Truth, stories and pain: how do we know what is real?

This is a story that is made up of other stories. Many long stories are smaller stories pieced together. Star Wars is made up of the story of two droids escaping Tatooine, then the story of the heroes surviving inside the Death Star and finally the story of the battlestation’s destruction. Similarly, the news is the story of our civilization told through smaller stories about power cuts or votes in parliament.

This story begins not long after I finished university, when I was caught in the nether world of recent-graduate unemployment. I paraphrase Ronan Harris of Futurepop group VNV Nation: I was so far from the shores of studenthood I had left behind, still far from the shores of employment I had yet to reach. I got very good at playing Worms United on an old PS1 that I found in the basement.

At the time I was an angry young man and the focus of my anger was religion. I had recently read Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and was fired up to tell all religious people, of whatever faith, that they were wrong and that they needed to embrace the objective truth of science. Preferably through watching Richard Dawkins documentaries on DVD, which I owned quite a lot of. I know now that this attitude of superiority and rudeness to people who think differently is not helpful. I am still very much an atheist, but I do not feel the need to declare this to everyone I meet.

At the time, there was a story I told myself about who I was. The story was simple: through my life and learning I had come to see the truth of the universe: there was no bearded man in the sky who had made everything, no paternalistic father figure or jealous supernatural tyrant watching over us. I believed that the material world was all there was; no spirits or ghosts or angels or demons. My life via Scout Group church services and internet atheist forums had brought me to an understanding of this fundamental truth of the universe. It was a story that was incredibly important to me. The story was me.

Then I moved in with a group of former students in the same position as me. A group that included a High Anglican, who was considering a career in the priesthood of the Church of England, a Roman Catholic and a man who followed a diverse pantheon of gods and other supernatural beings drawn from a variety of faiths that included Buddha, nature spirits and the Norse god Loki, amongst others.

There is a finite number of hours that bored adults can play Worms United for, and so eventually we started arguing. A lot. About everything. Gradually, and through many shouting matches, something dawned on me. They were as smart as I was, probably smarter. There was not a veil of ignorance protecting their worldview that I needed to puncture. Not only that, but they had stories about their lives that had led them to be the people they were, just as I did.

This led me to think: who is the arbiter of objective truth? How do we know what is true and what is not?

In their book Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – And Why Things Are Better Than You Think, Dr Hans Rolsing, Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund laid out ten simple methods of defining the truth. Their tips (such as avoiding comparing extremes, remembering that things can be bad and getting better, avoiding lonely numbers and avoiding single perspectives) are useful for not being misled by eye-catching dramatic headlines, but they do not help tackle questions such as “is God real?”

Dr Rosling et al’s Factfulness ties in with post-enlightenment thinking, which claims that truth can be found in the scientific method. This appealed to me as an atheist, but the question of the existence or non-existence of God remains impervious to scientific investigation. We are no closer to a definitive answer to the question than the enlightenment thinkers were.

Technology companies claim that they have found the truth of humanity through big data. All the information gathered through our devices betrays the truth of who we are. We are more ourselves when we are alone with our phones then we are with anyone else. Big data reveals preferences and patterns of behaviour that even the most probing focus group cannot uncover. However, big data may reveal truths about human behaviour, but not about the universe.

I could not prove objectively that I was right, and that God or Loki did not exist. I did not stop being an atheist, and I still am. However, I came to see the story of my life not as a journey towards discovering a fundamental truth about the universe, but as a story of finding my truth about the universe, which was one amongst many. It was the only way to get along in a small house with no jobs, no money and little to do.

The story of my first post-university houseshare is now key to how I see myself. It includes the story that made me a hardcore Dawkins-esque atheist, but it also includes other important lessons about life such as the benefits of personal growth, the value of re-examining your thinking and the importance of friendship. This is a better story.

As well as my opinions about atheism, I have deeply held political views about the importance of being tolerant towards other people of different races, religions, sexualities, gender identities, subcultures and interests. I believe it is important to be respectful of other people and their personal stories.

