The Idea of a Shared National Culture — a ‘Common Culture’ — in the United Kingdom
The restrictions which were put in place by governments across the world during the COVID pandemic served to break society up into ‘bubbles’ which sometimes comprised no more than single individuals. In other words, the lockdowns atomized society. That was as true in the UK as it was across Europe and beyond. We might have imagined ourselves stepping out into a society of togetherness and unity as we emerged from the age of lockdowns. But of course the society we left behind in early 2020 as we went into lockdown was far from unified, and it is a society as disunited as before that we find ourselves in now.
Class distinctions have always spoken to our living in parallel worlds. As the historian A. J. P. Taylor once memorably put it, the Establishment has its own accents, its own mealtimes, its own education system, and its own religion, not to mention its own kind of football. Additionally, ours is a multicultural society, and the critique of hard-line multiculturalism — multiculturalism minus integration — is that it functions as what Amartya Sen calls ‘plural monoculturalism’, which sets up a number of parallel societies.
Against the backdrop of these persistent divisions — and in connection with a lingering feeling that something better is possible, it may be time to revisit an idea which crops up in British letters from time to time. The idea of ‘common culture’ has been discussed by figures as diverse as F. R. Leavis and Raymond Williams. Common culture has always been suggestive of a national culture which is egalitarian. Such culture, owing to that egalitarianism, is bound up with the business of bridging cultural differences between different groups in society. Whether people are divided by social class or cultural background or some other potential ‘divider’, common culture amounts to a shared domain which can potentially help bring people together, instead of leaving them in their parallel worlds, or driving them apart, in the way that we suspect today’s filter bubbles do. Of course approaching this subject today, we quickly realize that the establishment of such a culture would not entail all of a person’s culture becoming part of the shared domain. Much of individuals’ and groups’ culture (particularly in relation to lifestyle) is destined to remain outside common culture, especially in multicultural societies. But common culture might amount to a sizable common core that everyone has a stake in.
What is it that blocks the development of common culture in the U.K.? In the second main part of this commentary, I’ll argue that we should reject the ideas which impede the development of common culture. But what do we mean by common culture? If we are to have such a culture, we need to develop a sense of what the defining features of common culture are.
Defining common culture
Common culture is characterized by two features which we may consider one at a time. It is easier to define these features if we first think of the corresponding characteristics of a culture bereft of sharedness or commonality. First, in such a culture, people of different socio-economic groupings enjoy different levels of culture with little or no overlap. This is undesirable per se, but it also has significant implications. A society in which different classes enjoy different strata of culture is inevitably a hierarchical one in which those at the bottom — the cultural have nots, as it were — experience a kind of cultural poverty.
A truly common culture would be one in which, up to a point, different social classes enjoyed the same levels of national culture. Here, culture which carries an appeal which is cross-class is of prime importance. Defined in this way, common culture is a culture which, to an extent, gets rid of cultural poverty. It wouldn’t eliminate all such poverty for much of the culture we enjoy is culture of other countries; but it would make a significant dent in it, given that much of what we enjoy is national culture.
Of course for such a common culture to come into existence the culturally ‘well off’ would need to yield to the joys of popular culture, but as I explain in this longer treatment of the theme, today’s ‘highbrows’ already tend to combine enjoyment of high culture with popular or even mass culture.
A second feature of common culture relates to locale. To return to a culture lacking commonality, such a culture is typically limited to the culture of a small number of national locales or putative cultural capitals. This feature has significant implications as well. Identity, after all, is based on local culture. As Northrop Frye observed, ‘Identity is local and regional, rooted in the imagination and in works of culture’. Consequently, the identities of a country (and perhaps its overarching identity) get distorted by a concept of national culture lacking in inclusiveness or the spirit of commonality.
A common culture, then, would also be one in which the local cultures of the entirety of a country are included: commonality would arise from everyone being able to see that, in addition to all other local cultures, their local culture was also a part of the hodgepodge which is common culture. And defined in this way, common culture is one in which, by virtue of that inclusiveness, all identities have their place.
So, common culture in the UK would be the culture of every locale but specifically the culture of each area which is neither hopelessly highbrow nor irredeemably commercial — in other words, culture which passes muster as cross-class. In Yorkshire, it would be the works of Alan Bennett, TV dramas written by Sally Wainwright, the plays of Alan Ayckbourn (who has a strong connection to Scarborough), the popular poetry of the poets of the area, including natives such as Hughes and Tony Harrison as well as adopted writers such as Larkin and Plath, or the work of an upcoming artist, such as Jade Montserrat, whose aesthetic is unequivocally popular. Or is might be enjoying a local newspaper or local radio. Common culture extends to a variety of different kinds of activities, so (still in Yorkshire) it might also be a day out at the Brontë parsonage or time spent enjoying cricket or another sporting event. In Glasgow, it would be the work of Glasgow filmmakers (Forsyth, Ramsey, Mullen, etc.), or a visit to an Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson building, or a football match at one of the city’s many grounds, or the works of one of the city’s many literary artists whose works possess popular features — everyone from Alasdair Gray to Liz Lochhead, and Edwin Morgan to Jackie Kay (who, alongside a number of other identities, may justifiably be spoken of as a Glasgow writer), or the popular music of the city — for example, that of the city’s chamber-pop bands (The Blue Nile, The Bathers). And so on. Were we to begin to organize our cultural lives around this idea of common culture, with time, fewer and fewer people would feel that their culture or identity had been side-lined, and, increasingly, it would feel as though enjoying all other British cultures was a viable option as well. (Perhaps PSBs could help to generate that feeling by broadcasting programmes about the culture of all UK locales over the course of each year’s programming.) And rather than enjoying different levels of culture from each other (and pretending that there are no differences in quality across culture), in a common culture our enjoyment of culture would also begin to coalesce around particular strata of films, TV etc., which would have the effect of reducing cultural poverty in society.
