Britain is a place of contradictory tendencies: both the historic home of the Industrial Revolution, and also the home of that most traditional of institutions, the monarchy and the aristocracy.
This contradiction is clear today from how the government, on the one hand, publicly encourages creativity in its many forms, but in practice its policies do everything to stifle it, by depriving channels of funding, and only encouraging channels that perpetuate (and exacerbate) inequality.
Under the Conservatives, the British government's natural bias is thus to see culture and creativity as something that should only be encouraged in "people like us" i.e. the well-off.
Part of this comes from a conservative definition of "culture" in the first place: that "culture" also means "tradition", such as the high arts. This natural bias follows from the belief that only those with the right education can truly appreciate, and therefore benefit from, "culture".
At an anecdotal level, this stratification of the arts in Britain has become apparent in fields such as contemporary music, the film industry and literature.
There was a time, not so long ago, when the music industry in Britain was filled with working-class bands (and from where the "indie" scene sprouted); go back further to the 1960s, and the egalitarian nature of the music industry - that anyone with a guitar who was good enough could "make it" - was clearly evident.
Today, apart from the dynamic and successful black music scene (successful partly because, by a happy coincidence, it is centred on London), there are few obvious routes for talented musicians of limited means to "make it". Again, this goes back to the wider conservative trend that has spread from politics into British culture. A career through creative pursuits is something only really available to those with the means: to most others, it is a pipe-dream. Whereas at one time an enlightened government might find the funds to help talented people with limited means, those days have long passed.
For those without the means, the fact that the most obvious route these days is through a TV talent show says it all - "culture", to the ordinary person, has become even more facile.
Bottom-up and Top-down conservatism
That facile perception of "culture" is perpetuated among the lower class. This is the flip-side to conservatism: bottom-up rather than top-down.
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Working-class conservatism stems from the deep adherence to orthodox thinking.
Partly this may be down to lack of education meaning that they lack the imagination to think of doing things in any other way. As a result, people who think differently are seen with suspicion and thinking ideas "beyond their station"; there are a whole host of other belittling terms that have been used by the conservative working class to describe creative or talented peers. "Get a real job", "fancy Dan", etc. etc.
People from their background who think, act, dress, or talk differently are made fun of, or at worst, stigmatized. Thus "creative" people in these circumstances are encouraged to suppress their inner tendencies out of the need for social acceptance within their peers.
The traditional mindset is that male and female roles in their strata of society are fixed, and the implication is that a "real" man would not waste his time thinking of creative pursuits. Equally, a woman from the same background ought to be thinking of her family and not her selfish day-dreaming.
In this way, creative and talented people from the lower classes of society, without government support, can find it almost impossible to reach their natural potential. Discouraged by the conservatism found among their peers, and by a government that treats them with indifference, the result is a tragic waste of human creative resources. Talent and creativity go to waste by a society that sees little value in their worth. Meanwhile, the human impact on those people directly impacted by this might be immense, resulting in a whole plethora of mental health issues.
It is this combination of both top-down and bottom-up conservatism in a society that suppresses its natural growth, leading to stagnation. It is no coincidence that the most conservative societies are also the most stagnant: societies with no dynamic "culture", other than the narrow definition that suits the accepted orthodoxy. These are societies that are frozen in time: culturally-dead to the outside world.
Britain is one of the most unequal developed societies in the world; a situation that has exacerbated in the last forty years, after previously improving.
The long-term effects of de-industrialization in Britain on the working class have resulted in a class of society that feels emasculated and forgotten, its sense of self-worth lost. In that sense, when many of these areas voted to leave the EU, this was also a forlorn cry of frustration. These are people that have lost their sense of motivation.
As said before, there was a time when Britain was more egalitarian; this was also a time when society was arguably at its most dynamic and creative.
The most obvious reason for this is that egalitarian societies provide an evident motivation to improve and be imaginative; when there is a greater chance that being creative will result in social success, naturally you will try your best to do so. There is a good reason why, to use one example, for a while in the 1960s it seemed that every group of teenagers wanted to be (or tried their hand at being) a band.
The other reason is that egalitarian societies tend to be less conservative; the belief that inequality is somehow "natural" to society is a key tenet of conservative thought. Thus egalitarian societies tend to be more open-minded because society is closer together, both economically and culturally. In an egalitarian society there is less of a social division between (for example) the working-class factory worker and the well-off artist, musician or writer. In this way, there is more engagement between the different strata in society as opposed to social "self-segregation" in more unequal societies. More engagement with other social groups leads to hearing different perspectives and naturally helps to improve someone's creativity, and thus social creativity as a whole.
It is that "self-segregation" in more unequal societies (such as contemporary Britain) that is the cause of the top-down, bottom-up "double lock" on creativity.
The most extreme manifestation might be like this. Those at the top of society see "culture" as something that is wasted on the uneducated lower class, and thus perpetuate the problem through their indifference; they don't want to educate the lower classes in something they wouldn't understand, therefore the lower classes will continue to be uneducated in "culture". Besides, there is also the barely-suppressed historic fear of the lower classes becoming too "cultured", and thus too intelligent: intelligent enough to want to change the social hierarchy completely.
Meanwhile, the lower classes see "culture" as something only connected with "bourgeois" pretensions, and anyone within their strata that affects to be interested in it is a "class traitor". In this way, people from this background who aspire to creative tendencies and an interest in culture are "forgetting their roots" i.e. their traditions and upbringing.
In this way, those at the top and bottom of society segregate themselves from effective contact from each other.
These types already exist, in one form or another, in Britain today.
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