Money and Classes

8/13/2019 Money and Classes

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WATCHING THE ENGLISHdocumentaries in which we see birds and other creatures engaging in'displacement activity' - turning aside ?nd nervously pecking at theground or grooming themselves when they are in the middle of aconfrontation over territory or mating rights or somethirrg. In tense,hostile situations, animals often perform these meaningless 'displace-ment' routines, as a kind of coping mechanism. It is much the satnewith the English in business meetings: the whole process of doing busi-ness makes us uncomfortable and embarrassed, so we distract ourselvesand attempt to delay things by performing a lot of irrelevant little rituals.And woe betide anyone who dares to cut short our therapeuticpecking and fussing. A visiting Canadian businessman complained: 'Iwish someone had warned me about this earlier. I had a meeting theother d"y and they'd all bebn dithering and talking about the weatherand making jokes about the Mz5 for what seemed like half an hour,so I suggested maybe we could get started on the contract and they alllooked at me like I'd farted or something Like, how could I be so crass?'Another told me he had worked in Japan, and been invited to partici-pate in tea ceremonies 'but there you arc either havtng a tea ceremonyoryou are doing business, they don't try to pretend the business meetingis really a tea party, like you do here'.

TH E MON EY.TALK TABOO'But why?'asked another mystified foreigner - an Iranian immigrantwith whom I was discussing the 'polite procrastination' rituals. 'Youare right, this is exactly how they behave. It takes forever. It drives mecrazy. But why do they do this? Sfhat is the matter with them? Whyare they so reluctant to get down to business ?'

Good question - to which I'm afraid there is no rational answer. TheEnglish find 'doing business' awkward and embarrassing at least partlybecause of a deep-seated but utterly irrational distaste for money-talkof any kind. At some stage, business-talk inevitabiy involves money-talk. Ve are comfortable enough, allowing for our usual social inhibi-tions, with most of the other aspects of business discussions. As longas boasting or earnestness are not required, we'll talk reasonably happilyabout the details of the product or project, and pragmatic issues suchas objectives, what needs to be done, how, where, by whom and so on.

WORK TO RULEBut when it comes to what we call 'the sordid subject of montend to become rongue-tied and uncomfortable . Some cover theirrassmenr by ioking, some by adopting a blusterirg, forthrigaggressive manner; some become flustered and hurried, othersover-polite ald apologeric, or prickly and defensive. You will nsee an English person entirely ar ease when obliged to engage intalk. Some *iv appear brash and bullish, but this is often assymptom of dis-ease as the nervous ioking or apologetic mann' Afrustrated American immigrant told me that she had'finallyour rhat it is best to do all the financial negotiating in letters orThe English just can'r talk about money face to face, Iou havein writir-,g. In writing rhey're fine - they don't have to look yoeye and they don't have to say all those dirty words out loud'.as she said this, I realised that this is exactly how I have always mro ger round the problem myself. I am typically, squeamishlyabout money, and when negotiating fees for c6nsultancy work oro ger research funding I will always try to put all those dirtymoney, cost, price, fees, payment' etc. - in writing rather than'sfaceto face or even on rhe telephone. (To be honest, I don't ewriting rhern, and usually rry ro caiole my long-suffering cointo doing all the negoriating for me - with the feeble excuse tuseless at maths.)

Being English, I had always rarher taken it for granted that thance of money,talk was normal, that everyone found it easier tothe taboo subject in writing, but my well-travelled informanadamanr rhat this is a p..ulirrly English problem. 'I neveranywhere else in Europ,' said one. 'Everywhere else you can beabout money. They're not ashamed or embarrassed about it; younormally, they don'r try ro skirt round it or feel they have to aor make a joke our of it - thar's it, with the English you alwayssort of nervous laughter, someone always tries to make a joke oThe joking is of course another coping mechanism, ourway of dealing with anything we find frightening or uncomfoernbarrassing. Even high-porvered City bankers and brokerswho have to talk about mbney all day long - are affected by thetalk taboo. One merchant banker told me that some types oand negotiating are OK because 'it's not real money', but th

