Or, the use of hygiene as a proxy for moral worth.
Last week, a man died when — so it appears — two paramadics failed to render appropriate assistance. The legal phrase is ‘wilfully neglecting to perform duty in a public office’. The circumstances aren’t clear, but reading between the lines (among other things) one suspects they were holding their noses. Why? Apparently the old chap lived in squalor, but not the kind brought about by poverty (he was employed as a civil servant, and apparently well paid). His house was filthy:
After Barry Baker, 58, died at his home in Braybon Avenue on 29 November, the paramedics were suspended on suspicion of neglecting a public duty.
Two South East Coast Ambulance Service staff allegedly made derogatory comments about Mr Baker’s home.
The small rubbish-removal company charged with cleaning up the wreckage has posted photographs on its website detailing the scale of the mess. They’ve also now been linked to by the BBC, which could be interesting for their server if nothing else. Two of the photographs are included below, as I doubt the company will keep the same front page for any great length of time.
This story, of course, is feeding into the Karen Matthews saga — she also had a filthy house, coupled with filthy children. It is also broaching wider public concerns, not only about ‘the underclass’, but about what David Cameron is calling ‘Broken Britain’. This account — from the wildly popular ‘coppersblog‘ — catches the angst from a police perspective:
Not long ago, I attended a house where the woman was complaining that her neighbours were throwing eggs at her windows. She was a mother of five, aged 24. Each of her children was the progeny of a different man (or boy) and none of them was supported by his or her father, in any way. The woman had left school with no qualifications whatsoever and had never worked. None of the fathers had ever worked; all were criminals of one stripe or another. It’s hard bringing up five children on your own, true, though she was an adult and she’d made her own bed (metaphorically, I doubt literally). The house was inexcusably filthy: piles of dog faeces of several different ages lay on the carpets, some of it trodden in by young feet. The woman sat in her armchair, in her house paid for by taxpayers, smoking Lambert and Butler and shouting at me about the neighbours.
This is not about material poverty: she had a big telly (admittedly, not a plasma), and a VCR, and a big computer game console, and a CD player, and a diet of relatively expensive fast food. It’s about human nature, and a lost generation (or two). Some people are, by nature, of the underclass. They are lazy, venal and greedy and they see an inch and try to take a mile. Fifty years ago, they had a hard time doing this: now it’s very easy.
Our job, in the new civil war, is to stop them.
Although not written by PC David Copperfield (the blog’s founder), this account ties into the issues that Copperfield has raised himself, first on his blog, and then in his very popular book, Wasting Police Time. For a long while, no-one knew who the anonymous ‘copper’ who wrote the blog actually was, only that he was (very obviously) a copper and (very obviously) alert to the bureaucracy and mismanagement that were destroying British policing. Wisely, he outed himself only after he’d (a) published his book and (b) migrated to Canada and taken a job with the Mounties Edmonton City Police, which involved a very different style of policing.
Inevitably, seeing things like this hardens you. I’ve only looked down the legal end of the telescope, but dealing with the same people — day in, day out — and watching them waste court time is very dispiriting. After a while, you start thinking that some folks are clearly incapable of finding any compass, let alone a moral one. And then you start to realise: I had to be taught to be clean and well-organised as a child. It didn’t come naturally, and I have to admit I was lazy. And my mother’s solution to my laziness was repeated floggings and standover tactics.
She’d been ‘in service’ as a girl and young woman. This polite euphemism means ‘working for the landed gentry’. Even after she emigrated to Australia, her primary income was earned cleaning middle-class peoples’ houses. She taught me all the skills a servant needs — cooking, cleaning, sewing. The only one I never mastered was knitting, but I can do all the others. I’ve also absorbed by osmosis her values. Like the ambulance men, I too instinctively recoil at a filthy house. Interestingly, as a child I saw the ‘filth=moral reprobate’ applied pretty equally to men and women, too.
