Should I Be Proud Of English Culture?

In the aftermath of the piece I wrote on Yorkshire’s onanistic tendencies I’ve had some interesting conversations about patriotism, loyalty and pride in a place. Patriotism in particular is a pretty spicy potato, given on the one hand its association with the nastier elements of the far right and on the other the frequency with which it is employed by mainstream politicians to ingratiate themselves and their policies with their electorate. Loyalty too, while it can be a virtue, can also lead you to ignore or actively abet some pretty messed up shit. If you help your mate bury a body you’re a pretty loyal friend, but you still probably shouldn’t do that. I don’t particularly want to talk about that aspect of patriotism today though, but rather a conceptual problem I think I have with the concept of national pride.

This dog makes me weep with raw emotion

It’s quite hard for me to summon a sense of pride in my country. As someone who’s not particularly into sport or war, I’m not party to the main arenas of patriotic fervour. The easiest way I’ve found to make myself feel a twinge of pride in Englishness is to think about our musical culture. I was listening to Basement Jaxx the other day, and I found myself thinking “this is a good example of what English music does really well”. Their music is poppy without being cheesy, it is modern sounding (for the era it was made), it mixes elements of different musical cultures into something different, with both mass appeal and credibility

From Jungle to UK Garage to Grime to Dubstep, England has been at the forefront of new electronic music for 25 years (at least), while mainland Europe remains stuck in a Vengaboy’s nightmare of trance and euro-house and the US acts like a little brother who’s just discovered pills and raves for the first time and thinks he invented that shit. And that’s just the music I’m personally familiar with. English guitar bands from the Beatles to Radiohead via Led Zep and the Clash have been world beaters, defining genres – defining eras. Not bad for a little country on the edge of Europe. “Well done England”, I think to myself, and then I feel all fuzzy inside.

It’s like I’ve got ducks in my heart

But here’s my conceptual confusion – why should I be proud of England for what Basement Jaxx do? England didn’t make all that music, individual bands and artists did. But I don’t feel proud of Basement Jaxx. The only English artists I feel proud of are those I know well personally. And yet I do feel it, on some level, this pride in English music. What’s going on here?

What’s going on here?

First of all, it seems to me that pride is an emotional reaction and not an intellectual one. Pride is something we feel, it arises unbidden. I just do feel proud of English music; that feeling is not the end result of a chain of reasoning. If we accept that pride is an emotional reaction then we’ve kind of answered my original question. I don’t think we can dictate what emotional reactions people should or shouldn’t have. Those reactions are outside of our control and thus not subject to moral judgment. We can judge the underlying values which contribute to those reactions, and the actions taken as a result of them. In other words, we can still examine the sources of our emotional reactions and try and work out what the fuck a gwarn.

What The Fuck A Gwarn

Let’s do a little untangling.

It seems to me that pride is a three-way relation: X is proud of Y for Z. Eg – Jack is proud of Jill for making it to the last round of the Great British Bake Off. X and Y can be identical: I am proud of myself for my effortless cool under pressure. Z can be highly specific or quite nebulous: my mum might be proud of me for a particular grade I got at school, or just generally for the person I have become.

Pictured: the person I have become

Within this model it is clear that X has to be a person (a thinking thing capable of feeling pride) and Z has to be an achievement, a past action. What kind of thing can Y be? That is, what kind of things can we feel proud of? Ourselves, obviously, and other people close to us (nb – this ‘closeness’ might be one-way, ie we might feel close to an artist or celebrity who impacts us greatly and thus take pride in their achievements, despite them being entirely unaware of us). We could conceivably be proud of animals, or machines we have got sufficient emotional investment in (as we might feel proud of a battered but beloved car for completing a long journey). In short it seems that Y can be any entity which satisfies a) something we can invest an emotional attachment in and b) something which is able to act, and thus accrue achievements.

Is a nation able to act and accrue achievements? This seems to be the heart of my conceptual problem. I guess it depends what a nation is. Maybe a nation is an idea, maybe it’s a collection of people. Collections of people can act, although really each person acts individually. Ideas can affect the world, but to say they ‘act’ is to speak metaphorically. Actually I think it’s plausible that a nation is a collection of people and ideas – not all collections of people are nations so there must be some additional factor which makes a nation.

People certainly speak and think as though nations can act. ‘England expects’, ‘France invades’, ‘China exports’ and so on. This seems to me to be a species of loose, metaphorical talk. ‘England’ doesn’t expect the British government does, just as the French army invades and Chinese businesses export. The metaphor is useful shorthand, but its easy to get the metaphor confused with the reality.

I think when I’m proud of English music I’m treating England like a group of people I know well, in the same way I might be proud of a band I was at school with. But England isn’t a group of people I know well. It’s a heterogeneous collection of people inhabiting a specific area, tied together by varyingly spurious ideas of common culture and history. Nations are seductive and deceptive things and we’re trained from a young age to identify with them. I probably do have more in common with the average English person (whoever the fuck that is) than with the average Chinese person. But I kinda wish that wasn’t the case. There are better things to have in common than being from a fucking country.

I think in all honesty I’d rather I didn’t feel proud of England’s musical culture. I said at the start that we can’t control our emotional reactions, and in the moment that is true, but over time we can temper and train our emotions. Maybe I’ll try and extinguish what lingering vestiges of national pride I still harbour in anticipation of the eventual destruction of all nations and the establishment of a new world order.

Sign me the fuck up

I’ve already answered my opening question but now I’m gonna answer it again. Should I be proud of English culture? No, it’s stupid. Pride in a nation is an emotional reaction, sure, but it’s one instilled by the dominant culture and I want out.

This Is The End Now

Boy, that conclusion wasn’t very well justified. I think I just hate countries and teams and all that shit. It’s nice to throw some fancy words around first though to confuse motherfuckers, then say what you really think and ninja smoke the fuck out of there.

*NINJA SMOKE!*

Join me next week when I come up with a different joke to put at the end of these things.