British History, and ooohhh, the state o' this country

Christopher Hill Reloaded? Four years of coming (almost) full circle

This is about 1) British history, and 2) me. Most people probably find both of these topics boring, let alone the two at the same time. Sorry about that. Seeing though how I am (kind of) an only child of two British historians, and have just finished a four history degree focused around early modern Britain and Europe, it does, at least, make sense. More importantly, anyone who does read to the end will find that it is actually trying to say something radical about 1) politics, and 2) community. These really might be important topics for discussion, even if my piece is rubbish.

So my Dad did history at Oxford with, amongst other people, Christopher Hill: without doubt the most influential English-speaking Marxist writer on the 17th century, if not on any period, ever. His books, including my own favourite, The World Turned Upside Down, persuaded a large number of ( often non-Marxist) people, for a long time, that this was when Britain changed for good. The property-owning middle classes (bourgeoisie) gradually got hold power after the Civil War; despite Milton, their revolutionary-poet-talisman, regretting the repression of further radical democratic movements in Paradise Lost.

Dad, certainly not a Marxist, always really liked Christopher. Before I went to UCL he told me this story of a journalist coming to interview Christopher at Oxford, convinced that he worked for the KGB. Christopher began with (I think), ‘Oh, so you’ve come to unmask me’, and the other guy thought he had a confession! Dad meant, obviously, that he was an important thinker and that people were always getting him wrong. Until just now though, I never, stupidly, asked myself properly why Dad thought this.

Before going to uni, or maybe before my gap year, the answer was simple. Christopher was a Marxist, and therefore interested in Capitalism, which is inherently more important and interesting than cheese, the Church of England, and the architectural histories of T.Francis-Bumpus. Dad, of course, probably didn’t agree with this. In my first two years of studying history, moreover, courses with Nicholas Tyacke and Negley Harte proved to me conclusively that there was, in fact, no deep transformation of the economic structure of British society during the Civil War. Around this time, also, I stopped thinking seriously about politics in my own life. The World Turned Upside Down, it appeared, was just something made up to bash right-wing historians in the 1970s.

After coming back from Paris, though - where I slightly re-politicised thanks to conversations with Erasmus friends when Segolene Royal’s lost to Nicolas Sarkozy - everything quickly became important and exciting again. Ben Kaplan and David d’Avray persuaded me (indirectly) that Western politics and philosophy depends, as I had not realised, on stories we tell ourselves, even unconsciously, about the Enlightenment and the 17th century (this is unintentionally made explicit in article called ‘The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus’ by John Rawls, the inventor of Human Rights). Any liberal, or even defender of the modern nation state, must normally hold that beliefs are private and the public spheres is neutral towards them. For a hard nationalist like Roger Scruton, therefore, we are British because we all have a shared commitment to the White Cliffs of Dover and Wookey Hole (‘territorial sentiment’). For liberalism, we are British because of our very commitment to the privatisation of belief (‘the British value of tolerance’ (c) New Labour). So when did this privatisation happen? For both Scruton and the liberal the answer is: the 17th century. For them, however, this was not because of the coming of Capitalism, which is true, but because of an Enlightenment caused by Europe’s religious wars, which, as I think I found out, is false.

As soon as you start telling the story it looks wrong. Seeing the carnage in Europe, apparently, Hobbes, Locke, Liebniz and Spinoza decided religion was to blame, and attempted to work out something better (as David says though, compare this with wars for Democracy). Eventually everyone saw it their way, because they were right. In Ben’s excellent books, however, Hobbes and Spinoza don’t even to come into it. The public and private spheres, he says, were basically invented first by normal Dutch people. In Holland, during and after the Revolt, all religions became illegal except Calvinism. Nevertheless it was easily the most tolerant nation in Europe. The ‘tolerated’ religions simply played no part in the (totally intolerant) Dutch collective identity: the New Jerusalem. Catholic ‘House chapels’, hidden behind big buildings and made to look like merchants’ houses, held 300+ people. Everyone knew they were there, but pretended they weren’t. The private sphere in the West has simply contracted spatially since that time, now being something like ‘the privacy of a consenting adult’s home’. No argument needs to be made about the ‘neutrality’ of the public sphere.

