like a womb from which society and culture come forth. A culture that is estranged from natality betokens a culture suspicious of mutual allegiance at its most visceral. A culture thus truncated is condemned always to be fractious, always ensnared in unbridgeable differences of opinion. A culture that celebrates primordial allegiance, however, can know the freedom of shared endeavour. As Christopher Lasch states, ‘the sources of social cohesion’ are to be found ‘in shared assumptions so deeply engrained in everyday life that they don’t have to be articulated: in folkways, customs, prejudices, habits of the heart’.16 This source or origin was once simply ‘there’; the tacit, unspoken assumption that each belonged to and came from a particular place, to which they would always return once hostilities had settled. It functions like that Paul Embery describes an ‘old universal moral code’, binding on all, ‘irrespective’ of ‘class or political beliefs’; a ‘deep social and cultural homogeneity’, which engenders ‘a spirit of reciprocity and belonging’.17
In this substratum of allegiance, we encounter identity unpoliticized, not intersected by ideological commitments, something more primary than the political. To make identity fundamentally political is to drag the unspoken realm of our ‘habits of the heart’ into the harsh light of day. That which sleeps within is then always awoken. People are rendered ‘woke’. To be woke is to have lost the place of inward slumber and not to know one’s way back to it. One is not ‘awake’ because the present needs to grow from the past to be truly present. Instead, the alienated past lingers on and torments the present and so the word has slipped into the past tense. Being woke means to be deprived of a past, to be living in a tortuously enduring state of having always just-this-second awoken. It is to live in those dread infinitesimal first milliseconds of the morning, before you can remember the day before or what lies in store for the day ahead. It is to be disorientated, unkempt and squinting under the merciless strip lights of a world that aborts itself in every moment. It is no coincidence that the Jacobins declared Year 1 after the French Revolution or that the agitators at the barricades in 1851 dated all their correspondence from that date for the rest of their lives. To call something ‘progressive’ is to secure a vantage for the present that rudely cuts out the past.
The Guardian songbook of Greenham Common prints the lyrics of one of the camp’s most common songs: ‘Carry Greenham Home’. Those who celebrate this music today do not notice how haunting it is, because this period of history still evinces the sense of a shared cultural home, of mutual allegiance. Then, shared concerns could be expressed differently and contentiously, while still remaining shared. This allegiance resides not in the sphere of conscious assent, of self-chosen lifestyles or desired identities. A culture truncated from its sources of social cohesion is perpetually ex utero, forever orphaned, because it is deprived of that which lies beyond any choosing or self-selection, of that ‘so deeply engrained in everyday life’ it does not ‘have to be articulated’. This is also why it is so hard to imagine a way back, because that would be a way to go from ex utero to in utero. This also explains why the phrase ‘culture war’ is ubiquitous and yet the phrase ‘culture peace’ has not yet been coined. There is a broken binary and repair is needed if we are ever to envisage a pax cultura.
The generative promise of mutual allegiance seems fuzzy and unreal to us today. It is jarring to suggest that what people think of as inhibitive of freedom actually liberates people to be themselves. It is counter-intuitive to say that dutiful attachments actually free people to live their lives fully. Looking back on this antiquated viewpoint is like being the man who was once that one-year-old on his mother’s lap when the news about the cruise missile base went out on TV. It feels fuzzy and unreal to read about yourself as a babe in arms, stumbling across this passage as an adult many years later. This describes a moment deeply engrained in my own history, yet I am not even aware of it at all. It lies somewhere beyond my conscious awareness. It is beyond my memories; beyond my earliest reminiscences of skipping through the woodland around the common on a summer’s day; beyond my remembering of the triumphant cheer I voiced when my childlike painting was shown on the national news on a December night. But all of us were once caught up in an allegiance like that my mother described in that passage. Our allegiance to peoples and places similarly sleeps somewhere within us and seems unreal to us now. But this is not a dream, this is real.
Notes
1 1. Quoted in Greenham Women Against Cruise Missiles, Centre for Constitutional Rights Legal Education Pamphlet, New York, p. 2
2 2. Barbara Harford and Sarah Hopkins (eds), Greenham Common: Women at the Wire, London: The Women’s Press Limited, 1984, p. 16
3 3. Ibid., p. 16
4 4. Lynchcomb, At Least Cruise is Clean, Niccolo Press, p. 5 n
5 5. Harford and Hopkins, Women at the Wire, p. 10
6 6. Ibid., p. 94
7 7. Dora Russell, ‘Foreword’, in Lynne Jones (ed.), Keeping the Peace, London: The Women’s Press Limited, 1984, pp. viii–xi, p. xi
8 8. Lynne Jones, ‘Introduction’, in Keeping the Peace, pp. 1–7, 4
9 9. Tamar Swade, ‘Babies Against the Bomb: A Statement’, in Keeping the Peace, pp. 64–8, pp. 64–6
10 10. Ibid., p. 67
11 11. Harford and Hopkins, Women at the Wire, p. 80
12 12. Swade, ‘Babies Against the Bomb: A Statement’, p. 67
13 13. Harford and Hopkins, Women at the Wire, pp. 74–6
14 14. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780–1950, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1963, p. 18
15 15. Wendell Berry, What Are People For?, Berkeley, California: Counterpoint, p. 45
16 16. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, New York, London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018, p. 92
17 17. Paul Embery, Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class, Cambridge: Polity, 2021, pp. 18 and 58
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