Economic uncertainty is to cultural expression a bit like what benzedrine is to narcoleptics. It gets things going. A sense of peril makes people challenge the rules: it may not have been the only trigger, but consider: would there have been a revolution in France if the price of bread had not soared beyond the reach of the mob?
Take the bad-tempered but absorbing row over what it means to be a woman, and the trans question: last week, Germaine Greer was disagreeably rude about Caitlyn Jenner in an interview on Newsnight. That set off a perceptible tremor in international news coverage, and alerted an audience beyond hardcore feminists to an underappreciated semiotic conflict, while not really illuminating the even more interesting and enduring question about the meaning of being a woman.
But uncertain times don’t just produce new ideas. They also produce an equal and opposite reaction, a desperate search for eternal laws by which even the most fragile existence can be sustained. A generation ago, during the economic crisis precipitated by Thatcherite economics, the Sloane Ranger was born (if you want to know more, read Andy Beckett, Promised you a Miracle) and a small part of central London became populated almost entirely by young women kitted out in an identical uniform, all of whom associated feminist ideas with a shocking disregard for wearing the right shoes.
Soon the Sloane Ranger was overwhelmed by a tidal wave of consumerism. Sloanes themselves either adapted, or slowly declined into an obscure and ageing sect, forlornly clutching heavy silk scarves and good handbags as they sank beneath the sparkling wealth of the oligarchs.
What it means to be a man has never attracted quite the same degree of cultural attention, at least not in a gendered way; most literature, one way or another, has always been about manhood. But in these fluid and uncertain times men, too, have started to look for some intellectual handrail to guide their life choices and show them how to think about how they live.
How smart, then, of Country Life – a self-consciously conservative weekly magazine that cherishes a very particular way of life enjoyed by a very, very small number of people (circulation: 38,275) – to come up with the antithesis. Those anxious to know the rules of being not a man, but a gentleman, need look no further.
Last year, as it launched a new competition to identify a gentleman of the year, it helpfully set out the 10 features by which you would know one. (It was won, rather unexpectedly, not by some old buffer from a damp stately home in Herefordshire, but by the rather racy cosmopolitan old buffer David Dimbleby.)
Now barely a year on, they have updated their guide. This is worrying news for those of its readers who might have thought there was only one way to be a gentleman and it was pretty well unchanged since the days of chivalry. But it makes good commercial sense because many of its readers will be checking off the qualities as anxiously as their great-grandparents studied Nancy Mitford’s U and non-U back in the 1950s.
Also, bonanza time for Country Life’s publishers, the list has grown from 10 to 39 while excluding some of the original essentials (like the one about a gentleman making love on his elbows). It now includes a few things like being able to ride a horse and sail a boat, skills that are usually the blessings of a prosperous and nurtured childhood, which will be reassuring for people who believe it is all about money.
It is easy enough to dismiss the national obsession with class (or more accurately, the national middle-class obsession with class) as some kind of interesting but inconsequential cul-de-sac like, say, ornithology. Only of course it isn’t. The gentleman contest may be a more or less harmless way of flogging magazines. But class, endowed by birth, still matters. It remains the most reliable predictor of a child’s life chances, and a pernicious influence on access to power. Maybe the urge to find a way of distinguishing the gentleman from the players the way cricket teams once did is a sign that the tectonic plates are finally beginning to shift.
