The Rest Is History - 46. Culture Wars

Episode Date: April 26, 2021

The battle lines are drawn as Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook get involved in this most timely of subjects. They discuss the historical significance of culture wars from Ancient Rome to the US Civil Rights movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. The English people are being betrayed. Under the influence of dangerous new foreign ideas, a tiny minority of metropolitan intellectuals are trying to undermine our national history and destroy our traditional culture. Never before has our identity been...

You get the gist. So this is England in the 1530s, it's England in the 1640s,land in the 1700s the 1900s the 1960s and now once again in the 2020s welcome to the rest is history with battle scarred culture warrior tom holland and me the far more nuanced and reasonable dominic sam brooke dominic hello you are so battle-scarred in the culture wars. I mean, you write for the Daily Mail. That's the essence of a culture warrior. Okay, you're going to go there straight away.

Fair enough. Now I know where we stand. I'm hacking you down early. We are going to get into the history of culture wars. Maybe we'll fight some culture wars in the second half of the pod but maybe the start with i think it's really this is such a hot topic and i think we should really sort of get into what culture wars are are they confected you know where do they come from historically and we might as well start i think

tom with a question so we've got a question from gilberto more back who says what is the first instance of a cultural he says it's not the culture camp which is bismarck's war against the catholic church itself now i don't think it is i think culture wars are as old as history itself and i think they go back to you know what are the greeks and the persians but a culture war what are the arguments within the roman republic but a culture war but maybe tom you disagree i do disagree because i think that if you use culture war to mean the war between two different cultures i mean every that's every war every war is is bringing different perspectives different cultural understandings different cultural assumptions so you might just as well say war i think i think but that's not that's not

quite but the idea of um that's not really what I mean. What I mean is the argument about who should we be? What are our values? What's our identity? I mean, Greeks did argue about those things. And Romans argued about them and said, you know, are we becoming too Greek? Are we becoming too Persian? Are we betraying our ancestors? Are we living up to our history?

All those arguments, which we have as britons right now or americans they are as old as history itself but you see i think that's like saying that julius caesar conquered france it it's kind of true but it's also missing quite a lot and i think it risks anachronism so i i do think that that the culture camp you know it begins with yeah basically it does begin with with bismarck and the oh i don't agree the conflict with with the with with the catholic church as a concept as a category and perhaps you can then back project that in a certain way but i think that that essentially the the culture war that bismarck is engaged in is over the the limits of um religious authority over a secularizing state so i think it's about

the tensions between the secular and the self-professingly christian but an astonishing surprise yeah but as you as you will know of course the the concept of the secular is itself a christian one so what i would say a culture war is basically it's sublimated theology so it it it is generated out of out of a specifically christian context but it's a a context in which one side no longer recognizes itself as being christian so it's a kind of post-christian war so that's i think so i think that all the culture wars in america they are essentially all revolving around issues of christian theology it's just that one side doesn't recognize that and once i don't let's go back for tom i want to go back further

before let's before we get back to bismarck and christianity and stuff are you saying that when in in the sort of the later days of the roman republic which you've written about you know so successfully um when people are arguing that the the founding ideals the sort of puritan what they see is the puritanical ideals of the republic have been lost and they are arguing about um what they see is the luxurious effeminacy and decadence of the modern age and you know people like cato are arguing against what they see as the sort of the new people who are un-roman and all that stuff you don't think there's a culture war element to that you really don't i think it's more about political style because that's the essence but that's what culture wars are about i'm not sure it is because i think that it's it's about i think that bake it

into our understanding of culture war and unless it's going to become something so kind of broad reaching that it just becomes nebulous and pointless is the idea of progress it's the idea of whether you're on the side of progress or not so it it requires people who feel them that they're progressive and people who feel that that progress is actually a form of loss so a kind of conservatism there are of course you know there are people who define themselves absolutely as conservatives in in in in rome but yeah cato would be a great example but see but caesar is not um he he's upholding a kind of style it's a it's kind of flash it's a kind of um an appeal to the tastes of the people but it's not going against the very idea of Rome it's not

kind of formulating the idea that there are customs and practices that are superseded that should be jettisoned I think if you want so if you want, the closest approximation to a culture war and i think that the christians who are opposing certain aspects of roman culture are doing it in a way that we could perhaps define as progressive they're kind of saying okay things can be improved things can be better and um the the traditions that you are are upholding are antiquated and should be jettisoned so so i wanted to ask you about that when christianity comes in because there surely you have you must have a sense i mean it's very hard to get hold of that now because our sources are so limited but you must have a sense of people in there in rome in the days of

constantine the great and his successors well i suppose more his successors who are saying you know i was always brought up to believe x y Y, and Z. And now everything that I believe has been turned on its head. And isn't it awful that these shrieking, strident people, in this case the Christians, are taking our country from us. I mean, they wouldn't have said our country, but our world from us. And turning everything on its head. I just believe what people believed 20 years ago. And suddenly I'm told that's all wrong.

