Financial Times

At the bicentenary event that took place recently in the glare of publicity, a businessman of conspicuous background and personal charm had been overheard earnestly apologising to an equally distinguished business colleague, whose wife happens to be the editor of a leading society magazine. According to a source close to the couple, “the quarrel”, which predates the society magazine, was sparked by the now apologetic businessman disdainfully ignoring the couple in order to close ranks with a highly placed and at that time politically very hot economist, whose ill feelings towards the couple had made them social pariahs to the economist’s cronies.

That was then. Today with a successful chronicle for the fashionable society at play what could the businessman have done but apologise for his failure to envisage the future?

Gossipy anecdotal evidence aside, it is plain that the craving for social respectability is not limited to new money. We all want at least to be respectable in point of social standing or character.

It is a coarse rendering of the popular mind to think that respectability is identical to being prominent in fashionable society.

The notion of respectability is closely tied to success. A man of good social standing is someone who has made a success of his life and his work. He is someone who is fulfilling his aspirations as a human being, and succeeding in his ambitions. And in the measure he is successful, the community seeks to draw on his skills, knowledge and wisdom, and enlists him to perform important public duties.

In a word, respectability is a test or touchstone of man’s success; it is the appreciation of man’s actions and the effects they produce relative to something good and worthwhile. That is perhaps why the craving for respectability regularly drives us to sham and falsity, to behaviour that is calculated to impress.

In that sense, it is not a wildly unreasonable representation of the notion of respectability to caricature it, as it is famously done in literature, as one of the seven deadly sins.

The caricature certainly resonates with meaning in this country. For, if character and achievement are inextricably linked to social standing, the desire for respectability acting on our actions ought to produce, in some measure, a life-giving – i.e., morally enhancing – effect, both on ourselves and others. Yet, for the most part no such effect appears to have been produced here. Or, perhaps it is more accurate to say that when we consider the abject poverty, political pathology and cultural despair around us, it is difficult to discern the life-giving power of the desire for respectability that acts on us.

We obviously have few good men whose actions and the effects they produce are truly praiseworthy.

Perhaps we do not have enough good men for their actions to produce a salutary effect on the persistence of ills, at once economic, social and cultural.

But how is it that our habit of going to extraordinary lengths to become socially prominent and featured has failed to encourage enough men to act in a truly praiseworthy manner, thereby measurably averting our land from becoming increasingly coarse, stagnant, corrupt and putrid?

The obvious explanation is that either the ideals by which we as a society measure what is praiseworthy and blameworthy are lacking in vitality and splendour, or we are a cynical lot. Evidently, it could be both – the prevalence of moribund ideals and widespread cynicism, where cynicism is defined as the refusal to have ideals and the mocking of those who fall short of their ideals.

The ideals are objects, not of observation, but of aspiration and faith. It is therefore well to remember the fact that the desire for respectability acting on us - in the absence of a spirited practical and spiritual idealism to inspire and guide, either our society or us – would make us conform to the coarse habits, superstitions and traditional lore of the society.

To put it differently, the desire for respectability acts as an encouragement to moral excellence in the measure a society’s habitual ways of doing things are shaped by standards that are morally noble and enlightened. Yet even then, it has its moral limitations. The desire for respectability erodes a man’s resolve to endure disgrace and suffering as the price of seeking great and splendid achievements of the human spirit.

Indeed, if men everywhere were morally limited to what is respectable, there would be no original scientists or creative artists – and liberal democracies would lack reformers and wartime leaders who would prevail over fickle public opinion – and industrialists, sportsmen and professionals would not risk failure and disgrace to reach beyond themselves.

But most of us, being average men, are by definition morally limited. All we need is respectability, and we are even willing to go to the devil to get it.