‘Vultures and philistines’: British attitudes to culture and cultural diplomacy

I imagine that the fiftieth anniversary year of the British Council has sent many lecturers to the pages of their dictionaries to find out how the lexicographers define the word 'culture'. If so, and if their experiences have been anything like mine, they will have emerged both puzzled and dissatisfied. The more discursive and pretentious dictionaries adopt a tangential, circumlocutory approach as if they were obliged to explain the meaning of an obscenity to a roomful of Victorian ladies. The shorter dictionaries use terse phrases which fall a mile short of conveying what the word means, to me at any rate. In the opinion of Chambers's Twentieth century dictionary, for example, culture is a 'type of civilization'. Very discreet. But Chambers then lets the mask slip by going on gratuitously to define a related term-'Culture Vulture'. This, according to the writer, is a 'derogatory term for one who has an extravagant interest in the arts'. Why do the British, or at least a large number of English people, find it necessary to take refuge in a smokescreen of uneasy embarrassment, often discharging itself in derision, when the word 'culture' is introduced? It is not as if we were barren of the commodity in question. I suppose that the whole body of English literature must be one of the richest and most varied that the world has ever known. In music and the visual arts our achievements may fall short of those of other European countries, but they are still formidable. British domestic and ecclesiastical architecture, from the cottage and parish church to the stately home and the cathedral, is distinctive and full of beauty. We lead the world perhaps in love of flowers and gardens. The catalogue is long. But what will not do in certain circles, which were until very recently a powerful influence in the conduct of our nation's affairs, is to systematize these various manifestations, characterize them as 'British culture' and take, as Chambers would have it, an extravagant interest in them. I doubt whether this notion of excess, as in Culture Vulture, exists in regard to, say, an interest in cricket or football or sailing small boats single-handed round the world. But 'culture' is different. To demonstrate more than a modest interest in aesthetic or intellectual matters, still less to contemplate exporting 'British culture' to 'foreigners', used to be regarded in certain quarters as being as indicative of moral turpitude as being 'clever'. Indeed the two defects more often than not went together. I am certainly in no position to probe the root causes of this phenomenon. George Orwell believed that it had something to do with the privateness and individualism of English life. In his essay 'England, your England', written in 1941 and published in the famous volume Inside the whale, he notes what he describes as the English 'horror of abstract thought"and the lack of need for any philosophy