I don't even know what the right words are. We know the lingo. So aren't they saying exactly that then so what christians are bringing in to the to the party is first of all the idea that there is a kind of universal identity that transcends the local so rome roman traditions are not that important relative to the good news that Christians bring, which are properly universal. And also the other idea is that certain aspects of Roman culture are not just kind of irrelevant, but literally demonic and therefore have to be abolished in the name of something that perhaps rather anachronistically we could call progress because christians would see the removal of the demonic as improving life for um society and everybody within it so is that things like gladiatorial yeah gladiatorial games slavery

there's one there's one particular kind of incident which is which is famous which takes place in the late fourth century there is an altar in the senate house um called the altar of victory which serves as a symbol for the romans of their the glories of their past so there's a statue of victory nike which dates back to the wars with pyrrhus um so before the time of Hannibal even um and the altar itself is has been put there by Augustus to celebrate his victories over over Antony and Cleopatra so it's absolutely you know it's it's Nelson's column it's it's everything that the Romans kind of see as embodying their martial glory. Statue of Churchill. Yes, absolutely. And the Christians hate it because it requires people to offer,

to burn incense, to offer sacrifice to these gods who Christians see as demonic. So they're constantly agitating to have it removed. And 357 Constantius II does remove it. Then he's succeeded by Julian, who is notoriously known by the Christians as the apostate because he wants to reintroduce paganism. So he brings it back in. Then it gets removed again in 382. And the emperor who does that, a guy called Gratian, then dies in a coup. And his half-brother um valentinian the second is then petitioned to

bring it back and the reason that this is um is is very well documented is that we have both sides so we have a guy called simicus who is a senator pagan senator who's writing to the emperor and saying look you know live and let live um christians can have their churches why can't we have our altar sure that's fine and then we have have the response from St. Ambrose, who's the Bishop of Milan, saying we cannot negotiate with this because this is demonic. It has to be got rid of. We have no compromise at all. And I think there you do see a kind of a proto example of the contours that the culture wars in our society will take on. The sense that certain things for those who are identifying themselves with what we might call the progressive cause is non-negotiable that and and that the the detritus

of the past cannot just be tolerated it has to be removed so i think that tom i think you've you've brilliantly disproved your argument at the beginning of the program because i because you've just i mean that to me is utterly compelling i mean that sounds completely recognizable ambrose as well is woke and the other fellow is unwoke and never the compromise between so what i would what i would grant is that there is a there are certainly cultural war elements within christian Christianity's relationship to the pre-existing society and it's there for instance also in the anxieties that Christian philosophers and theologians feel in their attitude towards pagan literature so um so in the in in the 10th century

there's an abbot of Cluny who has a dream in which he sees a vase and it's full of coiling snakes three coiling snakes and he wakes and an angel appears and says, these snakes are Virgil and Horace and Ovid. So you must get rid of them. Meanwhile, simultaneously in Ravenna, you have people who are saying that actually we should be studying Virgil rather than the Gospels because they're much better. So that I guess is a kind of, you know, there are kind of prefigurings there of trends that we recognise. But I think that basically what is happening there is that it's the tension between a fundamentally Christian society and a society that is not identifying itself as Christian. And I think that... Do the Christians cancel stuff? Do they want to cancel literature, for example?

Not really. Some do, but it's a kind of minority but there's always a slight ambivalence around it and i think that you know there are kind of i mean i would argue that the say you know people giving giving um warnings before trigger warnings before studying ovid or something in in a 21st century american university that there is a kind of echo there of the ambivalences that Christians felt, say, towards Ovid or Virgil in late antiquity. And I think that essentially, but in both cases, it's bred of deeply Christian assumptions about both the universal and the progressive. And I think that those are the keys. What you also get in this period, Tom, well, sort of late antiquity, early medieval, is a huge amount of hullabaloo about images.

And one thing that does strike me as a kind of continuity is that obviously there is a torrent of stuff at the moment about statues and about plaques to people and, you know, who you celebrate in the graven image. And that's there in, you know, that's in their byzantium and the arguments about iconoclasm and then there again i think don't you see the same kind of thing people who say well i've been brought up to believe x y and z i've always believed that these images were an important part of that they're central to our our culture and our

imaginative and religious a spiritual world and now these bastards are coming along and whitewashing them and getting rid of them just as they obviously later do in the reformation and that seems to me to be that's a fascinating impulse running through the last 2000 years constant battles about images and who you put up and whether it's right to put up an image at all but i was i was kind of thinking about this knowing that we were going to be talking about this and i just kind of have this i feel that that's different because those are christians arguing in christian terms about what should be done so the arguments about about icons in byzantium and about images in the 16th century are people who who both accept that they're christians on both sides so it's it's arguments

