Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

VULGARITY AND MORALITY

Recently I have been reading my way through the short stories and novels of Angus Wilson (1913-1991) and in due course on this blog I will bore you with my conclusions. In one of his short stories “Crazy Crowd”, from his very first book The Wrong Set, Wilson has a foolish and snobbish person say something that is the text for today’s sermon.

The character says: “Vulgarity is the most dreadful of the Deadly Sins”.

The phrase stuck in my mind because I’d recently had a difference of opinion with a woman who accused me of having “vulgarity in the matter of human relationships”.  Apparently it was vulgar of me to condemn, or even to draw attention to, the wrongness of older people in a position of power or authority having affairs with people younger and more gullible than they. But I shouldn’t have said this. I was being “vulgar”.

What interested me here was the woman’s category mistake.

Let us consider vulgarity. Vulgarity is what is regarded as crude, impolite and unseemly in company; or as representing a lower form of taste. It is vulgar to pick your nose or sniff your armpit in public. It is vulgar to use too many four-letter words without cause. It is vulgar to fart loudly and noisesomely at the dinner table. It is vulgar to sing or recite bawdy songs, or to make blue jokes to the wrong sort of audience. It is also vulgar to read trashy novels, subscribe to sensationalist tabloids, be addicted to gossip columns and waste your time on the internet

In short, it is vulgar to do or say things that offend politeness or show poor taste.

Now I am all in favour of tact, consideration for others, avoidance of crude language where possible and all the other things that come into the category of politeness. But then, I wasn’t dealing with what is impolite or polite (vulgar or not-vulgar). I was dealing with the quite separate category of what is right or wrong. In other words, my condemnation of a certain behaviour was about morality, not about taste or superficial social shibboleths. Vulgarity had nothing to do with it.

Let it be made quite clear that one can be perfectly polite while also being immoral. And conversely, the absolutely vulgar slob, who breaks the rules of politeness, may well be a very moral person. I am not so naïve as to assume that this is always the case, but it is often so. And, of course, I am not going to delve into the meaning and sources of morality, which would require a treatise, save to note that morality is not the same as the law of the land. You can be a complete bastard to others while breaking no laws.

In and of itself, vulgarity is not a matter of morality and morality is not a matter of politeness. Indeed, I long ago devised the slogan that “Niceness is the enemy of morality” because niceness allows people to think that by acting in a seemly and socially acceptable way, they are being moral. When taste becomes a substitute for morality, as it often does among intellectuals, we end up with the Bloomsbury attitude that our uncouth social inferiors are somehow less moral that we are in our position of cultured refinement.

And to answer Angus Wilson’s foolish character, vulgarity is, of course, not the most dreadful of the deadly sins, for of itself vulgarity is not a sin at all.