On a Common Culture: The Idea of a Shared National Culture - a book review
Without addressing these questions of moral values and personnel, Graham’s case for a putative common culture looks too undefined to attract active support from dissidents.
A book review of Brian Russell Graham’s On a Common Culture: The Idea of a Shared National Culture, Zero Books, 2022, paperback, 180pp, $17.95/£11.99, ISBN 978 1789 048322.
Brian Russell Graham, lecturer at the University of Copenhagen, has written On Common Culture to address what he sees as cultural inequality. That is, that the local, group and ethnic cultures present in Great Britain are not universal but divided and, to some extent, exclusionary. As a consequence of mass migration, political polarisation and the multiculturalist project to keep the population divided, no plausible national culture currently exists, suggests Graham. Graham laments the divisions within British culture and proposes the forging of a common culture. For any culture to be common, it must be national and inclusive and it must allow common ownership and common consumption. He sets out three unexamined presuppositions in his preface. He takes the view that inequalities are (a) identifiable, (b) wrong (that is, suboptimal) and (c) measurably redeemable. None of these points is obvious or unarguable.
There is some discussion about consumption not being merely a matter of taste but of participation. Also pointed out is the fact that high-, middle- and low-brow descriptors may not carry much weight in a cultural landscape that is more horizontal rather than flat, as the result of fields of production being considered equal in value, rather than assessed hierarchically. This is in large part the result of post-modernism and the collapse of high culture.
Graham states that both the far left and far right reject common culture because there is an antipathy to subsuming ethnic identity into a multi-ethnic civic culture. On the right (more than on the left) there is suspicion towards the mainstream. Newspaper-reading and television-watching are both cited as cultural activities, yet the lockstep uniformity within mass news and broadcasting outlets on highly controversial issues such as Black Lives Matter, COVID-jab mandates and the Ukraine-Russia war demonstrates to dissidents that these supposed common areas of communication are completely compromised due to organisations and individuals sharing uniform values. The difficulty is not absence of commonality but the uniformity of content and values within those common national channels. Finding no place that represents a traditionalist – let alone a nationalist – outlook, dissidents perforce reject common culture because at every strata common-cultural channels are materialist, liberalist and egalitarian in character.
Graham suggests it as a near necessity for us to consume foreign culture, as an antidote to parochialism. He writes that common culture “can produce national identity, and it may help to bring about cultural equality.” This position towards study of world culture is not additive but dilutive. It suggests that no culture can be understood or appreciated adequately without a comparative framework. We will set aside the difference between an average person knowing their national culture and an intellectual striving to understand national culture at a deeper level through a wider understanding of human culture. After all, the average Englishman of 150 years ago may have been counted more ignorant than us on matters of foreign culture, but he may have understood his own national culture better than we do – and was he any the poorer for that? Many will contend, no, he was not.
Graham’s position implies globalisation must be accepted. It presents someone concerned with preserving national cultural integrity with the fait d’accompli of “in the current year, globalism is a fact of life, get used to it”. This is not so much a statement of reality, as it is a political stratagem to overcome resistance. In what sense is this forced globalism compatible with a common culture of a nation which may wish to preserve its heritage and self-determination? The process of doing so may involve the active rejection of globalist colonialism.
Graham writes that rejection of integration and national culture on the grounds that they are implicitly racist has no valid basis. He points out the widespread retreat from the hard-line multiculturalism as divisive. He does not use the word “balkanisation” but that seems implied. He quotes Jonathan Sacks on multiculturalism. “It began as a commitment to value all cultures. Then it became valuing all cultures equally, a completely different proposition. Then it became valuing all cultures except your own. That is when it becomes pathological.” This is a generous interpretation of multiculturalism. A less charitable view is that the intention of the liberalist governing elite was always to fracture and demoralise the general population by importing groups which had few common interests, and little shared culture, with the indigenous population. Moreover, these immigrant groups would be beholden to the political overclass and thus become client groups of the elite.
The author recognises that the argument that British culture “should reflect the way we are now” is an argument in favour of quotas, stated or otherwise. He thinks such an artificial imposition would be a distortion. “We could only ever arrive at the stage where there is a match between the ethnicity of British culture and the ethnicity of the British population by badly skewing British culture: we would need to tilt it very aggressively towards the recent chapters of British culture.”
Graham is caught up on the issue of “cultural inequality”, which seems to be unequal production and consumption of (or broadly, involvement in) culture. He acknowledges that there have always been disparities in the amount of control (or influence) different groups, classes and regions have had in past British common culture. He also acknowledges the differences in Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish culture, regarding Anglocentric British culture. Yet, inequality is the natural state of nature and man, so we should expect the ruling class, the capital population and the wealthy to have an inordinately strong influence on culture. Even with open opportunities, individuals and groups participate more or less in production and consumption and this should not surprise or worry us. What is alarming is when the values of much of the population (outlined in the penultimate paragraph of this review) are barely, or not at all, represented in common culture, as we currently find.
Graham devotes space to analysis of the possibility of defining a common culture in literature and television. On a Common Culture is a last-ditch attempt to find a compromise position in order to avoid a lasting fissure or revolution. This is a view that is similar to that of the Social Democratic Party – moderate social conservatism in a framework of egalitarian values, along the lines of Hoggart and Orwell’s left-conservatism. Graham is proposing unity, reform and common values. Is such an approach workable or even desirable? After all, tinkering with balance, message and access within cultural production does not address the issue that governing elites always direct (or at least selectively edit and promote) culture that accords with their values and aims. If the drive towards egalitarianism, which Graham in no way condemns or questions, remains, then it must lead to a materialist-liberalist ethos taking the upper hand over tradition and religion.
The prime drawback of Graham’s argument is that he is caught up in the divisions between the Leavises (followers of F.R. Leavis) and the Arnoldians (followers of Matthew Arnold) about mass culture versus high culture. Due to this, Graham overlooks what all else depends upon, the most primal issues of power: moral values and personnel.
The question is, what kind of culture could be maintained if activist-administrators remained in place and could not relinquish their commitment to using cultural resources for social engineering? Should a new outlook be promoted, why would the persistent curatorial caste not just reassert itself indirectly, subverting in a concerted manner? How could one stop the progressivist worldview – that man has no inherent tendencies or values and is overwhelmingly susceptible to social conditioning – from coming out through culture?
Surely, what is needed is a new group of top administrators with different values, able to prevent progressivist idealism from undermining core truths. What are those truths? That biological sex in humans is overwhelmingly binarily distributed and unalterable; that family bonds supervene all others; that one culture may be superior to another; that religious-ethical rules may be more important than temporal laws; that not everyone is born equal and that socially imposed equality is perverse and unattainable; that we have no human rights other than those given and withdrawn by others; that democracy does not have any innate superiority over other forms of government; that commitment to one’s own people can be of greater importance than commitment to humanity globally. If these values are not embedded in common culture then dissidents (and many average apolitical persons) cannot participate in that culture. Additionally, whatever the value of a common British (or, at least, English) common culture, the question remains, which elite group will implement and guide this cultural production?
Without addressing these questions of moral values and personnel, Graham’s case for a putative common culture looks too undefined to attract active support from dissidents.
