Piers Morgan: No constraint (©ITV)


With the Brexit negotiations looming like a coming war, foreigners will want to learn, perhaps for the last time, what drives British culture. The stereotype, still widely believed after all these years, of buttoned-up, stiff-lipped Britishness, will not help them, I’m afraid.

That exhausted cliché reflects a classical ideal of British culture. At the BBC, in the civil service, police and public sector, judiciary and much of the private sector, you are still meant to be impartial and discreet; to fulfil your duties without allowing your emotions or political opinions to sway your judgment. It would still be shocking if a Supreme Court judge were to stand up and announce how he voted at the last election, or a BBC news journalist were to campaign openly for a controversial cause.

As an opinionated writer I can never be a part of classical British culture. But I expect police officers not to take bribes and judges to keep their views on anything beyond the law to themselves. I admire British classicism in others, while being able to see why it is dying.

The dominant culture now is a modern version of romanticism — again, please forgive me for using terms broadly. Its ideal is to be yourself and express yourself. Its enemies are self-restraint and conformity. Romanticism has been building since the 1960s and has been amplified beyond measure by new media. As with the classical tradition, it is easy to see romanticism’s attractions. For who wants to bottle up their feelings and suppress their opinions? In what sense is that guarded person, hedged by rules and under constant surveillance from the policeman in the head, the “real you”?

Classic British attitudes fail now because so many think they are expert at stripping off the mask of impartiality and finding real or imagined political, racist or patriarchal thoughts lurking behind the apparently neutral exterior. The right-wing press scours BBC output with a malignant squint for the smallest hint of liberal bias. Leftists detect echoes of colonialism or misogyny in everyday language. What is less appreciated is that the stripping of modern British romanticism of its pretensions is long overdue.

Assume that we have true selves that we can somehow reach by freeing ourselves from constraints. I don’t believe it, because homo sapiens is a social species defined in large part by the constraints our interactions with others impose on us. For the sake of argument, however, let us assume our true selves exist like archaeological sites buried under mounds of earth. As tens of millions of social media users have discovered, the truth about most of us is that our lives are pretty dull. If you want attention you have to go to the extremes, regardless of whether the “real you” is an extremist. You must be extremist in your “revelations” about your private life, your views on sex and in your politics. The desire for attention in a crowd of billions explains why social media has been overrun by the crazed and the violent. (Or perhaps I should say the purportedly crazed and violent.)