Britain, Culture and the Love of Place
The concerns of those outside the bubble aren’t driven by racism, hatred or ignorance but rather by a love of the place they live and a desire to see it preserved, protected and, perhaps, made better.
In this short article about place and culture I’ve drawn, as my texts so to speak, on three poems by Rudyard Kipling:
‘Sussex’, his love letter to the place he lived and which he loved
‘A Charm’ from ‘Rewards & Fairies’ which invokes the ancient in England
‘The Land’, a reminder, especially for lawyers, that pieces of paper aren’t everything. Folk singer Jon Boden sings a version set to music by Peter Bellamy which you’ll enjoy.
The single idea that, for me at least, forms the heart of conservatism is that, as Kipling put it:
God gave all men all earth to love,
But since our hearts are small,
Ordained for each one spot should prove
Belovèd over all
It isn’t that we don’t care about what’s happening on the other side of the world but that what happens across the road is much more important to us. We share with the other people (or so we hope) in the place we find ‘beloved over all’ a desire to protect and preserve that place, even to make it better. And, over time, we grow to be like our neighbours because we share the same spaces, experience the same weather, go to the same events, get joy or concern from the same lights and sounds. We might, for the sake of finding a word for it, call this our culture.
This connection with a place, this culture, isn’t a fixed thing and nor is it entirely exclusive. Our attachment to the South Pennines or the North Downs - to home - is joined by other attachments and connections. To people who look like us. To people who share our language. To music and art, style and design. We share the rhythm of the year, festivals and activities, and we retain a sense of that which has gone before. Kipling again captured this feeling when he spoke of the “...mere uncounted folk of whose life and death is none report or lamentation.”
Some want to take all this and turn our place into an exclusive resort, to say that you cannot be of this place if you can’t place your ancestry with those ‘mere uncounted folk’ who like Old Hob can say their “...dead are in the churchyard—thirty generations laid.” But for all that we must remember how those men made where we live (every inch of it shaped by man as A. E. Trueman tells us in a book about how geology creates the scenery we love), we should also remember that our culture is not closed and limited but open and shared.
At the weekend, Keni Badenoch, leader of the Conservative Party, made what should be an uncontroversial observation:
“We have to make sure that we have a dominant culture in our country, and the people who move here want to help make the UK a better place. Our country’s not a hotel, it’s not a dormitory, this is our home”
There are, I’m sure, some who reject this idea preferring to be ‘flat earthers’, citizens of the world, as Dutch geographer Harm de Blij called them. These are such people who, as Sir Keir Starmer does, prefer Davos to Westminster, feel at home in the bubble of international business, politics and law. These people see the earth as flat, easy to traverse and where in every airport lounge, international hotel, conference centre and boardroom people like them gather to, as it were, run the world. But de Blij, like another Dutchman, psychologist Geert Hofstede, warned that most people aren’t in this shiny, multinational world and, as a result, feel excluded from power. The geographer calls the problem ‘distance decay’ and thinks primarily in terms of physical distance while the psychologist adds barriers of communication, culture and technology to the idea of distance.
Britain, maybe more than many other places, but not uniquely, has been more greatly affected by de Blij’s ‘flat earthers’ because of its dependence on trade, history as a colonial power, and openness to other cultures. The third influence here - other cultures - isn’t, of course, a new thing for Britain since we have shared other cultures without much thought for centuries. Our popular music was crafted here but would have been less without rock and roll from the USA, orchestral and choral glories from Germany, and opera from Italy. And those musics joyfully incorporated folk music from everywhere, the religious music of Jews, and the rhythms of Africa washed through the waters of the Mississippi. But, for all that, Sgt Pepper is unmistakably English.
We can say the same of art, dance and literature plus, of course, food and drink. Britain had chilli peppers before India but the glorious combination of their heat with the flavours of Asia made the subcontinent's food a glory. But we don’t mind and cheerfully absorb such glories into the range of what we eat without worrying that this somehow corrupts our culture. After all, we still have breakfast.
Culture is not fixed in place or time but, despite this, there is much of what we do today that would be familiar to somebody dragged forward in time two or three hundred years. And while there will be many strange things, our visitor would, to borrow from a Martian, ‘grok’ those things with comparative ease. The problem for culture comes when its connection to place is broken, not when elements of culture mix. This was the thinking that, at first, lay behind the idea of multiculturalism. How do we do the English thing and respect others’ religion, food, drink and dress while protecting and preserving our own culture. The problem was that this simple idea soon transformed into a combination of cultural relativism (‘all cultures are equal’) and practices that led to unresolved clashes with British laws and mores.
Badenoch’s formula, perhaps reflecting her own heritage, isn’t to claim superiority for British culture but to stress its dominance (at least in Britain). Without British culture being dominant then that ancient process of shaping where we live alongside our neighbours is interrupted. There’s a need to remind those who come to live here about Old Hob:
His dead are in the churchyard—thirty generations laid.
Their names were old in history when Domesday Book was made;
And the passion and the piety and prowess of his line
Have seeded, rooted, fruited in some land the Law calls mine.
This is not to bar people, let alone to force them away for the crime of difference, but to observe that the place that, we hope, they will come to love wasn’t made by accident but by the care and attention - the love - of men and women whose names we’ve forgotten. And that, if you come to live here, like the Lords in Kipling’s poem, your duty is to respect what those men and women did to create their - our - place.
This duty should, and I think this sits at the core of what Kemi Badenoch is saying, be taught. And, where new cultures clash with history and tradition, they should step back with quiet and respect. School curricula, the national broadcaster, the events and festivals that mark the year in Britain, these things should not be culturally neutral, should not have their religion and history pulled out, and should first and foremost promote the culture (and we can argue what this means) of Britain and the British. To do this we need to draw back from the blandness of the international culture proffered by those citizens of everywhere and nowhere, those ‘flat earthers’. This isn’t a condemnation of the international economic and political system but of the manner in which those engaged in that system have lost connection with the people who aren’t dancing in international society’s bright lights. The concerns of those outside the bubble aren’t driven by, as so many among the ‘flat earthers’ believe, by racism, hatred or ignorance but rather by that thing we started with, a love of the place they live and a desire to see it preserved, protected and, perhaps, made better.
Orwell said:
>By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people.
Liberals have forgotten this as we try so hard to make multiculturalism work.
One problem is that this debate has picked up the stigma of the culture wars and culture warriors feel they need to pick a side — but we should all recognise how our culture is special.
https://raggedclown.substack.com/p/cultural-loss