If you are English,
you've probably had the experience of being a conversation with a
European – say a French or German person – and beginning to feel
uncomfortable that it was going on just a bit too long. The 'are we
still talking about this?' feeling. If you are the European, you may
have had the opposite experience in a conversation with an English
person; you are just get warmed up when they change the subject.
Probably by making a little joke.
I've been the English
person, and for twenty years I've been aware that English people need
to change the subject of conversation more quickly than Europeans.
I've also noticed that even among themselves English people seem to
need to change the subject of a conversation quite often. Talking
about the same thing for any length of time is considered 'getting
heavy'. Perhaps I'm not quite as English as I ought to be, because I
also have a bit of a tendency to grind away at a theme after others
would like to switch – or just because I've noticed this. Most of
the Europeans with whom I've discussed this understand what I'm
talking about straight away, though they hadn't been consciously
aware of it.
Why should this be?
Here is a hypothesis. English people don't like talking about
anything for long because it might lead to a disagreement, which
might in turn lead to an argument. An argument would involve some
sort of emotional engagement, which would be uncomfortable and
unseemly. The avoidance of confrontation of any kind seems to be
pretty fundamental to English conversation patterns. Of course there
are rows, and disagreements, and there is verbal aggression – quite
a lot of it. But much of the time English conversational sparring
takes the form of banter – jokey teasing – rather than argument
of any kind.
I suspect that this
might be related to the Restoration Settlement after the Civil Wars
of the seventeenth century. I know this seems a bit of a long shot,
but hear me out.
In the Civil Wars the
English got very serious about religion. They had massive arguments
about doctrine and ritual. For a while they tortured, massacred and
executed each other for believing, or affirming, or preaching the
wrong thing. They smashed up churches and destroyed images in a way
that was deliberately and self-consciously sacrilegious. By the end
of the seventeenth century they were traumatised and exhausted, and
the settlement that they reached was that a wide variety of doctrinal
positions and liturgical practices could co-exist within the same
established church.
I think that this was
quite unique in Europe. In other countries the church ended up
following the 'cuius regio' principle, and those who didn't like it
could adapt or leave. But the churches themselves were much more
doctrinally homogeneous. I don't want to hold England up as some
utopia of religious tolerance; the Netherlands were much more
tolerant, and the English still excluded both Catholics and
Dissenters from acceptability. Nevertheless, the English church
included both people who thought of themselves as Protestants and
people who didn't – and it still does. I don't think this happened in any reformed churches in Europe.
I think the price that
the English paid for this was an agreement not to discuss matters of
religion, or rather to transmute them into matters of personal taste,
about which there can be no right and wrong. This conversational
convention has gradually spread to other areas of public discourse
(try disagreeing with something that someone says about the weather,
or try getting someone to disagree with you by saying something that's
obviously not true). This might also explain why the English
intellectual tradition is so resolutely anti-theoretical, in matters
of philosophy and politics and even science. As Marx observed, "If the Englishman transforms men into hats, the German transforms hats into ideas."
Remember
this next time the French guy you are talking with seems to be
worrying a subject to death like a dog with a bone. It's not him
that's got a problem, it's you.
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