The story of my post-university houseshare fitted into this. It was a story about how I was open-minded and receptive to a plurality of views and lifestyles. We cannot be certain that God did or did not cause the Big Bang, even though I believe he did not (or at least we cannot be as certain about the origins of everything as I am about the fact that the table I am leaning on exists). This also applies to the question of whether Loki is real or how tangible the spirit of Mother Nature is. I have my own beliefs, but I do not have a direct line to the objective truth of the universe. As we cannot know if our beliefs are the objective truth, it is important to be open to new ideas and to seeing the world from other people’s point of view.

There was another story that I told myself that factored into this. It was about all of history and how it could be expressed as the story the powerful trying to exploit the weak and the weak crying out in anger and frustration. This cry of frustration has echoed through time and could be felt in Moses’s demand of the Pharaoh to “let my people go,” through medieval peasant uprisings, the Levellers, Peterloo, the Suffragettes, the Civil Rights Movement, the Stonewall riots and all the way to anti-austerity protest movements. This cry of pain was captured in the works of Harriet Jacobs, James Baldwin, Robert Tressell, Pablo Picasso, Laurie Penny, the Selford Mods and many others. This was a single story of the shout of defiance in the face of oppression that had sounded throughout all of human history. 

In the last few years this story of being tolerant to a plurality of different views and life stories has come under attack. There are those who do not want to listen to the voices that throughout history have cried out in pain as they were clamped down on. The voices of women, people of colour, LGBTQ+ people, poor people and people who did not fit into the limited range of pre-set sockets that their society had provided.

Being a tolerant person was part of the story of who I am, but I also agree with Karl Popper that: "In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance." Attacks on tolerance have come from internet trolls who wish to silence women who speak out in the #MeToo movement and social media hate preachers who to vent their anger at people of colour who demand basic safety and bodily autonomy.

Some of those who attack tolerance are in groups with names such as GamerGate, the Proud Boys, Incels, the alt-right or neo-Nazis. There are too many to name here and we are all too painfully familiar with the forces of intolerance. There is no general name for them all that I could use in this polite essay, so I will refer to them as the “forces of intolerance”.

Members of the forces of intolerance have two things in common. Firstly, they reject the story of history as a cry of pain from the oppressed and in doing so reject the stories of many people throughout history who have suffered at the hands of the powerful. They seek to recast themselves (they are usually white, straight men) as the real oppressed people of history, and thus they reject any understanding of political power throughout history that I recognise.

Secondly, they believe that their actions are supported by objective truths about the universe. This I find very frightening. They have no time for the opinions of others or other people’s stories. It is no coincidence that thinkers championed by the forces of intolerance, such as Jordan Peterson, are so critical of postmodernism, as postmodern ideas about there being no objective facts threaten their certainty.

When I see Ben Shapiro claim that “the facts don’t care about your feelings” and then making an emotionally-charged, subjective statement which he passes off as fact, I remember the story of my life. A story that tells me that I used to believe that certainty was on my side until I met other people who were equally certain and so learned a valuable lesson. This was a painful, frightening lesson to learn, but it was worth it to be more open-minded to the experience of others.

The forces of intolerance have not learned this lesson. They believe they are irrefutably correct. However, they have no more claim to objective reality than my former housemate who had a shrine to Loki in his bedroom.

Where does their claim to objective truth come from? It comes from stories they tell with which a lot of people, sadly, have sympathy. Narratives play a bigger role in what we think is true than ‘Factfullness’, the scientific method or big data. In his radio show The Tyranny of Story, John Harris lays out how narratives are more effective in politics than facts. He shows how Donald Trump’s story about the dangers of vaccinations was much more effective in convincing people on the campaign trail than former neurosurgeon Ben Carson’s calm facts about vaccines.

