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More Social Formality

Neal

Active member
A world without WW1 or a similar revolutionary shakeup of society would likely continue to emphasize social formality to a greater degree than OTL. But what factors would prolong this emphasis?
 
Some of it is American economic and cultural predominance (which is tied up in all of the causes you mentioned) because America was long noted for having less of an emphasis on formality than Europe and even than other settler-colonies (except maybe Australia, but certainly less formality that you would find in Latin America).
 
Some of it is American economic and cultural predominance (which is tied up in all of the causes you mentioned) because America was long noted for having less of an emphasis on formality than Europe and even than other settler-colonies (except maybe Australia, but certainly less formality that you would find in Latin America).
Without WW1, would America become more formal especially with urbanization
 
I can speak to this in a very particular part of American culture - social dance.

I'm going to issue the caveat that I'm an enthusiastic blues, swing, and ballroom dancer who unironically believes that the destruction of formalized dance in the 1960s was an awful American cultural tragedy of the twentieth century and its replacement with the wretched hive of scum and villainy that is the modern nightclub.

Up until the 1950s or so you had to go out to appreciate good quality music - this meant, more often than not, dance halls. A variety of dances were danced in these halls, and they were, by modern standards, quite formal, like so:



One of the big shifts was music became increasingly able to be listened to in the home - the record player being a big one. As this improved, the need for live venues, and thus dance, and thus dance clothing, lessened. This fit the more informal zeitgeist of the 1960s as that came swinging.

The ultimate result was a dance culture that had very little formal etiquette to the point where the music was so loud you can barely hear others talk.
 
Some of it is American economic and cultural predominance (which is tied up in all of the causes you mentioned) because America was long noted for having less of an emphasis on formality than Europe and even than other settler-colonies (except maybe Australia, but certainly less formality that you would find in Latin America).
Can confirm that Australia is (and was) more informal even than the US of A. To the point that even today one of the basic points of etiquette that needs to be taught even to relatively successful, cosmopolitan Australians doing business overseas is that you shouldn't assume that everyone is on first name terms immediately.

Personally, I blame it on the fact that Australia was founded by people who realised that if you wanted to live in a place much warmer and sunnier than Britain, all you needed to do was steal a loaf of bread and you'd be given free travel there - and you wouldn't even need to give the bread back. That sort of attitude doesn't encourage social formality.
 
Can confirm that Australia is (and was) more informal even than the US of A. To the point that even today one of the basic points of etiquette that needs to be taught even to relatively successful, cosmopolitan Australians doing business overseas is that you shouldn't assume that everyone is on first name terms immediately.

Personally, I blame it on the fact that Australia was founded by people who realised that if you wanted to live in a place much warmer and sunnier than Britain, all you needed to do was steal a loaf of bread and you'd be given free travel there - and you wouldn't even need to give the bread back. That sort of attitude doesn't encourage social formality.

Correct me if I'm wrong but DoD has the not altogether uncommon AH trope of a more internationally prominent *Australia, although DoD may be the ur-example. How do you think social formality plays out there?
 
Formality and deference cultures were badly hit by the world wars, but there's a few other factors.

The transportation revolution was important: cars and rising access to efficient and cheap public transport let people move more freely and reduced dependence on local employment (and local hierarchies.)

Cheap, reliable and safe contraception had a massive effect. As the sexual revolution eroded the power of traditional arbiters of morality, the attendant social structures and their rituals became less influential. Organised religion is one of the last spheres in which citizens of developed nations assume a shared code of formal language, a dress code and social deference- and it's far, far weaker than today.

Compare a Catholic service in, say, Sydney in 1970 (post Vatican II!) to one in 2020. The social status of the priest, the number of people in the crowd, the colours and layers they dress in, even the various activities that bind the congregation together like schools and social clubs- it's all very different.

