the rules of their "betters", claiming that the rules existed only to exclude others.
However often the rules themselves had purpose, and in specific, hygienic ones. The use of cutlery, not sharing cutlery, separating food from the table with a plate etc were practices that reduced disease transmission. In this regard, democratization of manners would be better if some manners of the "uppers" were spread widely as opposed to being discarded. Of course other rules were designed to exclude others, and those ones should be (and many have been) chucked out. But it's worth being selective.
Mine is the ability to distinguish between public and private. You can do what you want in your home, but in public you should show consideration. The current decline of manners is manifesting in a switch whereby people are expected to demonstrate manners by ignoring mannerless people doing private things in public.
Manners is a measure of social conformity, just like countries with populations that are more likely to queue or wait in line, which the UK seems to be good at, but does this also restrict their economic activities on the global stage, or does it make their more civil barbarians when doing business?
That seems to map very well to feudalism and well blood feud cultures as well. There was an interesting thing that happened in both Japanese and English linguistically - both had 'ultrapolite' linguistic elements that were discarded because they wound up used only mockingly/ironically when it went from polite to refer to your superior using thee/thou as opposed to rude. Thee/thou was transitioning to rude in Shakespeare's time and while Japanese still has many formal pronouns the most extreme were reserved for historical fiction, mockery, and the massively arrogant.
You've got it sorta backwards, at least as far as English is concerned.
"Thou" and "thee" were the descendents of Old English "þū" and "þē", respectively, and were originally the nominative and dative[1] forms of the singular second-person pronoun. "Ye" and "you" (< OE "ġē" and "ēow") were the corresponding forms of the plural second-person pronoun. In the High Middle Ages, English adopted the "tu-vous distinction", named after the French pronouns corresponding to "thou-you", wherein social superiors were always addressed in the plural (cf. "the royal we"). "Thou" fell out of use because people did not want to risk offending anyone by implying the other was their social inferior, wherefore they began addressing everyone as a superior.
When Shakespeare writes "I thou thee!", it's not to ironically mock, but rather to explicitly disparage, by asserting that the recipient is inferior, unworthy of being ye'd.
Of course, the vacuum created by the loss of a productive singular was later filled by constructions like "y'all", "you guys", "yous", &c. The same phenomenon occurred in Dutch, where the singular "du"/"di" was replaced by the plural (and therefore formal) "gi/u" during the Middle Dutch period, and the plural later filled by "jullie", a contraction of "je lui", meaning "you folks".
[1]: In late Old English, also the accusative, replacing "þec". From Middle English, the oblique (the sole objective case).
Japanese continues to have plenty of "ultrapolite linguistic elements". However, there are many formerly polite pronouns for "you" that have, over time, become blunt or outright rude: omae, temae > temee, kisama, etc.
These transitions can also be rapid: my mother-in-law calls me otaku without a hint of irony, since that was a perfectly polite term until it was suddenly adopted to refer to sociopathic geeks in the wake of the Tsutomi Miyazaki murders in 1989. Like many people in her age group, she never got the memo on this.
That is indeed how it was. "thou" was the familiar form in contrast to "you" which was the formal form (see for instance the discussion at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou). Modern English speakers typically hear "thou" as more formal because it only persists in Biblical and similar archaic usages.
The use of “thou” in the English translation of the Bible was made deliberately to “lessen the gap” with the divinity (as opposed to the incomprehensible Latin used by the Catholics.) Funny how that got lost and it’s now perceived as old-fashioned submissiveness.
As far as I can tell, the use of "thou" in the early (until about the 17th century) English translations was to preserve the grammatical number found in the Hebrew and Greek originals, which had separate forms for singular and plural second-person pronouns. This was certainly the case in the Old English translations, as well as in Wycliffe's Middle English and Tyndale's early Modern English. When those translations were made, "thou" and "ye" were the ordinary English words that corresponded with the originals. It has nothing at all to do with Latin.
At the time James VI/I commissioned his Authorized translation, "thou" was already starting to fall out of production, but was not something that seemed foreign or archaic to English speakers, and he'd asked his translators to follow the style of the existing English translations, which were by-and-large based on Tyndale's. There are certainly some ways in which the translation attempts to emphasize certain theological/christological viewpoints, but the usage of "thou" is not one of them.
> There are certainly some ways in which the translation attempts to emphasize certain theological/christological viewpoints, but the usage of "thou" is not one of them.
It wasn't theologically neutral, though. To address God with the polite plural form of the second-person pronoun suggests that the speaker is addressing an entity that occupies a higher position in some kind of social hierarchy, which implies that one's relationship to God is mediated by social structures. Use of the singular form was considered more consistent with Protestant theology, which emphasized a direct and individual connection between the believer and their God.
You see the same phenomenon in German, a language that's retained multiple forms of the second person. In German translations of the Bible, and in German prayers, God is addressed as "Du" (the familiar singular "you").
> You see the same phenomenon in German, a language that's retained multiple forms of the second person. In German translations of the Bible, and in German prayers, God is addressed as "Du" (the familiar singular "you").
You also see it in the Latin Vulgate, where God is addressed as "tu" (singular), rather than "vos" (plural). My point is that the translation as "thou" was more-or-less a direct translation of the original text in almost all cases, preserving the distictions made in the Hebrew and Greek manuscripts. At the time those English translations were made, the choice was theologically neutral insofar as the original texts were theologically neutral.
All those people who think we should go back to some earlier form of Western culture try to make the manners back then look far better than they actually were.
This is off-topic, but I just wanted to highlight the following sentence:
[Thomas] reads everything. Not just the latest scholarship across innumerable topics, but also theorists – whether Marx and Engels, Gramsci or Bourdieu.
Zounds! Don't tell me he reads Lenin and Kropotkin as well!
Well yeah, it's unusual enough to be worth mentioning that a historian is interested in social theory. As an example of the stuff they read that you might not expect.
All four named authors were communists. In attempting to demonstrate diversity, they accidentally demonstrated the opposite.
It would be like bragging about the diversity of people that you listen to today, and then listing Bill O’Reilly, Alex Jones, Sean Hannity, and Tucker Carlson. Yes, that's a lot of work by a bunch of different people, but you're not really getting exposed to the full range of thought in our culture.
More seriously, reading these writers is really basic stuff for any humanities graduate curriculum...and the book under review is authored by a well-known Oxford don.
For what it’s worth not a lot of Marxists themselves have read Marx, and a guy like Gramsci wasn’t that popular outside of Italy and a few select circles until not that long ago. It baffles me though why people still spend time reading Bourdieu, he reminds me of “champagne socialism”.
Yeah, we could do with more of this.