Does what you believe to be true fit into a larger narrative? Does your story tie in with a bigger story like “Take Back Control”, “For The Many Not The Few” or “Make America Great Again”? If what you tell yourself about who you are fits into one of these larger narratives, then you are more likely to think your truth is the truth.

There are many of these larger narratives and they conflict with each other. Just because I can make my personal narrative fit with “For The Many And Not The Few” does not mean someone else cannot make their narrative fit with “Take Back Control”. We all have stories, so authenticity becomes important in judging what we believe to be true.

Cambridge academic David Runciman describes this in his book How Democracy Ends as an affirmation with authentic truth-tellers. We see these people as the ones who call out the fake narratives and reaffirm the authentic ones, i.e. the ones that chime with our own personal narratives. These people can be Chelsea Manning or Tommy Robinson.

Technology also contributes to a sense of certainty. We live our lives online, tell stories about our weekend on Instagram, our careers on LinkedIn, read stories about other people on Facebook and wider society on Twitter. There are millions (and in the case of Facebook billions) of people using these platforms, which means there is too much information and it would be too disorganised for us to see all of it. All of these platforms are gathering data about us and use this to customise what we see.

What I see when I log into Facebook or Twitter is different from what you will see. On some level it is an expression of my story as represented by data points and then fed back to me as content. A news story that fits with my personal narratives, and the larger narratives about society that a technology platform knows I subscribe to, will be more significant in my circle of digital friends than it will be for someone whose data points or personal narrative is different.

This process of personalisation of internet content is dividing us into different camps, and fundamental truths can vary massively between these camps. All of this is fed by the data that technology platforms have, which we gave as we expressed our personal stories through them.

This is what allows the forces of intolerance to claim that they see the world objectively. Their message is funnelled by technology platforms towards people who are likely to see the world as they do. They do not encounter opposing views, as I did in my first post-university houseshare.

Narratives will spread amongst people in these camps and take on the appearance of objective fact, just as Harris described for Trump’s comments about vaccinations. Some of these camps can be large, with names like liberal or conservative. Some of them can be small, but the effect of a story taking on the appearance of objective truth is the same.

This process is best illustrated by the story of the “Johnlock” fandom, a subset of the fans of the BBC TV show Sherlock who believe that there was a romantic connection between the characters of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. Whether or not Holmes and Watson are secretly in love with each other cannot be proven objectively, but a story about the future of the TV show can take on the appearance of objective fact.

There is a sub-group of the Johnlock fandom called TJLC (The JohnLock Conspiracy) who believed that Holmes and Watson would become a couple at the end of the fourth series of the show and that its creators, Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, were hiding elaborate clues to this fact in the show.

Like any other group through which a narrative spreads and takes on the appearance of fact, TJLC is a community and its members put together elaborate explanations of why they were right. This included a 48-part YouTube series which asserted that Holmes and Watson would become a couple in the final episode of the fourth series. The final of the 48 videos claimed "it's about to happen", stating that Holmes and Watson will become a couple as a fact.

To the members of TJLC their belief was true - completely and irrevocably an objective truth. The story that they spread through the TJLC took on the appearance of objective fact, helped along by pieces of evidence such as the showrunners’ love of playing games with the fans and misdirecting them. Despite this, it was not revealed that Watson and Holmes were a couple in the final series of the BBC detective drama. The views of TJLC were revealed to be subjective opinions about where the show was heading.

Slate TV’s critic, Willa Paskin, interviewed members of TJLC for her podcast Decoder Ring, whose research I drew on heavily. When interviewing the progenitor of TJLC, who still asserts as fact that Watson and Sherlock will become a couple, Paskin states that she is becoming convinced of this fact despite the fact that there are currently no plans to make any more series of Sherlock. In the podcast Paskin said: “there is something compelling about being in the presence of so much passionate certainty."