Appliances, too- the world wars hugely accelerated the decline of the country house in Britain and elsewhere, but between 1900 and 1960 middle-class families in the English speaking world largely stopped employing servants, or aspiring to employ servants. Dishwashers, better ovens, washing machines, lawn mowers, these all played their part in eroding formality. Once you don't have a maid, you've fundamentally changed the way bourgeois social hierarchies are no longer practiced, taught and enforced in the home. Now, the relation of all of this to women's liberation is its own complicated question but that's tangential to this discussion.

Really, there's a lot more to get into- fast fashion, the democratisation of cooking, decolonisation, radio, television, the USSR, changing attitudes to race and racism, cheaper overseas travel...

Really, it's arguable that 'how long could formality be maintained' is the wrong question. Rather, it's 'without the world wars, what is the difference in the process by which formal culture ends.'

You can picture a twenty first century where hats remain much more fashionable, for example- throughout much of the world head coverings are still an important part of day-to-day wear, and the same could still be true in the USA.
 
I want to agree but consider a society like Japan- still has a huge degree of formality when compared to the West, in some cases has developed formal structures entirely in the modern era (the consensus method of business decisions in Japanese corporations has resulted in a physical system of ornate stamps of which there is an entire system of etiquette and ceremony, albeit descended from an earlier era but expanded to the private sector only in the modern day)- and all this in the third or fourth largest economy in the world, one which defined the technological avant-garde for decades and which had a huge shift in urbanization and huge population dislocations due to WW2 and a post-War occupation. That would seem to indicate that informality is not necessarily a given with those sorts of factors.
 
Good point with Japan, but it does seem like Japan's become less formal than it used to be as well even if we'd still go "wow that's formal"?
 
Good point with Japan, but it does seem like Japan's become less formal than it used to be as well even if we'd still go "wow that's formal"?

Some of that's because the dominant economies all push more informality though*, but that's a fair point. The WI was "more formal" though so I think there is something there.

*as one example, Toyota actually requires their manager-track employees from Japan to spend time working in America or Europe- so Toyota ends up having a marked "foreign" influence on their management, which often manifests itself as less formality and a certain lovable slovenliness (for Japan)
 
Compare a Catholic service in, say, Sydney in 1970 (post Vatican II!) to one in 2020. The social status of the priest, the number of people in the crowd, the colours and layers they dress in, even the various activities that bind the congregation together like schools and social clubs- it's all very different.
Even among EF (or whatever term the Vatican wants us to use, idk) types you see this change, though not as much as in mainstream Catholicism. Part of it in America may be that class boundaries matter a little less (though they still matter even as any red-blooded American will deny it).

Still, there is a lot less deference among Anglophones at least towards the clergy, even among these types, much less than the 70s, usually chalked up to the fallout from the Scandal (there is somewhat more deference among some Hispanophone populations IME).
 
RE: fashion, climate change also makes heavy suits rather less comfortable than they used to be, especially in hot and humid climates.
RE: cooking, that's interesting-are you talking about how more and more people cooked for themselves (so no assumption that food came from somewhere else) or something else?

The climate change point is a huge stretch IMO- is an Italian cut suit really that much more climate-change adaptable than the traditional clothes of a Gulf State man of importance? It also isn't like the move towards less bulky cuts has been driven by temperatures in the Global North.
 
I think that politically the three most powerful world leaders post 1945 being the Secretary General of the Communist Party of the USSR, the President of the USA and the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party and Central Military Commission played an important part in weakening social formality. From what I saw of President Clinton's visit to NI, there is still plenty of formality and deference around but this is expressed in much more subtle ways than it would have been 120 years ago.
Senator Chickpea isn't wrong about the social effects of technological change and effective contraception, but I could see a world with no WW1 or a relatively early Central Powers victory could have led to a society that (while not as stuffy as say pre WW1 Germany) is relatively formal by comparison to OTL
 
My point about cooking is that food- its sale, acquisition, preparation, presentation and consumption- is one of the spheres of domestic life where we see a lot of written and unwritten social laws.

I want to say at the outset that having thought about @JesterBL's point with Japan, I've decided this: I don't know enough to contribute intelligently there. Remember, kids: speak in generalities and someone intelligent is going to hang you on a specificity. Instead I'm going to do what I should have done at the start and say that these are broad-brush statements that are largely about the US, the UK and its dominions.

