Though I don’t think this author is quite right about community formation in the US, nevertheless this a very nice article. And I look forward to more of this kind of rumination on UnHerd – less about immigration and transphobia, more about the human condition.
And yet…! I can’t help but notice this quote:
Because England, even the “worst” parts, still has a real community, built around a shared history and culture
There are numerous parts of England where it doesn’t seem to me that there is a “shared history and culture.” When a majority of the population is immigrant, or first- or second-generation English, how much “shared history and culture” is there?
Now normally that would be no cause for worry, because the English would be busy socializing those immigrants into that shared history and culture, through common entertainments, through education curricula, through the lingua franca of advertising and news reports and so forth.
But in recent decades the English have become ashamed of that shared history and culture, and don’t want to teach it or welcome immigrants into it. It’s as if the English want to escape their history and culture for some New Labour (and now New Tory) fantasy of globalist multiculturalism, where ‘English’ means something so abstract and slippery, so vaguely idealistic, that it can’t possibly unify people in their hearts and souls and stomachs.
The English must stop fleeing from Roast Beef and Warm Ale, from Tudors and Little Dorrits, from Col. Blimp and Spitfires, and embrace that grand assortment of fascinating tragedies, triumphs and oddities that constitute their shared history, in order to preserve the possibilities of community formation the author envisions.
The vast majority of us aren’t ashamed of our history. It’s a mistake to take too much notice of the very small minority of vocal pundits who are. Whilst they might appear to exert undue influence at the moment, they’re a mere blink of an eye in our ancient island history.
I hope/wish that were true. But when the ‘small minority of vocal pundits’ controls the apparatus of social formation – education, media, corp policies, even which historical monuments are allowed to continue existing – they can exercise a profound, out-size effect.
If the British want to reclaim their ‘shared history and culture’ they will have to be pro-active and forceful about it, and rebut the lies and half-truths that have been spread to undermine it.
There’s a great book by Roger Scruton that discusses just this point at length. Well worth reading: Where We Are: The State of Britain Now
Martin Butler
6 months ago
Whether or not this is a fair representation of the UK I’m not sure. But what is certain, the author is spot on about happiness- particularly in this age. Hopefully we are all beginning to see through the ‘embarrassed millionaire’ mindset that has been endemic in US culture. The endless narrative about aspiration and getting ahead, which apart from anything else, is just incoherent. If everyone aspires and gets ahead who exactly is there left to be ahead of? ‘Losers’ becomes a necessary part of the ideal. It wouldn’t work without them. Which then produces a discontented society with the absurd myth that everyone can be a winner. Far better is a culture of acceptance where work and financial success is not the be-all and end-all. A society which can at least provide the basics for everyone and then we can spend more time appreciating the wonders of the natural world rather than destroying them.
The idea that we can go back to a predetermined hierarchy based on tradition is unrealistic to put it mildly. Such a view has not been justifiable in most people’s minds for centuries. It was seriously challenged as far back as the English Civil war. What I am recommending is that we do not conceive ‘our lot’ in financial terms alone. Which is what we do – almost unconsciously – at the moment. I am not for a minute recommending absolute equality at all. Just de-emphasizing financial reward. Why don’t we understand aspiration to mean acquiring new skills just for the sake of the enjoyment. I am always puzzled by the assumption in our culture that what we all really seek is to be able to lay next to a swimming pool all day with a cocktail to hand. Alright for a bit no doubt but personally I would feel far more fulfilled if I was great at playing a musical instrument, or a great cook, or very good at a sport.
I agree completely. I like the idea of very occasionally sitting next to a pool drinking a cocktail on some exotic island – maybe once every five years for a few days – but I wouldn’t like to do it any more often than that, because the novelty would wear off, and you’d get fed up with it. You need the next five years of ordinary life to make the whole thing make some sort of sense. It surprises me how many people don’t seem to realise this.
Yes agree – although some explaining needed before it is clear why it is deeply misleading.
Simon Neale
6 months ago
Somewhere between New Romney and Rye, I met Mark, who lives with his furless cat in a van in a squatters’ camp.