Perhaps the most telling incident cropped up during the research for my novel. An elderly chap who lived a couple of streets away broke his leg and hip very seriously, necessitating a lengthy hospital stay. The wife of one of my interview subjects offered to ‘wash his dishes’ for him, whereupon she discovered a house considerably filthier than Mr Baker’s. It took six of us a week to clean it. Unusually, the man in question hadn’t had any time in the military (either Red Army or Waffen-SS). None of the ex-army men were dirty. One told me how a young man from Polish West Ukraine had left his bed unmade in the barracks because making it was ‘women’s work’. The Germans flogged him. The rest learnt, but — once again — they’d had to be taught. And not just frightened by flogging: the German or Russian Lance-Corporals and Quartermasters had to teach them the relevant skills, from peeling a potato to mopping the floor to knitting a sock.
I’ve noticed, since I’ve been at Oxford, that lots of people are almost as bad as Mr Baker at keeping themselves ‘tidy’. But Oxford has its ‘scouts‘, you see, people who do for Oxford students what my mother did for the Duke of Connaught. Often Polish immigrants overseen by the sort of cheery Englishwoman who could have stepped straight from the cutting-room floor of Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake, they clean our rooms and report exceptionally messy members of the future ruling-classes to the Dean (a very scary individual, even for 30 year old graduate students). I’ve also noticed that I’m often the only one who knows how to do the same things the scouts do. I’ve encountered people who don’t know how to clean a toilet.
But the middle-classes have a fall-back: their education and income. For the most part, there will always be a scout for them, even though the label will change with geography and circumstances. The poor (and unpartnered men of a certain vintage, as I suspect was the case with Mr Baker, and know to be the case with the man I described above) don’t have that fall-back. And they’re often unfit to do anything else. I get notes from my scout where every word is mispelled. Another scout — who leaves the common room and kitchens spotless — cannot read or write at all. I went to show him how to write his name, once, just so that he could sign his timesheet. ‘Oh no, Miss, don’t bovver, they tried for ten year at school. Didnat do no good’.
When she visited Oxford, my socialist sister (and she is, the real deal – Labor Left and all) noted the College staff eating provided lunches, and the grave care the Collegiate system took for them. ‘It’s very civilised, the way they’re cared for, eating in their own defined space’. But she also noticed the fawning and scraping, the ‘sir’ and ‘ma’am’ directed at people often half their age.
‘I think that’s the trade-off’, I said. The poor and the dull get cared for, while the rich and talented get their rooms cleaned. And people of both sorts point and giggle at the single mother or older single man who can’t keep his house ‘tidy‘ (this phraseology has particular resonance in Wales).
I’m reluctant to equate moral worth with hygiene, even though I know hygiene is essential for many other things (successful care of an infant, for example). That said, schooling that fills people with false hope as to what they can achieve in years to come is genuinely blameworthy. Believing you can be a rock star while simultaneously failing to learn how to read (and while failing to be taught anything that could make you even remotely employable) suggests that whoever runs the schools in this country is telling more lies than your local Amway man (‘anyone can get rich in this business’).
19 Comments
I must confess that I am the owner of a Messy Desk (further details in this post here). My mother and father tried to teach me to be tidy (the latter particularly), but to no avail. I think I’m just someone who tends to pile paper, and I’m a bit scatty to boot. That being said, that portion of my thesis which is not a giant pile on the desk was tidied in a frenzy of labeling about 6 months ago, and is now neatly filed in 10 labelled and flagged ring binders…I do try.
I suppose there’s a difference between untidy (me) and unhygienic (never never never me). I have a bit of a thing about germs. Yes, my house is full of clutter and piles of books and paper, not to mention my daughter’s toys scattered EVERYWHERE, despite my efforts to teach her to be tidy. But I’d never ever ever ever let my house become unhygienic. Ugh. To live like that means that you lack respect for yourself and for others who might have to share your space.
I guess the latter point is really the clincher. If you are so unclean that people can’t bear to touch you or to sit next to you on the train, or to live next to you, it shows a lack of respect for your fellow human beings (or at least, an ignorance of your impact on others). It’s obviously different if you live on the streets and so have no access to amenities, or if you are mentally ill and don’t have a clue. But if you have amenities to keep yourself hygienic and clean, but refuse to do so, then it shows that you lack the capacity to live in a civil manner with other human beings.
As expected, the Brighton rubbish-removal company’s server has died — either that or they’ve removed the images for discretionary reasons.
