The British, a people who once ruled a quarter of the globe, are now reduced to bickering over restaurant bills. A recent kerfuffle has erupted over an etiquette expert’s warning against the vulgar practice of splitting bills equally. The nerve. The audacity. The sheer, unbridled banality of our age. One can almost hear the ghost of Lord Chesterfield weeping into his brandy.
Let us be clear: I am not opposed to fairness. But fairness is a nuanced virtue, not a blunt instrument of social coercion. The modern insistence on equal splits is a manifestation of a deeper cultural sickness: the fetishisation of quantifiable equality over organic justice. It is the same impulse that drives the fanatical pursuit of gender quotas, racial proportionalism, and other such bureaucratic deities. We have become a society of abacuses, tallying up moral credits like some demented celestial accountant.
Consider the historical parallel. In the late Roman Republic, the breakdown of traditional patronage networks led to a vulgar levelling. The plebeians demanded their grain dole, their bread and circuses, irrespective of individual merit. Sound familiar? Today’s equal-split advocate is the spiritual descendant of the Roman mob, demanding that everyone pay the same for vastly different meals, as if the universe owed them a perfectly balanced ledger.
But the damage is not merely fiscal. It is relational. True friendship is built on the delicate dance of generosity and reciprocity, not on the sledgehammer of enforced parity. When I dine with a friend, I do not keep a mental tally of who ordered the scallops and who the steak. I revel in the conversation, the claret, the shared experience. To reduce this sacred communion to a matter of arithmetic is to poison the well of affection. It is to treat your companions as counterparties in a transaction, not as fellow travellers on this vale of tears.
The etiquette expert is right. There is a reason the British have long prized the art of the discreet tip, the gracious pick-up of the bill, the subtle negotiation over who pays. These rituals oil the wheels of social intercourse. They allow for a gentle inequality, a recognition that we are not all the same, that some are richer, some poorer, some more generous, some more frugal. This is the glue of civilisation.
Of course, the modern egalitarian will snort at such sentiment. They will accuse me of defending privilege, of clinging to hierarchies. To which I say: every society has hierarchies. The question is whether they are natural and humane or artificial and tyrannical. Forcing the impecunious artist to pay for the City banker’s champagne is not fairness; it is a farce. And forcing the banker to subsidise the artist’s watercress soup is not justice; it is charity disguised as arithmetic.
So let us abandon this debased cult of equal splits. Let us instead revive the art of gracious inequality. Let us take turns treating each other, let us settle up in private, let us engage in the beautiful, complicated dance of human indebtedness. This is how friendships are strengthened, not by the dead hand of forced fairness. The Romans fell. Will we?
