Global culture is global?

"English identity" versus globalism with Hungarian characteristics

On Wednesday morning I found myself reading Lewis’ The Abolition Of Man at 5am in an airport lounge. It felt ironic: in Nomos of the Airport I characterised airport architecture as a built environment as sacred to the replacist order as, say, Chartres Cathedral was to the Christian one. And there I was reading Lewis denouncing the technologies with which we wage war on our own nature, right in the stainless steel and sheet glass heart of a temple to that very technological order.

We don’t have to call the order itself “replacist”, as in Camus’ provocative formulation; we can simply say “global culture”. The sensibility I’m referring to is easy to recognise, though. It propagates both literally and figuratively via the nomos of the airport. It is clean; informal; portable; networked; frictionless; seamless; youthful; solvent; and interchangeable. Its lingua franca is International Business English. The first thing it does anywhere in the world is ask for the wi-fi password. Its characteristic accessories are AirPods and a discreetly expensive carry-on suitcase.

And it is nominally, itself, content-free; a kind of meta-culture. In keeping with Marshall McLuhan’s formulation, that “the old media become the content of the new media”, the relative merits and pick n’mix consumption of national cultures is the content of global culture. Cultures are no longer the water a people swims in; they may be observed, compared, traversed, and consumed, from a stance of detached curiosity that is, itself, presented as transparent and without cultural content.

This is why so many English commentators and politicos were furious with Robert Jenrick last week for suggesting that the English might have a cultural identity. The point isn’t whether or not “Englishness” is a thing: duh, of course “Englishness” is a thing. The battle is about status.