“A clean desk is a sign of an empty mind”
Seen on the wall over the very messy desk of a very well organised and clear thinker.
On the main story, a casual (contract) worker lobbed into the office recently and told how he worked for some time with the Department of Aged and Disabled doing house-cleaning. Some of his clients were the obvious – old and seriously disabled – but the clients that blew his mind were two or three who did not appear to be disabled at all, (one of them worked and another had no problem getting to the pub) they just let things stay were they fell and allowed their places to become stinking, rotting health hazards.
In the same vein, an outspoken conservative art critic came to Sydney from London and let his apartment to a high level civil servant who presented well at inteview and had good character references. At the end of the tenancy the place had to be professionally cleaned out from top to bottom, as it seemed that nothing had been done in the way of proper clearing all that time. The guy must have kept himself in order to hold a demanding job but the house was allowed to rot and mould around him.
What I appreciate most about your posts, H, is that you do not have absolute judgments about or solutions to the problems you raise.
Those problems (education system, children’s upbringing, tradeoff between rescuing people at the bottom and encouraging them to stay there…) are difficult. Politicians and newspaper columnists treat them as easy.
They are nevertheless worth discussing and chewing over.
Cleanliness isn’t next to Godliness it is Godliness. That said I’m a messy person.
It’s slightly worse than the BBC story suggests.
The Times has more detail.
As SL can attest, I was actually evicted from a house in Wales because it wasn’t ‘Tidy’ enough (the Welsh definition of this qualifies as advanced obsessive-compulsive disorder most everywhere else, but that’s a historical throwback to coal mining in the valleys where everything gets black in minutes) by a landlady who also started ‘in service’. Yes, like this chap I have an excuse – I was becoming disabled in a three storey house, (he was on crutches due to arthritis) but more than the lack of mobility and energy it was mostly lack of skills that was responsible. My family was solidly upper middle class and my grandmother had passed on what skills she had but these were more of the hostessing and how to set a table for a six-course meal for twelve people rather than housekeeping. I suspect she learnt to keep a home exactly the same way I am doing now … from a book (I think I can actually identify which one she used though it was never seen in my lifetime). My own working mother has never had the motivation to do this so it wasn’t like I’d ever learnt before.
It wasn’t that I didn’t care … I DID care, desperately, which was why I was too humiliated to ever allow someone in the house to help get it under control (even if I’d been able to afford the help). My house has got to a stage similar to that of Mr Baker’s on several occasions at which point it becomes so daunting and depressing that you end up doing nothing because you can’t work out where to start. “Lack of respect for fellow human beings” doesn’t come into it LegalEagle. Baker wasn’t personally filthy and had held down a full time job as a civil servant his whole life. He also lived alone, so it wasn’t like he was deliberately inflicting this chaos on anyone else. He wasn’t deliberately doing anything (life and houses tend to chaos naturally, it requires deliberate, consistent and systematic effort to keep order and not to have it go to hell). He wasn’t a stupid man and there’s no reason to asssume he was a lazy man. If he’d been able to keep a tidy home AND hold down a full-time job, he would have.
Due to physical disability I’ll always have to choose between using my finite energy on housekeeping or having a life. It offends me that the default will probably be housekeeping rather than other personally valuable pursuits, if only because my life and comfort may actually depend on the good opinion of strangers.
DEM, my comment was not really about Mr Baker in particular, but about what it takes to live in a society where we all have to coexist. Personally, as I said above, I am not a tidy person…if I was damning those who didn’t have a clean house, I’d be damning myself.
As far as I’m concerned, you can do what you like in the privacy of your own house – it’s when it starts to impinge upon others when it’s a problem. Thus, I would also draw a distinction between clutter which causes no harm to anyone, and mess which poses a risk to the health of others. If someone let raw sewerage leak into the neighbourhood, that’s obviously different to me leaving the dishes in the sink for a day.
I didn’t realise that Mr Baker had a disability. As I said above, if there are reasons why you can’t look after yourself or your house, that is understandable. And frankly, even if you don’t have a disability, the hours of work these days don’t leave much time for housework. If I really wanted to have a spick and span house, I’d have to do housework all the time – and I do want to have a life. So I just make sure it’s not dangerous, filthy or unhygienic to others.
