It’s difficult to decide which is worse: that a Conservative MP with leadership aspirations should be thought of as brave for talking fondly of “English identity”; or that the Left establishment via its media outriders should be so predictably sniffy about the possibility of there even being such a thing. “Englishness”, for the Left, is like Australian wine or the success of Clarkson’s Farm: tolerable only to the extent that it’s not discussed.
Robert Jenrick MP has an inexplicable aspiration to lead the post-election wrecking yard still bafflingly known as the “Conservative Party”. He has written this, for the Daily Mail:
The combination of unprecedented migration alongside the dismantling of our national culture, non-integrating multiculturalism and the denigration of our identity have presented huge problems.
Cue the inevitable “gotcha” ambush, this time from a house mediocrity on Sky News, who demanded from Jenrick a definition of this curious relic he calls English identity. Jenrick’s reply was sensible enough, as far as it went: that he was unable to condense in soundbite form a set of cultural, historical and legal phenomena which make for a collective of quantum complexity is hardly surprising (I’m helping him out a bit here, but that’s the gist).
The journalist’s question amounted to a crude, tedious and very voguish reiteration of the Socratic strategy. The Socrates of the Platonic dialogues, talented though he undoubtedly was, was also a nuisance who spent his days walking the streets of Athens in search of likely marks on whom he could lay down his own “gotcha” schtick. This would involve asking them to provide a definition of an abstract concept (such as “justice”) and then explaining to the victim why his response was deficient.
Most of us know how that ended: a speedy trial followed by an invitation to down the cup of hemlock – cancellation being of a less reversible (and arguably less deserving) form in those days.
A “gotcha” of this sort is philosophically in error. It assumes that for a thing to have an identity then it must have an essence, one which is definable in non-vague terms. But the world is not constructed like that. There are logical systems which are constructed in acknowledgement of the fact that vagueness is an intrinsic feature of the universe. It would be absurd to think, for example, that a person is not bald when he has n hairs but becomes so when that number declines to n-1. There is hirsute, there is comb over, and there is bald – and the details of that journey are not conducive to a strictly arithmetical formalisation. Certain parts of that map are of necessity impossible to read.
What is it we want from a definition? Wittgenstein, whose competence as a philosopher of language arguably exceeds that of even the most intellectually agile news anchor, has some persuasive things to say here. In his later writings he suggests that it is strange to think that the meaning of a concept is reducible to a list of necessary and sufficient conditions which determine its application:
The idea of a general concept being a common property of its particular instances connects up with other primitive, too simple, ideas of the structure of language.
The example Wittgenstein uses is that of a “game”. There are all manner of games. Some of these require a ball others do not; some are played as a team while others are not, etc. These things we call “games” admit of no single unifying definition but share in a common resemblance. As with games so with “English identity” – perhaps its resistance to an easy classification is evidence of the strength, rather than the weakness, of the concept.
We do not need a theory of Englishness to be able to know it when we see it, any more than a Catholic communicant is required to fully understand the concept of transubstantiation before she receives the Host. An account of English identity might refer to the Common Law, make mention of the complicated history of the Anglican church, or valorise the peculiar nature of English traditions (including the tradition of being sceptical about the nature of Englishness). Or it might prefer to point at the perverse pleasure we take in an England batting collapse, or the Pavlovian and very English default to apology when somebody bumps into us.
These are, of course, all things which exercised the wonderful mind of Sir Roger Scruton, whose explication and defence of English culture and identity is distributed throughout many articles and books. Sir Roger was famously ostracised by the Tory parliamentary party for “unacceptable” remarks he made during a New Statesman set-up job a year or two prior to his death. Remarks which, it almost goes without saying, his accusers had not bothered to contextualise. Perhaps the current crop of Tory leadership contenders would find it useful to look at what Scruton had to say about our shared culture and the increasingly acute threats to it? (An appreciation of irony is, of course, also a very English thing.)
Sky’s question to Jenrick was not worthy of serious consideration. And to his credit Jenrick displayed a very English embarrassment at being expected to answer it. I’d have been more robust. If asked the same question I’d have said that English identity includes an affection for eccentricity and a love of queueing. If further pressed I’d have pointed out that Englishness is a bit like crap journalism: we can’t define it, but we know when we are in its presence.
Questions about immigration are not exclusively questions about economics. They can also arise from a sense that a national identity is something worth preserving. Jenrick is quite correct to reframe the discussion in this way. Yet again the legacy media has shown that it is more interested in the easy gotcha than a serious discussion. Which is a pity for all of us, because that discussion is becoming urgent.
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