I had an image of some pathetic scabby sick feline “cared for” by an incompetent, but it cheered me up a bit to see from the picture that it was in fact one of those expensive “sphynx cats”.
What depressed me was that some traitorous bureaucrat had allowed “Sandra Puta” to settle here and add to our stock of troubles, all at our expense. In a more efficient and proud nation, someone in the “Border Force” (sic.) would be on the phone to an official in Dover this very minute, ordering that Sandra be tracked down and put on a plane back to Brazil. Her phone and cash assets seized to pay back a tiny proportion of the ticket and the misallocated funds.
The problems in this country are rarely on the beaches and cheap bars. They are much higher up, in the Government and sinecured offices.
R Wright
6 months ago
Good piece. More of this sort of thing please.
Derek Bryce
6 months ago
England is not an island, as the writer claims early in this piece, but part of one. He needs to make up his mind about what and who he’s talking about, England/English people or Britain/British people. The two are not interchangeable in the back and forth sense he uses both in this piece. One needn’t be a Scottish or Welsh nationalist to object to this, sadly typical, American inability to understand this fundamental fact about British history and constitutional reality. In fact, what and who he’s writing – otherwise quite well – about is a particular slice of England and of the Englishness there. Both of these are neglected themes and deserve the kind of empathetic attention we see here, rendered interestingly through American eyes but, please sir, I doubt if you would use American and Texan or Californian interchangeably as you do here.
To foreigners, a Yankee is an American. To Americans, a Yankee is a Northerner. To Northerners, a Yankee is an Easterner. To Easterners, a Yankee is a New Englander. To New Englanders, a Yankee is a Vermonter. And in Vermont, a Yankee is somebody who eats pie for breakfast.
I think it’s a little curmudgeonly to expect visitors from another continent to know the difference between a Scot, an Irish, an English, and a Welsh person ;). It’d be like expecting Europeans to know the difference between someone from Minnesota and someone from Wisconsin.
The only thing Americans worry about when in the UK is not being able to understand what you’re saying.
I disagree and, as the author himself states, he lived in the UK for a period of time. Neither is it an intellectual leap for a European to know that the US is made up of individual states. I repeat, he uses England and Britain interchangeably, so he’s either confused or wasn’t paying attention to the basics of his host country’s political organisation when he was living here. Or maybe you’re right and he doesn’t care, in which case readers should take any other insights he produces with an equivalent pinch of salt.
Agreed. Although the writing and essay had it charms, it’s really impossible to compare societies like he does. I have cousins who are blue collar, Trump voters – they know who they are and it’s not that they don’t ‘aspire’ but they just get on with life, with less than most. They work hard in construction, local education, etc. They find great joy in their extended family of which I am on the outer edges because I did ‘aspire & attain’ but they still welcome me. I too am a Trump supporter but have become less welcomed by my ‘high class liberal’ friends when they realized I didn’t goose-step to their creed. I also engage locally with various groups of so-called ‘ordinary people’. They are getting along / I don’t sense despair that they’re not millionaires. Most folks are just trying to get by day to day, working, taking care of families. I do find a difference in humility & kindness at the lower end. I find those who have least are more kind and open-minded. I have had the privilege of living both high and low. I can not say that the writer’s perceptions accurately portray the lower American classes.
Last edited 6 months ago by Cathy Carron
Geoff Wilkes
6 months ago
I wonder if the writer has children, and if so, where he’s bringing them up.
Good point; or to put it another way, why is he choosing to spend two hours “chatting with Puta” before walking on? What’s he trying to escape from? His rubbish materialist past?
He sounds lost to me; lost to himself, therefore looking for meaning in squalid depictions of orhers and their surroundings. Would i give him my last Rolo? Hmm… he needs it more than most.
I’ve been following Arnande’s travel adventures for a few years now. He made his name when he went in search of the disaffected people who voted for Trump in 2016 and, ever since, he has been travelling around the world, predominantly in working class areas, and reporting on what he finds. I recommend his blog on Substack. Lots of photos. Lots of stories.