The BBC stories didn’t go into much detail. I thought that there must be a rational reason for why the paramedics didn’t treat this man – they couldn’t access him behind the clutter, or there was some other problem which posed a risk to their health. I didn’t realise that the paramedics had done such a terrible thing. The poor guy doesn’t deserve to die simply because he lived alone in a mess. What an awful story.
“the use of hygiene as a proxy for moral worth.”
Actually, as The Economist noted, "Cleanliness is next to godlessness" which I riffed on here with other psych research.
Dave — I wonder how much of the moral decline evidenced in those religions that have somewhat over the top personal purification rituals is to do with ‘well, I’m clean, bugger you’ (follow Dave’s first link, the reference to religious purification rituals will be made clear).
Funnily enough, though, the link between clean public spaces + ‘order’ and lower crime rates (the Broken Windows thesis I blogged on during the World Youth Day fooferaw) has now been demonstrated. That’s a separate issue again.
I wonder to what extent the callousness of the ambulance men was a response to ‘disorder’ in the Kelling & Wilson sense. I wonder, too, if people in the emergency services — as representatives of public authority — transform private spaces into public ones simply by showing up.
There is a difference between untidy and dirty. You can have an untidy house that isn’t dirty in hygenic terms. Leaving books on the floor isn’t the same as leaving dog shit on the floor.
Good post SL. I agree with Ken’s comment.
Dave, that is very interesting. I have heard that some ultra-orthodox Jews believe that untidiness is next to godliness. If you’re tidy, then you’re not thinking enough about God, and spending too much time cleaning.
SL, just want to get this straight as it seems unbelievable to me – is the allegation that paramedics refused to treat Mr Baker simply because his house was untidy? If so, that is one of the worst things I’ve ever heard.
Once I saw a story on A Current Affair (or something like it) where this guy’s front and back yards were literally filled with car parts and rusting metal bits piled up taller than he was. The next door neighbours were complaining. I can kind of understand the position of both parties. The junk yard guy said it was his property and he should be able to do what he wanted within its bounds. The neighbours said it was affecting their enjoyment of their property.
I’m not 100% sure. If you follow DEM’s link (the piece in the Times), you can hear the dispatcher call and form your own view. On a superficial reading, it does seem that they used his filthy house as a proxy for his moral worth — much as the police officer did with the complainant in the piece I’ve quoted from PC Copperfield’s blog.
I actually think the hygiene/disgust/moral worth proxy is very, very common, and that there are — in evolutionary terms — probably sound reasons for it. However, in a developed country like Britain it leads to some very perverse things; this is undoubtedly one of them.
I’ve noticed, for instance, that women are very unsympathetic to both Mr Baker’s circumstances and those of the elderly Ukrainians the Germans beat up when they were young lads due to failure to ‘keep tidy’. A young mother, by contrast, gets lots of sympathy — as Karen Matthews did before she was found out. For a while there I was trying to peg the various reactions as a form of sexism, but I think it’s more complex than that.
Pedantic Moment:
PC David Copperfield has nt joined the RCMP (the “Mounties”) he was recruited by, and has been sworn into, the Edmonton City Police.
Where’s that call SL, I can’t find it?
It’s been removed. I played it again this morning and now there’s just a news featurette with a journo giving a summary of the call. Very irritating, but obviously because the matter is now in the hands of the court/coroner.
The story I heard was that he was crippled by chronic arthritis and too proud and embarrassed to ask for help to clean his house.
Anyway, on a different note as a skeptic,
I also thought you might appreciate looking at this book when it comes out in April.
http://brucemhood.wordpress.com/about-supersense/
No matter whether you are a believer or a skeptic, it has something really important to say from the world of child development about the origins of adult belief.
Best
Bruce
Leaving books on the floor isn’t the same as leaving dog shit on the floor.
Somehow I get th feeling that a person who has problems with the latter won’t have difficulties with the former. Just a wild guess.
Leaving books on the floor isn’t the same as leaving dog shit on the floor.
Depends which books you leave on the floor.
Good point.
Sometimes there’s little difference.