Britain is stronger divided The truth doesn't always lie in the centre

Simon Schama’s latest television series, Story of Us, raises a number of awkward questions — beginning with its title. The series reflects, among other things, on the divisions in British society and the role of culture in trying to heal them. But is British history really as coherent and continuous as the word “story” suggests? And who, exactly, is “Us”? Does it include, for instance, Northern Irish nationalists who live under British sovereignty but don’t consider themselves British at all?

Like most bien-pensant liberals, Schama seems to assume that divisions are a bad thing, which is surely untrue. Some forms of discord are certainly to be regretted, but others aren’t. Low-paid workers who strike against companies which could easily pay them more stir up trouble, and so they should. The alternative to such conflict is consensus, which means that working people meekly accept what they are given, which may mean in turn that they find it hard to eat and keep warm at the same time.

Conflict worries people like Schama because it undermines social unity. But no society has ever been fully unified, and not all societies need to be. All civilisations have been marked by the clash of opposing values and feuding life-forms. It wasn’t, for example, as though there was a coherent entity known as the British nation which began to fall apart not long after the first immigrants arrived on its shores. Immigrants have been arriving on our shores for centuries, including the British. It’s true that the idea of unity begins to gain ground with the rise of nationalism, but nationalism as a full-blooded ideology isn’t much more than a couple of centuries old. Even when you think you’ve achieved a state of concord throughout the realm, bits of the nation can suddenly revolt or drop off, as Ireland did early last century.

When there has been cohesion between rulers and ruled, it’s often enough because the latter have been too weak or intimidated to fight the former. Two hundred years ago, when poets and politicians were praising the spirit of unity which sprang from pride in the Empire, Britain was effectively a police state, equipped with draconian laws against those who stole a hen and dedicated to muzzling dissent and free speech. A little later, the Victorians lived in constant fear of revolution. In the early 20th century, the government sent gunboats into the river Mersey with their guns trained on a potentially seditious Liverpool.

In none of this did culture matter very much. Like many liberal intellectuals, Schama overestimates its political clout. In fact, a lot of the finest literary culture of the early 19th century — from the prophecies of William Blake to the ferocious polemic of Shelley, the satire of Byron and the essays of the magnificent William Hazlitt — was dedicated to attacking the autocratic state in Westminster, not to healing the wounds of the nation. The dream of culture as a unifying force emerges only later, in the work of authors like Matthew Arnold and T.S. Eliot. In the early decades of industrialism, social and political antagonisms were too raw for the intellectual fantasy that something known as culture could spirit them away. Poetry was not the answer to Peterloo.

Why should anyone have imagined that it was? There was, in fact, a reasoned case behind this apparently fatuous claim. The idea was that social strife was real, but largely superficial. It concerned our material, everyday, less-than-glamorous selves, while beneath this surface lay spiritual resources which everyone shared at some incomparably deeper level, and which could be given the name of culture. Culture was now beginning to usurp the role of religion, which had run into a whole range of problems from the age of the Earth to the corrupt behaviour of the churches. If the arts were important, it was because they encapsulated these elusive spiritual resources in palpable form. In the case of literature, you could even hold them in your hand. The arts were the refuge to which the creative imagination had migrated, driven out of everyday social life by the rise of a philistine industrial capitalism. By the time we reached the 20th century, there would be plenty of commentators for whom this was pretty much the only place where human value was to be found.

The problem, however, was that this idea of culture went rather too deep. It seemed to suggest that actual social differences — being a woman rather than a man, or a landowner rather than a window cleaner — didn’t really matter. And this was rather more convenient for men and landowners than it was for women and window cleaners. As long as culture brought us together in spirit, we could remain the mutually hostile, vastly unequal people we actually were. Culture seemed to make all the difference, and yet to make no difference at all.

In this sense, too, it bore a resemblance to religion. It represented a common ground on which we could meet purely as human beings, suspending for a magical moment whatever divided us. But this made our common humanity seem unworkably abstract and impalpable. It by-passed our concrete differences rather than working through them. In any case, culture was hardly a common ground in reality. On the contrary, its distribution throughout the population has always been strikingly unequal. In this sense, it was less a spiritual consensus than a field of contention. The culture of the court and the culture of the folk had never exactly constituted a unity.

There were other problems as well. For one thing, it was hard to believe that poetry and painting represented the acme of civilised existence, not least when you looked at the louche careers of more than a few poets and painters. For another, was there really no value to be found outside the arts, in sexual love, human community, the rearing of children, political transformation? Despite its elevated pitch, wasn’t this flight to art a desperately alienated view on the part of privileged men and women too dissociated from the everyday world to see it as anything but uniform and banal? The concept of “the masses” would soon emerge, which as Raymond Williams points out in Culture and Society is simply an external way of seeing most other people. I’m not part of the masses, and neither are my friends or family, but everyone else is.

This raises another issue. Along with the idea of the masses came the notion of mass culture, not least with the birth of the mass-circulation newspaper. From the last decades of the 19th century to around 1920, there was a major expansion of the popular press. Newspaper owners were reaping the benefit of educational change, which had brought to birth a literate but not highly educated mass readership. By 1900, the recently founded Daily Mail was reaching almost one million readers. That same period also witnessed the arrival of cinema, radio and recorded music. Something utterly momentous had happened to culture, which now included the Mirror as well as Michelangelo. It had been integrated into the very mechanistic, profit-driven civilisation it was supposed to rebuke. Culture itself was split between high and popular. It could no longer provide a model of spiritual solidarity, if indeed it ever did.

There is also, however, culture in its more capacious sense, as a whole way of life. If there is high culture, there is also gay, Jamaican, Mancunian, police, beach, Geordie and pigeon-fancying culture. In our own time, the concept of culture has been pluralised. Far from representing a common humanity, it reflects a diversity of interests and identities. Culture has shifted from being an ideal of unity to a field of division. Some political quarrels are fought out nowadays as issues of cultural identity. Far from providing cohesion, culture has become part of the problem. It can be even more contentious than politics, since it involves the sensitive question of who one is.

So there are two major drawbacks with Simon Schama’s case. One is that culture in the narrow sense of the arts has never been much of a source of social cohesion. In any case, the function of art is quite as much to wound, confront and divide as it is to bring together. The other difficulty is that some social conflicts are simply essential, and can only be solved by one side winning and the other losing, which is not quite what liberals like to hear. Resolving the antagonism between slave and slave owner is known as getting rid of the slave owner. The same applies to democrats and tyrants or black bus drivers and white supremacists. It would be gratifying if there were some middle ground between them — semi-supremacism, perhaps? — but there isn’t. The truth doesn’t always lie in the centre. Bringing people together isn’t always a positive move.

And while culture may help to alter people’s awareness, it will do nothing to change the material inequalities and social exclusions which underlie so much political violence. Those things are part of a system, and liberals find the idea of a system rather distasteful. It smacks too much of rigidity and totalitarian thought. This is a pity, because without grasping social divisions in this context they will remain stubbornly unresolved, however much culture you bring to bear on them.

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