His method is to try to immerse himself an area and get to know the people there, the lost and the lonely and the alienated. He avoids tourist areas and stays in run down places. I was a little amused that he spent every evening in England in a Weatherspoons but pleased that he had some illuminating conversations and met some interesting people. He is always sympathetic, even to the drug addicts and the prostitutes outside the edges of society.
What is he trying to escape from? Hah! Great question! I think of him as in search of something. Why is our world so broken? Why are so many people suffering? And, occasionally, how can so many people be content with their lot when it is so far from what we might have chose for ourselves?
This piece seems to encapsulate the why we snigger at those tourists who think of themselves as travellers engaging (fleetingly) with other cultures. Weekend publishing must take what it can get I suppose.
Of course most people can’t afford to travel for more than a few days, and unless we expect them to stay at home their whole lives, by definition it means that when they do travel it’ll be pretty superficial precisely because they can only do it for a short time. So I’ve always found that criticism to be slightly unfair, because only the wealthy can afford to spend a long time abroad.
Last edited 6 months ago by Andy JS
Andrew H
6 months ago
I’ve got a few quibbles with some of this but it’s a good read and I’d like to see more of his journey on Unherd.
Rocky Martiano
6 months ago
“I believe the biggest contributor to happiness is not having tons of stuff, but knowing your address in the universe of meaning.” Nice line.
I think arguing over whether we’re talking about England or Britain (as some commenters seem to do) rather misses the point. There are many different ‘Englands’ and if you restrict yourself, as the author has done, to just one of them – the run-down south coast seaside towns – then you will get a very one-sided perspective. If he walked around some of the northern ex-industrial cities or rural East Anglia he might come to a very different conclusion.
As a Londoner, I have taken refuge in one of the few parts of the country that is not “something to be laughed at or pitied” and where I still recognise some of values of shared history and culture that made us a great nation. On my rare visits I barely recognise the city of my birth. Apart from a few architectural landmarks, I could be anywhere in the world. That’s what an overdose of multiculturalism can do.
I would quibble “knowing your home address”. Because gulag 3 doesn’t sound like a source of happiness.
Belinda Shaw
6 months ago
Thank you for this. I come from a very depressed working-class town in England (of course I got out, my family were obsessed with education) and I recognise the “make the best of it” attitude described here. And this kindness and social solidarity isn’t just in the white English community, contrary to some other comments – some of the newest immigrants from Muslim or African backgrounds, demonstrate the highest levels of neighbourliness in poor communities. Example, during the pandemic, my elderly relatives were checked on, shopped for, and made to feel less alone by local Syrian refugees who are in no way embraced by the white working class community there.
Adam M
6 months ago
Quite a touching piece about an ‘Anywhere’ discovering the lowly lives of the ‘Somewheres’. As someone who spent a lot of my childhood on the south coast, this makes me quite nostalgic. It’s a little snapshot of a disappearing time. I’d happily read a longer article about the full journey to Portsmouth. Maybe you could rename this piece ‘The road to Clarence pier’.
Carol Hayden
6 months ago
This article is interesting as a particular window on a part of Britain but tends toward the stereotype of ‘left behind’ coastal areas much beloved by the London based media. The scenes depicted are recognisable but not illustrative of most of the working class in such areas. I live on the south coast. There are families enjoying barbecues on the beach in our increasingly hot summers, windsurfers, paddle boarders, sailing ….
And plenty of restaurants
Peter Kwasi-Modo
6 months ago
Canny American members of the commentariat are belatedly embracing “When in Rome, do as the Romans do” (or, as I prefer to put it, “When in Jonestown …). This one’s in the UK, so he whinges and moans and gets to sell the result to Unherd because we lap it up.
Mark Melvin
6 months ago
What a really nice article. Very well observed too I think. As an expat Brit, I feel the same way as his 90’s banker did and sometimes (maybe even always) forget how good the other stuff is. Just getting on with things is a pretty good attitude to have.