There's clearly still class connotations in what we eat, of course. But one of the things that's changed is that the diet of the working classes and the bourgeoisie become much more closely aligned.* By the late nineteenth century, western diets were being transformed by the availability of cheap refrigerated meat. That was actually a part of why Australia and New Zealand (and large parts of Canada and the US) became comparatively informal. Australia was sometimes called 'muttonland' in the late nineteenth century, because a working man could eat meat three times a day! Compared to life in the slums of Liverpool or Glasgow. A family of seven might sit down to breakfast on a Sunday- six eating porridge, and the father choosing which favoured child gets a bite of the bacon and eggs that's expected to set him up for the week.

What's the relation to formality?

That a lot of class boundaries that were expressed on the table didn't hold in these societies. Hamburgers and meat pies meant that people could snack on meals that would have been a rare treat for their grandparents. Supermarkets and globalisation meant that ingredients that had been status symbols were found in every large town. Again, the appliance revolution meant that it could be prepared quickly. All this meant that a lot of the formalities of middle-class dining weren't as meaningful.

There was also an increasing shift in taste. For a variety of reasons, the twentieth century saw a shift away from the Victorian preoccupation with aping the mores of a sophisticated (and imagined) Parisian household. If you compare the menus of a banquet in 1900 and 1950, they're both lavish compared to today. The chances are, however, that by 1950 you'll notice that fewer courses are being served and fewer of the dishes and courses are French. Both the left and the right in North America and Australasia began to make a virtue of a local, authentic, 'working man's food.' Steaks all round!

That leads to a situation where class is increasingly expressed through what ingredients you use, rather than what you make with them. Haute cuisine is still a thing, obviously, but its much more of a rare treat now. But what I'm getting at is that fifty years ago the clearest gap between a 'working class' and a 'middle class' restaurant would be about the type of service, the setting, the names of the dishes and so on. You can still see that today, of course, but now... let's put it this way with a UK example. McDonalds- Byron Burger. Right? Or Five Guys might be a better example. The food is more expensive than traditional competitors, but the actual experience of eating it invokes a mythologised, fetishized 1950s diner. Today's middle classes pretend that they're the working classes of a previous generation- though that last thought is rather unformed.

The thing to remember here is that neither this nor any of the other things we've discussed in this thread are 'the cause' of increasing informality in these societies. What I'm arguing is that instead you're seeing a set of historical processes going back to the nineteenth century middle class, and those processes reinforce and accelerate each other over time. World Wars, the Depression and the Russian Revolution didn't cause them, though they obviously gave them fuel. But as m'learned colleague @SpanishSpy points out, radio is already there and that's one genie you're not getting back in the bottle.

I do think that it's very possible that without those big events that different vestiges of formal society might survive. As I said, I think hats are a good example. Or you could see Mod culture win more if its battles- hell, let's picture a White victory in the civil war giving rise to latter day Muscadins!

I think, though, that so much of formal culture relied upon a particular use of shared public space, limited access to a fashionable lifestyle and the class markings of a particular type of education. I think the erosion (and transformation) of all those things was well underway by 1914.



*Food poverty is another matter.
 
What's interesting I think is that you're describing a change in formality and what constitutes food etiquette rather than an abandonment of such rules (which admittedly is very much your point re: formality/informality and how eating is a performance of social class. To use kind of a broad-brush example: a formal/fancy restaurant in 2020 might not be full aping of French burgeois customs but it still shows social class performance in other ways-for example, by use of ingredients or preparations that would require considerable research or study for a home cook to procure or use, how it caters to dietary requirements, locality, and so on.
 
That leads to a situation where class is increasingly expressed through what ingredients you use, rather than what you make with them. Haute cuisine is still a thing, obviously, but its much more of a rare treat now. But what I'm getting at is that fifty years ago the clearest gap between a 'working class' and a 'middle class' restaurant would be about the type of service, the setting, the names of the dishes and so on. You can still see that today, of course, but now... let's put it this way with a UK example. McDonalds- Byron Burger. Right? Or Five Guys might be a better example. The food is more expensive than traditional competitors, but the actual experience of eating it invokes a mythologised, fetishized 1950s diner. Today's middle classes pretend that they're the working classes of a previous generation- though that last thought is rather unformed.

