Rural Aesthetics (UK Edition)

Earlier, I wrote about how there is a large element of culture that generally goes unnoticed in and of itself, but that significantly contributes to the general spirit of the nation. I called this ‘low culture’ not as a snub, but because it is less at the forefront of the mind than say, the cultural impact of Star Wars or Pablo Picasso.

I classified architecture as ‘high culture’ – certainly the Sydney Opera House or Empire State Building are – and even in a more general sense, city designs and public buildings change from country to country and make a noticeable, publicly recognized difference. But what gets less coverage is just as important – the rural aesthetic.

As my penname suggests, I am an Anglo-Saxon, and have close ties with England. I will use England as my example here, but have seen the same pattern, though the specifics obviously differ.

For me, the English countryside has three distinguishing, man-made features: Walls, Farmhouses, and the Freedom to Roam.

Walls: Walls in the English countryside are generally drywall, and are everywhere. Not just along well-farmed estates, but in desolate moorland and up mountains in the Lake District or further north along scree-laden slopes that it seems ridiculous anyone would have ever bothered to climb, let alone while carrying and rearranging heavy stones for miles and miles. This is different from Scotland where, in my experience, they only built walls where it was sensible and purposeful to do so.

In addition, stone walls in England have jagged tops. I have been told by locals, though I have never confirmed through any written source, that this is because it prevents heavy buildup of snow. By contrast, Irish stone walls have flat tops. This makes for an interesting transition in the north of England, where walls around Liverpool and then up through Lancashire have quite a few ‘Irish’ walls, a legacy of Irish laborers who came to that area looking for work. Then as one moves westwards towards and across the Pennines, the walls become increasingly ‘English’.

Farmhouses: Old farmhouses too are generally made of stone, as are the outbuildings. It lasts in a way wood does not, especially in a wet climate, and England has had centuries of having to treat local timber as a high-value strategic resource. Up north, the farmhouses increasingly resemble fortresses, which stems from the fact that they often were, back when Anglo and Pict and Scot didn’t let something as trivial as national borders or Common Law get in the way of a good old-fashioned bloodbath.

I have spent less time hiking in the south of England than the north, but the farmland is more prosperous and also closer to the urban centers, and so while there is still a heavy use of stone, they don’t tend to double as a defense against a medium-sized army of sheep raiders. There is an interesting juxtaposition in Yorkshire – particularly around Richmond and York – which were historically very prosperous and it shows in the farm houses. These are very nice fortresses.

Freedom to Roam: Scottish law is similar but slightly different from England & Wales. In all cases though, the general gist is that if a footpath has existed, the public has a right to walk upon it. The public also has the right to ‘roam’ on public lands, where ‘roam’ means the right to walk, to sit and rest, and in a delightfully British way of speaking, the right to picnic and watercolour. If the land is held privately (such as on a farm), the farmer may reroute you but must provide a route through that is reasonable: he can direct you around the edge of a field rather than through it; he can’t send you three miles down the road.

‘Commons’ in England are much more common in the north than in the south, due to urban growth and the enclosure acts back when industrialization was starting up. The Commons today tends to be very marginal land, and when used is pretty much used for sheep grazing and grouse hunting, with little infrastructure beyond the ubiquitous stone walls and the occasional stone cabin that serves while hunting said grouse.

The net result is a web of public footpaths all interconnected to common land such that it is possible to go from Land’s End to John O’Groats on foot without more than few miles of walking on a road.

I guarantee that not once have you been in an argument about whether British people have culture, and someone brought up the freedom to roam and the right to watercolour a pointy-topped stone wall. But in sum, the result is that you can be anywhere in England and not only know that you are in England without a sign or another person, but you can know in broad terms where in England you are. 

It results in a cohesive national identity with all the regional diversity that progressives insist only comes from importing Mogadishu. It is the result of a high trust society where a stranger is still a countryman and so can be trusted onto one’s land to do nothing more but walk across and admire the view. It is lovely, and if you go to England I highly recommend taking time out of the London – Oxford – Stonehenge – Edinburgh blitz and spending as long as you can in the Cotswolds, The Wye River Valley, the Norfolk Broads, The Yorkshire Dales and Moors, the Lake District, the Pennine Way, Snowdonia, West Highland Way... take your pick. 

What Is Culture?

On the one hand, writing this article feels a little pointless, because the same people who like to shout that white people have no culture also like to shout about how they wuz kangz with flying pyramids, so laying out a dialectical argument is perhaps not going to be very effective.

