When they feel anxious about the modern world, British politicians and commentators reach for the supposed certainties of history. Insecure about social change, conservatives have been doing this for more than a century. But in the past couple of years the centre left has become nostalgic too. The trouble is, the thing they are trying to find from the past—a stable set of identities and values—simply isn't there. The study of history is far more likely to dissolve a coherent sense of who "we" Britons are than to buttress a stable form of identity. For the left, that should be a good thing.
Britons today are not unique in lamenting the lack of a unifying story. American conservatives believe that a once coherent sense of national identity is being undermined by scepticism and diversity. But similar anxieties were common even at the height of Britain's imperial power. "Progressive" nationalist historians, like John Seeley in the late 19th century, wrote stories about British greatness because they feared domination by the rising powers of their own time.
British nationalism, from Seeley to Gordon Brown, always looks enviously at others who supposedly have more cohesive forms of national identity and history. But this is mainly an illusion based on the fact that large groups of people seem to act in a coherent and united fashion when looked at from a distance. Viewed close up, their actions are more disparate, their values and motivations diverse. It is far easier to see foreign countries, or one's own country in the past, as more clearly defined than one's own society in one's own times.
Of course, it can be useful to explain long-term trends by lumping people together into categories and seeing them as objects buffeted about by global forces. Abstract nouns such as capitalism, globalisation and nationalism are useful up to a point. But to understand people's values and identities, one needs to get up close. To comprehend their thoughts, one needs to treat the people of the past as familiar beings—as complex and incoherent as one's own friends and neighbours.
By contrast, the kind of close-up approach necessary to understand what people thought and did in the past breaks down the coherence of global and national narratives. It shows how human existence has been governed by a constant process of mutation and change, not the united actions of a single group of people. For that reason, serious history is incapable of providing the basis for anything approaching a stable form of national identity. Indeed, history as practised today is more likely to help dissolve stable forms of identity. It should be seen as an ally of progressive politics, because it shows how the present and future are not merely the creatures of our past.
Bookshops and television screens are saturated with stories about the past. But it is, mainly, close-up history which is popular with the public, not the attempt to celebrate bland national continuities. The BBC television series Who Do You Think You Are? is a good example of this kind of subversive history—it undermines identities that individuals and families construct for themselves. One programme revealed how the comedian Alistair McGowan's genealogy was a transnational story about the ties of commerce, blood and political domination connecting Britain, Ireland and India. McGowan's assumption of a Scottish heritage was a suppression of the real historical record.
History is surprising. Historians revel in a sense of openness about the past. They assume that it is different from the present, and that the two are connected in complex chains of causality which can't be anticipated.
When translated into a populist idiom by producers and publishers, this sense of surprise can end up creating unsophisticated history. There is a danger that popular history becomes merely a tale of the violent, weird and spectacular. But the point is that an increasingly historically aware public is used to seeing history as the scene of difference and dispute. They won't buy sanitised narratives about national sameness.
To some degree it was ever so for the British. Most countries can celebrate a single set of national events, even if their interpretation is contested. Most American, French or Indian citizens are able to recognise a moment of independence or revolution at which their modern nation was founded. But Britons have only ever argued about the list of moments to memorialise.
Britain's political culture is based on competition between different narratives. Politicians claim to articulate their own stories on behalf of the nation as a whole. But the tales they tell to win power always exclude sections of the population, whether Thatcher's "enemies within" or Blair's "forces of conservatism." Britain has never been defined by shared values or collective narratives, and has not collapsed yet.
Neither the rise of mass genealogy nor the rising sale of history books is based on the public search for rootedness and stability. Like politics, history has broken free from mid 20th-century solidarities of class and generation, and become something one picks and chooses depending on how far one is persuaded by what one hears. Many young history students are instinctively postmodern; they cope happily with the absence of a single set of values or narrative. It's the middle-aged politicians who find it difficult to cope.
Dreaming of a single set of national values or the production of a harmonious national historical narrative is reactionary utopianism—a yearning for something that never existed. In the past, when historical knowledge was confined to an elite, it was easier to dream. Now the genie is out of the bottle, complex historical narratives are absorbed by a far wider audience. More than ever, Britain's wellbeing depends on political leaders able to cope with multiple, overlapping and sometimes contradictory stories about who we are.