In Britain, the situation was slightly different. The World really had been Turned Upside Down, at least religiously and politically. The Paradise which Milton believed Lost was a London where everyone ran to the inn at sundown to talk religion and politics! Not even in France would this be ok now. Let alone anywhere in England before 2am and six pints. Even in the 1700s European visitors’ accounts describe a completely ungovernable, wild country. The later 18th century invention of ‘Britishness’, moreover, had almost nothing to do with the Enlightenment. It was hatred of the French, driven by constant colonial war, and the unique Church of England that did it. The C of E, whilst mercilessly persecuting Protestant Radicals (who went to America) and Catholics (especially in Ireland), refused to open ‘windows into the souls’ of its people. The horror of a time when the King was executed and Cromwell banned Christmas was simply too much; as long as you were not Catholic or Radical we would get by by simply not telling each other what we think. ‘Nice day isn’t it?’. ‘Musn’t grumble’. ‘More tea?’. Britishness, basically, was a drastic solution to a drastic problem. The result, as I see it, is both the something noble, and the something horrific, in a very British person’s response to genuine pain. There is something dignified in avoiding hysteria and not passing on your burdens to another, but the all-to-obvious quiet suffering which often follows can be difficult to live with (see Tim in The Office).

A lot of people, of course, say stuff like this. What I also believe, however, is that the ‘Britishness’ solution to our Civil War not only explains why modern Britain is fast becoming less happy (see any of Richard Layard’s economic studies), but also why it is structurally incapable of halting its decline. The root cause being that we cannot now tell stories about our lives. We really do pass from one moment of aesthetic and physical consumption to another. I know genuinely nice people who work for charities and go out in the evening looking for fights with strangers. The reason, in turn, for all this, I think, is that Britain is no longer a stage ((c) Shakespeare). As Alasidair MacIntyre says, any ‘action’, no matter how freely chosen, still tells the next part of an infinity of historical narratives. ‘What’s he doing?’, for example; ‘gardening’, ‘pleasing his wife’. ‘preparing the vegetable patch for winter’, ‘taking the agricultural productivity of this part of Cambridgeshire to a new 400-year peak’. Our lives are literally meaningless if we can’t make them understandable in the context of other, bigger stories. It is these larger narratives which modern Britain does not have.

All of this came home to me at the annual conference of Compass (the largest left-wing pressure group in the Labour Party), which I went to last week. Everyone there was angry at the Government for their abandonment of socialism. Fair enough. But I think Douglas Alexander, the Secretary of State for International Development, actually had it right when he said that we (the Government), just will not be able to make the case for equality to ‘Middle Britain’, whatever its quantifiable social benefits. That language only ever made sense in a world of organised religion and trade unionism. This must be true. You just can’t imagine a Labour event with a speech like that I heard at a Le Parti Socialiste rally last year, which went something like ‘because remember there were always two Frances, in May ’68, during the Resistance, the Revolution, and with Jean of Arc (a member, I guess, of the 15th century Socialist party)’. Yet the difference was not always so big. When Attlee’s post-war Labour government founded the NHS, it was framed as the next chapter in a British workers’ struggle for dignity stretching right back to the Reform Act of 1832. Similarly, Thatcher’s later popularity rested, at least partly, on her historical claim to have ended the unreasonable stranglehold which organised labour had exerted on the nation since the war. Of course her alternative, a ‘Back to Basics’ return to the Protestant Ethic, failed. Her defeat however, of the trade unions was total. The Protestant Ethic is almost dead, whilst British children, apparently, now recognise the MacDonalds ‘M’ before their own surname. The concept of a ‘vocation’, in both its economic and spiritual sense, has become entirely alien to us.

