The Baseball Cap Maketh the Man
The loss of distinctions in dress and speech has made the world sadder and more vulgar.
President Trump has been criticized, in my view rightly, for wearing a baseball cap at a ceremony for U.S. servicemen killed in the war against Iran. His cap is undignified at best and wearing it at the ceremony was lacking in respect for men who had died carrying out his policy.
No doubt by wearing the cap he was showing himself to be a man of the people, and doing so in a sense quite accurately: It is true that much of the population of the Western world has lost any notion that there are different registers in the way one should speak or dress, and that what is appropriate in one social circumstance is inappropriate in another. Informality has triumphed over any manifestation of ceremoniousness, the former supposedly being democratic and the latter supposedly being snobbish.
Informality of dress on all occasions is a tribute that the rich pay to the subliminal but nonetheless prevalent (and false) Marxist idea that private wealth is illegitimate, necessarily distilled from the blood of the workers. By their informality, they hope that the difference in wealth between them and the workers will thereby go unperceived by those who might otherwise be enraged by it. I need hardly add that there is a deal of bogusness in this conscious, ideological adoption of informality.
There are other tributaries flowing into the great river of modern slovenliness. When I was young, I was slovenly myself, believing that appearance, being merely external, was also superficial. It was the inner man that counted, not the outer; to judge a person by the way he dressed was like judging a book by its cover.
Now as it happens, I have had quite a lot to do with books in my life, and covers, while not infallible guides to the value of the contents, at least create first impressions, and attract or repel according to one’s interests and propensities. Publishers devote considerable attention to the covers of their books, and they are not stupid, though they may on occasion be foolish. (Incidentally, the best cover known to me is that of the giant French publisher Gallimard, which has used the same simple but elegant design for the covers of its books for more than a century, the design now standing in the minds of sophisticated book-buyers as a guarantee of at least a minimum degree of literary merit.)
Naturally, no sensible person would make a full and final judgment of a book by its cover, but equally no sensible person would take no notice whatever of such a cover. Pulp fiction tends to have different covers from serious historical studies.
The romantic idea that it is only the inner being that counts is, of course, a license for degradation. Many of the worst criminals I knew when I worked in prison as a doctor would claim that their despicable actions were not a reflection of the real them; their immaculate cores remained unsullied by anything as vulgar, trivial and superficial as the way that they had actually behaved. Criminals who claimed that they had lost their memories for what they had done—either through drink, drugs, lying, or psychogenic amnesia—would also claim that they couldn’t have done the things they were accused of having done because they were not the kind of things they did, and they claimed this even when there was a clear and indisputable record of repeated such behaviour.
In a certain way, it comes as a relief to think that outward appearance is unimportant, because trying to present a smart outward appearance imposes a discipline, an effort, whereas the doctrine of the inner man imposes none. It is like the difference between being religious and being spiritual. The former imposes obligations, the latter imposes nothing, except possibly obedience to whim, such as hanging wind-chimes in the garden (often a pleasant enough sound, though apt to become irritating if continued too long). When I hear someone say that he, or more often she, is spiritual but not religious, I feel a mixture of irritation and contempt—though of course, believing as I do in the importance of the outer man, I say nothing.
Anyway, I was cured of the romantic notion that outward dress is completely unimportant in Africa, where I saw really poor people—not billionaires or chief executive officers—making a great effort to make themselves look good, at least on special occasions. In conditions in which washing clothes, let alone pressing them, was difficult, they nonetheless managed to make themselves a pleasure to the eye. Deliberate, ideological carelessness as to their appearance was unknown to them, no doubt because when they wore worn-out clothes with holes in them, it was through necessity, not choice. Their guys and dolls were never deliberately slovens and slatterns.
As with all things, there is in the matter of outward appearance a happy medium. Care for how one appears to others—self-respect—can degenerate into vanity. But a dandy, though he may be ridiculous, is at least not harmful, and indeed a leavening of dandyism makes social life more pleasant.
Along with an indifference to outer appearance, and a failure to dress differently for difference occasions (I have been to funerals where the mourners, if that is what they were, made no special effort to differentiate the way they dressed a funeral from the way they dressed for an excursion to a convenience store), I have noticed a similar absence of difference in the mode of address that young people employ. They believe—they have in effect been taught—that to speak differently to different kinds of people on different occasions about different subjects is a sign of insincerity, and insincerity is the worst of qualities. They cannot differentiate between friendliness and friendship, the latter having been hollowed out in any case by the spread of social media. They seem not to understand that where everyone is your friend, no one is your friend. (The paranoid, by contrast, think that universal enmity is possible.) Not long ago, a young man said to me, when I suggested to him that there were and ought to be different ways of speaking to different people in different situations, that he always spoke in the same way to all, because he wanted everyone to be his friend and he wanted to be the friend of everyone.
I thought this was sad. It was a mark of profound loneliness.
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and 2) this would have made the alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election — never proven beyond penny-ante hijinks — look piddling by comparison.