The ideas blocking the development of common culture — and why we should reject them
With respect to the first feature of common culture, it may be that common-culture moments are afforded by mass viewership of television programmes. After all, it is not a matter of everybody watching the same show; rather, it is a question of people enjoying the same levels of programmes. But certain trends stop the emergence of widespread commonality. Ultimately, this limited commonality stems from the fact that we see value judgements as taboo. ‘To each their own’ is the ethos of culture in our times. In his The Way We Live Now Hoggart documents how over the course of the eighties and early nineties in the UK a laissez-faire attitude to cultural taste settled into an orthodoxy. On another level, humanities departments also decided some decades ago that value judgements about culture were beyond the pale. Cultural hierarchies depend on value judgements — they are the lynchpins of such structures — and the sooner we get rid of them, the better.
However, the vanquishing of value judgements has itself been effectively critiqued, and such judgements get redeemed by that critique. No one helps us more than Hoggart when considering these issues. He puts a different spin on value judgements about the most commercial culture in his The Way We Live Now. Flying in the face of the spirit of the times, he argues that the refusal to make such judgements about culture can fairly be construed as a counter-productive attitude encouraging the less well-off to adopt a non-aspirational attitude to culture. Today, borrowing the phrasing of speechwriter Michael Gerson, we often speak of the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’. Hoggart foreshadows this sentiment when, with reference to Aneurin Bevan, he speaks of ‘the poverty of expectations’. The idea that there is no need for mobility in the cultural domain, tied in with denying that some culture is more valuable than other culture, is anathema to Hoggart. In effect, he argues, it is as if, suppressing their aspirations, we say to people ‘stay as sweet as you are’:
To anyone from a bookless home the suggestion that there should be […] a prior social filtering rather than a judgement of different qualities, is offensive and ill-judged. The thought that such a creed is being offered up to people who still live in a bookless culture, as a justification for being satisfied with the popular press, the shoddier television programmes and other such barbarisms, is yet another instance of the “stay as sweet as you are” syndrome.
With respect to the second feature of common culture, it could be argued that we put a good amount of effort into generating a sense of the UK as culturally various or diverse. Whenever we celebrate local cultures while acknowledging that we are dealing with aspects of national culture, we are helping common culture along. Many of our institutions are involved in this process: the media, government (at different levels), the education system, and so on. We see these processes at work today when steps are taken to encourage more appreciation of the UK’s cultural variety. The picking of a UK cultural capital every four years is an example — Coventry became the capital in 2021, after a delay owing to Covid 19. Broadcast media picks up where government policy leaves off: the BBC is offering a roster of programmes in support of Coventry’s mantle. Not enough attention has been dedicated to local culture in academic work — there have been too many distractions stemming from identity politics, not to mention the transnational turn — but when, for example, an academic turns his attention to the Romantic literature of the West Country, the whole business of doing justice to regional or local culture and identity is being advanced.
But even if our efforts in this area are more focused, they are nonetheless sub-optimal. Part of the problem lies in the fact that, having identified ethnicity as the main grounds for exclusion, the trend has been to invest in multiculturalism as the solution to a lack of inclusivity or commonality. What Goodhart calls ‘liberal multiculturalism’ has tried to reshape mainstream British culture and identity so that it reflects not just white majorities but ethnic minorities, too.
Liberal multiculturalism is a progressive development, and it yields appealing results. So refashioned by such multiculturalism was UK identity by 2002 that the cultural critic Paul Gilroy, in a rebuttal of a far-right trope, could say it was clear that, figuratively, there was indeed black in or beneath the Union Jack. But from the point of view that I am advancing it’s important to work with local identities in the first instance, forever pushing for more and more inclusivity in connection with that category of identity. This does not exclude considerations of ethnicity. After all, each of these local cultures and identities must be dealt with in an inclusive manner: we need an inclusive account of the cultures and identities of Yorkshire, Glasgow, south Wales, and so on. But considerations of ethnicity, along with various other categories of identity, must come second to local identity if common culture is to burgeon.
The choice
If we wish, we can stick with the ideas that presently inform how we think about national culture in the UK today. We can continue trying to refashion British culture and identity by throwing the emphasis onto ethnicity (and identity politics more generally); and, in connection with cultural poverty and cultural wealth, we can limit our ambitions to promulgating the norm which insists value judgements are verboten. But, as should be clear by now, a common culture is a far better option.