about theology where both are recognizing that they're christians on both sides so it's it's arguments about theology where both are recognizing that they're arguing about theology i think they don't think the other people are good christians though do they no they don't they really don't think the other people are good christians but i think i think the definition of a culture war is where both sides are essentially debating theological terms but only one side one side doesn't recognise it. Okay, so explain that to me. You think one side pluralist and the other not pluralist. So on the statues issue,

there is absolutely, of course, Christian culture introduces a huge ambivalence about statues. And the idea of putting up statues to memorialize great figures is is a very culturally specific one it's it's one that the greeks have and particularly the romans have so the romans the romans are always shoving up statues of their great generals and their great men and essentially the the the trend in modern Europe to do that reflects a kind of loosening of specifically Christian understandings about what is acceptable in the public space. So it's in the 17th century, really, and then through into the 18th century, that you start getting people saying,

you know, we too have great men. know this is this this increasing identification with with particularly rome so so you know the 18th century is known as the augustan age so it's in the 18th century that you start getting people putting up statues of of great men of generals and kings but also benefactors christian benefactors um yeah so so up they go and that's why most of the statues in our public spaces are represent figures from the from the um the 18th and the 19th and the early 20th centuries because this is a this is a classicizing age this is an age that is looking back to the roman age now i think that the the anxieties around statues today are bred of kind of deeply christian ideas it's just that the people who are campaigning

against it, they wouldn't recognize that as being Christian. But essentially, the sense that we can't have a statue up because it commemorates depravity and evil. So if it's a slave trader or an imperialist or whatever, you know, this is very, this is drawing on the assumption that to make a profit from slaves or to conquer vast reaches of territory and kill people while doing so is not something that is deserving of praise. And these are assumptions that are bred of the great heritage of Christian history. But they've escaped the moorings of specific christian doctrine and they now just kind of percolate in the air and people just kind of breathe them in

and and and take them for granted but that i think is for me that's what i would see the culture wars as being is that it's it's it's arguments about theology that do not recognize themselves as being arguments about theology so then when you go back to so let's go back to the the reformation um because i thought we'd spend a lot of time talking about the reformation because when when the sort of the george floyd was killed black lives matter kicked off there was a you know ton of stuff we're obviously in lockdown at that point that was last year in the sort of middle of 2020 so it monopolized it was the one story that wasn't the coronavirus basically and at that very moment I was writing my children this is a good plug

actually I was writing my children's book about Henry VIII and his six wives and so I was reading books about the reformation like Peter Marshall's great book heretics and reformers about a brilliant one of the best history books I think I've ever read, about the English Reformation. And I was thinking to myself how uncannily similar this is. You know, these accounts by sort of good Catholics of their shock and their horror as Protestants with imported ideas,

you know, clever, well-connected, affluent merchants and stuff, with European ideas that have travelled along the trade routes. You know, these illiterate people who are saying, no, everything you believed was wrong. You know, you should educate yourself. You should purge your church. You should do all this. And I thought there was such continuity here. You know, it's hard to tell where the news ends and this history book begins i completely agree you don't see no there is

absolutely there is continuity there i completely agree it's just that for me the word culture war is it kind of you know it it's it it's coined um in um bismarck's germany and then as it as it evolves with its use in amer I think that of course all these all these trends all these wars all these battles are inherited from Christian paradigms it's just that I think that what we mean by culture wars it refers to arguments about theology that do not recognize themselves as being about theology whereas whereas in the Reformation they do. So I completely agree that reading the accounts of the iconoclasm in towns and cities that are becoming Protestant, where people are going into cathedrals and smashing crucifixes and kind of mocking statues of the Virgin and chucking statues of saints into the river. I mean, it is kind of shocking, but it's done in overtly theological terms.

The justifications for them are given in terms of scripture and theology. That's not what happens now. So when people argue about trans rights or about statues or abortion or whatever the arguments are framed often i mean often so abortion or gay rights or something like that it's it's often cast as you know it's christians against progressives so it's the christians who are the conservatives now and it's the progressives who are turning their back on that as kind of benighted superstition but what i think is that the progressives are drawing just as much on that inheritance of christian history and theology as the the self-confessing christians it's just that they don't recognize it so that that's that's what i think a culture will not

approve of your argument there tom yes so Yes, so Alice Roberts is absolutely a figure who would be unthinkable in any other context except a kind of Protestant Christian one. But she doesn't accept that. And that's what makes her a culture warrior rather than a Christian contestant in an intra-Christian war. And such an entertaining comic figure. But anyway,

so there's one other dimension to this which I think is really interesting that you, I imagine, will completely reject. And that is the sort of more overtly political dimension. So, to me, I would argue, and you clearly would disagree, that British politics

has always been a kind of culture war. I mean, this is what, for example, Robert Toombs argues in his book The English and Their History. He argues that British politics has always been a kind of culture war that the I mean this is what for example Robert Toombs argues in his book the English and their history he argues the English politics specifically has always had this culture war dimension that it's always been there's always been a religious gap you know the the Tories and the Conservatives are the kind of Church of England at the voting booth and that the sort of liberal left-wing tendency, particularly in middle-class life, has always been driven by kind of religious non-conformity

