Outgroup Homogeneity Bias; Ingroup Nuance Delusion
Some thoughts on national stereotypes
Progressive conventional wisdom, which I tend to subscribe to, dictates that the stories told about nations and their people are untrue. They’re crass parodies to be ignored. If they’re dressed up more academically, they’re probably a figment of Hegelianism: the ‘national spirit’ which guides the peculiar character of a place. Like stereotype, this particular flavour of Hegelianism is not a done thing, to put it mildly. The best summary of the ‘national spirit’ can be found here, by the way. It’s Slavoj Zizek pointing out mysterious trends in the design of toilets. The point to pay attention to is that the design of this home furniture seems to be consistent within nations, but differs between nations.
To my mind, a ‘national characteristic’ is not necessarily something that says anything deep, meaningful, spooky or ‘spiritual’ about a nation. All a national characteristic is is something which is common to a particular geopolitical unit but which can’t be found outside of it. That’s all. I think it is entirely possible that such ‘characteristics’ are pure coincidence. In fact, maybe ‘national character’ has to be coincidental: the formative history of a nation is the collision of a bunch of events which were not in themselves inevitable. The result is a peculiar mixture. The ‘English national character’ is not distinctive because the English national character is something that has always existed, not because the national character is “a firm and solid nucleus which is completely removed from the world of arbitrariness, peculiarities, caprices, individuality and contingency” (Hegel’s words). No. The ‘English national character’ is distinctive, if it does exist, because it is the result of many contingencies, much arbitrariness, several caprices, one after the other. When you add all this up, it is impossible for any other nation on earth to have quite the same character because it is impossible for any other nation to experience exactly the same randomness in exactly the same order.
This summer, I’ve been travelling a fair amount, chiefly in Germany and Spain, which are radically different places. Both are also radically different places to the United Kingdom. An important feature of travelling abroad is the revived sense of ‘otherness’ which happens when you land on your own soil. Travel reminds us that where we come from is peculiar, not universal. It makes one reflect on the least obvious thing under our own noses: our own noses. If someone asks you to say what the German ‘national personality’ is, I doubt many people would struggle: apart from Germans. If someone asks you to say what the Spanish ‘national personality’ is, I would wager you’d be able to name at least two things: unless you were Spanish.
If you, dear reader, are from the UK, I suggest that you would not name a British ‘national personality’. You would instead make excuses, appeals to nuance. Not us. We’re too complex. Too varied. Just think about how many accents we have.
The special pleading that one’s own nation is too complex to have at least some peculiar characteristics is just that, special pleading. It’s vanity, it’s jingoism dressed up as some kind of nuance. Take the example of the multiplicity of accents: many people in the UK seem to be absolutely convinced that the possession of a gamut of different accents is somehow a marker of the complexity of British culture (note that this also admits a different kind of stereotype). They fail to realise that different ‘accents’ or indeed dialects are rather common. They’re an intra-national difference which is nearly universal. In Spain, the Castillian Spanish which is ‘proper’ Spanish uses dental fricatives ‘th’ in a few places, yet, just like in South American varieties of the language, it drops out of the Andalusian Spanish. With that, there are a lot of final ‘s’ sounds missing too. In Germany, the Bavarian dialect is so thick that it is barely mutually intelligible with Hochdeutsch at all. But Hessen has its own dialect—not a pretty one, honestly, which is just as distinctive.
Having lots of accents, or dialects even, does not make you special. It doesn’t mean, at the same time, that there isn’t some common ground that links together the political invention we call ‘nations’.
One of the most important features that has shaped modern Britain is its eyewateringly precocious industrialisation. Our railway infrastructure is Victorian. Think about that for a moment, and reflect on how peculiar that really is. Conjure the image of a railway bridge and try not to imagine it built of brick with thick buttressing. As a Brit, I can’t actually do this. More importantly, a huge proportion of our housing stock dates to the same period of turbocharged technological and colonial expansion. We live inside the built legacy of the Victorians and we move through it at speed
Try, now, to imagine a Spanish 19th century terraced house. Again, I genuinely cannot do this. I have been to a few different Spanish cities and towns in the last two years, north and south, from historical beasts like Leon and Salamanca, to faded seaside places like Sanlucar de Barrameda, to cities with a mixture of very old and pretty new like Oviedo and Granada. In none of these places do I recall seeing the type of cookie-cutter high-density housing from a hundred or more years ago which pepper every English town and city. Instead, you see cookie-cutter high density housing produced in the later 20th century, which is generally about 5 storeys tall and usually has commercial space at the ground floor.
Why is this? Because, famously, Spain industrialised very late indeed—which may be because of the easy gains of New World plunder. This means in turn that there was no demand for high density housing for factory workers. Because the factory workers didn’t exist. By contrast, even some rural parts of the United Kingdom have early 19th century terraces. Cornwall could be called an ‘industrialised countryside’ and is dotted with early terraces built for mining families.
Here’s where I’m going to propose one ‘national characteristic’ of Brits: a pathological obsession with a sense of their own decline which cuts right across society from the tabloid-fan to the statistic-enjoyer intellectualist Twitterati. Only with an inheritance as oppressively successful as the British one could make the Brits feel as inadequate as they do. The tabloid-fan will probably not feel too bad about the ethical implications of the British Empire, and maybe even feel a bit nostalgic about it. But the statistic-enjoyer types have a different type of nostalgia, about the fact that the country didn’t used to be as London-centric, or about the fact that WE USED TO MAKE STEEL, or about the fact that our massive railway network was eviscerated in the 1960s by the Beeching Report. There are too many stories of decline to list here. But they are all haunting the British psyche.
I think Britain is, perhaps, one giant nepo baby. Our parents’ name is blue on Wikipedia, and our parents have some skeletons in their closet which were accumulated in one extremely long gap year in India, among other places. The legacy of our parents have made us rich, but we only know how to count the remaining beans—and our political system is choked by treasury brain, how we spend daddy’s trust fund with ever increasing miserliness and ever decreasing intelligence.
Self-effacement is another famous feature of British ‘national character’, by the way, and I’m making myself into a vivid example of it. I think there is truth, to some degree, in ‘national character’. Yes: nuance does exist and there are hundreds of thousands of outliers in any country. And no, I don’t think every stereotype is true. One thing which I distrust is the claim that a whole group of people are all ‘really lovely’—unless you can point to some specific cultural tenets that make people behave in a lovely way. The point in the end is to observe differences between places, to note ‘national character’ and the many exceptions to them, but not to turn those observations into prejudice, not to make extrapolations from them, and not to treat people or places differently based on them.