These were the questions that the philosopher Julian Baggini set out to answer in his book Welcome to Everytown. Identifying the most typical postcode in the country – that is, the one that most accurately reflected its demographic and economic mix – he ended up going to live in S66 in Rotherham for six months.
There he immersed himself in English popular culture, reading, watching, eating, drinking and doing only what the largest proportion of the English did. Befriended by the regulars at his local, he became a philosopher among pub philosophers.
Respectful but penetrating in his analysis, he found a ‘conservative communitarian’ culture, one that valued customs, traditions and a sense of responsibility more than abstract notions of human rights, and attached importance to community despite its claims to be individualistic.
It was broadly tolerant, happy to live and let live, empirically-minded, preferring to trust the evidence of its senses rather than theory, and ethically motivated more by a sense of fair play than by ‘the rules’.
Baggini is honest about the limitations of his project, acknowledging that it is possible to question both what he experienced and the conclusions he drew. The first step in defining any national philosophy is to recognise that there is no definitive national philosophy.
The real virtue of his exercise, however, lies less in how well it was done (although Everytown is done very well) than in the simple fact that it was done at all. These questions need to be asked.
We fall into a serious error if we believe that there is a normal, rational, objective way of living, from which certain groups (be they religious, ethnic or other) deviate. Each of us ploughs our own philosophical furrow, not only seeing life, the universe and everything in a particular way, but living accordingly (or at least trying to). As Baggini says: ‘Everyone carries around with them a set of assumptions about the fundamental nature of the world … we can no more live without a metaphysics than we can without ethics.’
We tend to realise this only when we read accounts of other people’s lives – or when we are called to give an account of our own.
Nick Spencer
Nick Spencer is director of studies for the public theology thinktank Theos.
Reproduced with permission: © The London Institute for Contemporary Christianity