This is a disaster. We have now no means of opposing the commercialisation of every aspect of our lives, including that of even the youngest children (see video screens at every London bus stop). The British State, whos only narrative is ‘taking Britain into the 21st century’ (you see what I mean), lacks any legitimacy to do this. Reasonable people become angry with traffic wardens for giving them a ticket, willing the end but not the means. The current rage over fuel tax demonstrates how impossible it would be for the Government to do anything serious about global warming, even if it wanted to. It’s hard to see, moreover, how this will ever change if we continue as we are. Jack Straw, for example, now is trying to draw up a British Charter of reciprocal rights and duties to be incorporated into statute law; not necessarily a bad idea – social life acquires its meaning from how we fulfil our obligations to others. But the problem is that these obligations must contribute to achieving a greater community good, or else people cannot be blamed for just staying home and watching tv. This community good, in turn, must be determined on the basis of shared values, and Britian has none! Richard Dawkins is just as British as Rowan Williams. The preamble to the Charter will probably say something vague about Magna Carta, British tolerance, and respect for Human Rights. I, however, read the letters pages of national newspapers after the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, and discovered that the majority of people apparently believed that he gave up his fundamental human rights when he (supposedly) refused to pay full fare for his tube journey!

After 350 years, however, and in the face of all this, we on the even moderately anti-capitalist left and right are still too British to tell each other that we think this is wrong. We are terrified of offending each other, because we don’t know what each other think (although looking at the De Menezes letters,maybe this is a good thing). In fact, almost no statement against the prevailing liberal-individualist moral status quo ever reaches the public sphere. After sport on tv, the only question the interviewer asks is ‘how do you feel?’, and the only answers the interviewee gives is either A) ‘so happy’, or B) ‘gutted’. Emotion is increasingly virtualised for mass consumption, and our knowledge of how to express ourselves coherently on ethical and emotional topics is in danger as a result. I know that sophisticated theory people like Adorno and Habermas say in clever ways that this is the fault of advanced Capitalism generally, but I don’t think that’s true. Even in France and Italy, at least on the basis of my year abroad, the problem doesn’t seem to me to be as drastic as chez nous. Even if the British suspicion of over-emotionalism, like that which manifests itself especially in our French and Italian stereotypes, is, I still think, basically good thing, it must however, at some point, be compromised for a better life.

The British state, in short, cannot write for itself a new narrative; that is a community task. Which communities are these? I don’t know (I asked someone at Compass whether a team on ‘Deal or no Deal’ would qualify for her and she said yes!) I know they are not, however, those decentralised voluntary associations which David Cameron claims will run the country instead of the Government. Any worthwhile communitarian project must aim to achieve some over control by Capitalism by legitimate political authority. It will, moreover, be completely distinct from any many implicit Conservative criticism of our immigrant communities. On the contrary, it seems to me like much of the Daily Mail readership’s anger comes from an unacknowledged frustration with being confronted with what Britain has lost. Certainly, spending living time with the Pakistani families in my Paris cricket team - who were all completely marginalised by French society – was an altogether more powerful experience than what I have found usual. Honest. Finally, and avoid John Rawls fans saying that I want more religious wars, community differentiation must also, clearly, take place with an eye to some limited, but important modern demands of supranational integration. Dispersal of power is a must when political communities form around values, and climate change and global population crises will not solve themselves (all of this now goes too far for my little head, however).

Of course, before any of these questions can be answered, we must first be able to talk to each other, without being drunk, about those things which matter: love, politics, art, and religion (or maybe science). For people like me this will be very hard. It will, indeed, appear something like the World Turned Upside Down: Christopher Hill’s genuinely alien but hope-filled chapter of what 1950s history textbooks used, ridiculously, to call ‘Our Island Story’ (On this note I recently discovered, thanks to an article by a guy called Doc Bill at my secondary school - who I never, tellingly, knew anything about when I was there - that the village of Balsham in sleepy Cambridgeshire was, in the 17th century, home to the Family of Love: a famous sect of polygamist mystics). I believe, basically, that to begin understanding and directing our lives again, we British people must look to that national narrative of which they are a part. Being British is bizarrely central to many of our views of the world, even semi-socialists like me. If we can begin to unravel our historical Britishness just a bit, however, remembering that it is no precious gift of the Enlightenment to be treasured, and that there is no Britishness gene, then things might just take a turn for the better. Paradise Regained anyone?