On being English

The death of Arthur and Mordred Wikipedia

We English are experiencing a severe loss of cultural identity. The result of this is that English people have widely different values and some people even doubt whether England should continue to exist in the future.

There should be no mystery about this loss of an English cultural identity. It is obvious what caused it because when you look at almost any town in England there is an empty church at the centre. The church was the place where culture was spread to the general population and now few people go there. Things were very different a century ago when almost everyone went to church and most children attended a school that held religious assemblies. Religion was central to English culture.

The connection between the church and our culture is not surprising because there is a direct connection between culture, religion and myth. Myths and religions contain stories that describe the world in terms of what is significant and meaningful to people. For example in the tales of King Arthur the green land of England becomes connected with the story of Christ through the fate of the Holy Grail. The myth of Arthur reflects the desire that England should be God's own country.

The word 'myth' sounds very grand and distant but myths are not just stories from the past, they are created every day. A recent example is the way that Prime Minister Gordon Brown was portrayed as being a product of the church, a “Son of the Manse”, and so mythologised as the sort of good and godly man that we would prefer to see installed in the post of Prime Minister. This myth is about what we would like, not about the actual truth – Brown himself may be good or he may be bad but we would all like him to be good.

Myths and religion describe the world in terms of significance and meaning. They do not explain how the world works and so can seem to be silly stories. Some myths can seem mad but their significance is not at all crazy. As an example, the tale of Zeus transforming himself into a bull for the purpose of obtaining sex with Europa is obviously absurd but when we look at it from the viewpoint of an Ancient Greek it described how their land and lineage was connected to the gods themselves. The relationship between Zeus and Europa was about the significance of Greece to an Ancient Greek and wasn't really about bulls and sex at all.

Myths deal with meaning and could be dismissed except that outside of myth and religion there is no universally accepted answer to the question of why anything should be meaningful or significant for us. Attempts at mechanical answers, framed in terms of simple cause and effect or the survival of genes do not tell us why we should decide to do or be anything ourselves, now.

So what happened in England to change us from people with a fairly unified sense of purpose in life to a population with large numbers of people who feel lost? How did we lose our myths and religion? The answer lies in two World Wars and a church that portrayed God as a man in the sky who controlled everything. The independent spirited English realised that if God had caused all this suffering He could “f**k off ”. This was the right response because the Church had made a mistake. It had patronised a modern, educated community with myths for children. If there is a God He cannot be a man in the sky. God is about meaningfulness, not the mechanical control of our lives. If you cut your foot God didn't do it but when you are limping around days after the injury and your faith allows you to avoid despair then God may indeed be present.

This dissolution of national and moral purpose has let in the post-modernists who have been converting a vaguely structured society into an anarchy.

Where do we go from here? Does it even matter? Well, if you are, or have ever been, a parent or a teacher you know it matters. It must have been so much easier for teachers in the 1950s to control a class and for parents to instil morality in their kids when the whole of society sang the same tune about how we should behave towards each other. It must have also been much easier for politicians when there was widespread agreement about what type of policing and justice system should be used. Of course this shared culture had problems, it tended to be racist, xenophobic and supported an established order that was far from perfect but it definitely made people happier and society a safer place (recorded crime has increased 1000% since 1950 http://www.civitas.org.uk/data/recordedCrimePer100.htm ).

We have got ourselves into a right mess so how do we get out of it? The keys to this problem are held by government, schools and churches. Government should change the curriculum so that schools teach English history from a positive viewpoint where this is consonant with the truth (ie: the English abolished global slavery at huge cost and effort, not how England was a terrible slaving nation, how the British Empire was dismantled voluntarily, not how Britain suppressed the Mau Mau etc.). Cultures have “self esteem” like individuals and it is essential to stress how our culture has set an example in the world rather than how some actions of the British government were sometimes reprehensible. Most importantly the government should realise that, as an ex-imperial power, the British are painted as villainous in the national myths of scores of other countries and should combat this negative propaganda. Schools should hold assemblies that contain moral and cultural messages. The Church of England should be re-vitalised as a place for families and concentrate on the teachings of Jesus, playing down the childish myths. In particular people should be taught that "good works" are done with people you meet in the flesh, they are not performed by you if you are simply investing money in Christian aid businesses. Aid businesses should not be allowed in churches, they are not about Christianity itself and propagate the fatal message that "doing good" equals raising money.

Other religious faiths should be encouraged to describe their faith in an English context (ie: what it means to be a good English Hindu, Jew or Moslem etc.).

If governments protect and teach our culture then many other problems will be solved from lowering crime to reducing the suicide rate. After all, what is a civilised culture but the background that helps you declare that "I am English, I do not murder people, I am not racist, I believe in freedom, I believe civilisation is caring for others and enhancing our environment."

10/11/2008