6 September, 2024

The WAR against OUR Past: inside the ideological project to undermine our history and collective memory

Matt Goodwin below rightly notes the decline in British patriotism and shows how that is a loss. He fails to take note of the fact that it is almost entirely the political Left that is pushing that. So to understand that you have to go down into the psychology of the Left. WHY are they so corrosive of British national identity?

There a number of reasons but a major one is that they are born gloomy. The genetic studies show a strong inherited element in political orientation and the research also shows that your happiness level is largely preset. Most of the time a person is either happy or gloomy or somewhere in between.

So the really interesting question is how the gloomy ones have gained so much influence

Most of the answer is fairly clear. We live in a broadly very sucessful society that is kinder to its people than any previous society has been. And that seems fragile to many people. They fear that it might all collapse. So when the Left come out with all their doom and gloom prophecies, They are closely attended to in case they are onto something. The global warming nonsense is an example of that

And patriotism is also an easy concern. There have been notable examples of people's patriotism being disatrously misused by politicians, notably Adolf Hitler. So anti-patriotism has emerged as a a barrier to a possibly destructive phenomenon.

But patriotism has many psychological benefits, particularly feelings of belonging and solidarity, so the attacks on it can destroy much that is beneficial to people. The gloomy Left are good at detecting possible dangers and that gets attention to them


Here’s a story you might have missed. The British people’s pride in their history has collapsed to a historic low. At least, that’s according to brand new findings from something called the British Social Attitudes survey, which has been tracking what the British think since the 1980s. Here’s what the survey found.

Over the last decade, the Brits have become much less likely to feel pride in their country’s history and achievements. And the numbers are truly striking.

Consider this. In 2013, 86% of all Brits said they were proud of Britain’s history. Today? The figure has collapsed to 64%.

And in 2013, while 62% of Brits said they would rather be a citizen of Britain than anywhere else in the world, today just 49% think this way.

What’s going on? Well, the expert class will tell you this reflects wider changes in British society and, in particular, people’s changing conceptions of who we are.

There are basically two stories of our national identity.

The first, cherished by the elite class, is of a diverse, multicultural, pro-immigration society that largely defines its identity by its celebration of diversity.

This is what we might call a ‘civic’ conception of our national identity, a thinner vision which puts the emphasis on respecting laws and welcoming others.

The second, cherished by lots of people outside the elite class, is of a proud country that has withstood all invaders since the Norman Conquest, and which enjoys a rich and unique historic and cultural legacy that needs to be cherished and preserved.

This is what we might call an ‘ethno-traditional’ of our national identity —a thicker vision which rejects racism but also puts more emphasis on our shared history, ancestry, and distinctive culture and ways of life.

Today, according to the British Social Attitudes survey, the British are gradually moving away from this second vision of who they are to embrace the first —which explains why they are less wedded to things like their history.

As the country’s population is becoming more diverse, university-educated, and as younger Zoomers from Generation-Z and Millennials are steadily replacing older Baby Boomers —with immigrants, graduates, and younger people more likely to embrace this civic vision— more and more people are viewing Britishness or Englishness in these terms, repacking their identity around universal liberal themes like celebrating diversity while downplaying their distinctive ancestry and history.

At least, this is the narrative the elite class promote, largely because it reflects how the elite class like to think about their own national identity.

But there are two problems with this.

The first, as we’ve seen through things like the rise of UKIP, Brexit, Boris Johnson, and now the Reform party, is that, actually, millions of people still think there is much more to Britishness and Englishness than a hollow celebration of ‘diversity’.

While the elite class is wants to repackage our identity around these universal themes —saying the only thing that defines us is that we celebrate diversity and multiculturalism— many other people think ‘no, hang on on a minute, there is something distinctive and unique about coming from these islands and we don’t want all this unique history and culture to be pushed aside for things that could just as easily apply to many other countries around the world’.

As I said last night on television, to say that a nation is welcoming of things like ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ is fine. But it cannot be the entire basis of your identity because if the only thing that defines you is that you welcome others then it’s like saying you have no real identity of you own.

And many people in Britain and England, like many people across the West, do think they have a unique, distinctive, special identity that cannot simply be pushed aside in favour of a rather bland celebration of immigration, diversity and multiculturalism.

The second problem with this elite interpretation of who we are is that it completely ignores an alternative hypothesis for why people’s pride in their history and culture is declining —and this owes more to ideology than demographic change.

