Karen Hewitt - Understanding Britain Today

So the rest of this chapter will be about the English, those four-fifths of our total population. The English distrust generalizations. They like details and examples. In this book I have given you far more details and examples than you would ever find in a similar book written by Russians (That is not quite true. Russian guides overwhelm their listeners with the heights of monuments, the lengths of railways, the weight of huge precious stones.) I mean the kind of details which provide evidence and explanation. However, the problem with details and examples is that they can be anecdotal and untypical, so we have to be careful in choosing them, just as you have to be careful in your generalizations. I have tried to be careful.

One way of distinguishing cultural values is to compare the 'communal' response and the 'individual' response. It is sometimes suggested that Russians think in 'communal' ways and Americans in 'individual' ways. Using this line of thought, I suggest that the English seem to like defining themselves as members of small groups which they have, as individuals, helped to create. I have illustrated this trait at several points in this book. You can also see it in our attitude to names.

Russians are often surprised by the British pleasure in giving names to people, to places and even objects. We find this pleasure so normal that we are surprised when we encounter your culture and discover that, by contrast, names are either lacking or strangely anonymous in Russia. While the differences are not just between Britain and Russia, most other countries probably come somewhere between yours and ours. Your naming system recognises gender differences, patronymics, diminutives which get longer and longer. But you have few names to play around with. In your classic novels the peasants have colourful and ingenious names, but the major characters from noble or merchant homes share a handful names among them. It is not just Chekhov who has to make do with his Olga and Masha and Irina and Natasha. If I ask Russians today to name more than twenty current girls' names or boys' names, they struggle.

By contrast, every year one of our national newspapers publishes a list of the fifty most popular boys' names and fifty most popular girls' names. We can assume that another five hundred different names for each sex are in use that year, and that many more have been used in previous years. So where does all this dazzling variety come from? From traditional saints' names; names from the Bible; Irish, Scottish and Welsh Gaelic names; names from legends, mythology and history; names from flowers and plants and animals; names of virtues; names from novels and stories; names from film stars and other celebrities; nicknames which have become 'standard'; names of political and sporting heroes; surnames turned into first names; names which are traditional in recent immigrant groups, some of which are becoming popular in the wider community. Names that parents simply invent for their children because they like the sound or the vague associations. The joke that the main street in every Russian town must be Lenin Street derives from a society dedicated to many kinds of social conformity. Ostensibly Lenin Street can be compared with the standard name for the main street in an English town: High Street. But 'High Street' is deliberately anonymous as it is the centre for everyone. More interesting are all the other streets, roads, avenues, lanes, parades, drives, passages, ways, alleys, closes, and other routes which make up our towns. Typically, Russian towns are built on grid patterns, so that roads keep the same name as they cross from one side of the town to the other; by contrast, English roads wind and twist, connect and disconnect, stop abruptly, change names when they meet another road, or exist as little appendages to other roads. Each of these short stretches of roadway glories in its own name. Some names refer to important features: 'Church Lane' or former uses: 'Hayfield Road' or to orientation: 'West Hill View'; some to famous people: 'Churchill Way' or well-known local men and women such as 'Jack Smith Drive' or 'Camilla Close'; many try to suggest an atmosphere, usually a rural atmosphere in an urban setting: 'Thornfield Road' or Almond Tree Crescent' or perhaps Rabbit Alley.

In villages, individual houses are given names - how else could the postman know where to deliver the letters? Rose Cottage, Sea View, Sunny Heights announce proudly, This is what is special about our home.

We give our schools and hospitals names too. School No.37, for example, sounds heartlessly official to British ears. We wonder how a number can inspire pride. We do not say 'School Number 15 named after Pushkin' which is a Russian habit in which Pushkin gets forgotten. We say Wordsworth School or St Peter's School or Ashwood School. Big office buildings or blocks of flats have names - Nelson House or Daffodil Buildings. Our instinct is to make our place of work homely, comfortable and at the same time distinctive. Our home, we are saying, is not the same as your home - even if they are actually rather similar.

To return to English values. We are sometimes described as a nation of amateurs - and this description is intended as a criticism. It means that we do not take professional commitment seriously enough, and where other nations are proud of their qualifications and diplomas, we enjoy ourselves by simply doing things without attention to the level at which they should be done. That may have some truth. But the English have no objection to being amateurs; consider our enthusiasm for creating and enjoying small groups. [See Part 6, Chapters 2 and 3.] I do not want to suggest that the members of such groups always work in harmony; they don't! Frequently they dispute, quarrel, resign, re-make their friendships, and learn to compromise. They are human. What they do not accept is the notion that one person must be the leader to tell them what their attitude must be. People do not feel pressure to respond alike, as Russians claim they do. 'We Russians feel/think/believe such-and-such!' The English simply would not say that. They decide for themselves how to compromise and work alongside each other - or to leave if such arrangements are not satisfactory. If someone says, 'Comrades, we are all agreed...' the reaction of everyone in the room will be to say, 7 don't agree!' So, since widespread revolt is not what we want, people, even leaders, do not say, 'We all agree'. They are careful to do nothing so silly.

This leads me to another point. The English (and the Scots) are culturally pragmatic. To understand this discussion you have to realise that 'pragmatic' has different meanings in English and Russian. For you, a pragmatic person is someone who makes choices on the basis of money or other gain; someone who is not very principled. For us 'being pragmatic' means recognising the real complications of a situation, and working out the best way of dealing with them. Throughout this book I have given you hundreds of 'examples' of the way we think pragmatically. We know that what is good for someone is often bad for someone else; that policy-making emerges from struggles of different interests; that solving problems is best done not using theories but taking account of evidence of what actually works. And in life, what works in one case will often not work in another. For this reason we are suspicious of overarching theories, whether they be theories of revolution, theories of cultural definition, theories of the responses of the human psyche or theories of translation. We want to see evidence, examples, analogies. 'How do you know?' seems to us a very sensible question. It is typical of this culture that our great scientist is Darwin who constructed his theory of evolution out of thousands of little pieces of evidence that we can all examine. In a curious way, Darwin's colossal explanation of the origins of species was an amateur activity to which many amateurs have happily contributed - and continue to contribute.