I do not like reminiscing about the old days; that immediately marks you as entering your dotage. However, in these days when organizations don’t bother much about accountability for money in their care, I cannot resist telling the story of Edgar Readwin, excellent tennis player and also Treasurer of the Lawn Tennis Association in the 1950s.
Edgar Readwin used to set aside New Year’s day for completing the Lawn Tennis Association’s accounts for the previous year and on January 2nd had the accounts prepared and typed ready for auditing. He would then harass the auditors to examine the Association’s books urgently so that he could circulate to all members the audited accounts of the Association for the previous year by the end of the first week of the new year.
A trifle obsessive, I admit, but indicative of an attitude which is important in any society: the determination to give a proper account of your stewardship, the satisfaction obtained in doing a job meticulously and well and on time, a concern to maintain high standards of service, accountability and professionalism. Any society should hope that such attitudes never become out of date.
Look around and who can doubt that while raising standards anew may be given official lip service, in practice it is not given enduring priority. Most people seem hardly to know anymore what is meant by the term standards.
They measure behaviour by today’s only standard which is who comes off best and who gets the most. If what you can get away with gives a private advantage then go for it as hard as you can. So the roads are a free-for-all madhouse; residential, business and entertainment areas are mixed up in contravention of every urban regulation or order that ever was; garbage and junk are still strewn abroad as at a devil’s wedding; structures still go up on reserves and drainage systems are neglected; courtesy and politeness in a thousand daily transactions are forgotten or even somehow considered a sort of weakness; the courts are clogged and useless in delivering prompt and efficient justice; basic civility between neighbours, political opponents, customer and server, the public and the public’s guardians hardly exists; and the treatment of women has abandoned any trace of gallantry or even common-or-garden courtesy and descends frequently to levels of appalling depravity. Why does bitter shame not overwhelm us?
Throughout any good society there must be a deeply ingrained and widespread ‘culture of standards’. In a magnificent address Vaclav Havel, when he was President of the then
Czechoslovakia, spoke of the vital need to raise the level of relationships between state and citizens and the relationships between people themselves in society. I wish we all could pay continual attention to his ringing, truth-filled words.
“Perhaps what I’m trying to say is clear: however important it may be to get our economy back on its feet, it is far from being the only task facing us. It is no less important to do everything possible to improve the general cultural level of everyday life. As the economy develops, this will happen anyway. But we cannot depend on that alone. We must initiate a large-scale programme for raising general cultural standards.
“And it is not true that we have to wait until we are rich to do this: we can begin at once, without a crown in our pockets.
No one can persuade me that it takes a better-paid nurse to behave more considerately to a patient, that only an expensive house can be pleasing, that only a wealthy merchant can be courteous to his customers and display a handsome sign outside, that only a prosperous farmer can treat his livestock well.
“I would go even farther, and say that, in many respects, improving the civility of everyday life can accelerate economic development – from the culture of supply and demand, of trading and enterprise, right down to the culture of values and life styles.”
After all, as Havel goes on to say, is there anything that citizens – and this, surely, is doubly true of politicians – should be more concerned about, ultimately, than trying to make life more pleasant, more interesting, more bearable, more civil, more varied – in a word, more cultured for everyone?
