What is to be done about the increase in order

Can anything be done to restore civility in public places such as hospitals?

Clearly, no one wants to live in so regulated a society that minor infringements of a code of behaviour are subject to arrest and legal sanction. In any case, the law's mesh is not nearly fine enough to catch minor degrees of ill-conduct.

Doctors and nurses, moreover, are in a peculiarly difficult position, for they are under an ethical injunction to accept their patients as they are. They cannot refuse to treat because the patient is in some way unattractive or disagreeable. They carry no sanctions: recently, when I asked a young patient to take her bare foot off the seat on which she was sitting, I was only too aware that, had she refused to do so, there was nothing I could have done.

There are three levels at which so effort of restoration of civility might be made: the intellectual, the social, and the legal.

The intellectual elite (that includes journalists and broadcasters) should give up its unreflective and automatic antinomianism. Civilisation needs conservation at least as much as it needs change; stability is at least as important as reform. Those who argue against destructive change are at least as valuable to society as those who propose reform that represents genuine improvement. Intellectuals should display a greater interest in and honesty about everyday social phenomena, because their ideas have had, do have and will continue to have, consequences that bring about new, and not necessarily desirable, social phenomena. Whether or not the trickle-down effect exists in economics, it certainly exists in the realm of ideas.

The general loss of self-control and consideration for others also has its roots in the model of family relations that was first mooted and then actively promoted in the second half of the 20th century, and that was made financially possible, though not inevitable, by the existence of the Welfare State. According to this model, all social, ethical and contractual obligation should be removed from human relationships, so that the full beauty of untrammelled love might flourish unconstrained. Only current feelings and desire should be relevant in the maintenance of a close association between two people. In this matter, whim has become law.

It is scarcely surprising if a young man, who has never met his father, and whom his mother has kicked out of her home because her current boyfriend, only a few years older than he, does not want him around, concludes that the only thing that should govern behaviour is first what you want and second what you can get away with.