The certainty with which TJLC asserted their subjective view of the reality of the Sherlock TV show led me to believe that everyone sees the world subjectively, based on their own personal story, the narratives about wider society they subscribe to, the personalised information environment they get from social media, and the community bubble they live in  made up of their friends, family and other people who are likely to be similar to them. Within our own subjective lives there are things that are objective truth to us, but they are all in reality subjective. We all live subjective lives.

Fake news is a part of this. It reflects the subjective lives people live and the fact that they think their subjective truth is an objective truth. “Pope Endorses Trump”? This is an objective truth to the people who support Trump and shared this fake news story on Facebook. To them, how can the Pope not support Trump? How can this not be true?

The forces of intolerance do not see their subjective view of reality as subjective. They see it as objective reality, just as members of TJLC did. This inability to see other people’s subjective truths as having validity equal to theirs is one reason why they cause so much pain. 

In their minds, it is an objective truth that saying racist, sexist or homophobic things is acceptable. In their minds, the symbols of the Confederate flag or Nazi swastika represent an objective truth about the universe that everyone else does not understand. They are wrong, but this does not stop them from causing lots of emotional and physical pain. I am writing on the two-year anniversary of Heather Heyer being killed by neo-Nazi James Alex Fields Jr at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. This showed how dangerous people can become when they believe they have objective truth on their side.

There are many other subjective narratives that cause pain. In some people’s minds it is an objective fact that vaccines have a risk of causing autism. This narrative causes real pain for children who catch the diseases for which vaccines are available. It also causes pain for the people who cannot get vaccinated and so rely on herd immunity to keep them safe.

Narratives that deny climate science or seek to minimise the threat posed by the climate emergency also run the risk of causing real pain when communities are destroyed by rising sea levels. A subjective truth backed up by a story has a huge amount of power to hurt people.

There was a story I told myself about the world not having an objective truth in it. This story helped me understand the person who I was. However, I had to outgrow it to live with other people and to understand that they had their own story informed by different ideas, different personal experiences and different facets of the world. This allowed me to understand that the world is made up of subjective truths which might appear objective, but are not.

The world is made up of subjective truths, but this should not minimise the pain that these truths can cause. Pain is real and it is the only universal truth, so we must do what we can to minimise it, and even if we don’t understand someone’s pain we should do what we can to help them. The forces of intolerance do not see the pain that their narratives bring, and therefore their narratives must be opposed.

This is a story about how we can live together by recognising the subjectivity of each other. However, we can’t live together if it means that our own subjective truths lead us to inflict pain on each other. We must learn there is no objective truth and we must learn not to hurt each other.

"Richard Dawkins no Fronteiras do Pensamento Porto Alegre" by fronteirasweb is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Why everyone on the left should read Hannah Arendt

Everyone on the left should read the works of Hannah Arendt. Her books are a challenging read, but engaging with her work pays off. Arendt’s work combines philosophy with journalism and she spent her life trying to answer the big questions raised by the twentieth century.

To borrow from Justin Sane, I think the things she says are important. She was a German Jew who left Germany because of the rise of Nazism. She became a refugee and eventually settled in America where she wrote some of the most important political writing of the twentieth century.

Her greatest work is The Origins of Totalitarianism, which attempts to explain the series of historical events and philosophical developments that led up the Third Reich and Joseph Stalin’s regime of terror in the USSR. Arendt subscribed to a Marxist interpretation of history, but was also very critical of the totalitarian direction of Communism in Russia.

Totalitarianism in the twentieth century

The world that she describes in The Origins of Totalitarianism is difficult for someone like me to imagine. For those of us who came of age during the so-called “end of history”, it’s hard to conceive of a world ruled by Totalitarian regimes. Reading Arendt’s book it helped me to understand not just what life was like Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, but also what institutions, ideas and thought process contributing to making those regimes so oppressive.