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WATCHING THT ENGLISHnegotiating over his own fees he suffers from the same squeamish embar-rassment as eve ryone else. Other City financiers echoed this, andexplained that, like everyone else, money-men cope with embarrass-ment about money-talk by ioking. 'When things go wrong, one of themtold ffi, 'you'll say, "So ) are we still on your Christmas-card list?"'To be honest, I am somewhat puzzled by the money-talk taboo,despite my own instinctive adherence to it. Introspection does not reallyhelp me to figure out the origins of the English squeamishness aboutmoney-talk at work. Our distaste for money-talk in everyday social lifeis well established: you never ask what someone earns, or disclose yourown income; you never ask what price someone paid for anything, nordo you announce the cost of any of your own possessions. In socialcontexts, there is a sort of internal logic' to the money-talk taboo, inthat it can be explained, to some extent, with reference to other basic'rules of Englishness' to do with modesty, privacy, polite egalitarianismand other forms of hypocrisy. But to xtend the money-talk taboo tothe world of work and business seems, to put it mildly, perverse. Surelythis should be an exception to the rule - the one arena in which, forobvious practical reasons, w set aside or suspend our prissy distasteand 'talk turkey' like everyone else? But then, that would be expectingthe English to behave rationally.\7hile I'm being ruthlessly honest, I have to admit that saying there isan 'internal logic' to the money-talk taboo is a bit of a cop out. Yes, themboo is clearly related, in a 'grammatical' sort of way, to the rules ofprivacy, modesty and polite egalitarianism, but this is how anthropolo-gists always try to explain the more outlandishly irrational beliefs orgrotesque practices of the tribes and societies they study. A belief or prac-tice may seem irrational (or in some cases downright stupid or cruel),but, we argue, it makes sense in relation to other elements of the culturalsystem of beliefs and practices and values of the tribe or community inquestion. Using.this clever little trick, we can find an 'internal logic' forall sorts of daft and apparently unintelligible notions and customs, fromwitchcraft and rain-dances to female circumcision. And les, it does helpto make thern more intelligible, and it is important to understand whypeople do these things. But it doesn't make them any less daftNot that I'm putting the English money-talk taboo on a par with femalecircumcision: I'm just saying that sometimes anthropologists should come

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WORK TO RULEclean and acknowledge that a particular native belief or practice bloody weird, and perhaps not entirely in the natives' own bestAt least in this case I can't be accused of being ethnocentric oror patronising (anthropological equivalents of blaspherny, for whcan be excommunicated) as the daft taboo I am denigrating is an unrule of my own native culture, and one that I blindly and slavishVariations and the Yorkshire lnversianThe money-talk taboo is a distinctively English behaviour code,not universally observed. There are significant variations: southerngenerally more uncomfortable with money-talk than northernerhe middle- and upper-classes tend to be more squeamish aboutthe working classes. Indeed middle-class and upper-class children abrought up to regard talking about money as 'vulgar' of 'commIn the world of business, observance of the taboo increassenioriry: whatever their individual class or regional origins, higher-people in English companies are more likely to be squeamish abouttalk. Those from working-class and/or northern backgrounds mout with little or no 'natural' embarrassment about money-talkthey rise through the ranks they learn to be awkward and uncomfto make apologetic jokes, to procrastinate and avoid the issue.

There are, however, pockets of stronger resistance to the rnonraboo, particularly in Yorkshire, a county that prides itself oforthright, blunt and plain-spoken, especially on matters that mhesitant southerners find embarrassing, such as money. To illustrno-nonsense, no-frills attitude, Yorkshiremen describe a sconversation between a Yorkshire travelling salesman and a Yoshopkeeper as follows:

Salesman, entering shop: 'Owt?'Shopkeeper: 'Nowt. t42Salesman leaves

This is a caricature, of course - most Yorkshire people are probmore blunt than any other northerners - but it is a caricatu42. For those who do not speak Yorkshire: 'Owt?' means Anything?' andmeans 'Nothing'.


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WATCHING THE ENGLISHwhich a greatmany people from this ^rea identify, and some activelydo their best to live up to it. Far from beating about the bush, ditheringand euphemising about rnoney in the usual English manner, the proud-to-be-Yorkshire businessman will take a perverse pleasure in blatantlyflouting the money-talk taboo - saying, directly and without jokes orpreamble: 'Right, and what's all that going to cost ffi, then?'But this is not an exception that invalidates or even questions therule. It is a deliberate, dramatic inuersion of the rule - something thatcan only occur where a rule is well estabiished and understood. It isthe flip side of the same coin, not a different and separate coin. BluntYorkshiremen know that they are turning the rules upside-down: theydo it on purpose, they make jokes about it, they take pride in theirmaverick, iconoclastic status within English culture. In most othercultures, their directness about money would pass without notice: itwould sinlply be normal behaviour. In England, it is rernarked upon,ioked about, recognized as an aberration.Class and the Vefigial Trade-preiudice Rule'Without atternpting to defend or justify the money-talk taboo, I can

see that there rnight be historical explanations for this peculiar prac-tice, as well as the rather circular 'grammatical' ones. I mentioned earlierthat we still suffer from vestigial traces of a prejudice against {trade',left over from the days when the aristocracy and landed gentry - andindeed anyone wishing to call himself a gentleman - lived off the rentsfrom their land and estates, and did not engage in anything so vulgaras the making and selling of goods. tade was low-class, and those whomade their fortune by commerce were always quick to purchase acountry estate and attempt to conceal all evidence of their forrner unde-sirable 'connections'. In other words, the upper-class preiudice againsttrade was in fact shared by the lower social ranks, including those whowere themselves engaged in trade.