I could go on for pages about how this applies to modern social dance communities. Essentially, I'd argue that many middle class dancers - especially blues dancers - have a very narrow view of what these dances were, filtered through middle class notions of respectability.

I'll demonstrate this with an example about blues dance. Note that my opinions are heterodox in relation to most blues dancers, and bringing this stuff up at a real blues dance would get you at least weird looks.

When people think of blues music, they think sadness. They think of poor oppressed black people lamenting the woes of segregation, of Jim Crow. This isn't inaccurate in certain cases, for there are certainly songs that meet that description.

This emphasis on direct response to oppression is the result, in part, of white British academics studying blues culture and emphasizing those particular aspects. What this ignores is that blues music, and blues dance, came from spaces where black people could express all their emotions, rather than the limited servile spectrum that white people allowed them to. Blues music can certainly be sad, but it isn't just sad. It can be joyous. It can be boastful. It can be proud.

It can also be really, really horny.

I was once at a blues dance festival in Washington, D.C. where Chris Thomas King, a respected modern blues musician from Louisiana, told us that the word 'blues' in Louisiana creole has a sexual connotation it does not in standard American English. In my own research, I have found that academic discussions of blues culture are very frank about sexuality in those spaces.

Go to a modern blues dance, with mostly middle-class white people, and ask them about that aspect of blues dance. They will vociferously deny its presence, or at least underplay it, all the while insisting that they, the respectable people, would never be so base. They will say this while they dance in very close partnerships doing moves that cannot be interpreted any other way.

These middle class whites bring with them a fetishized, romanticized view of 1920s-1950s dance venues where blues dance (as well as swing dance) were born. The popular image is of well-dressed people in frame dancing daintily to Glenn Miller-style swing. The environment is what middle class whites view as 'respectable.'

But the places where these dances were born served alcohol. There was gambling. There was sex in backrooms. There was prostitution. There were bar brawls.

Does it surprise you, then, that a dance that came from such a place could be danced in a sexualized way? Does it surprise you that people today find and exploit such possibilities?

Take this quote from the essay Characteristics of Negro Expression by Zora Neale Hurston (one of the great black writers and scholars of her day, famous for writing Their Eyes Were Watching God) as she describes dances in juke joints (black bars/dance halls/gambling dens/other things in the rural South, where much blues, music and dance, was developed):

“The Negro social dance is slow and sensuous. The idea in the Jook is to gain sensation, and not so much exercise. So that just enough foot movement is added to keep the dancers on the floor. A tremendous sex stimulation is gained from this. But who is trying to avoid it? The man, the woman, the time and the place have met. Rather, intimate little names are indulged in to heap fire on fire.”

As someone who has gone to blues dances for a number of years, I can vouch that I have personally been to blues dances that meet that description. Particularly, any blues dancer who really has indulged in that aspect of the dance knows the meaning of the phrase "heap fire on fire."

Also consider how this rather unsubtle song was released in allegedly wholesome 1954.

There is strong denial (at least rhetorically) of this aspect of blues dance, and it leads to a number of unpleasant knock-down effects. Sexuality isn't openly talked about at these dances. It is not the habit of instructors to teach ways of enforcing consent, and more generally ways of navigating sexuality on the blues floor. In this culture of denial, you get women who don't know how their body language can be interpreted, men who see consent in places where it isn't, women angrily leaving blues dances because they feel like they've been lied to, and men exploiting the lack of clarity to dishonestly indulge in their vices without respecting consent.

Beyond the practical effects, this also leads modern white blues dancers to reduce the black people who created these dances to rhetorical constructs that exist to suffer. If we see people - any people - as rhetorical constructs, we by definition deny them the things that make them human.

And I find that appalling on a moral level.