Arendt draws a distinction between authoritarian regimes (governments like that of Vladimir Putin in Russia today, or Recep Erdogan in Turkey; the strongmen that Donald Trump openly flirts with) and Totalitarian regimes that seek to control every aspect of their citizen’s existence, which only exists in North Korea today. As David Runciman shows in his book How Democracy Ends, democracies can easily collapse into authoritarianism, but Arendt outlines the very specific circumstances that are needed for the rise of all-consuming totalitarianism.

This murky totalitarian world is brought to life through her writing. She explains how it works and what it’s made of: the social groups, political instructions and philosophical ideas behind them. The book shows that totalitarianism is more than just soldiers on the streets enforcing a dictator’s whims. It’s a complex series of political processes and historical precedents that Arendt traces to the origins of the antisemitism of the nineteenth century and the imperial expansion of the late nineteenth century.

The fear of totalitarianism

It would take a book to summarise Arendt’s complex ideas and they are best understood when expressed in her own words. What makes them relevant today is that we are terrified (for good reason) of the return of totalitarianism. Everyone today is frightened that their political enemies seek to become an all-dominating force that desire the establishment of total victory by controlling every thought of the people, as Stalin and Hitler attempted to do. Political debate is not framed as an exchange of ideas but a battle for freedom of thought itself.

On the left we are frightened of the authoritarian streak of Trump, Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson. The way that they fawn over strongmen like Erdogan, Putin, the Saudi Royal Family and Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte makes us worry that something even more sinister lurks behind their flattery of these bullies. We cannot escape the idea that Farage doesn't just want to crush Remainers and make himself Prime Minister of the UK on the back of a surge of populist nationalism, but that he would ideally like to make it impossible to think thoughts in opposition to his.

Is this an exaggeration of the power cravings of Farage and Johnson? I can’t say that it isn’t. It’s, just, within living memory that such things were tried in Europe. This is why Arendt’s writings are so important.

How society can go wrong

It was once assumed that the combination of the freedoms that liberal democracy brought, and the prosperity of free-market capitalism, would destroy authoritarianism. This is what I mean when I say that I came of age at the end of history, as proclaimed by Francis Fukuyama. His assertion turned out to be premature. Authoritarianism is alive and well today and the combined forces of liberal democracy and capitalism have failed to defeat it. In some cases, they have aided the spread of authoritarianism.

Now that the inevitable triumph of capitalism and liberal democracy is in doubt, it’s essential to read Arendt as she has a lot to teach us about how our society can go wrong. Authoritarianism is spreading around the world and even supposedly liberal democracies with free markets like Hungary and Poland are not immune. It’s worth being aware of the warning signs that Arendt identifies to be aware of the rise of totalitarianism.

One of her key ideas is that social atomisation can lead to a charismatic leader coming fourth who has a story that explains the reason for most people’s suffering. This can be seen today in the strong men from Farage to Trump and Duterte. This story captures people. It cannot be argued with and those who follow the narrative of the leader grow to doubt even their own experiences that conflict with the narrative.

This can be seen today in Cornish people who followed Farage and voted for Brexit despite the money that the EU had poured into their communities. Or the blue collar Americans voting for Trump despite his inherited wealth and that he lives in New York. These facts didn’t fit with the narrative so they were dismissed.

Man is a political animal

Today we live in a society that is more atomised than the early twenty century that Arendt studied. A remedy to this can partly be found in some of the other writing of Ardent. She thought that everyone should partake in political life, as they did in Ancient Greece where politics was done face-to-face in person. Or at least in an idealised form of Ancient Greece that most historians and philosophers talk about. The one that ignores the fact that women and slaves could not engage in politics.

As a philosopher, Ardent agreed with Aristotle who said: “Man is a political animal.” She liked the idea of Socrates philosophising in the Agora with everyone else and not Plato thinking by himself. Seeing and understanding other people is more important than solitary reflection.

Arendt thought that the falling away of community in the 20th century as capitalism spread further and people became mere labour commodities was completely opposed to this way of doing politics. Today we are even more atomised than during Arendt’s life. We need to stop thinking alone and start seeing and understanding other people.