Though I don’t think this author is quite right about community formation in the US, nevertheless this a very nice article. And I look forward to more of this kind of rumination on UnHerd – less about immigration and transphobia, more about the human condition.
And yet…! I can’t help but notice this quote:
There are numerous parts of England where it doesn’t seem to me that there is a “shared history and culture.” When a majority of the population is immigrant, or first- or second-generation English, how much “shared history and culture” is there?
Now normally that would be no cause for worry, because the English would be busy socializing those immigrants into that shared history and culture, through common entertainments, through education curricula, through the lingua franca of advertising and news reports and so forth.
But in recent decades the English have become ashamed of that shared history and culture, and don’t want to teach it or welcome immigrants into it. It’s as if the English want to escape their history and culture for some New Labour (and now New Tory) fantasy of globalist multiculturalism, where ‘English’ means something so abstract and slippery, so vaguely idealistic, that it can’t possibly unify people in their hearts and souls and stomachs.
The English must stop fleeing from Roast Beef and Warm Ale, from Tudors and Little Dorrits, from Col. Blimp and Spitfires, and embrace that grand assortment of fascinating tragedies, triumphs and oddities that constitute their shared history, in order to preserve the possibilities of community formation the author envisions.
The vast majority of us aren’t ashamed of our history. It’s a mistake to take too much notice of the very small minority of vocal pundits who are. Whilst they might appear to exert undue influence at the moment, they’re a mere blink of an eye in our ancient island history.
I hope/wish that were true. But when the ‘small minority of vocal pundits’ controls the apparatus of social formation – education, media, corp policies, even which historical monuments are allowed to continue existing – they can exercise a profound, out-size effect.
If the British want to reclaim their ‘shared history and culture’ they will have to be pro-active and forceful about it, and rebut the lies and half-truths that have been spread to undermine it.
There’s a great book by Roger Scruton that discusses just this point at length. Well worth reading: Where We Are: The State of Britain Now
Whether or not this is a fair representation of the UK I’m not sure. But what is certain, the author is spot on about happiness- particularly in this age. Hopefully we are all beginning to see through the ‘embarrassed millionaire’ mindset that has been endemic in US culture. The endless narrative about aspiration and getting ahead, which apart from anything else, is just incoherent. If everyone aspires and gets ahead who exactly is there left to be ahead of? ‘Losers’ becomes a necessary part of the ideal. It wouldn’t work without them. Which then produces a discontented society with the absurd myth that everyone can be a winner. Far better is a culture of acceptance where work and financial success is not the be-all and end-all. A society which can at least provide the basics for everyone and then we can spend more time appreciating the wonders of the natural world rather than destroying them.
Happiness reliably comes from ‘knowing your place’ … which is a hell of a lot different from ‘accepting your lot’.
The idea that we can go back to a predetermined hierarchy based on tradition is unrealistic to put it mildly. Such a view has not been justifiable in most people’s minds for centuries. It was seriously challenged as far back as the English Civil war. What I am recommending is that we do not conceive ‘our lot’ in financial terms alone. Which is what we do – almost unconsciously – at the moment. I am not for a minute recommending absolute equality at all. Just de-emphasizing financial reward. Why don’t we understand aspiration to mean acquiring new skills just for the sake of the enjoyment. I am always puzzled by the assumption in our culture that what we all really seek is to be able to lay next to a swimming pool all day with a cocktail to hand. Alright for a bit no doubt but personally I would feel far more fulfilled if I was great at playing a musical instrument, or a great cook, or very good at a sport.
I agree completely. I like the idea of very occasionally sitting next to a pool drinking a cocktail on some exotic island – maybe once every five years for a few days – but I wouldn’t like to do it any more often than that, because the novelty would wear off, and you’d get fed up with it. You need the next five years of ordinary life to make the whole thing make some sort of sense. It surprises me how many people don’t seem to realise this.
I really despair at the expression “you can become whatever you want”
Yes agree – although some explaining needed before it is clear why it is deeply misleading.
