Our planet’s national treasures
Some New Year observers are saying that 2020 doesn’t look too promising for Britain. We’re about to indulge a heroic island fantasy with uncertain consequences, the Union is creaking, and we may find ourselves uncomfortably prey to the whimsies of eccentric politicians elsewhere. It’s a fitting time to consider, therefore, what we’re still good at.
The notion of National Treasure is an important one for any student of culture. Its meaning in English has morphed over the years. The term, denoting some shared cultural artifact, is rooted in the 19thCentury language of romantic nationalism; where the political legitimacy of the state derives from the unity – in customs, ethnicity, myth and religion – of those it governs.
But we British, with our enduring aversion to ideology of any sort, are nowadays more apt to attribute the term to people. Where a building, relic or place is pretty much fixed, people, in contrast, can evolve and develop; they can speak for themselves; they can even die and make way for new National Treasures. National Treasures as people makes for something more mutable, with a bit of ironic distance built in, less subject to the predations, paradoxically, of the nationalist.
An informal poll we conducted last week suggests that our number 1 National Treasure is Sir David Attenborough.
What does this tell us about how we see ourselves? And about what we do best? And about, most importantly, our cultural relevance to the emerging globe of the new 20s?
He’s fantastically old, yet apparently indestructible. He took the stage at Glastonbury last year; 93 years old and unfailingly handsome. He has put sustainability on the agenda like no other. He exudes fascination with the world’s natural cornucopia – never the mad scientist, just the devoted lover of knowledge for its own beautiful sake. But perhaps above all, it’s the voice. British English cadences that sooth and mesmerize. Intonations that are posh yet never affected or superior; always just authentic. For over 60 years he’s been deploying this most precious of tools – the language – to enlighten and entertain; and above all to educate. His treasured status lies, perhaps, in his unofficial guardianship of an idiom evolved not merely to be shouted hoarsely by the market hawker or to deconstruct the world or to impose its imperious authority on its craven subjects, but to fire the imagination, to convey ideas and stories. He embodies something that is surely the magic sauce in Britain’s future.
Look out, in the coming weeks, for more CultureMorsels on (human) National Treasures from around the world.