and by the tradition of dissent. And actually, you know, when I look back at the period that politics was born, that what we would recognise as politics, so you're talking about late 17th, early 18th century, I mean, it's shot through with arguments about sort of culture war kind of issues i mean the example i know you've read this piece that i wrote a few weeks ago for unheard about the sucheverall case so there you've got a preacher

you know that that's the the single biggest issue in the general election of 1710 um and it's a preacher who has condemned the wigs and condemned dissenters and the tories pick it up and they run with it and they amplify it into a sort of major national political issue in a way that people now would say oh typical tour is confecting a culture war all this sort of stuff i mean that people are doing it right back then in the 17th sort of 18th centuries so to me culture wars and sort of you know partisan parliamentary politics have always gone hand in hand to some extent i i don't disagree and i i've read you know you know i read your essay and thought it was fantastic um and and people

haven't read it it was it was in unheard a couple of weeks ago wasn't it i mean i thought and i thought it was fantastic and it kind of really made me think about this so and what i think about that is that i would say that um say that the the disagreements the conflicts the tensions the cultural arguments say in the period of the protectorate after the civil war where you have all these kind of rival religious denominations all debating with each other i would not see that as being a cultural because i think that's still being conducted in in in overtly christian terms but something like wiggery that that might evolve is progress so wiggery it's a kind of secular idea of progress and that is absolutely coming up against the kind of tory idea of the church of england that it should be you know that this this is anathema so I I do completely agree that I think that that is kind of

um you know that's the precursor to the modern culture war because with Whiggery you're getting the idea of of you know it's clearly a massively theological concept that could only have emerged and it clearly does emerge from from the uh the the argument between um established church and and dissenters in the 17th century but it it looses it you know it slips that that mooring so i think that that kind of 18th century argument is i i completely accept the validity of that um and what what do you think about whether there's a sort of temperamental as it were um impulse behind these things that we are we are all little you know gilbert and sullivan had this liberals or little we're all born little liberals or little conservatives i mean we're all born

culture warriors do you not think to an extent we all have an instinctive even if you haven't thought about the issues or you're not steeped in the history or the theology or whatever, people have a very instinctive, visceral reaction to these things. Are they somebody who values tradition and conservatism and how things have always been done? Or do they want to see themselves on the side of progress? And are they horrified at the thought of being on the wrong side of history and all that stuff? I mean, those things are quite innate,'re quite innate aren't they don't you think yes but i think that um i it

won't surprise you to hear me say this i i do think that christianity radically alters the terms of the debate because um back in ancient times basically everyone was a conservative so even if they wanted to change things, and often, of course, they did. I mean, there's a constant process of change. But they would always justify it by saying that they were going back to the way that things were always done. So when the Athenian democracy gets set up, this incredibly radical experiment, they say, well, we're just going back to do what what theseus set up and and and augustus when he and you know he he plants his autocracy on the rubble of the republic he says well i'm you know back to basics i'm restoring the republic i'm restoring the way that things always were and i think that um that what changes with christianity and what and what

is really manifest in our society now is the idea that actually change for its own sake becomes a good, that there is such a thing as an arc of progress and that you're either with that arc of progress or you're not. So I agree that there is a kind of, you know, you either have a kind of, you know, you relish change and you enjoy the excitement that it represents, or you have a kind of instinctive shrinking from it and you just wish that things could stay as they were. And I agree that's a temperamental thing. But I think that what changes with Christianity is that that then becomes much more kind of ideological divide. And I think that we live in the kind of aftermath of that now. I also think that we've possibly talked about this long enough and that we need a break. What do you think?

I was just thinking that. I was thinking about how I was going to get us into the break. Tom, I think you need to tool up, sharpen your weapons, and the battle will resume after this, after a word from our sponsors. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment.

It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History and welcome back to The Culture Wars, which Tom Holland and I are engaged in right now. Tom, America. America, we've had a whole podcast about Americanisation,

so we don't need to do that again. But America clearly plays a huge part in The Culture Wars. Now now i'll tell you my thesis and then then you can reject it um i mean i think basically the when the settlers and the the sort of puritans and stuff went to america they took the culture wars with them and that the arguments all the arguments you see in America are descended from 17th, 18th century British, sort of English and Scottish arguments, and that what's happened is that America has now re-exported those arguments back to us. So we see them as American, but actually they are ultimately

kind of Whig, Tory, good old cause, Civil War era kinds of arguments. And they've survived in America in such a sort of intense form because America is much more religious than the UK is. So the intensity of their culture wars, it seems to me, is a very religiously inspired thing.