I had an image of some pathetic scabby sick feline “cared for” by an incompetent, but it cheered me up a bit to see from the picture that it was in fact one of those expensive “sphynx cats”.
What depressed me was that some traitorous bureaucrat had allowed “Sandra Puta” to settle here and add to our stock of troubles, all at our expense. In a more efficient and proud nation, someone in the “Border Force” (sic.) would be on the phone to an official in Dover this very minute, ordering that Sandra be tracked down and put on a plane back to Brazil. Her phone and cash assets seized to pay back a tiny proportion of the ticket and the misallocated funds.
The problems in this country are rarely on the beaches and cheap bars. They are much higher up, in the Government and sinecured offices.
Good piece. More of this sort of thing please.
England is not an island, as the writer claims early in this piece, but part of one. He needs to make up his mind about what and who he’s talking about, England/English people or Britain/British people. The two are not interchangeable in the back and forth sense he uses both in this piece. One needn’t be a Scottish or Welsh nationalist to object to this, sadly typical, American inability to understand this fundamental fact about British history and constitutional reality. In fact, what and who he’s writing – otherwise quite well – about is a particular slice of England and of the Englishness there. Both of these are neglected themes and deserve the kind of empathetic attention we see here, rendered interestingly through American eyes but, please sir, I doubt if you would use American and Texan or Californian interchangeably as you do here.
A Scottish reader
To foreigners, a Yankee is an American.
To Americans, a Yankee is a Northerner.
To Northerners, a Yankee is an Easterner.
To Easterners, a Yankee is a New Englander.
To New Englanders, a Yankee is a Vermonter.
And in Vermont, a Yankee is somebody who eats pie for breakfast.
I think it’s a little curmudgeonly to expect visitors from another continent to know the difference between a Scot, an Irish, an English, and a Welsh person ;). It’d be like expecting Europeans to know the difference between someone from Minnesota and someone from Wisconsin.
The only thing Americans worry about when in the UK is not being able to understand what you’re saying.
I disagree and, as the author himself states, he lived in the UK for a period of time. Neither is it an intellectual leap for a European to know that the US is made up of individual states. I repeat, he uses England and Britain interchangeably, so he’s either confused or wasn’t paying attention to the basics of his host country’s political organisation when he was living here. Or maybe you’re right and he doesn’t care, in which case readers should take any other insights he produces with an equivalent pinch of salt.
The description of the whores and pimps is Wetherspoons sounded made up, as if he’d read Paul Theoroux and updated it.
Agreed. Although the writing and essay had it charms, it’s really impossible to compare societies like he does. I have cousins who are blue collar, Trump voters – they know who they are and it’s not that they don’t ‘aspire’ but they just get on with life, with less than most. They work hard in construction, local education, etc. They find great joy in their extended family of which I am on the outer edges because I did ‘aspire & attain’ but they still welcome me. I too am a Trump supporter but have become less welcomed by my ‘high class liberal’ friends when they realized I didn’t goose-step to their creed. I also engage locally with various groups of so-called ‘ordinary people’. They are getting along / I don’t sense despair that they’re not millionaires. Most folks are just trying to get by day to day, working, taking care of families. I do find a difference in humility & kindness at the lower end. I find those who have least are more kind and open-minded. I have had the privilege of living both high and low. I can not say that the writer’s perceptions accurately portray the lower American classes.
I wonder if the writer has children, and if so, where he’s bringing them up.
Good point; or to put it another way, why is he choosing to spend two hours “chatting with Puta” before walking on? What’s he trying to escape from? His rubbish materialist past?
He sounds lost to me; lost to himself, therefore looking for meaning in squalid depictions of orhers and their surroundings. Would i give him my last Rolo? Hmm… he needs it more than most.
I’ve been following Arnande’s travel adventures for a few years now. He made his name when he went in search of the disaffected people who voted for Trump in 2016 and, ever since, he has been travelling around the world, predominantly in working class areas, and reporting on what he finds. I recommend his blog on Substack. Lots of photos. Lots of stories.
