THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE: Countryside and Culture
Scruton, Roger
THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE Roger Seruton Countryside a.nd Culture " ' 1 HERE IS AN EMERGING "CULTURE WAR" which has I dominated British politics for the last two decades, and is beginning to...
...And it was clear from the beginning that the debate was not about animal welfare but about culture-specifically about the culture of Old England, with its hierarchical social order, its equestrian way of life, and its carefully woven landscape of fields, hedgerows, and quaint little villages, so offensive to the "multicultural" orthodoxies of the new ruling class...
...THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE Roger Seruton Countryside a.nd Culture " ' 1 HERE IS AN EMERGING "CULTURE WAR" which has I dominated British politics for the last two decades, and is beginning to be noticeable in America too, and that is the war over the countryside...
...In those difficult years the family farm became the symbol of continuity, settlement, and national sovereignty...
...In short, rural America is becoming the target of a new wave of"ethical" policies, which urge us to boycott American farming on grounds that reflect the lifestyle choices of the urban elite...
...How should the land be settled...
...54 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 2006...
...Hostility to rural America is therefore largely directed at farmers, and at their rough and dominating SZPTZMI~R 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 53 THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE ways with the natural world...
...There are whole swathes of the country without vegetarians or public homosexuals, and where the principal amusements are bear hunting, pig wrestling, and rodeos...
...Nor has the countryside acquired any settled cultural significance for the majority of Americans...
...Moreover, golf courses mutilate acre upon acre of those irritating pastures and establish car parks and clubhouses in the place of ancestral halls...
...His goal is a suburban jungle, with people carefully slotted into the spaces between habitats, moving on tiptoe through the territories of raccoons and bears, and living on an imported diet of "fair-trade" vegetables...
...Environmentalists look on the American farm as a disaster...
...Protests from the Countryside Alliance (a pressure group formed to represent rural England) led to its restoration, not as hunting, but as "hunting and the opposition to it," so that pictures of hunt saboteurs in their balaclava helmets could feature alongside the proud uniforms of the Beaufort and the Berkeley as symbols of the England we love...
...Meanwhile, the agency has been filled with appointees with no reputation in the countryside except as people who would like to abolish it, while the new minister for rural affairs--David Miliband-lives in London and confesses that he does not own a pair of Wellington boots...
...But golf is an approved use of the countryside, being the favorite sport of urban incomers...
...And either way, it will cease to produce what the country needs in peacetime, so preparing the way for instant surrender in time of war...
...But the art, literature, and music of rural America are as egalitarian and democratic as the art, literature, and music of the cities...
...We follow them on their daily visits to the organic food market, stand over them as they cook their beans and sorghum, and listen to the tedious moralizing that only people like themselves, living at one remove from production and enjoying all the hidden subsidies of the modern suburb, can afford to act upon...
...Better a sterile wilderness than the Eden of the old upper class...
...Their "ethical" suppers are symbols of a deep conviction--shared by a growing number of American liberals-that the countryside is in the wrong hands...
...Labour members of Parliament took up a record 220 hours of parliamentary time in order to force through the bill banning "hunting with dogs," while devoting only 18 hours to the war in Iraq...
...All those things get up the nose of leftist puritans...
...Better a sterile wilderness than the Eden of the old upper class...
...For them Old England is a delusion of the upper class, an ideological fiction that masks not only the historical oppression of the rural poor, but also the real nature of modern England, as a place of migrant-filled towns...
...At a recent exhibition of Stubbs in the National Gallery, hunting was carefully censored out of the exhibits-even though hunting was the activity that had drawn Stubbs to horses and explained their dominant presence in the life of his patrons...
...Every effort has thus been made to excise the For the British leftist, the countryside needs to be taken over by the urban crowds and trampled to extinction...
...The job went to a bureaucrat who lives in Birmingham and who gained his experience of the English countryside at the World Bank, the IMF, and the Treasury...
...T HE ATTACK ON THE ENGLISH countryside and its culture is also a reaction to the Second World War...
...There have been important agrarian movements, which have found expression in the arts...
...Roger Scruton, the writer andphilosopher, is most recently the author of Gentle Regrets: Thoughts From a Life (Continuum...
...The countryside is dimly glimpsed in the background of the drama, though washed clean of all politically incorrect sports and all old-fashioned religious feelings...
