On the death of England

The English landscape versus the forces of progress

'God is dead. . .  And we have killed him.” Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous words came to mind as I was pondering that recurring question of whether England is dead or dying.

Of course Nietzsche wasn’t making a scientific statement but a metaphysical or even literary one. He was saying that God was dead conceptually; that the idea of God was dead: that it had been killed by the Enlightenment, the sway of reason and the elevation of Man.

I think the framing of death around England now has a similar quality. Both progressives and many of their conservative opponents say the same thing: that England is already dead. That is to say that it doesn’t make sense anymore. It is out-of-date, behind the times. It may linger in certain forms, but conceptually it is dead: like God is dead despite still being worshipped and like the Conservative Party is dead despite being in government.

In this sense England’s killers have already prevailed. All that remains is for the body to decompose, and this will take time. In the meantime England as an entity will continue to exist as a sort of relic, living on borrowed time.

Saying it’s so to makes it so

People saying this sort of thing sound very clever and insightful, which is part of the point. By describing this historical story, they are claiming knowledge of the past (the death) and the future (the continuing decomposition). But both of these things are unfalsifiable. We can’t verify this death because it is metaphysical. The same goes for the decomposition, added to the fact that it is partly in the future.

This is an example of something I’ve been exploring a lot, which is how we do politics via the expression of knowledge. For hard-core progressives, the story is a form of wish-fulfilment. As Robert Tombs has written of history as a profession in The English and Their History, “In the case of England particularly, some historians have come close to suggesting – sometimes with surprising vehemence – that it does not have, or should not have today, a meaningful history at all.”

Through this style (practising politics via the assertion of knowledge), you attempt to eliminate something by saying it does not exist and cannot exist. In order to win, you say you have already won. The intellectual-as-expert attains political authority in this way, gaining command over that which can exist and that which cannot, reframed as that which is of the future and of the past.

Having said all that, we must admit that there is some truth in these stories. Nietzsche clearly had a point about God. And the fact that progressives and conservatives tend to gather around the same story about England shows how the story resonates beyond any authoritarian fantasy.

Migration, technology and presence

For both sides, migration plays an important role here, in helping to eliminate that which is respectively loathed and loved. It’s a touchy subject and not easy to discuss, but there’s clearly a basic truth here. People from elsewhere moving to a place, from within a country as well from outside, have little existing relation to it by definition – especially the local aspects of it. If you move into a new estate in a different town, you won’t care about the meadow that the estate replaced and destroyed. You won’t even be aware it was there. To locals who enjoyed walking their dogs in that place, the relation is very different: with the new estate appearing as an imposition, a loss and perhaps a source of anger.

The same goes for local culture. Someone from abroad will not care so much about the loss of local accent or of a pub. They simply don’t have that existing relation to the place, that care for the place as it is and was.

In this sense, migration can be a vehicle of death as well as new life. And the more of it, the more of what existed before fades in presence and importance, dying off as much from neglect and ignorance as conscious rejection and elimination: both land and culture.

I was quite struck in reading Paul Kingsnorth’s review of Robert Winder’s book The Last Wolf the implied idea of national identity as a relation between people and landscape, which is to say place. And as a greater proportion of us come to live, work and take our leisure in urban or quasi-urban areas, that kind of identity inevitably dissipates.

As Kingsnorth says,

When people in England, or anywhere in the modern world, have more connection, via their handheld screens, with the mill race of global consumer “culture” than they do with the landscape around them, and when only a handful of us work on or really know that landscape, what chance does it have of forming the basis of our cultural life?

In this sense, as fewer of us abide in a context of countryside and landscape, England is dying, but so are any number of other entities and ideas which insolently maintain their existence in the face of progress. There does appear to be an inexorable quality to this: certainly a great force of pressure which is difficult to appreciate let alone resist.

The North Downs Way seen from Puttenham, By http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:SuzanneKn - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:North_downs_way_seen_from_puttenham.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4734432

I remain an optimist however.

I rather love the way many small ‘c’ conservatives wallow in the defeat of what they love. It has a lovely elegiac quality to it, especially in the writings of Roger Scruton. However, by seeing things as inevitable, you make them so – and in the process make democratic, political life futile and irrelevant. This is not something I am willing to countenance, despite all the evidence in support.

As I see it, you can always change things if only you have the organisation, the skill and most importantly the will, not least to pool resources and learn from others.

Admitting defeat furthers that defeat. It means bowing down to ideas of historical inevitability that you oppose - and submitting to the authority of those who are trying to kill you by declaring you already dead.