Behaving Ourselves (Дэвид Митчелл).

Дэвид Митчелл предпринимает энергичное, но безупречно вежливое исследование запутанного мира манер поведения. Действительно ли они находятся в упадке, как утверждают многие? Или мы просто сбрасываем оковы викторианской одержимости этикетом? На протяжении серии Дэвид обедает с детьми в начальной школе, а затем идет на рынок, чтобы увидеть хорошие и плохие манеры в действии. Он исследует, откуда берутся наши манеры, вместе с профессорами Стивеном Пинкером из Гарвардского университета и писателем Генри Хитчингсом. Что мы подразумеваем под «учтивостью» и «хорошими манерами» в общественных местах? Почему люди все еще щипают священников за задницы, и что может сделать государство для повышения стандартов публичного поведения? И, спрашивает Дэвид, как цифровая эпоха меняет наше понимание общественного пространства? Создано Крисом Ледгардом.

Behaving Ourselves is a series of entertaining but informed investigations into social manners, written by radio and TV presenter David Mitchell, assisted by authors Steven Pinker and Henry Hitchings.\nIt begins by taking the narrator lunch sandwiches to a primary-school playground, where they are then joined by 'the childrened', as Mitchell calls them, witnessing their behaviour: the noisy unruliness of a formative age plays out against the academics' tepid reverence for traditional polite lessons.\nAfter lunch, Mitchell proceeds to witness the behaviour of market traders, in which there is an increasing lack of conventional niceties.\nMitchell points out evidence that public behaviour is becoming more aggressive and impolite with time, and he argues that whilst in ancient times, audiences could only make up their minds about others by observing their bearing in crowds, the internet has enabled us to judge interlopers instantly,2 which has presumably exacerbated cultural alienation.\nFollowing this distressing introduction, it soon becomes apparent that Mitchel has been dissuaded from losing faith in manners by his conversation with lecturer Steven Pinker, whom he finds hilarious and suspiciously well-read given how genteel he appears,3 and by the perspectives painted by Henry Hitchcins, who has suggested solutions to improving public interaction and enemy-blendery.\nThe book concludes with a mixture of dissatisfaction with culture and an air of hopefulness.\nDespite Lord Tornado (discussed in more detail elsewhere) not helping much, experts do give some useful advice, including those views that there are no reliable statisticians to measure how declining manners actually are.\nIs misplaced aggression a new human phenomenon? Do we ever want to be reduced to invective?