Do you buy that? Completely. Yes, I knew you i do i could of course very good and i think that you know we talked about that in the americanization podcast that's one of the reasons why we're so susceptible to catching colds when american cultural warriors sneeze is that basically we we have no natural immunity to it because because it came from us um so i i think but again i i think that that what has made culture wars in america particularly virulent is as you say that it they are it is a much more committedly christian society than than britain's been for a fair while. And I think that what happens in the 60s and 70s

is that that religious culture mutates in a very, very profound way, in a way that is kind of analogous to the 1520s, really. I mean, it's a change in the fabric of Christian thought on that scale, beginnings of the Reformation. Because what you get in the 50s and 60s is the civil rights movement, which is a deeply, deeply Christian movement. The Reverend Martin Luther King. The Reverend Martin Luther King, yeah. And his language is absolutely steeped in biblical narratives. So the language of Exodus, the idea that God leads slaves out of Egypt, that he's on the side of those who are oppressed rather than on the side of Pharaoh.

And of course, he's invoking Christ, the guy who dies the death of a slave all the time. And essentially, that's what gives the civil rights movement its traction, is that he is able to remind white American american christians that if there is no dual greek then there is no black or white in christ and and white christians accept essentially you know within limits accept the justice of that argument and and that establishes a template for other people who come from um sidelined communities, people who feel that they've been suffering oppression from majority rule to do the same. So gay rights would be an example of that.

I guess even feminism would be an example of that, both of which gain enormous kind of sustenance from the example of the civil rights movement and the campaign for racial justice. But the problem, I guess, for practicing Christians with feminism and even more with gay rights is that the arguments and certainly the rhetoric rub up against a traditional Christian understanding and kind of scriptural dictates in a way that the campaign for racial justice hadn't. And so what you get over the course of the 70s is that, you know, in culture

wars, it forces people to take sides. And so people who are practicing Christians increasingly come to identify as conservatives, people who are under attack from people who are not Christian. And progressives, likewise, increasingly come to identify Christianity as being something repressive, negative, something that has to be conservative, fossilized, something that has to be oppressive, something that has to be jettisoned. And so essentially, those are the kind of the battle lines that the trenches still run across America to to this day where you have people who say i'm christian i hate progressives you have progressives who say i'm a progressive i hate christians but basically both sides are articulating arguments drawn from the same kind of great seedbed of christian thought so i think you know it's it's

not a christian against progressive war it's it's it's's a Christian civil war but what makes it a culture war in my light is that only one side recognises that Have you read this book by James Davison Hunter so this is the book that enshrines the term culture wars published in 1991 American sociologist now what he basically says is it's the clash between the orthodox and the progressive

so he says you don't have to be a christian to be on the orthodox side you can you just believe in tradition you believe in the nuclear family you believe in you know your country in the military and all these kinds of things and then there's the progressives and he said that you know it's very hard to find that politics is increasingly being fought on out on those lines. And obviously now people talk a lot, so political scientists in Britain talk a lot about how the Conservatives, for example,

have moved from being sort of the Thatcherite party, the party of neoliberalism, as people call it, to being one that fights on more overtly cultural grounds, cultural conservative grounds. And people sometimes talk about that as though this is this tremendous new thing. But it seems to me that politics has always been fought out on that. There's always been the orthodox progressive, particularly in America, in American politics. I think that that tension has kind of always been there.

It's only been there since the end of the Second World War. There's no doubt about that. Yeah. And I think escalating since the 60s. I think think so i think the 60s is a really crucial decade but i thought also what was brilliant in your essay which i also think is completely true is that um the culture war issues are a bit like personalities in politics that politicians are always saying people aren't really interested in this kind of nonsense people just want to talk about you know the inflation rate yeah nhs funding or something

but it's it's it's evident that culture wars kind of blaze into fire because for lots of people they're enormous fun well you have i mean you know i have very strong views about this so i think strong views people people who are interested in politics i think i think one of the extraordinary things about people who are interested in politics is often they don't really understand they're very interested in politics but that makes them very bad judges of politics and how politics works because they're interested in it. So they because they're super interested in politics, they think that that that everybody else is interested in the same things that they are. It's rather like somebody who's incredibly interested in a particular sport and in the sort of statistics of it, understanding what other people see in it. Often they don't.

And I think with politics, these arguments that sort of political obsessives and kind of guardian colonists think are contrived and confected about flags and statues, you will ordinary people, as it were, ordinary people, I know I sound like I'm getting into my column right in the vein, but sort of, as it were, ordinary people, people know I sound like I'm getting into my column writing vein, but sort of, as it were, ordinary people, people who are not very interested in politics, find those much more interesting subjects than exactly that, some arcane discussion about inflation or something.