An atomised society

We cannot go back to how Ancient Greece did politics. Aside from the fact that it tolerated slavery and excluded women, their face-to-face politics was incredibly violent. Arendt also recognised this, but what she thought we could re-create from Ancient Greece is space for dissent and for new ideas to come forward. Today, when I look at the Brexit Party, or the FBPR crowd, I am worried about their lack of space for dissenting opinions.

Today we need more democracy. Technology has allowed us to take more control of our lives, to interact in ways we couldn’t before and has given us the freedom to choose on a scale that previous generations would have found unimaginable. However, this technology appears to be breaking our politics, whilst at the same time, it seems harder than ever to influence our institutions. We need more ways that people can make decisions that affect their lives and exert some control over their existence that goes beyond putting an X on a ballot paper every five years. Politics has become more nuanced than that, but our ways of doing politics have not.

Three human activities

Another of Arendt’s ideas that remain relevant today can be found in her book The Human Condition. Here she laid out three main human activities. Labour, where we feed ourselves and do other essential things. Work, where we make things that have utility. Then action, where we do things together. Arendt thought it was through action that we reveal who we really are. This is connected to her idea that we need to be together to be political.

Under neoliberal captialism, labour and work are crushing action. Technology and capitalism have given us greater choice, but it has made the labour part of existence more complicated and time-consuming. Choice is not in itself a bad thing and lack of choice can be authoritarian, but choice that does not enrich our actions serves only to reduce the time we spend acting, together and being ourselves. Work has also expanded greatly as technology and the pressure of the job market, such as precarious contracts and cutting back the welfare safety net, have made it a necessity to never stop working. This has squeezed out action.

The commercialisation of everything has taken much of the togetherness out of action, as it is now something that can be packaged and sold. This seen as necessary to allow labour and work to continue under neoliberalism. All of this is atomising our society even more than in Arendt’s day, when capitalism was still relatively immature.

Servants of totalitarianism?

We live in atomised societies where a charismatic leader has arisen with a narrative that explains all the suffering, which would worry Arendt. She wrote that other things are necessary for the rise of totalitarianism, mainly a movement such as the Nazi or Bolshevik parties. Others are needed as well including conspiracies, real and imagined, secret police and people who are willing to serve the totalitarian movement. The latter is of utmost importance.

One of Arendt’s later great works was a detailed study of one of the most notorious servants of a totalitarianism movement. In Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Arendt described the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. Eichmann was not a senior or particularly influencial member of the Nazi regime, but he did oversee the transportation project to move Jews from Western Europe to the death camps where millions lost their lives. His dispassionate administrative work was essential to the greatest crime in human history.

In her book, Arendt describes how she found that Eichmann was not the great villain that he appeared to be. He was thoughtless, he spoke in cliches and was unable to understand what he had done. He lacked the clear thought process that we imagine villains have when they decide to do evil. Arendt found William Shakespeare’s character of Richard III to be particularly insightful into how we imagine evil, because Richard is constantly thinking about the evil that he does and why he is doing it. Eichmann, it appears, did not.

Evil is like a fungus

The fact heat Eichmann was able to do what he did was made possible by the bureaucratisation of the world. Eichmann’s was an evil that Franz Kafka could understand; one that was cold and functional, not calculating or filled with passionate fury. Eichmann had created an unthinking machine that fed human lives into the maw of death, for no apparent reason other than he was told to do it. Arendt’s insight is that evil is like a fungus. It doesn't have deep roots. It’s only surface deep.

The growth of technology today has sadly made it easier for people to be desk murderers like Eichmann. Technology has provided us the widest range of food and taxi services ever available to humanity, all just the click of a button away. However, these same technologies have also driven people into poverty because of the lack of regulation that surrounds the people who deliver these services. Such technology could be applied to mass death with efficiency beyond Eichmann’s wildest dreams. All that is needed is the unthinking people to create them and then for no one to stop them.

