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Sarah Boyes
posted 9 March 2007

The idea of conceptual space is popular with philosophers. A friend of mine once applied for funding for a summer research project there: he wasn't successful. But Baggini was. In Welcome to Everytown, he embarks on a six-month voyage into the English cosmos, exploring strange new concepts, boldly going where no funded philosopher has gone before. Yes, these are the voyages of the Starship, well, 'Baggini'. He's off to discover what people really think about politics, food, aesthetics, holidays, immigration, metaphysics, youth, gender and the good life, in short, to find out what the English folk philosophy is. Which means he's actually off to Rotherham: statistically the most average place in England.

On one level, the book is quite enjoyable. It's pellucid, it's engaging, intelligent, insightful. It's a mixed bag of observation, anecdote, analysis, speculation, description, confession. There shouldn't be a good reason not to like it. Of course, all journeys need a destination and a feeling of having got there, but with all the things going on in this book there shouldn't have been a problem. Firstly, the project is philosophically subversive: rather than sitting solitarily in armchair, pipe in one hand and pen in the other, Earl Grey snugly in nap, Baggini has gone out to watch people and interact with them. Secondly, he's doing something kind of topical in writing a book about the underlying English belief system at a time when national identity is such a major concern, though oddly he avoids politics as such. Thirdly, it's simply an interesting topic. And it is an interesting book: there are lots of mental nebulae, synaptic storms and a few fit women. The problem is that Baggini just doesn't end up anywhere particularly fascinating. If he were Captain Picard in Star Trek: the Next Generation, he'd never even get past the Q.

The first chapter starts promisingly by discussing our working class roots. We may think we're all middle class nowadays, but this is because we wrongly draw class distinctions in purely economic terms. Whilst it's true to say we generally have more money than we did in the past, consume more, have bigger houses and drive faster cars, we don't all share metropolitan middle class values. People still read the Sun or the Daily Mail, enjoy going down the pub, and are very suspicious of high culture. Values are as they were before the Second World War: families are central, we have an attachment to locality and are patriotic. What we really care about is stability, community and continuity, and once we understand this, the rest of the English folk psychology makes a lot of sense, says Baggini.

You have to wonder, though, whether these are peculiarly English traits. Baggini explains in the prologue that he's trying to describe English beliefs and values, but that if he ends up describing those of other cultures or countries, or even describing human nature itself at the same time, there's nothing wrong with that. But it's hard to see what the point is in writing a book about the English mind if everything written applies equally as well to, for example, the French. If there's nothing Baggini can find that differentiates the English mind from the French it begins to look like there isn't such a thing as an English mind to begin with. In which case, either (logically) there is nothing to journey into, or Baggini's object is something much less particular.

While Baggini's discussion of multiculturalism begins well, then, unsurprisingly it lacks proper depth:

the shared values we all need to sign up to are actually pretty minimal and civic, rather than religious- or culture-specific. As long as we all have respect for the rule of law, the democratic process and the basic rights agreed to by most liberal democracies, from the point of view of maintaining civic society it doesn't matter one jot if in our private lives we love Jesus or worship Satan.

But a big part of the multiculturalism problem comes with deciding what sort of laws should be followed, of what the correct democratic process is and what the right basic rights are. A lot of people aren't concerned just with maintaining 'civic society', whatever that is, but are committed to particular, often religious, values that they believe should apply to the whole of society, including those who don't currently share them. The problem is agreeing on what the content of society's underpinning values should be, without making them so general that they cease to have any content whatsoever. And, frankly, so what if 'people with incompatible ideals about how society should be run can often get along very well on a personal level'? There's a moral to be had from the Star Trek story in which Geordi captures a Borg, gives it a name and makes friends with it, and then a few episodes later it turns up to blow him apart. No, the moral isn't that your friends are out to kill you, but that it's neither here nor there that people with conflicting moral and cultural values can get on every now and again. What matters is when they don't.

Baggini says it's wrong to confuse the need for everybody to feel they belong to their country with some need for everybody to feel the same kind of belonging: 'whilst the former is politically essential, the latter is psychologically impossible'. We should all feel attached to our country in our own way: 'the white majority of Rotherham need to feel that the country they know and love is theirs, even if it is a country that British Asians or professional Londoners have no sense of whatsoever'. Whilst this makes a lot of sense to me, I think Baggini neglects the fact that the Rotherham and London are part of the same country, and Baggini seems to give little thought to what this means beyond mere geography. He seems to be saying that constructing a national identity, ie, a set of beliefs and values that all English people share, is impossible. But then what's he doing attempting to uncover the shared underlying beliefs and values of all English people?

The more light-hearted chapters work better. For instance:

our relationship with food reveals a kind of Protestant Puritanism and utilitarian functionality….[we have a] binge-and-purge mentality…the new food fascism, however, is simply a continuation of the old moralizing of food in a new form.

I quite like the thought of a utilitarian fish and chip shop complete with outhouse vomitarium. And it does seem that the English have a very different relationship with food than, say, the French, who would obviously only touch a dish if it consisted of five different types of red meat, four sauces made from the lymphatic juices of three extinct animals, two bottles of champagne and a fat cigar. Baggini reveals that our stereotypes do have some grounding in reality: what distinguishes the two is that the English care most about functionality (hence the sandwich) and feel chronically uncomfortable even watching formal dining.

Similarly, the chapter on gambling has a good second half: Baggini rants for about seven pages about how annoying it is that people believe in ghosts, star-signs and psychic readings. People much prefer the intuitively simple explanation (that they've seen what they think they've seen) rather than the one that takes a bit of reflection to arrive at (hovering semi-translucent people with no heads don't exist). This is reflected by the dire situation at Waterstone's: ten shelves of Mind, Body and Spirit to one shelf of Philosophy. This is the only time he says 'this is one aspect of the national philosophy which I think is plain wrong,' and one of the only times I think we're finally getting somewhere.

Baggini's discussion of sexism is sensitive: 'unless something does change, women's liberation will mean nothing more than the equal right to get pissed and succeed on men's terms'; and the bit where he goes on a binge in a Rotherham pub in the name of research is quite endearing : 'there was nothing at all to suggest young people were more decadent than when I first went to nightclubs'. But by now we're reaching the end of the book and I'm still wondering, 'are we there yet?'.

I know, I know, journeys are supposedly all about the journey and not about the destination. But the point is that they're not, not really: however good Star Trek Voyager is, it would be crap if Janeway didn't end up on Earth. And the entire series would lose its meaning, and appeal, if they didn't at least have a destination in mind. The intangibility of Everytown means Baggini's journey into the English mind ends up feeling rather pointless.

Baggini's conclusion to his point about the epistemology and metaphysics of the English mind is that, 'we are all too willing to accept the apparent evidence of our own sense and experience, and fail to take seriously the possibility that we could be fundamentally and systematically mistaken about how we perceive things'. But everybody fails to take seriously the possibility they might be fundamentally mistaken, and some philosophers would argue that it's impossible to take such a possibility seriously. This conclusion isn't particularly surprising or critically interesting, and delineates nothing distinctively English. And if there's nothing distinctively English, what the heck is this conceptual space we've been journeying through? Whatever it is, sadly, I don't think Baggini's boldy gone anywhere no man's gone before.