(that was a tangent - sorry about that. As you can tell, I have opinions on the subject)
 
Or Five Guys might be a better example. The food is more expensive than traditional competitors, but the actual experience of eating it invokes a mythologised, fetishized 1950s diner. Today's middle classes pretend that they're the working classes of a previous generation- though that last thought is rather unformed.

Five Guys as a fake 1950s American diner is interesting in a British context, cos back in the 1950s that diner would've been seen as a glamorous foreign thing. "Look how wealthy America is!! LOOK AT THOSE BURGERS!" So for us, this is pretending to be that shiny myth from old films - probably Grease and Back To The Future more these days - divorced from class issues, a different experience than the original American market is getting.

When people think of blues music, they think sadness. They think of poor oppressed black people lamenting the woes of segregation, of Jim Crow. This isn't inaccurate in certain cases, for there are certainly songs that meet that description.

This emphasis on direct response to oppression is the result, in part, of white British academics studying blues culture and emphasizing those particular aspects. What this ignores is that blues music, and blues dance, came from spaces where black people could express all their emotions, rather than the limited servile spectrum that white people allowed them to. Blues music can certainly be sad, but it isn't just sad. It can be joyous. It can be boastful. It can be proud.

It can also be really, really horny.

You might like this documentary on British blues pioneer Long John Baldry, which goes into the blues cutting through to white British youths in the 50s and 60s. There, you can see photos and clips of youths clearly having a raucous time ("and I dare say a sexuality that was inescapable" quoth a writer in it).
 
SpanishSpy's post made me think of that entry from Stuff White People Like, "Black Music Black People Don't Listen To Anymore" (though that also extended it to a white middle-class fetishisation of 1980s/early 1990s hip-hop of which I myself was once guilty). Also of the way a lot of Right-wing white people (the people born and brought up here passively racist, the white flighters, especially from the Brexit heartland of the West Midlands, actively so) in my part of England think of rock music as if it were indigenous - in a way people here would once have reserved for Hardy and Barnes or, in musical terms, the Yetties - and see it as the native culture they voted Leave to maintain, even to the point of thinking their children and grandchildren are offending against its principles by listening to contemporary Black pop, when of course if it hadn't been for a cross-fertilisation between poor rural whites and Black people, and the former recognising that they had more in common with the latter than they did with the Eisenhower WASP elite as small-town and rural kids listening to Tion Wayne & Russ Millions' "Body" recognise that they have more in common with those artists than they do with the Cameronite-Johnsonian Rock Right establishment, rock would never have existed at all and whatever would be the ruling culture in Britain today would be wholly different.

This distancing of what came into Britain from America in those times from its roots by people who want to justify their racism and avoid facing anything in their own tastes which might undermine it is also related to Charles' post, of course - the way this sort of Americana in the UK does indeed have less class baggage attached to it because its initial context here was based around the idea that mediocrities and worse in the US wouldn't get the top jobs simply because of who their fathers had been, a dream finally blown out of the water at the beginning of this century. It's like the way Lipstick on Your Collar is talked about less than Dennis Potter's earlier works partially because rock music was used, in 2003, even in a newspaper with the baggage of The Times, to justify an equally stupid and imperial Middle Eastern adventure in a way nobody would have imagined a decade earlier under serious, pre-rock politicians like Major and Smith.

(Sorry, this does seem to have diverged a bit from a more *formal* society - though you can put a variant on that only 27 years ago, and imagine a less pop-culture-influenced UK politics had John Smith lived or even if Gordon Brown had replaced him, and potentially certain newspapers retaining more of their grandeur or earnestness respectively, although the generational pressure as boomers took power would have been hard to resist even with more serious politics. It is striking that Radio 4 or the Daily Telegraph refer to "Mr Macron" and "Mrs Merkel" rather than the "Monsieur Mitterand" and "Herr Kohl" styles which I am convinced they still used only 30 years ago, something which undoubtedly has to do with their style guides now being written by rock fans, people whose conception of the whole world is based much more around the Anglosphere, in a way they were not then.)
 
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