Totalitarianism could happen again

From reading Arendt one thing becomes clear: totalitarianism could happen again. It will be different from the Third Riech or Stalinist Russia, just as the tech monopolies of Facebook and Google are different from the monopoly of Standard Oil and US Steel, however, the essential elements have not changed. We just need the factors outlined above and the other critical ingredient: terror.

Terror is more than living in a state of fear (although we already have that); it’s a political project that splits your legal, social and political self from your body or animal self. It’s something that rips away the fragile framework of legal and political protections that have been built around individuals since The Enlightenment. It turns people back into animals and animals can be killed easily.

Terror as a political tool has become less prevalent than it was in the time that Arendt wrote about. However, the denial of basic legal and political rights to migrants, the ICE raids and putting of kids in cages that is currently happening in the US, and is the dream of many Brexiteers, are reminiscent of the political terror that Arendt describes. Just because there is no political terror in Nunhead doesn’t mean it isn't in migrant detention centres. To paraphrase William Gibson: “The terror is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.”

Lessons for now

Arendt identified how the perfect storm was needed for the rise of the totalitarianism of the 1930s. It will not happen like that again, but understanding how it happens will allow us to prevent anything similar happening again. This is why Arendt is such an important writer right now. 

We may not have the perfect storm that Arendt describes, but today has many factors in common with what she described. A lack of personal politics, atomised societies, unthinking servants of totalitarianism and political terror are all present today.

Everyone on the left should read the works of Hannah Arendt to understand how society can wrong and how we can be vigilant against it.

In defence of rainy weekend days in January

On a clear summer’s day, from the escalator on the outside of the Pompidou Centre in Paris, you can see the Eiffel Tower standing proudly over what is a good candidate to be the most beautiful city in the world. It’s the perfect place for an epiphany or to be struck by inspiration. 

I always thought of myself as strange that I was more likely to be inspired by the sheer beauty of the world in a Wetherspoons or walking along the side of a ring road. Maybe that’s just me. These places are as full of life as a Moroccan Bazaar or the Amazon rainforest, but are less likely to be the subject of rapturous descriptions rendered in sparkling prose. Beauty can be found in the magnificent squares or Rome with its steady diet of Renaissance masterpieces or in the sublimity of Niagara Falls, but there is beauty to be found in the mundanity of suburban life, in queues for the post office, or in a round of drinks after work on Friday.

In Britain, there is no truer expression of beauty than a good pub. I have known many good pubs in my time on this Earth, and I can say that there is no formula for creating an excellent pub. George Orwell laid out his ideal pub in his essay The Moon Underwater, which has given its name to many pubs (most of them Wetherspoons). I disagree with Orwell, there is no perfect pub. A great pub is a response to its environment and shouldn’t be measured against a universal standard.

I am a man of my time and a product of my environment, so I can usually be found in a trendy East London craft beer bar that probably used to be a warehouse, with exposed brick and pipes as well as keg beer from a local microbrewery. It’s easy to sniff at these places for being the embodiment of the modern aesthetic, but a pub should be a response to a time as well as a place. 

Another mode of pub that I very much enjoy is the traditional high street boozer, usually with recognizable pub design and names such as the Kings Head, Rose and Crown, or celebrating a local historical figure or event. In recent years I have seen the range and quality of beer and food offered in these places increase greatly. They have always moved with the times to be the cornerstone of British life.

The best of these pubs are friendly, but not so relaxing that you think you’re in your own living room; so please don’t take off your shoes or put your feet on the chairs. They have subtle, inoffensive interior design, great beer and good food. They capture the community, town or suburb they are located in and reflect it back, whilst still being welcoming to outsiders.

These places offer a refuge from the assault of to our mental wellbeing that is the month of January. Why many people decide to quit drinking in the most depressing of months is beyond me. They sit on the high streets of small towns and street corners of suburban sprawl. Many of them are in tasteful Victorian buildings, but they come in varieties from delicate Mock Tudor to modernist cubes with flat roofs. The town centre pub is one of the few things that link us together in an increasingly atomized society.