As Professor Frank Furedi argues in an important new book, The War Against the Past: Why the West Must Fight for its History, over the last twenty years, across the West, members of the elite class have simply declared war on our past and history.

Cancel culture, Furedi argues, has now moved from focusing on the present towards imposing its narrative on how we view our past and history. The goal of radically revising if not cancelling our cultural inheritance is pursued by reorganising society’s historical memory and disputing and delegitimating its ideals and achievement.

To achieve this objective, the elite class consciously erase the temporal distinction between the present and the past.

This is why they target historic symbols of our identity and Western culture more generally, as if these things constitute a clear and present danger to their wellbeing.

This is why great historical figures of Western science and philosophy – David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Charles Darwin, among many others – are attacked and condemned for their values and behaviour, as if they are our contemporaries.

And this is why this war against our past, against our history, is relentlessly pursued in the institutions that incubate our young people, including our taxpayer-funded universities and schools. We are funding an attack on our own history, in other words.

Increasingly, as I’ve been pointing out for a while, teachers and the curriculum rely on teaching materials and dubious theories such as Critical Race Theory (CRT), which essentially encourage our children to think negatively about their own history, identity, and the West. Routinely, they’re taught there is more bad than good in our history and cultural inheritance when the very opposite is true.

The curriculum guidelines suggest the deeds of the British Empire are somehow comparable to those of Nazi Germany, while children are taught to be critical of their own history, and the history of the West, while comparable examples of imperialism and slavery in non-Western states —including ones still taking place today—are routinely downplayed or simply ignored. In effect, these guidelines seek to make our children feel ashamed about their nation’s past and, by extension, their ancestors.

At the root of this is not just the elite’s desire to repackage our identity around a universal liberal celebration of diversity and multiculturalism but, more accurately, around a conception of ‘asymmetrical multiculturalism’, whereby the British and English are told to celebrate the distinctive identity, history, and culture of minorities while simultaneously being told to forget, downplay, or criticise their own distinctive history and identity, and repackage them instead around universal liberal themes.

As Furedi argues, this elite project of estranging society from its historical and cultural inheritance is proving to be remarkably successful. It is drifting out from the educational institutions and being reinforced by the creative and cultural industries, where the continual revision of our history and past is now visible in everything from Netflix to the latest Hollywood films.

Those who resist, such as by flying the flag, are condemned as ‘far-right bigots’, while icons of our identity and history, from William Shakespeare to Winston Churchill, are continually demonised as the personification of ‘white supremacy’. The absurdity of this imperative to render toxic every great individual of Britain’s past is highlighted by the attempt to turn Shakespeare’s hero, Henry 5th, into a war criminal.

This deep-seated mistrust of tradition and our history also extends to the family, going so far as to warn mothers and fathers to be wary of the child rearing practices used by parents in previous times. The advice and views of grandparents is frequently attacked as irrelevant and possibly prejudicial to the development of the child by so-called ‘parenting experts’. As a result of the institutionalisation of these attitudes, children are no longer socialised into the values that were held by their grandparents, and certainly not by their more distant ancestors. As Furedi notes:

“It is through the alienation of society from its history that opponents of Western Culture seek to gain moral and political hegemony. The stakes are high in this conflict since the project of contaminating the past diminishes the capacity of society to endow people’s life with meaning. A society that becomes ashamed of its historical legacy invariably loses its way. It weakens society’s capacity to socialise children and dooms them to a state of a permanent crisis of identity. It is our responsibility to the young to ensure that they have access to the legacy of the past.”

Human-beings, he points out, are historical animals. The past lives on through us. Or, as Shakespeare reminded us through the Earl of Warwick: ‘There is a history in all men’s lives’. The possession of a sense of the past is integral to what it means to be human. If this sensibility is culturally devalued and people become desensitised to its use then, increasingly, our public life will fall under the spell of social amnesia, which is perhaps what those latest survey results are at least partly reflecting.

Ultimately, it is through our connection with the traditions of past and their cultural inheritance that people learn to understand their place in the world. Without this sense of connection our identity of being part of a wider, distinctive community and nation becomes emptied of meaning. And so, in turn, do we.

The harm that is now being done by this war on the past is all too evident in the contemporary world. And it is our young people, growing up with a weak and troubled sense of connection with what preceded them, who are the human casualties of this war. As Winston Churchill said, ‘a nation that forgets its past has no future’.

https://www.mattgoodwin.org/p/the-war-against-our-past-inside-the

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