They are very emotive, very powerful subjects, and always have been. And that's true the other way around, isn't it? That people on the left, likewise, are equally as obsessed by these topics as people on the right. Yes, I think that's probably true. They're more emotive to people on the left, aren't they? But that raises that left-right issue. It raises another interesting dimension, which I don't think quite fits with your theology theology thing which is a big element of the culture wars right now in britain are about britishness and about patriotism so orwell would have recognized all this because orwell in the 1940s he says you

know he mocks orwell orwell is the great man of course he's every conservative columnist-to for kind of quotations because he's kind of on the left but he loves nothing better than basically mocking other lefties and he sort of says you know the british intelligentsia they get their cooking from paris and their opinions from moscow they would rather be seen stealing from a poor box than standing to sing god save the king and all this sort of thing and there's this interesting element of kind of national peculiarly national self-loathing you do get that a bit i think in america but you know the british i think lead the world i mean if we do leave the world on one thing it is self-flagellation about our sins and i wonder how that fits into york because i think that's there's a really interesting and strange thing at the heart of of Britishness that has always been there to some extent, which is a kind of we are uniquely sinful. The British project.

So you go. I mean, you know, there's the word sinful immediately. But then but then you see if it's christian why don't other christian countries have it well because the french i don't think have it to the same extent you know the dutch are very proud of their empire um all those kinds of why don't other people have the same self-flagellating instinct that let's say the british intelligentsia have well i think i think Well, I think that, I mean, every country tends to be Christian in a different way. Okay. So there's a kind of different inheritance. broader world has been so formative both for the british themselves but also for um people who have

had the british turn up and and be informative on them um the the kind of tension that exists within christianity the the suspicion of of the specifically national and the embrace of the universal manifests itself in a distinctive way so if you if you think if you you look back to the um the altar of victory essentially the argument is that um there is a universal christian identity that this is this is the answer and that um the the legacies of of kind of Roman militarism and imperialism are specific are not it's not just that they're specific to the Romans and therefore not of universal import but also that they're malign and malevolent and that's always been a a deep strain within within christianity i mean it's what catholic means universal um

but obviously i i think that there is a kind of huge human impulse to identify with the local over the universal at the same time and i think a huge amount of the argument in in in britain therefore revolves around that issue should you emphasize the the universal over the local and it's the citizens of the world first sorry that the citizens of somewhere versus the citizens of nowhere isn't it i mean that's the from the theresa may speech yes i mean because that was an interesting one because now this is maybe the difference between us when i heard that speech i mean i'm the only person in the world who would admit to this. Certainly the only person who does a history podcast. I thought, yes, great.

I completely agree with that. Sod the citizens of the world. But, of course, most people who are historians who are kind of part of the literary world do see themselves as citizens of the world. They see the local as parochial well or as well as i'm constantly reading as xenophobic or as you know as um as nationalistic but i mean to go back to to your your your fantastic article about the the roots of all this in kind of early 18th century politics um the wigs as a marker of their their kind of progressive identity kind of scorn tory roast beef eating patriots like yourself dominic um and dr johnson well yes to to to a degree um and they identify

with kind of french ideals so i mean all the way through the napoleonic wars you've got you know the holland house aptly named yeah they're all happily named lord holland and and so on they're all kind of you know byron is writing poems lamenting the fall of napoleon and and so on there's a kind of identification pain and yeah a sense that um that kind of uh british toryism is is not just um parochial but but kind of you know turpitudinous that it's xenophobic that that and and therefore to be properly moral you have to identify with um with the ideals of and and the cultures of places beyond the shores of of britain and i think that's that's always been a huge trend. And it's always particularly appealed to intellectuals and writers and poets.

So Shelley and Byron are absolutely, this is absolutely what they are articulating. And I guess that today is no different, that by and large, that's, you know, I mean, that's the metropolitan liberal elites. It is. I remember, Tom, I remember being at Oxford. But Holland House is heaving, you know, in the Regency period,

is heaving with metropolitan liberal elites, the equivalent of. I was about to say, I remember being at Oxford in the 1990s and hearing for the first time, so England were playing a World Cup qualifier or something, football, and hearing for the first time other students saying, how can you support England? Anyone but England. How can you support england you know anyone but england your own country and i was utterly dumbfounded because it was the first time i'd encountered this having sort of grown up and you know in the heart in a hobbit hole as you

know yeah in my hobbit hole and um yeah surrounded by the ghosts of nelson and toby john and all exactly so i couldn't believe that there would be people who were clearly english who who would not support their own and they said it wasn't just the anyone butting and thing it was also they didn't agree with the principle of supporting your national team at all no matter who you were if you were burkina faso they wouldn't agree with supporting yeah your own team because they thought that was nationalistic. In which case, why were they watching football? I mean, isn't the whole point of... They were trying to dissuade other people from watching it. They just thought the idea was national football.