There is a quiet beauty to the High Street pub that suits its usual understatedness. It’s the same quiet beauty that can be found on rainy weekend days in days in suburban streets. It can be found in a family or group of friends tucking into a Sunday roast. It can be found in weekly shops and car MOTs and the way that fans watching football in a pub can cast aside British awkwardness to share in elation at victory and commiseration at defeat.

This is where the profound can be found on a rainy January weekend afternoon in suburbia. It is on one of these weekends that I write this, in the midst of a local high street pub that serves good beer. People are sharing stories. There are family meals and friends’ reunions. A young couple is having a drink on the leather sofa near the fire. Kids are running around but are closely supervised. American Pie just came on the stereo. The pub is starting to empty out as the sun sets. Work tomorrow.

This is as fine a subject for a painting as the Battle of Trafalgar, and it says more about the Britain that we are than a mythologised naval encounter with the French. Pubs on rainy Sunday afternoons are what brings our country together and we need some togetherness as recent events have done their best to tear us apart.

Recently, I have sensed a rejection of the idea that mundane British life is beautiful. This comes from a mistrust of normal people and their experience by people of my ilk, whatever ilk that is. We used to champion the person in the street against their wealthy oppressors, but since the person in the street voted for Brexit we paused and thought maybe they have opinions that we don’t find so wholesome.

This has led to a mistrust of the person in the street or the pub, usually a Wetherspoons. In many recent political discussion drinking in Wetherspoons has become code for being ill-informed, angry at nebulous elites and probably a bit racist. This is mainly because of the pro-Brexit views of Tim Martin, the chain’s owner. There is more to Wetherspoons than being a vehicle for pro-Brexit propaganda, and not everyone who drinks in one supports Brexit. When we reduce people’s everyday experience to a knee jerk reaction we lose some part of our collective identity.

Some of that identity has informed the collection of anxieties that make up Brexit. The closure of pubs in a local area reinforces these anxieties and contributes to the support for Brexit. Brexit is a nostalgic movement, based on a nostalgia for an idealised Britain and for pubs that are vanishing from large parts of the country. In other parts of the country having new, cool, craft beer oriented bars is a badge of identity as a successful, open and anti-Brexit community. The pub, and how we view it, is key to understanding how we feel about Brexit. 

I’m not denying that the referendum and Brexit are processes designed to divide people and turn us against each other. Brexit is not something that has to be merely accepted. What it is becoming is a culture war, a widening gap between people who share the same streets and pubs. Now we resent anything that smells of that other culture we feel so separated from.

I don’t want to trivialise the important disagreements at the heart of Brexit. I have written about the grave threats to our nation. However, we cannot continue to live as two nations in one land. Increasingly we have come to see each other as different. Not just politically or even culturally different, but different in the fundamental nature of the lives we lead.

If we view our Britain as the one of the exceptional, the cultured, the open-minded, then we cannot help but think of the other Britain as mundane, grey and filled with people ground down by the harshness of the world. If this is how we think, then we will grow to see every day experiences as signifiers of our cultural enemies.

At worst, a dislike of the person in the street could lead to a rejection of the everyday as invalid, a dismissing of the everyday things that bind us together. Rainy Sundays in suburbia are a part of everyone lives, regardless of who they are or what they believe. You can be awestruck in the Pomedu Centre Paris, or in a Wetherspoons in Grantham, but we all experience the same feelings.

I write this on a rainy Sunday afternoon in January in suburbia where our future is uncertain, but we must make sure that we don't turn against each other, dismiss the person in the street as an angry crank and render the everyday experiences of millions as invalid.

I don’t think that the answer to fear and suspicion is more fear and suspicion. We cannot harbor hostility to people who think differently to us or come from different places. I don’t want to live in a divided Britain.

 "The Shepherd and Dog Pub" by lloydi is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0