Watching the English

STEREOTYPES AND CULTURAL GENOMICS

'Well, I hope you're going to get beyond the usual stereotypes' was another common response when I told people I was doing research for a book on Englishness. This comment seemed to reflect an assumption that a stereotype is almost by definition 'not true', that the truth lies somewhere else - wherever 'beyond' might be. I find this rather strange, as I would naturally assume that, although not necessarily 'the truth, the whole truth and nothing but', stereotypes about English national character probably contain at least a grain or two of truth. They do not, after all, just come out of thin air, but must have germinated and grown from something.

So my standard reply was to say that, no, I was not going to get beyond the stereotypes, I was going to try to get inside them. I would not specifically seek them out, but would keep an open mind; and if my research showed that certain English behaviour patterns corresponded to a given stereotype, I would put that stereotype in my Petri-dish, stick it under my microscope, dissect it, tease it apart, subject its component bits to various tests, unravel its DNA and, er, generally poke away and puzzle over it until I found those grains (or genes) of truth.

OK, there are probably some mixed metaphors in there, not to mention a somewhat hazy notion of what proper scientists actually do in their labs, but you get the idea. Most things look rather different when you put them under a microscope, and sure enough, I found that stereotypes such as English 'reserve', 'politeness', 'weather-talk', 'hooliganism', 'hypocrisy', 'privacy', 'anti-intellectualism', 'queuing', 'compromise', 'fair play', 'humour', 'class-consciousness', 'eccentricity' and so on were not quite what they seemed - and they all had complex layers of rules and codes that were not visible to the naked eye. Without getting too carried away by these lab-analogies, I suppose another way of describing my Englishness project would be as an attempt to sequence (or map, I'm never sure which is which) the English cultural genome - to identify the cultural 'codes' that make us who we are.

Hmm, yes, Sequencing the English Cultural Genome - that sounds like a big, serious, ambitious and impressively scientific project. The sort of thing that might well take three times longer than the period originally agreed in the publisher's contract, especially if you allow for all the tea-breaks.

1. A term coined by my father, the anthropologist Robin Fox, meaning blindness to underlying similarities between human groups and cultures because one is dazzled by the more highly visible surface differences.

2. Such as the social psychologist Michael Argyle, who studied happiness, and the anthropologist Lionel Tiger, who has written books on optimism and pleasure, and teaches a course entitled 'The Anthropology of Fun and Games'.

3. We do, in fact, have some rules prohibiting behaviours which, while not inconceivable, are unlikely or even unnatural - see Robin Fox's work on the incest taboo, for example - cases where a factual 'it isn't done' becomes formalized as a proscriptive 'thou shalt not do it' (despite the claims of philosophers who hold that it is logically impossible to derive an 'ought' from an 'is'), but these tend to be universal rules, rather than the culture-specific rules that concern us here.

4. Although I was recently given a rather charming book, published in 1931, entitled 'The English: Are They Human?' The question is rhetorical, as one might expect. The author (G.J. Renier) 'came to the conclusion that the world is inhabited by two species of human beings: mankind and the English.'

5. There is also considerable disagreement on whether or not such 'universals' should be regarded as hard-wired characteristics of human nature, but I'll wimp out of that debate as well, on the grounds that it is not directly relevant to our discussion of Englishness. My own view, for what it's worth, is that the whole nature/nurture debate is a rather pointless exercise, in which we engage because, as Levi Strauss has shown, the human mind likes to think in terms of binary oppositions (black/white, left/right, male/female, them/us, nature/culture, etc.). Why we do this is open to question, but this binary thinking pervades all human institutions and practices, including the dinner-party debates of the academic and chattering classes.

6. To be fair, Fox was providing examples of human universals, while Murdoch was attempting a comprehensive list.

7. Not Hegel, who captured the essence of the issue when he said that 'The spirit of the nation is... the universal spirit in a particular form.' (Assuming I have correctly understood his meaning - Hegel is not always as clear as one might wish.)

8. Actually, there are two: the second is 'use of mood- or consciousness-altering substances', a practice found in all known human cultures, the peculiarly English version of which will be covered elsewhere in this book.