Among all the articles about what it means to be English and/or British in recent weeks, I didn’t encounter one which said what I longed to see. If I had, it would have gone something like this: 

The English are the legends of King Arthur, Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, and the plays of Shakespeare and Marlow, with the poems of Donne, Herbert, Spenser, and Pope. The English are Swift and Defoe, Coleridge and Wordsworth – Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, Gerald Manly Hopkins, St John Henry Newman, George Orwell, G.K. Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh, Iris Murdoch, A. S. Byatt, JG Ballard and The Buddha of Suburbia. They are the Book of Common Prayer, the New English Hymnal – St Anselm, Julian of Norwich, and St Thomas More. They are the music of Byrd and Purcell, but also the swinging sixties, punk rock, and rave music. The English are the Wilton Diptych, the artworks of Turner, Gainsborough, the pre-Raphaelites, David Hockney, and Chris Ofili. 

You get the idea. 

The list above could easily have been many pages long, and no doubt anyone reading it will find the inclusion of certain names questionable, and the omission of others unforgivable. You will also notice that some of the examples are not straightforwardly English by ethnicity. 

In what sense, then, is the culture one attempts to describe with such a list “English”? Some will answer that it is just an accident of geography and ethnicity, and any claim of a canon or tradition is really the product of some power game. Others that such art evinces shared values perceptible over time. The first is destructive of history and identity. The second is painfully optimistic, and always affronted by awkward exceptions. 

Recent discourse on the English, however, has been trapped between exactly this rock or hard place. There’s ethno-nationalism on the one hand, civic nationalism on the other. Both extremes can end-up in the same reductions ad absurdum — arguing about DNA tests and whether the Irish should be considered British on the one hand, or claiming, like David Lammy, that those rioting were not actually British because their values didn’t match those sanctioned by the state. Ethno-centrism is just an exclusively local particularism (something the English adventuring spirit has never been good at). Civico-centrism is just abstract universalism (against which the English intellectual tradition has always strained). 

We know the problems of each approach only too well. Civic nationalism pretends that different cultures can all subscribe to citizenship values without exception and dissipation into siloed communities, that host peoples won’t be held to account for their value-adherence in ways others are not. Civic nationalism reduces cultural differences to mere arbitrary and superficial quirks, most often national dishes. Conversely, civic nationalism means that a superimposed universal sameness lapses into seeking equity of outcome, which ends up deepening division through a resurgent racial essentialism.   

Between these two extremes there is a more meaningful space, which acknowledges the particular and the universal

Ethno-nationalism, by contrast, pretends that people are primarily biological organisms and that national identity doesn’t bring with it expectations and responsibilities, that there isn’t often a soft-edged, porous boundary between different peoples, and that you can be anti-woke while engaging in identity politics. Ethno-nationalism renders difference incommensurable. Conversely, ethnically indigenous particularism results in superimposing an abstract sameness on the people being called indigenous, as if they don’t differ wildly among themselves. 

Between these two extremes there is a more meaningful space, which acknowledges the particular and the universal, both ethnicity and values, but cannot be claimed fully by either. That space is culture, the realm of the general. A nation with a shared culture, is a nation where that culture is, broadly speaking, the general norm. Cultural patriotism is a standpoint which considers a shared cultural inheritance and way of life to be that which holds society together, and that which should be cultivated to achieve social cohesion and flourishing. It is richer and denser than mere values, and yet more agile and adaptable than mere biology.   

If the only alternatives are ethno- or civic nationalisms, the result is a Venn diagram with some overlap, but always a stubborn remainder which can’t be captured by these two. Civic nationalism can’t cope with those communities who do not believe in tolerance and democracy. Ethno-nationalism struggles with the deep anglicisation which results from well-managed migration. Of course there’ll always be stubborn remainders when dealing with situations of this size and significance — but between biological ethnicity and abstract values there is culture, and culture is capacious in its potential to orientate the discussion.  

Some will be thinking that, given most of the examples on the list above, what I mean here is “high culture” — but culture is here defined, as by Raymond Williams, as a “total way of life”. T. S Eliot captures this particularly well, with a paragraph which would have made an excellent opening paragraph for the piece on English identity I’ve been wanting to read. He says the term culture, 

… includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people; Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, 19th Century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar.

With culture we’re dealing with what Charles Taylor has called the “social imaginary” — paraphrased by Carl R. Trueman as meaning “the myriad beliefs, practices, normative expectations, and even implicit assumptions that members of a society share and that shape their daily lives”. Because it is not merely theoretical, not just a list of lifeless values, it is called an “imaginary”, which for Taylor means it is “carried in images, stories, legends, etc”. 

Cultural patriotism is not a coded call for multiculturalism — for it argues that what is needed to bind people together is a shared, general culture. But neither is it a coded call for racial essentialism, because it offers a sense of national identity that is genuinely porous, and a canon to which various ethnicities contribute. Cultural patriotism does not pretend that a phrase like “English ethnicity” can never be uttered, but neither does it pretend that genuine examples of integration and enrichment have not been realised in the past, and cannot be realised again. 

In fact it is precisely culture that sketches out the parameters of this aim. If shared culture is sought, then multiple choice tests about British history will not suffice, and an education system that problematises Englishness will have to be torn out at root. If cultural acclimatisation is be achieved, this has significant implications for policies regarding both the scale and impact of migration. If cultural fit is the goal, there will need to be consideration of the cultural tendencies at play in different groups. Yet it is only the quest for a cohesive English culture that promises to acknowledge the shared humanity central to the religious tradition of these islands, while also celebrating and preserving the frameworks of meaning that make the people of these islands distinct.