Being shy isn't always such a bad thing

Click here for more Evening Standard columnists

A drug has apparently been invented that will do away with shyness. It is called Escitalopram, and is meant to stimulate the brain to produce precise levels of seratonin, the chemical that controls mood. This will be better than the drug invented some 2,500 years ago that also did the job - the fermented juice of the grape - because it will not cause hangovers. That is all to the good because people who drink to overcome their shyness often wake up to agonies of shame and shymaking embarrassment when they remember exactly how they behaved the night before.

Shyness is not always a disability. Hugh Grant has made a whole career out of a charming, quintessentially English shyness. But on the whole, it is one of life's burdens - and not the most trivial. It runs from mere childish bashfulness through the timidity inexperienced young men often feel in the presence of women to real terror and phobias. One of the worst things about shyness is your consciousness of being shy - of appearing gauche, awkward and tonguetied. Fear of shyness multiplies the shame of it - just as the consciousness of having blushed can make you blush twice as furiously.

Stammering must be the worst sort of shyness, and the sort that most agonisingly feeds on itself, for a stammerer must live in dread that he (for stammering is exceedingly rare among women) will not get the words out - and this itself gives a motive to stammer. King George VI had a severe stammer, and for him to steel himself to open Parliament and make live wireless broadcasts during the war (with the whole nation willing him on to the next word when he hesitated) was something like moral heroism.

A few years ago a group of Welsh psychologists devoted an entire conference to shyness. There were papers on shyness from the ages of four to seven, self-consciousness and shyness in babies two to three months old, on shyness and narcissism, shyness in women and on loneliness.

But if you go back to the old " courtesy" (or etiquette) manuals of the Renaissance, you will find that shyness is not treated as a psychological malady at all. They all agree with Aristotle that there is such a thing as proper shame and modesty, in the light of which boorishness - the current vice Anglais - is a vice. And an utterly shameless person would be a sort of monster with no self-respect or respect for others, and hence capable of every sort of vile behaviour. The opposite vice to shamelessness was held to be bashfulness - a sort of fearful, irrational shame that more or less corresponds to shyness.

Aristotle thought it was good that young people were prone to this sort of bashfulness, because their lives were guided by emotion and appetite, and so it was only a quick flush of shame that prevented their being often rather disgusting. Apart from that, the guides to behaviour of our ancestors did not pay much attention to shyness at all, except to dismiss it as unmanly.

We are often cruel to displays of shyness. Shy people are sometimes thought to be self-absorbed, not taking the trouble to take part in normal social intercourse. When someone is described as "shy" this is often a code way of saying that he is pretty rude and churlish. The path between bashfulness and graceful ease is a narrow one. A child completely lacking in shyness is likely to be considered pert. And the truth is that shyness does prevent many children from being brattish.

Shyness has always been taken to go with modesty - and for centuries men especially looked for modest shyness in women. The late Diana, Princess of Wales would hardly have been human had she not understood that her very public shyness added to her attractiveness. Dame Edna also presumably has that in mind when she gives vent to her brazen-throated song, I'm shy.

But equating shyness with modesty posed almost impossible problems for women. A young woman who did not blush when indelicate subjects came up was regarded as knowing and immodest. But if she did blush, this indicated that she understood what was being talked about - and this also meant that she was immodest. Added to that was the universal feeling that the modest blush in women was extremely sexually attractive - so that it was also assumed that a young woman would contrive to blush deliberately. In Milton's Paradise Lost, when Adam leads Eve for the first time to their nuptial bower, she is described as "blushing like the morn", which is obviously meant to be fantastically attractive. In one of Darwin's books he describes cases of young women, under medical examination, and having to remove their clothes, blushing right down to their navels.

It was all splendidly complicated and difficult. The solution many women adopted was to wear rouge so that you could not tell whether they were blushing or not. No doubt that is all completely out of date. Or is it? I doubt that a man could find enduringly attractive a woman with absolutely no modesty or bashfulness. In one of his dirtier poems, A Lady's Dressing Room, Swift describes how love dies when a lover looks behind the scenes and discovers what his mistress gets up to when she thinks herself unobserved.

I suspect that most of us are at least a bit flattered if we bring out the shyness in another person. For shyness on the whole betokens some sort of respect, perhaps even fear - which is why older people look for at least a bit of bashfulness in the young.

So I am doubtful about this new drug. Shame, shyness, modesty, self-deprecation are all ways in which we see ourselves in relation to other people. On the whole they are good, and are among the forms of social conditioning that restrain us from being complete egoistic, hideously self-assured monsters.

Anyway, if there is a drug that gets rid of shyness, what about one for its opposite? It would be a boon for public life if some of the politicians who pontificate with supreme self-assurance could be persuaded to take a new shyness-attaining drug. A pilot scheme could include Tony Banks and Ann Widdecombe. And what about Paxman and the other Jeremy, the mini-Paxman whose name I forget, and Graham Norton, and Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst and Will Self and Julie Burchill and David Frost and ... Here the list should stop, for on second thoughts if all these people were to fall into bashful silence, life would be a bit more boring than it is now.

And - who knows? - what appears to be their excessive self-assurance in the form of bumptiousness might really proceed from their being, really, deep down, painfully shy.

? Dr Casey is a Fellow of Caius College, Cambridge.

Click here for more Evening Standard columnists