Why has Remembrance become weird?

Remembrancetide has become a bit weird. I don’t think there is any getting away from it. I previously outlined some examples in this blogpost. This year we have had a restored Dakota dropping hundreds of thousands of poppies over the White Cliffs of Dover. We’ve had a sporting mascot dressed as a giant poppy. We’ve had the usual unedifying squabbles about who did what incorrectly at the Cenotaph. Poppy branding is everywhere.

It’s hard to put your finger on the best way to describe the weirdness. It’s not quite sentimentality, though sentimentality is part of it. Nor is it hyper-patriotism or militarism. I’d maybe describe it as a kind of desperate reverence; an artificial and overwrought deference to any ritual, person or item linked to Remembrance. It seems to be more and more common, for example, to describe all military personnel as “heroes”, wherever they served, for how long and in what capacity. That seems to me to devalue the very concept of heroism. Now, don’t get me wrong: to have worn the Queen’s (or King’s) uniform in any capacity is enormously admirable, and as someone who has never done so I would not like to cast doubt on the martial virtues of those who have. By comparison with my cushy and cosy existence, line infantrymen are extremely heroic. But equally “hero” means, or should mean, something quite exceptional, above and beyond the normal fortitude expected of those who see active service.

A further layer of oddness stems from the fact that this frenzied Poppyism is entirely unconnected to any popular or political support for increased defence spending, or better provision for ex-service personnel, or even to a grown-up discussion of what Britain’s place in the world should and can be.   

So why has the weirdness arisen? I would like to suggest a partial explanation, and it is this: Remembrance is a form of safety blanket in a much-changed world, so we cling to it very tightly – perhaps too tightly. Just as we might grow unhealthily attached to the possessions we rescued from a house fire that destroyed everything else we had, we are unhealthily attached to Remembrance.

The rituals and traditions that surround Remembrance are some of the last remaining links to Old Britain. For a few days in the year, you can dwell on Britain as it was. You can think about the long Edwardian summer and the heyday of Empire and dashing young men in Spitfires. Watching the royals stand on the balcony of the Foreign Office while military bands play Nimrod and O God Our Help In Ages Past, you don’t have to think about motorways and no-platforming and graffiti and the tawdry modernity of glass, steel and concrete. Remembrance Sunday ceremonies have been largely untouched by the long march through the institutions by the Sixties liberals. Even the Blair government, a powerful movement of the revolutionary left, didn’t dare touch Remembrance.

Such links are fast disappearing. Her Majesty the Queen will turn 94 next year. Anyone who actually fought in the Second World War is well into their nineties. Simply to remember the war in even the most rudimentary way, as something of which you were vaguely aware as a young child, you have to be eighty-odd.    

There is a tangible sense in modern Britain of something old and grand slipping away, and being replaced by something shinier, louder, and more comfortable, but also shallow and brittle. It was Kierkegaard who suggested that the most effective revolutions were those which achieved sweeping substantial changes but left the old forms standing. I think people are rightly beginning to understand that this is what has taken place in Britain, so they cling to the old forms wherever they can find them, even though they are very often mere Potemkin villages. Peter Hitchens coined a memorable metaphor for the situation in which modern Britons find themselves: as children, playing in the ruins of a civilisation that they not only do not understand, but cannot understand.

This is a motif in the experience of the hobbits in the early sections of Lord Of The Rings. The world through which they travel is full of the debris of a collapsed civilisation – Arnor, the Northern Kingdom of Middle Earth. It still to some degree shapes their experience and the political arrangements – such as they are – under which they live, but they just have no way of understanding it, except through a repertoire of legends and myths and fireside stories.  

Perhaps the single saddest scene in Nineteen Eighty-Four is when Winston goes to a prole pub to find someone who can tell him what the past was really like, before the revolution that brought the Party to power. He knows that the Party’s propaganda is largely nonsense, and hopes that the proles, whom the Party make less effort to control, have not had their memories clouded and distorted. But the old man with whom he strikes up a conversation can remember nothing of any value. The few scraps of authentic memory he does retain are fragmentary and have been overlaid by propaganda. It is a moment of real bleakness, both for Winston and the reader. The real, complex past has been obliterated. All that remains is a caricature, a simplistic morality tale to bolster the ruling powers.

I think these are useful touchpoints in our thinking about the current cultural moment. Our national civilisation has not totally collapsed after the manner of Arnor, nor have we been taken over by a totalitarian regime seeking to destroy history. But we do live in the aftermath of a civilizational disaster – the World Wars – whose consequences are still working themselves out, and of a cultural revolution. The result of this cultural revolution has been not only to overthrow much that was valuable, unique and formative in British culture, but also to make their retrieval extremely difficult. We have moved to the nihilistic phase of the "culture of repudiation", where the repudiators have won but continue to bomb the rubble of conservative Old Britain because they do not know how to do anything else. A large portion of the British population have suffered what has been called "existential defeat" - that is say, they are not formally or legally disadvantaged, but their values, aspirations and attachments are publicly held in contempt by officialdom and cultural elites. The new masters take frequent opportunities to rub their faces in their loss, like the Bolsheviks dynamiting churches in Russia after the revolution. The most recent striking example of this was the unfurling of a rainbow flag during the climax of the Last Night Of The Proms. 

As an aside, I am never quite sure whether those who rewrite the past for popular culture in the service of progressivism are cynical (that is, being deliberately dishonest) or ignorant. I was amazed a few months ago to read a feminist academic describing a crude and sexualized billboard as "like something out of the fifties", when anyone with the slightest knowledge of what that decade was actually like would know that - whatever the faults of the time - sexually crude and suggestive advertising would simply not have been allowed. Similarly, when it comes to high profile TV shows set in the past like Peaky Blinders, World On Fire and The ABC Murders, which feature people behaving and speaking and thinking in ways that are ludicrously inconceivable, one wonders whether we are dealing with outright propagandists or just people who have been thoroughly indoctrinated with the progressive view of the past.      

At any rate, that is by the by. The revolution has happened. People sense this, even if they cannot articulate it, and they mourn. Is it too fanciful to think that the current overdone approach to Remembrance has its origin in a widespread half-understood sense that we are in the midst of a terrible great forgetting?