His method is to try to immerse himself an area and get to know the people there, the lost and the lonely and the alienated. He avoids tourist areas and stays in run down places. I was a little amused that he spent every evening in England in a Weatherspoons but pleased that he had some illuminating conversations and met some interesting people. He is always sympathetic, even to the drug addicts and the prostitutes outside the edges of society.
What is he trying to escape from? Hah! Great question! I think of him as in search of something. Why is our world so broken? Why are so many people suffering? And, occasionally, how can so many people be content with their lot when it is so far from what we might have chose for ourselves?
I show him the rollo before scarfing it down. He could add me to the menagerie he appears to be collecting.
The segment about ‘Sandra Puta’ is a journalistic rarity – honest reporting of the devious activity of an ‘asylum seeker’.
He left his family.
Interesting and well written, with a Bill Bryson style wit. Be interested to know if Chris is going to publish any photos of his travels.
I like the picture of the furless cat.
This piece seems to encapsulate the why we snigger at those tourists who think of themselves as travellers engaging (fleetingly) with other cultures. Weekend publishing must take what it can get I suppose.
Of course most people can’t afford to travel for more than a few days, and unless we expect them to stay at home their whole lives, by definition it means that when they do travel it’ll be pretty superficial precisely because they can only do it for a short time. So I’ve always found that criticism to be slightly unfair, because only the wealthy can afford to spend a long time abroad.
I’ve got a few quibbles with some of this but it’s a good read and I’d like to see more of his journey on Unherd.
“I believe the biggest contributor to happiness is not having tons of stuff, but knowing your address in the universe of meaning.” Nice line.
I think arguing over whether we’re talking about England or Britain (as some commenters seem to do) rather misses the point. There are many different ‘Englands’ and if you restrict yourself, as the author has done, to just one of them – the run-down south coast seaside towns – then you will get a very one-sided perspective. If he walked around some of the northern ex-industrial cities or rural East Anglia he might come to a very different conclusion.
As a Londoner, I have taken refuge in one of the few parts of the country that is not “something to be laughed at or pitied” and where I still recognise some of values of shared history and culture that made us a great nation. On my rare visits I barely recognise the city of my birth. Apart from a few architectural landmarks, I could be anywhere in the world. That’s what an overdose of multiculturalism can do.
I would quibble “knowing your home address”. Because gulag 3 doesn’t sound like a source of happiness.
Thank you for this. I come from a very depressed working-class town in England (of course I got out, my family were obsessed with education) and I recognise the “make the best of it” attitude described here. And this kindness and social solidarity isn’t just in the white English community, contrary to some other comments – some of the newest immigrants from Muslim or African backgrounds, demonstrate the highest levels of neighbourliness in poor communities. Example, during the pandemic, my elderly relatives were checked on, shopped for, and made to feel less alone by local Syrian refugees who are in no way embraced by the white working class community there.
Quite a touching piece about an ‘Anywhere’ discovering the lowly lives of the ‘Somewheres’. As someone who spent a lot of my childhood on the south coast, this makes me quite nostalgic. It’s a little snapshot of a disappearing time. I’d happily read a longer article about the full journey to Portsmouth. Maybe you could rename this piece ‘The road to Clarence pier’.
This article is interesting as a particular window on a part of Britain but tends toward the stereotype of ‘left behind’ coastal areas much beloved by the London based media. The scenes depicted are recognisable but not illustrative of most of the working class in such areas. I live on the south coast. There are families enjoying barbecues on the beach in our increasingly hot summers, windsurfers, paddle boarders, sailing ….
And plenty of restaurants
Canny American members of the commentariat are belatedly embracing “When in Rome, do as the Romans do” (or, as I prefer to put it, “When in Jonestown …). This one’s in the UK, so he whinges and moans and gets to sell the result to Unherd because we lap it up.
What a really nice article. Very well observed too I think. As an expat Brit, I feel the same way as his 90’s banker did and sometimes (maybe even always) forget how good the other stuff is. Just getting on with things is a pretty good attitude to have.
Is the crack good in Dover? Asking for a friend.