The "Potemkin economy"
Scruton on cultural taxidermy
My daughter gave me Roger' Scruton’s On Hunting for Christmas. She chose it from among my list of “want to read” books because she liked the cover (I imagine Scruton would have been delighted that someone judged his book by its cover).
Early in the little book, he describes what has happened to the Cotswolds in his lifetime. In doing so, he is also describing what has happened to the now-bougie parts of rural America and our prettiest cities and towns: Charleston, Key West, New Orleans, etc..
Scruton calls this the “Potemkin economy”.
We are dying creatures in a dying world. Our place is among the dead, and happiness comes when we acknowledge this, and strive to recreate in imagination, and to some small extent in reality, the moral order that has been established over more than a lifetime for the sake of more than a life.
My rides through the Cotswold countryside were not undertaken in a spirit of nostalgia, however. I loved Jessica’s old house precisely because it was a real and living part of the country economy, providing small-scale employment to grooms, gardeners and handymen, cluttered with the débris of generations and distributing its largesse unevenly over a network of friends. It was a fount of hospitality in a world where people still bade each other good morning and stopped to pass the time of day. And each house in the neighbourhood had something of this peaceable and gregarious atmosphere, so that the weird professor and his dung-coloured pony were greeted from doorways and vegetable patches as though they belonged, as trees and sheep belong, with the unseen throbbing movement of the seasons.
Nearby lived Laurie Lee, author of a book that had deeply affected my father when, in later life, books began to impress him. Cider with Rosie lovingly unfolds the Cotswold landscape, with its flora and fauna and people, as an antiquarian unrolls a vellum map. But, while it was no part of its author’s intention, the book joined the ever-growing pile of ‘heritage’, making its own small but signifiant contribution to the process whereby rural life has been slowly emptied of its economic entrails and preserved as a varnished skin. This exercise in moral taxidermy may look harmless when compared with the vast and thoughtless ventures into the future which are motorways and high-rise office blocks. It became apparent to me, however, as it was not apparent to Dumbo - horses being conservative, but only in the unimaginative way which rejects all innovation - that the heritage idea is but one among many aspects of the motor industry. The force which had set the world in motion, driving highways hither and thither for no other purpose than to reach places rendered uniformly dull by the ease of reaching them, which had poisoned the towns, demolished their centres and driven the people to the suburbs, which had reorganised the entire economy around the manufacture of machines - and machines of a peculiar kind, which were not so much used as consumed - this very same force had packaged the remaining fragments of real life and sold them off as ‘heritage’, to be visited, gawped at and swallowed from the inside of a motor car.
Only if people dwell in the land, rooted there from generation to generation, does its ancestral quality become apparent. You can verify this by a simple experiment. Visit first a major country house maintained by the National Trust, with all its contents carefully catalogued and displayed in authentic surroundings. Your curiosity will be aroused, and you will be granted a vision of vanished grandeur and elevated style. But it will be a frame from a moving picture, frozen for ever in the posture of ancient but not ancestral, since incapable of breeding.
Visit now a minor country house like Jessica’s - a house still inhabited by the family, with its furniture much broken and much repaired, its undistinguished portraits and smokey sylvan scenes, its bustle of life and clamour of voices, its cluttered corridors and piled-up attic - and you will receive an impression which is in many ways the opposite. These objects, which would be of no interest whatsoever in a museum, are warm, friendly, bathed in the light of ownership, a smiling and shifting background to the reproduction of human life. The atmosphere is ancestral, not ancient, and the charm and beauty of the surroundings speak directly of renewal - renewal of a house, a landscape, and a way of life.
Taxes on wealth and inheritance are a seemingly inevitable feature of democratic politics. Hence one by one all country houses will either disintegrate or be preserved by the National Trust as mausoleums. The same could happen to the countryside, though for different reasons. It will happen as soon as people cease to remake the countryside through the process of their own reproduction. If you love the hedgerows and pastures, the patchwork of fields, the copses and coverts which lie scattered among them, and the footpaths, bridleways, and hunt jumps which allow the passage through, then it is because you see in these things the imprint of human life. Ancestral patterns of ownership and labour speak to us from our landscape - patterns which have been wiped away from the industrialised prairies of East Anglia, as they have been wiped away from the collective farms of Russia, Hungary and Bohemia. In the hedge-seamed tapestry of the English pasture, you can read the history of the land and those who have lived in it. This landscape was made for a human use, and without its use it will lose its beauty.
Many of the occupations that kept people on the land have disappeared. While created by work, the landscape is destined for leisure. And yet, if the leisure does not involve those who live and work in rural areas, the landscape will cease to be theirs and become a theme-park for suburban visitors. The cities will then become places of migration, in which people no longer dwell, since dwelling requires piety, obedience and the sense of community. Like the cities of North America, they will turn into waste-lands of violence and crime, from which people flee to the expanding suburbs, there to exist in a kind of moral and aesthetic limbo. In that world without neighbourliness, without the earth and its warm attachments - that world of metalled roads, Astro-turf and ‘Executive Homes’ from a builder’s catalogue - the New Man will live out his days in tinsel-spattered isolation, knowing the outside world only through the windscreen of his motor car, and adding with every unnecessary journey to the cloud of gas which one day will stifle us all.
Scruton wrote that brilliant but hopeless description of cultural dégringolade in 1998. It’s as if he’s lamenting the last sunset anyone will ever see. The British seem so resigned that all is lost. On my last visit to the UK, nearly everyone I spoke with seemed to have given up hope; many of them spoke of needing to be rescued.
The “Potemkin economy” will last as long as we choose (and can afford) to keep making decisions that promote and entrench it. It’s a symptom of the phase we are mired in—a phase we can persevere through and choose to leave. In truth, we’ll eventually leave it whether we choose to or not.
During my last trip to the UK, we did meet one group of uncharacteristically ebullient and confident Brits: a dozen or so farmers who had gathered together for a hunt.