...The target of New Labour's antagonism remains today what it was for 19th-century radicals: the landed gentry who, notwithstanding the fact that they have lost their land and are no longer gentry, remain the main hate figures in British left-wing demonology...
...His principal cultural significance is that he is the son of Ralph Miliband, one of the most poisonous of the Marxist gurus of the 1960s...
...And two aggressive ramblers now sit on the board of the Countryside Agency, pursuing their campaign to abolish all private ownership of Britain's coastlines, so that the louts of modern Britain can expose their flaccid torsos on every beach in the land...
...The countryside has somehow failed to become a symbol either of wealth or of social hierarchy, even though it can be as rich and hierarchical as any region of rural England...
...The symbolic significance of hunting with hounds was revealed when the government, in response to worries about Welsh and Scottish devolution, established a website inviting people to propose their favorite icon of England...
...Hunting was an unquestioned part of the rural life that they celebrated, a kind of ritual repossession of the landscape in the name of the tribe...
...Had the ancestral sport of the landed classes been golf rather than huntingwe should have certainly seen moves to outlaw golf...
...For the British leftist, the countryside needs to be taken over by the urban crowds and trampled to extinction...
...For what purpose, by what kind of people, and with what way of life...
...Indeed, The Archers was the first program to broadcast the sound of two homosexuals kissing, as proof that life on the farm is no different from life in London attics...
...The BBC's radio soap, The Archers, which supposedly portrays life on the family farm and which was the most popular program during the war and its aftermath, is now produced by a city-dwelling lesbian...
...It was an icon which, thanks to Constable and Stubbs, Surtees and Trollope, Elgar and Holst, was already fully articulate in the English mind...
...Those great artists lived in a world of tranquil husbandry, in which social hierarchies were largely undisturbed, and troubles were exported across the seas...
...One of the most important laws passed by New Labour conferred the "right to roam" over large tracts of rural England, regardless of the rights of those who are the nominal owners...
...It was an explicit requirement that the chairman of the agency should be an opponent of hunting, and it soon became clear that the ideal candidate would be a visitor to the countryside, who flees back to the city appalled by 52 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 2006 ROGER SCRUTON the primitives who shoot rabbits, keep ferrets in cages, have no need of social workers, and attend their local church...
...Campaigners for "fair trade" and "global justice" urge that food should not be produced at home but imported from the small farmers of Africa and SouthAmerica...
...The urgent desire to police this moral wilderness is therefore beginning to make itself felt in the suburbs, and it may be time for American conservatives to observe what has happened in Britain, where the countryside has for a long time occupied the debating columns of the weekly journals, dictated much of the agenda of public radio, and been the conscious theme of a continuous stream of novels and documentaries...
...Wartime propaganda films from Ealing Studios therefore dwelled upon farming and country life, and when Eliot produced his great response to war in the Four Quartets, it was to rural England and its gentle religion that he turned for inspiration...
...So deep is the New Labour obsession with the countryside that the government has established a "Countryside Agency" to oversee the abolition of this cultural thorn in its side...
...Activists for"anireal rights" press for legislation to control every aspect of farming, to restrict or abolish hunting, and to ensure that our relation to other species conforms to the Disneyfied rituals that tie urban people to their imprisoned pets...
...The question of the countryside has also been the only question of interest to the Labour Party over the last decade, and the only question towards which the British government has a coherent policy...
...Things go on in rural America that have come to the attention of the elite...
...When it became clear that hunting was coming out on top--way ahead of football and fish and chips--it was removed from the site...
...Reports from visiting missionaries speak of environmental mischief, of primitive rituals with animals, of grotesque outbursts of patriotism, and of the frightening emergence of a"Christian Fundamentalist Right...
...The American liberal has a more positive approach to the problem...
...Yet more politically correct is "rambling'-the habit of escaping from the city in order to trample over other people's fields...
...countryside from the national culture...
...Either way the countryside will contain no conservative voters, and say no prayers to the Christian God...
...A LTHOUGH THE FOUNDING FATHERS were landed gentry in the English mold, their way of life has never been resented by the American people...
...A new book by Peter Singer and Jim Mason, The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter, portrays exemplary members of this elite, who show their contempt for America and its lifestyle in their ability to weep at the touch of a button over America's transgressions and who symbolize their sensitive natures in the food that they eat...
Vol. 39 • September 2006 • No. 7