Every English school pupil's essay on Jane Austen notes that whileshe pokes gentle fun at the snobbish preiudices against trade of her time,she does not seriously question them - but schoolchildren are not toldthat residual, subconscious traces of the same snobberies are still implicitin English amitudes towards work and behaviour in the workplace. Theseprejudices are strongest among the upper classes, the upper-middle

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WORK TO RULEprofessional classes (that's 'professional' in the old sense, meaninbelonging to one of the traditionally respectable professions,the law, medicine, the church or the military) and the intelligechattering classes.

These classes have a particularly ingrained distaste for the 'bobusinessman', but the stigmatisation of anyone involved inwidespread. Even the makes of car associated with either wealtnessmen (Mercedes) or sales representatives (Mondeo) are snby the socially insecure of all classes - and remember the near-ucontempt for another breed of salesman, the estate agent.

These examples indicate that the English preiudice against twell as being eroded (though not eradicated) has shifted slighAusren's time, in that the making of goods has become signmore acceprable than the selling of them. Although of courseare ofren inextricably connected, it seems to be the pushy, undmoney-focused selling of things that we find most distasteful, auntrustworthy. There is an unwritten rule - a truth universally aedged, even - to the effect that anyone selling anything is ntrusted. Distrust of salesmen is clearly not a uniquely English tour suspicion and scepticism, and above all our contemptuousseem to be rnore acute and more deep-seated than other culturEnglish are less litigious than the Americans when we feel chdissatisfied with what we are sold (qur tendency is sdll to cindignanrly to each other, rather than tackling the source of ourrenr) but our more marked mistrust and dislike of salesmen mewe tend to be considerably less gullible in the first place.In other cultures, salesmen may not be trusted, but they are ssocially accepred in a way that they are not among the English.parrs of the world, selling things is regarded as a legitimateearning a living, and successful businessmen who have mafortune by doing so are accorded a degree of respect. In Englanciwill buy you a lot of things, including access to power and inbut it will not buy you any respect - quite the opposite, in faseems to be almost as much of a taboo on making money ason talking about it. tWhen the English describe someone as'wealthl', w almost always do so with a slight sneer, and thcan be so described will rarely use these terms of themselves: t

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WATCHING THE ENGLISHadmit, reluctantly, to being'quite well ofl I suppose'. \fe may well be,as Orwell said, the most class-ridden country under the sun, but I thinkit is safe to say that in no other country is social class so completelyindependent of material wealth: And social acceprability in the widersense is if anything inversely relatecl to financial prosperity - there maybe some surface sycophancy, but 'fat cats' are objects of contempt andderision, if not to their faces, then certainly behind their backs. If youdo have the misfortune to be financi ally successful, it is bad mannersto draw attention to the fact. You must play down your success, andappear ashamed of your wealth.It has been said that th. ,rruin difference between the English sysremof social status based on class (that is, birth) and the A*.ri.an 'meri-tocracy' is that under the lafter, because the rich and powerful believethat they deserve their wealth and power, they are rnore complacent,while under the former they tend to have a greater sense of social respon-sibility, more compassion towards those less privileged than themselves.I'm grossly oversimplifying the arguments - whole books have beenwritten on this - but it may be that the English embarrassment aboutmoney and lack of respect for business success have something to dowith this tradition.

Having said that, it is clear that much of all this English squeam-ishness about money is sheer hypocrisy. The English "r."rro less natu-rally ambitious, greedy, selfish or avaricious than any,other narion -we just have more and stricter rules requiring us ro hide, deny andrepress these tendencies. Our modesty rules and rules of polite egali-tarianism - which I believe are the 'grammatical laws' or 'cultural DNA'behind the money-talk taboo and the preiudice against business success- are a veneer, an exercise in collective self-delusion. The modesty wedisplay is generally false, and our apparent relucrance ro emphasizestatus differences conceals an acute,consciousness of these differences.But h.y, at least we value these virtuous qualities, and obey the rulesdespite their often deleterious effect on our business dealings.

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Money and Classes