"Real England" and reactionary radicals

I'll be very curious to know what Rombald and this blog's other UK readers think of "Real England" by Paul Kingsnorth, who blogs about the book here. Here's what the book is about:

We see the signs around us every day: the chain cafes and superstores that dominate our high streets; the decline of small farms and the loss of post offices; the headlines about yet another traditional industry going to the wall. Now, for the first time, here is a book that makes the connection between these isolated, incremental, local changes and the bigger picture of a nation whose identity is being eroded.

As he travels around the country meeting fruit-growers, lock keepers, stall owners and the inhabitants of Chinatown, Paul Kingsnorth records the kind of conversations that are taking place in country pubs and corner shops across the land – while warning us that, unless we act, such quintessentially English institutions may cease to exist.

And here's an excerpt, available on Paul's blog:

‘The thing is’, says Fergus as he unwraps one of the bass from its tinfoil and pokes it experimentally with a stick, ‘that we’re just so cut off now. Very few people understand the land, or even know what grows in their gardens or on the bit of wasteland behind their back fence. But once you do know, you start to understand the place you live in, and feel part of it.

It’s about culture, as much as anything. Remember those St George’s mushrooms we picked earlier? They got the name because they start to appear around St George’s day, the 23rd of April. You hear people all the time moaning about how the traditions of this country are disappearing, we’re not in touch with our heritage, nobody celebrates St George’s day anymore, blah, blah. But most of these old traditions, when they were living, they came from the land and from people’s attachment to it. These days we don’t know where we are, or what happens in our landscape, so we can’t create new ones. Traditions come from places – from the land, from our relationship to it. Once that’s gone, so has that living culture.’

The fish is done. We unwrap one each and poke around in the shingle for our forks.
‘So many of my friends are constantly criticizing this country,’ says Fergus. ‘You know, “I’ve got to get out, it’s all going to the dogs” – all that. But for me, this is what I do. Foraging … it’s not even about food, really – it’s kind of about belonging. I feel such a part of it through this that I could never leave. I suppose it ties me to England. This is my place.’

The "Real England" blog bears spending time on, especially with Paul's blogroll. For instance, I found there a site for an organization called Common Ground, which is dedicated to:

... playing a unique role in the arts and environmental fields, distinguished by the linking of nature with culture, focussing upon the positive investment people can make in their own localities, championing popular democratic involvement, and by inspiring celebration as a starting point for action to improve the quality of our everyday places.

It's all about preserving a distinct sense of place in the face of mass culture. Go to that site, would you, and see if there's anything "liberal" or "conservative" in the US sense. You won't. This is the kind of thing I expressed hope that crunchy conservatives and like-minded liberals might work together on in the US -- and the sort of localism that Bill Kauffman sees bridging ideological divides in the emerging political culture.

Read this remarkable recent speech by Tory leader David Cameron, in which he more or less endorses small-is-beautiful/crunchy-con/Real-England ideals. A sign of things to come from our own conservative politicians? Let us hope so.

"Real England" gets whacked pretty hard by this review in Spiked-Online, which echoes the same criticism that "Crunchy Cons" got when it was published. "Elitist diatribe" the reviewer calls it. Sounds familiar. I think that a certain amount of that is a useful corrective to the tendencies of neotrads to romanticize the past and unfairly demonize the modern. But the reviewer seems to think that finding fault with the way we've come to do things by deracinating ourselves from tradition and the land is an intolerable insult. People like their big-box stores, he says, and they make life a lot easier -- so what's to complain about? To the extent that "Real England" -- which, obviously, I've not read -- makes the case that its neotrad/crunchy case is popular, I think that's a mistake. It is elitist -- but that's not a bad thing. For example, elitist tastes in coffee and beer in the US taught the masses that there is a such thing as better coffee and better beer -- and now it's easier to find both. If a small-is-beautiful ethic and aesthetic makes for a way of life that is more in tune with human nature and the natural world, then it should be advocated for and embraced.

I mean, look, McDonalds is popular and makes life awfully convenient, but are we to be told to shut up in criticizing fast food and the cultural values that surround the fast food phenomenon simply because the masses adore it?