WE ARE ALL STRANGERS NOW


The idea of a Middle England is an attempt to hold on to an identity that is slipping away. It creates – does not recreate, because it never existed – a homogenous community in the mind, ‘people like us’, in a society full of people who are evidently not like us at all.

An alternative identity, to make better sense of the reality, might be that of local stranger – not global citizen, that is romantic nonsense mostly except for some mega entrepreneurs – but strangers living locally and integrating as best we can or as little as we like in a society that is full of indigestible difference.

Of course a lot of people are more obviously strangers, new immigrants, political or economic exiles from societies that nurtured them, more or less. Many people have benefited, experienced dramatic transformation from the experience of exile – writers and artists make their restless identity the focus of their creativity and so do other professionals and business people. It can have genetic advantages: among my first cousins I just look at how big Australians are compared with their European forebears.

But now the category that we call indigenous is shrinking faster than the polar icecaps. Those that might think of themselves as indigenous are having to reinvent themselves as strangers in their own society, competing in their sectarian interests with other minorities.

This is in no way an easy process – it suits some post-modern people, who make themselves over, such as celebrities, but also ordinary people are looking for makeovers, dieting, taking drugs, going on Facebook, chasing after status jimjams …. whatever. Most of us can indulge some of that, but no-one – with very few exceptions – is totally post-modern in their thinking and experience.

We have to learn to be strangers in our home environment. This can be satirised in the grumpy old men and women movement, as recorded in television programmes – but young people can be just as grumpy, in this sense.

A working definition of ‘grumpy’: reacting to what makes us feel alien in a familiar environment.

In the extreme, this leads to fundamentalism, The BNP, Islamists, who can tolerate difference, these are social reclusivists, and to a lesser degree so are those who live in gated communities, or those who cluster together, students, Polish workers, whoever.

‘Middle England’ is one example of a wider phenomenon of defending one’s identity in an environment that we would like to be familiar, but it’s not. And in reality there is not one Middle England but thousands, niche markets for identity, and Middle England is best understood as an umbrella term for this phenomenon.

The dynamics that we have to think about is that between the social reclusivist and the citizen – the psychological tension in every individual as to whether they want to live in a closed or an open society – and the day by day, minute by minute decisions that we make to do one or the other.