Julian Baggini - Welcome to Everytown

Welcome

F ew impressions are as vivid as those of arriving in a strange place for the first time: the scrum of imploring bodies jostling for your custom in Nairobi, the chaos and disorder of Athens, the unrelenting reminders of the past penetrating the present in Rome, the just-arrived-on-a-film-set unreality of New York. People travel all over the world searching for such experiences of the world made new. But none of my own arrivals into foreign lands unsettled me as much as when I stepped off the bus and first set foot in Everytown. Here on Braithwell Road I had a curious sense of being somewhere that was at once entirely familiar, and at the same time utterly alien. And absurdly, these confused emotions were being stirred in Rotherham, South Yorkshire.

I was here in June 2005 to find somewhere to live for six months, as part of my attempt to understand the English mind: what we think, what we believe, what we want and what we value. I wasnt in search of the elusive national character or the essence of Englishness. Rather, I was looking to describe and examine the national folk philosophy, the set of beliefs and assumptions that informs how we live and how we think.

The English care little for philosophy in the formal sense. I laughed when spoof chat show host Alan Partridge named his favourite philosopher, but I didnt realize how insightful the joke was until I read a letter in the Yorkshire Post which quoted him more or less verbatim, talking of the late actor, writer and philosopher, Peter Ustinov. But although people may not know much about philosophy, they know what they like. Im always amazed at how many people profess to be a bit of a philosopher myself. One person I met gave me a short pamphlet he had written claiming to prove the existence of God. Another, a retired rambler had similar ideas and had been trying to get his work published for years. He believed that we had perverted the true teachings of Jesus and that nature would heal everything if we left it alone.

But the English philosophy I was looking for was implicit rather than explicit. Most people arent able to tell you what their metaphysical framework is, for example, not least because few English schools believe that their students (or teachers) have any need to know what metaphysics means. Nevertheless, everyone carries around with them a set of assumptions about the fundamental nature of the world: whether it is purely physical or partly spiritual; whether things just happen or whether everything has a purpose; whether we are locked in the present or whether we can see into the future or past. Likewise we all operate according to an implicit value system, a sense of what the good life entails, and an idea of how the laws and institutions of the country should be arranged. What I wanted to do was to identify what the dominant philosophy of England added up to, and whether it was sustainable.

To uncover this underlying belief system, I wanted to rely on facts, not just my personal opinions and perceptions. In his book about the English, A. A. Gill ventured that facts are what pedantic, dull people have instead of opinions. I would counter that facts are what boorish, bigoted people lack to back up their opinions. But facts alone cannot tell you everything. C. P. Snow was only half-right when he said that Comment is free, but facts are sacred. Facts need to be dissected and analysed if they are to tell us anything of use.

Finding pertinent facts is difficult enough in any country, but is even more complicated in one in which identity is shared between England, Great Britain and the United Kingdom an entity that, perhaps uniquely among nations, lacks its own adjective to describe the things and people which belong to it. Ulster Unionists have to rely on the geographically and politically inaccurate term British to express their loyalty. Most facts I would discover would be drawn from the nation as a whole, and not just England. Why then is this not a journey into the British mind? The reason is that England dominates the UK, accounting for nearly 85% of its population. Facts about the British are therefore mainly facts about the English: any differences in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are diluted and lost. In many cases these differences are slight, and so a lot of what I would be looking at would concern the whole of the United Kingdom, as well as England. But it is also the case that many of the beliefs and opinions are common to even larger units: northern Europe, Anglo-Saxon nations, the developed West, and in some cases perhaps human nature. So it should not be assumed that what I say about the English folk philosophy applies only to the English. The purpose is to describe the English mind accurately, and if as a result we are able to differentiate it from the minds of others, that is a bonus.