The way we *!@* live now

Liberals shouldn't be squeamish about disapproving of bad manners, says Howard Jacobson

There is, our parents used to tell us, a time and a place for everything. Which normally meant that now was not that time. Even if we didn't know it was Ecclesiastes they were quoting - "To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven" - we heard prohibition in it and went to bed disappointed. In fact, Ecclesiastes is not a charter of denial. The idea of granting every thing a season - a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to weep and a time to laugh - is as much about latitude as prohibition. What could be more liberal than to grant all man's works, and all his rejoicings in them, their time and place? If we find ourselves at one another's throats when it comes to the causing of offence, profanity, rudeness, and all other manner of contemporary objection- ableness, it is because we cannot agree what the proper time and place for them should be.

There is, our parents used to tell us, a time and a place for everything. Which normally meant that now was not that time. Even if we didn't know it was Ecclesiastes they were quoting - "To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven" - we heard prohibition in it and went to bed disappointed. In fact, Ecclesiastes is not a charter of denial. The idea of granting every thing a season - a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to weep and a time to laugh - is as much about latitude as prohibition. What could be more liberal than to grant all man's works, and all his rejoicings in them, their time and place? If we find ourselves at one another's throats when it comes to the causing of offence, profanity, rudeness, and all other manner of contemporary objection- ableness, it is because we cannot agree what the proper time and place for them should be.

After the watershed at the very least, pleads Martin Ward, the deputy general secretary of the Secondary Heads Association, with particular reference to the footballer Wayne Rooney's f-word fusillades. By which hour we will have packed our children off to bed without a role-model and settled in to watch Jeremy Paxman ("our" role-model) savaging the health secretary, John Reid, or New Labour's "attack dog", as he called him the other night. Which is the more frightening - Rooney bearing down on you, spraying virulent invective, or Paxman lengthening his face in lugubrious contempt for every idea you have ever entertained? I am unable to decide. There is an argument for setting the one upon the other and letting a wound-count settle it. But there is also an argument for not wanting our children to be there when it happens. Without doubt, Paxman is a democratic necessity. Any night he is not on television, treading where no angel dares, we are the poorer. But the sight of him making the mighty quake is not as exhilarating as it once was; for the reason, mainly, that the business of bad-mouthing politicians has become routine.

Ordinary members of the public, called in to question the Prime Minister, now effortlessly out-Paxman Paxman. If this means that we have become a less servile people as a consequence of Paxman's example, we must thank him for it.

But in so far as we have lost respect for the great offices of state, feel no equivocation in the presence of authority, are unable any longer to distinguish the accidental man from the abstract idea of the position, acknowledge nothing as owing even to simple, non-hierarchical good manners, then Paxman's example has been a bad one.

It has not been pretty, these past two years, seeing people with no matter how real a grievance addressing the Prime Minister in language they would not use to a dog. (That Peter Hain should be calling Michael Howard an attack mongrel just days after Paxman called Reid an attack dog proves how catching the canine insult is.) How far the Prime Minister, or anyone else for that matter, has had it coming are beside the point. The discourtesy has not been pretty in itself. It has not honoured those party to it. It is not a freedom we are the better for having won. In the same way, though there is no doubting John Reid's capacity to give as good as he gets; Paxman's roughing him up the other night felt indecorous, inappropriate to the time and place, if you like unworthy of the position of authority Paxman himself holds.

Newsnight does not position itself as satire. It operates as considered discourse. Allow such discourse to degenerate into brutality and derision and suddenly satire has no work to do. Channel 4's new series of Bremner, Bird and Fortune has so far been feeble beyond words. How could it be otherwise? When there are no political taboos left to break, when disrespect cannot be shocking because disrespect is the coinage of the times, the satirist has no role. It is the same with swearing. Nothing liberates the spirits quite like swearing. What one might call exceptional or creative swearing, yoking expletives by violence, revelling in outrageous hyperbole and infinity of insult, and in the process throwing precaution to the wind, is one of our most precious gifts. Yet when it is the daily currency of resentful give and take, it is among the most dismal expressions of despondency and loathing of which humans are capable.

Listen to children in a deprived area swear and you feel you are among the living dead. Listen to Wayne Rooney swear and you will be forgiven for wondering whether life has yet begun. We sometimes make the mistake of defining swearing lexically, as though its offence can be measured by the words it employs. In fact, swearing is just as much about the set of the face and the pitch of the voice, the vindictiveness of the delivery, and of course its direction and intent.

If we don't want children emulating Rooney it isn't only because we would rather not have them saying "fuck" every time someone takes their ball, but because we don't want them to become monsters of pugnacity, carrying their faces like rats loosed from the sewers, and visiting unreason and terror on persons charged with enforcing the rules. Rooney does not, after all, merely mutter his four letter disappointment into the turf. He runs up to referees and screams obscenities at them. It is very nearly assault and battery. Amazing to me that referees do not scream obscenities back. Or, better still, knock him flat. But we must assume that the ref is mindful, even if Rooney isn't, of the requirements of the discourse. Knocking footballers flat is not what referees do.

It can be argued that the discourse of football - passion and sweat in a confined area for 90 minutes on a Saturday afternoon - is precisely what justifies the swearing. Profane time, when the usual compunctions are held in suspense. Leave televised football out of it - because on telly the usual compunctions are not held in suspense - and they have a point. The concept of profane time and space explains the anthropology of Bernard Manning and Roy "Chubby" Brown, two masters of the expletive art who function best in the oasis of a private club or seaside pier, where those attending leave their sense of moral outrage at the door. Just off the mainland of Sri Lanka you will find Cursing Temples where it is considered reasonable - holy even - to go and incant all manner of harm on those you hate. We scoop out a time and place for such transgression. Catholics confine it to Carnival. My own belief system vests art and literature with the same exemption. It is absurd to complain that a work of art offends you, I argue, because that is what a work of art exists to do.

So there is no inconsistency in our applauding bad language and behaviour in one context, and abominating it in another. It is not illiberal to want Rooney gagged or people to mind their manners in a TV studio. We can insist upon propriety in our social relations without compromising our essential freedoms. Indeed, the more decorous we are when it is right to be decorous, the more potent our attacks on decorum when it is their hour to be heard. As the preacher says, there is a time to keep silence, and a time to speak.