Some Labor guy ranting about his country.
Listen to that first sentence: “…iconic attractions”.
Attractions, what a strange word to describe home. It makes England sound like Disneyland. For many living here, that is what England is: a hodgepodge of unoffensive ‘quirks’, and silly traits, marketable to the tourists. The late Queen, I suppose would be Walt Disney, James Bond and Harry Potter would share Mickey’s throne, and Big Ben can be Cinderella’s castle. If my childhood assemblies are anything to go by, the film
Up provides as much moral insight to people as
The Book of Common Prayer once did.
His video states nothing beyond superficialities. Bad food, bad teeth, bad accents. All very true, but what else? You’ve touched on appearances but how about we scratch through to reality?
Certain people live in a world that is essentially a flat image. Everything around them is slightly foreign, none of it excites their mind beyond confusion, and it all lacks colour. The exteriors of churches emit a cold glare. Monuments to the dead, with their archaic and formal names, leave the memory void. They live in a mystery, as though the whole country was Stonehenge. All of it imposes just by presence alone.
Thankfully, they have London, which the man in the video talks an awful lot about. Like most cities, it is great because it is full of noise. Whenever I visit, there is always something to do: some event going on, some gallery to look in on, some film to sit down and watch, or some book for me to buy and eventually read. And everyone is in such a rush- it makes me think I have missed a meeting that no one made me aware of. It is a reactive existence. Not once do you need to use your own volition; the city takes you in its excitement. There is no time to contemplate, no time for worry.
Conversely, he talks of the countryside. Another wonderful thing, everyone agrees. Those great documents of truth, polls, tells us the public (what is the public? How does one join?) thinks it is the greatest thing we have. I suppose that is why we are so willingly to sell so much of it, so everyone from the world can enjoy its pleasures. Land has become our greatest export.
It can be hard to love cultivated nature. As a child, my parents always told me I was lucky to be raised in the countryside. The BBC had many documentaries telling me to go outside, for health reasons and some vague notions of well-being.
Unfortunately, I was pernickety when it came to reasons and motives. People would tell me to love the countryside and they would repeat mantras, mottos, and memes, some you hear in the video, but I couldn’t abide them. I had heard those sayings before, and I disliked cliché. None of it rang true to me.
However, I was also a self-aware child, and knew how stupid I often was, so I began walking the countryside. For miles, I tried to work out why, or if, I loved the countryside. I was desperate. I wanted to appreciate it truly. When I returned home, I read Emerson and Thoreau, and I said to myself ‘that’s all well and good, but I don’t feel it’. I knew there was something missing.
I felt like this for a while. It wasn’t until… well, I am not going to get into it, but eventually I saw the beauty of nature. I had wonder. Years later, when I see a sunrise before work, or when I look at the stars in the sky at night, I do feel something. There is a pleasure, in its grandeur, in its silence.
It is me though. That nature is beautiful is because there’s a man to think it is so. That is our relationship with the world around us. We give the world meaning. So, I ask, how many people sincerely like the countryside? How many people, on the other hand, repeat the mottos and say they like it just because it is the ‘right way’ to think? Would they prefer to be near a Costa and where all the action is? Do they ever think why?
People bemoan a ‘loneliness epidemic’, but I disagree. We are as lonely as we have ever been. Consciousness presupposes isolation. Today we have more distractions to hide us from this fact. Before, we didn’t have a TV to make the day go by; we didn’t have the constant news flow to make the world, and by extension us, feel like we are forever moving; and we never listened to music unconsciously and turned it into a distracting rattle.
Why do people go on about loneliness then? Is it because people know what is going inside them? Are they afraid that in the silence they may the hear questions, and the doubts, and the fears, and the remorse that so much of the past has bothered itself with?
Loneliness is one outlook on man’s isolation. Solitude is another. The tedium seclusion brings is good for the soul. Depth can only be seen by looking within for a prolonged period. This is not instantly gratifying, but no fulfilling work was ever too exciting. Often, a great task is a slow chore. Excitement is primarily for young people, and can only be like wonder, a temporary stage in experience. Forever chasing that high where you forget yourself leaves a hole where something more should have been.
One issue I have with philosophy is when a thinker suggests a general rule. For example, Roger Scruton argues when ‘we’ see beauty, we seek to justify it, which leads us to spiritual and metaphysical considerations. Now, that might be what Sir Roger Scruton, FBA, FRSL, the Cambridge University educated, libretto writing philosopher feels when he hears the Liebestod, but does the average man feel that way? Perhaps he hears it and thinks Wagner is twaddle, or that it is nice, but nothing fancy; perhaps he accepts Scruton’s point but says ‘it is what it is' and does not think any further on why beauty is so wonderful and so unsettling. Scruton seems to forget his own education has played a great deal in his conclusions- conclusions that I think are mostly right.
There is a need to furnish someone’s mind, to at least put some idea in them that life has more complexity than initially perceived. It is lamentable that we have entered a world that has become for so many just a surface experience. It is liveable, sure, but it is not what I would describe as worthwhile, especially if we only live once.
To this end, I will quote Dickens’
Hard Times, the only book on pedagogy worth reading:
“Utilitarian economists, skeletons of schoolmasters, Commissioners of Fact, genteel and used-up infidels, gabblers of many little dog’s-eared creeds, the poor you will have always with you. Cultivate in them, while there is yet time, the utmost graces of the fancies and affections, to adorn their lives so much in need of ornament; or, in the day of your triumph, when romance is utterly driven out of their souls, and they and a bare existence stand face to face, Reality will take a wolfish turn, and make an end of you."
