Obedience is Freedom. Jacob Phillips

with your husband to see your son who’d got home safe from war’ and ‘Here was I, equally glad your son was safe.’ This motherly connection came to a head when the action began and the women unfurled their banner and turned their backs on the soldiers. There was a commotion, with jeers and insults thrown at the women, one of whom broke down in tears at seeing the horrified reaction from their new blue-eyed friend. The military mother cried out, ‘I thought you cared about my son!’ The Peace Woman replied ‘It’s because we care about your son that we’re here!’ The old common land of Greenham was at that moment active in the heart of the capital city. In that moment both sides saw they were coming from the same place, the same set of motherly concerns, they just differed on how those concerns should be realized.

      Jones reflects further on what the two women held in common. She writes: ‘We share the same values, you and I. We love freedom and happiness.’ Then she turns to where the difference lay: ‘You would tell me such things can only be maintained because your son fights to protect them’; whereas she would say, ‘The fact he has to fight destroys the things themselves.’¹³ This last observation is important. According to this account there is a profound commonality between the women, not just as mothers, but also as each bearing an allegiance to a particular cultural sensibility and set of assumptions described in terms of ‘freedom and happiness’. The difference between them centres on how best to realize and achieve the manner of life they both want. There is common ground, it is just ‘there’. The differentiation is not a broken binary, because neither side refuses to countenance the opposing position. This holds the promise that there is somewhere they can meet, that this particular battle can eventually cease.

      It is hard to imagine such an account emerging from the battles of today’s culture war. That is, from the moment, say, a man appeared from nowhere in Parliament Square during the Black Lives Matter protest of 2020 and ripped down all the racial slogans from Churchill’s statue, or when a youth was stopped from setting fire to the Union Jack on the Cenotaph later that day. Neither are there any such accounts from the annual Women Against Trump marches each January nor the ‘MAGA stand-off’ between Nathan Phillips and the protesting teenagers at March for Life. One of the most active protest groups, Extinction Rebellion, employs a rhetorical framework which means common ground is impossible to reach; there can be no accommodation to human extinction. All this shows that the culture war is fought on the other side of a broken binary, the common ground is no longer just ‘there’.

Once the common ground has gone, war and peace can no longer be distinguished. A war among cultures is the coldest of wars. Insofar as culture is defined as ‘a whole way of life’,¹⁴ to war against another culture is to enter into battle against a foe with whom there is no common ground. That is, no acceptance of a shared origin or history that can be agreed upon, no acceptance of a shared endeavour to realize and perpetuate in a common manner of living and no ultimate ends or goals to which a shared culture might lead people. A war like this, not centred on physical combat, can be enslaving in all dimensions of life. Even those not conscripted into battle are still restrained from engaging with challenging ideas because the dominant side deems them toxic. Being on the other side of broken binary means people of different views are treated with suspicion and distrust. For those who do engage with the war directly, notifications ping from social media late in the small hours of the night, invading every private space and all domesticity. There is no place to which one can retreat, nowhere to return and be recuperated. Common land, like Wendell Berry says of wilderness, belongs to ‘nobody’ and so ‘belongs to everybody’, it is ‘the natural enmity of tyranny’.¹⁵

      A shared common ground of belonging, of mutual allegiance, functions 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