That's what people always say about football is that it's tribal, don't they? I mean, we saw that with the whole debate over the Super League is that the essence of the argument, which I thought was really interesting and how rapidly everybody agreed with it, was that football clubs should be local. They shouldn't be the property of global supporters,

that really it's rooted in the local communities. And suddenly everyone was becoming kind of Tory in the 18th century sense. I think what's quite interesting is that there were some people, their voices were completely drowned out in the end, but particularly in America, there were people, for example, who are New Yorker writers and things, who are interested in soccer because it's, you know, it's seen in America as actually a bit more progressive

than supporting American football or baseball. And they liked the idea of the or baseball and and they were they liked the idea of the super league and they're kind of quite woke people and it's precisely that reason because it's they thought the idea of of the clubs being lifted from the communities and becoming national global things well i mean it's part of that universalism but also it shows they liked that but also it shows that there is a kind of little conservative within within everyone that if well isn't it said that you if there's certain things that when they get threatened suddenly oh we've got to defend this we can't have this exactly so exactly um let's have a quick question um from alex shiphorst so

he asks about generational he's he asks how much culture wars are generational now you saw that actually with the super league is a nice link to that because the Super League was supposedly set up for younger supporters who are more likely to be not so tribal and not so local. And also not to be able to cope with 90-minute games. Well, yeah. Which obviously is a cricket fan.

I was a cricket fan. I was very worried about that. Yes. Yeah, well, of course. But, of course, the man who was claiming that, Florentino Perez, is about 138, so I'm sure he knows the... He's got his finger on the pulse of youth.

Anyway, Alex Shipwell says he's thinking about the 1968 protests in France, which do have, I think, a culture war element to them, the protests against de Gaulle. And he says he's thinking about hippies, and he's thinking about arguments today about LGBTQ rights, veganism, et cetera, etism etc etc so do you think there's a generational i do how how yeah i completely do but and is and is that normal though in a culture war i think so right um so what you get i guess is the standard is you get a

a very um progressive ultra what you would say ultra christian younger generation and an older less christian um more orthodox more more conservative one is that right that's how you see the dynamic always work i think the dynamic has always been since the 12th century that that these kind of um impulses to purify the whole of Christendom, the world, this kind of mission to improve everybody. Initially, of course, absolutely couched in overtly Christian terms. In the 12th century, this leads to the setting up of universities. Universities are basically founded to train people who can provide the kind of moral and legal frameworks that can then govern now yeah and so what what then happens is that you get young people going there studying then going out

to work as priests or clerics or whatever and coming up against people again what the hell are you talking about i mean that's essentially what the albigensian crusade is the albigensian crusade is a targeting of the left behind of deplorables of people who are not up to speed oh my god with um so this is the sort of anti-racism yes sort of uh training people yes of the of the medieval period yes the albigensian crusade is a kind of very very brutal you know it's it's like the student coming back and and shouting at the father for using the wrong words um on a kind of very, very militant scale. There's a sense in which the Protestant Reformation

is the same in the French Revolution. And I think that you see exactly the same, that it's the universities, the role of the universities has always been to kind of educate and articulate progressive orthodoxies in a kind of radical new way and inevitably because it's it's in the universities that train the teachers who go out into the schools who then teach the young who then go through the the educational system who then become the teachers themselves and so

it percolates outwards and outwards and outwards and so every generation you will find i mean i you know i used to think of myself as progressive, but now that I've got children, I know I'm not really progressive. Sorry, I shouldn't laugh. I know, I know, I know. But also perhaps it's also because as you get older, you regard as normal things that you had in your youth, and therefore you don't want them to change.

So I think that's also a part of it. I don't want to incriminate you on the podcast but i think you were one of the first people i'd ever met who said to me it was just after the iraq war or thereabouts and you said um you really liked tony blair because he made britain look strong well he made he made he made he made he made britain i thought he made britain look good in a kind of bicycle-riding, aggressive... That's not what you said at the time. You used the word strong.

The first person I'd met in the sort of literary world who used the word strong approvingly of a political leader. But there's a kind of muscular quality. There was a muscular quality to it. Yeah, no, no, there was muscular Christianity. Yeah, a kind of self-assurance and a sense of purpose, which I must say I was still slightly wistful for. Well, now that I've got you cancelled, I wanted to...

You asked about which one you were going to say. I've never concealed my admiration for... No, you haven't. You haven't, to be fair. You were waxing lyrical about him in our Prime Ministerial World Cup. So you were talking about universities, and I think that's a really good point, and it brings up Paul duncan's question so paul duncan asked the question i basically want the answer to because i want to i he says how a culture war is worn i need to know because i want i will not rest until there's a statue of field marshal lord roberts in every market town in

england but um paul duncan says if you're trying to win a culture war, and it's a key question, are you better off trying to change people's minds or to have your position enforced by the power structures of your time? And before you give your answer, Tom, I was thinking about the Reformation. I mean, the Reformation in England, the English Reformation, was by and large, I would say, pretty unpopular.