However, I see plenty of whites who when screamed at about no culture don't seem to have any response. My intention here therefore isn't to provide a dialectic rebuttal to the other side's idiots, but to give our own people so framework from which to form their own rhetoric. Good luck!

I will be referring to 'white culture'. This is a phenomena that really only exists in the United States and perhaps Canada: Europeans are not culturally homogenous. Spain is not Sweden is not Hungary. But, for the purposes of this essay these cultures are close enough - especially when compared to non-European cultures - that I believe the term is acceptable.

For simplicity's sake, there are two types of 'culture' that any given society produces. The first, and most obvious, is what I call 'high culture'. This encompasses culture that is produced for consumption, and is comprised of literature, music, performance and fine art, architecture, sports, holidays, science, language, religion... you get the picture. Shakespeare is high culture. So is NASCAR.

For high culture, it is fairly easy to rebut enemy claims, which it is why it is usually only googles who make it. Most of the world plays soccer. White Culture. Baseball, American football, hockey, basketball... products of white culture. Disney films primarily based off of fairy tales: white culture based off of white culture. The Aircraft Carrier. White Culture. Sure, your Shaqwanda or Tyrone are going to deny this, and your problem glasses feminist or resident Echoberg will try and claim everything actually stems from some Aztec or Iroquois or Arab, but the fact is that the cultural output by whites in everything from throwing a ball to performing a play to landing on the moon is so blatant and overwhelming that there's no real danger of whites not being able to defend their own on this turf, unless they're determined to cuck in which case nothing I say matters anyway.

The only exception is music where whites tend to be happy to cuck even when they wouldn't otherwise, and accept black claims that all music is stolen from them to a greater or lesser degree. To which I'd ask how they can claim reasonably Jazz when they can't claim the saxophone or the piano. Or Music Theory. White musical tradition is as rich as relevant as any other part of our culture, and we should not let them get away with this, but again - it's not particularly difficult to make third parties realize that 'whites have no culture' is a bullshit claim, even for music.

But then there is what I'll term 'low culture', which isn't any less meaningful but is much more passive, less overt than its high culture counterpart, but in many ways is the most important.

Low culture is the often unspoken, unwritten rules that define how members of that culture interact. For instance, how does a culture respond to authority? Between civilian and warriors, police, bureaucrats? Juniors to Seniors? Sons to Fathers? Employees to Employers? When we talk, we understand that there is a cultural difference on this issue between say, Americans and Japanese. Even though there's no tangible culture in the same way we see a cultural difference between anime and western cartoons.

That's hardly the only one. The role of family, both nuclear and extended. How are morals and ethics valued? High versus Low Trust societies. Public versus Private space. Concept of Adulthood. Expectations of Motherhood. For every group from Anglo to Aborigine, we could research each of these topics and we would discover 1. An overwhelming general trend within a group and 2. Significant difference between groups.

Here is the challenge. If some dindu comes up and starts going on and on about no culture, it doesn't sound very convincing to rebut with well actually, we do have a culture, and it's centered around a high-trust homogenous society with a historical streak of egalitarian libertarianism that is acknowledged but kept in check by a traditionally strong church and...

Which is unfortunate, because that's the part of the culture these people immigrated to our countries for. They didn't come because we invent great sports or have funny musicals or figured out how to make airplanes; they came because culturally we have formed a very safe, very trusting society that is open to outsiders coming in and becoming not only wealthy, but actually benefitting from - again, culturally constructed - welfare programs built on a national sense of 'help your neighbor'.

It is therefore very important that other whites be made to see that this is what is going on. Once our wealth and safety are viewed as a direct consequence of a white culture, the outsider will naturally be viewed as a hostile cuckoo, not a friendly-but-unfortunate neighbor. Likewise, people might begin to realize that this safety is not guaranteed: as whites become a minority our culture will be replaced by their cultures: which generally range from persecuting outsiders, to tolerating the useful ones with the occasional purge thrown in, to full out rape-and-murder.

I urge you, the next time a 'no culture' claim is made, to not only score the rhetorical points on the obvious contributions of whites in high culture, but to point out that the very threads of the society they live in are the result of white people codifying their interactions with one another over centuries. You won't make any headway against those people in particular, but you may make an important point to bystanders - and when you're arguing with googles, it's the bystanders you're really reaching out to anyway.