The Paxman Fallacy

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Jeremy Paxman in The English: a portrait of a people(1998) ridicules the peroration of John Major’s St George’s Day speech, 1993:

Fifty years from now, Britain will still be the country of long shadows on country grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers and – as George Orwell said – “old maids cycling to holy communion through the morning mist”.

Paxman asks, rhetorically, “Where on earth did all this stuff come from?” Paxman finds it stupid that anyone should equate the real England with the rural England of nostalgic imagination. After dismissing John Major he also has a laugh at another Prime Minister, when quoting Stanley Baldwin who said in a speech:

To me, England is the country, and the country is England…. The sounds of England, the tinkle of the hammer on the anvil of the country smithy, the corncrake on a dewy morning, the sound of the scythe against the whetstone, and the sight of a plough team coming over the brow of a hill…. the one eternal sight of England.”

Paxman declares that all this was “pure fantasy. There was absolutely nothing eternal about any of these sights or sounds” – pointing out, among other things, that the breeding habits of the corncrake have been destroyed by intensive farming.

True enough. But now we come to Paxman’s main conclusion: that somehow in the collective unconscious of Englishmen there exists another England, “not the country in which the English actually live, but the place they imagine they are living in”.

He seems to think it would be better if our ideal were closer to economic reality. If the population is mainly urban, then, he implies, the soul of the country should be regarded as mainly urban, too. The idea, presumably, is that the soul of a country should reside in, or consist of, or be associated with, what the majority of its people do or are. It is this majoritarian view, applied to the dreams and symbols of a nation, that I call the Paxman fallacy.

It ignores the great truth that souls are (in a spiritual sense) trace elements. Character is a minority thing, a tincture that stains the rest with its special colour.

If you hesitate to agree, try applying the Paxman approach to The Glory That Was Greece. What, to us, is the soul of Ancient Greece? Why do we bother to think about it? Answer: minority things! Its philosophy; its intellects; its democracy. All unique for the time, but a trace element only. Most of Greek thought was irrational. Philosophers were a tiny minority, and, moreover, a minority interest. As for democracy – the famed democracy of Athens – it didn’t last long. Only when the people crowded inside the Long Walls during the Pelopponesian War, did mass democracy really work; otherwise most of the people of Attica were looking after their farms and in no position to turn up to vote in the city. (Quite apart from the fact that women and slaves and metics had no vote anyway.) Yes, it’s dead easy to do a Paxman on Ancient Greece. Easy – but what’s the point?

The Paxman fallacy applies majority weighting to a subject for which that style of thought is inappropriate. It would be more relevant to think pyramidally, as in the diagram of a food chain, which shows the fewest and most complex organisms at the top. That is much better at preserving the notion of significance.

Another way of preserving significance comes from the theology of original sin – the idea that parts of our natures don’t fit properly together. Applying this to nations as well as to individuals, it allows us to understand that the soul may fit ill with the body. We’re not necessarily integrated – either as nations or as individuals. That being so, what we do isn’t always a good guide to what we are.

And anyhow, even on a majoritarian view, Paxman is only right about England if the focus is on “modern” England. (I put “modern” in quotes because every age is “modern” to those that are living in it.) Otherwise, if the majoritarian approach is followed to its logical conclusion, to include a majority of times, you get a very different picture. It becomes no longer credible to set such store by the recent development of Britain as an urban nation. The soul of a land with two thousand years of history must surely not stem from a mere two centuries of its life. For most of our history even town-dwellers lived within easy reach of the countryside, and took it for granted. Who’s to say that big cities will last? Who’s to say that our great population density will still be a fact in 2000 years’ time?

The more you look at them, the more “hard” facts “soften”. The enclosed fields that are so beautiful, the hedges and stone walls, are at first open to the criticism that they are not traditional Merrie England stuff because Merrie England was a time of open fields; but then I seem to remember reading that the open field system was only widespread in some counties, perhaps mainly in the Midlands, and that in other areas, enclosed fields are actually ancient…. Certain some hedgerows are very old. The Paxman style is far from conclusive even in its own terms.

However, my main point is that dreams and visions are facts. Spiritually revealing facts. Consider the criticisms levelled at the tartans and kilts of Scotland. If they were Victorian inventions, so what? Consider the creativity of Sir Walter Scott and how he almost single-handedly gave Scotland its place in the human imagination. If all this stuff resonates, if these ideas succeed in shedding their retrospective glow over Scotland’s past – so as to make the past a build-up to that – well, then they work! Linear time, chronology, aren’t everything. Romantic nineteenth-century inventions are inventions of the truth, eruptions reaching the surface of consciousness, bringing deep, long-maturing visions to the light of day. Almost too late, perhaps; but that’s the way it’s always going to happen.

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Source by Robert Gibson