I mean, you've got the Pilgrimage of Grace. You have a series of risings, prayer book risings, and all these kinds of things. was by and large i would say pretty unpopular i mean you've got the pilgrimage of grace you have a series of risings from prayer book risings and all these kinds of things and the reformation it seems to me wins because it's backed from the top or at least sort of very you know with a bit of ambiguity but it's got them the states behind it but also because england is a very young country and people forget quickly and by the time Mary tries to turn back the clock she's a culture warrior of a very different kind because she's a kind of reactionary culture warrior

I suppose you'd say or at least I'd say a lot of the people who remember Catholic England are dead and younger people have grown up knowing only Protestant England so to some extent it's just a question of outlasting your opponents and I guess

converting the young which is why I wanted to ask you about universities so do you think that is the way that you win a culture war through schools and universities or is it all kind of control of the state you know if Boris Johnson is listening and he wants to win his culture war can he win without universities I suppose is what i'm saying i think the universities matter more uh and that's kind of the grampskin idea that you affect change through culture and i would say that the most dramatic illustration of that i mean almost in the in the whole of history actually is the the um evolution of attitudes to homosexuality over certainly my lifetime um you know it a few years before i was born it was illegal now essentially it's illegal not to support it and you know my again my my

children i think would would find it kind of incomprehensible to imagine you know that living in a world where it was regarded as as as criminal um and that's obviously um i think that that's a kind of classic example of where the change of of public attitudes i think that was much more important than kind of individual politicians stepping in and oh absolutely i completely i think isn't it aren't things like that and also anti-racism um they're driven by sport they're driven by fashion and culture far more than anything any yeah but also i think but also i think uh accepting the essential justice of a cause that once once once once once something becomes kind of you know attains a critical mass then it becomes very very difficult i think to oppose it and that's kind of, you know, attains a critical mass, then it becomes very, very difficult, I think, to oppose it. And that's kind of what happens with the Reformation.

It's what happens with the Christianization of the Roman world, that something can be quite kind of new and shocking to people in the initial onset of this perspective. But once it beds down, it just becomes the kind of standard very very but it also is about you want to you know people don't want to be viewed as eccentrics do they by and large um people people also successful talented people or people who dream of being successful they don't want to go they don't want to espouse views that will lead to their cancellation, as it were. So by definition, as people come up the ladder, they're more likely to go with the new orthodoxy rather than the old. But I think it's more than that. I think it's not even, oh, I better believe this

or else I'll get burnt at the stake or thrown out of my university post or something. I think it's just people just think this is what I should think because of course I should think. Of course the Pope pope is is antichrist um of course gay marriage is absolutely to be celebrated i mean it's just what you think so here's a here's a counter example though a huge culture war which we haven't mentioned at all fought in the course of the 20th century communism's culture war on the old.

So they have control of the universities. They have control of schools. I mean, they have control in a way that today's cultural wars couldn't dream of. But it doesn't work. And that's an interesting that lots of people, they preserve somehow the old orthodoxies or the old views, the the pole the poles and their catholicism for example so why do you think that cult that particular culture when they had all that apparatus of victory didn't work because it doesn't work economically does it so you think it was driven

it was about the economics rather well we talked about that in the communism one that that that um it's it's an attempt to create heaven on earth that rubs up against the fact that it's not possible and that essentially you know a progress towards dictatorship perhaps is baked into the attempt to to impose it whereas let's end with this then go on no no no no no go on um so we talked about winning and losing does it have to be winning and losing, or can there be compromise? You see, what I see all the time is... Now, I'm now putting on my sort of popular newspaper hat. I see all the time sort of high-minded people moaning and saying, oh, they hate the confected culture war.

They hate all this. But then in the next paragraph, they then say how determined they are to win it and to crush their opponents and to strip museums of their problematic artifacts or whatever so it seems to me they patently clearly like the culture or they just want to win it can there be a compromise in some of these things do you think can societies find a way through or must it end with victory as it did with the christians for example and again in rome or indeed in the reform, mustered in with victory for one side or the other.

Well, I mean, you've argued that the roots of our contemporary culture was lying in the 18th century in the Whigs against Tories. I mean, essentially, the lineaments of that argument is still present today. And there's a sense in which the parliamentary system the party system in britain evolves to create a dialogue between those two rival points of view so i would say yes absolutely because because in a sense i think that that you can see that there are the inheritors of of the whig and tory traditions of the 18th century are still going strong today and that in a sense the you know our parliamentary system exists to ensure that if not necessarily compromise then at least kind of you know that people can live alongside each other in the same country and have these arguments i know you disagree you want you want i want a total crushing defeat of the wigs. Okay, well, culture warring.

I used to like the Whigs, but I've now just taken against them completely. Okay, so this particular battle, I think, Tom, is over. You should retreat to lick your wounds. The war, of course. You have won. The war, of course, continues. As indeed does this podcast. So we will be back, Tom, next week with the French Revolution,

another very good culture war. But before that, we'll be back tom next week with the french revolution another very good culture war but before that we'll be back but before that before that we're back oh yes with with the podcast episode on a literal war the seven years war seven years war so certainly as well not a culture war then the french revolution definitely a culture war definitely and then food with uh pen vogler very entertaining food historian the food of course is a culture war of a different kind guillotines pies seven, Seven Years' War, we've got them all. And on that note, goodbye from me, and goodbye from me.

Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com.