Paying attention to place

Thinking about the hills and cities of the North

In the first post, I said that political ideas are always rooted in particular physical places. I think the same is true of political movements. At the same time, though, the relationship between a politics and the place that nourishes it is difficult. The conscious parts of a politics are made by people, and people can know very little of a place.  Let me try to explain what I mean.

I can hear the wind whipping around the gable end of our cottage, as it has for the last two centuries. With the rain, it has eroded shallow depressions into the grainy sandstone, but the wall is as thick as my forearm is long. It was made to endure this weather. I know almost nothing about the people who built my tough little home. I don’t know much about those who have lived here either, who daily lit the fire that I sit by. Through a deep window, I can see hills, fields, wood. Most of the grass has the stark greenness of chemical improvement, but these fields were centuries old when my grandparent’s ships came to Britain. The horizon hills have not changed their line since the glaciers retreated.

I am very small, too small to hold even the few miles of land that I can see from this hilltop in my mind. If I were to spend the rest of my days watching it, I would see no more than one breath of its long life. And it is hard to keep my attention on it. Instead, I get drawn into the bustle and chatter of the world: work takes me away, screens drag me into abstraction. I do not even know the moment that I live through very well.

If it is difficult to know these few miles, then it is even harder to know something like “Yorkshire” or “the North”. But places on the bigger scale do have a character that we can recognise. It would not be right to say that we do not know them at all. Although we only know a tiny fragment of everything that they are, we do know a fragment.

This means that any politics that cares about truth must avoid two big lies. One lie is that we don’t really know place at all, or that any such knowledge doesn’t matter. It leads to doomed initiatives from top-down bureaucracies, fashionable schemes by clever people far away, and the monster that James C Scott calls “high modernism”. The other lie is that we can adequately know a place, or that some particular people speak for it. It leads to constantly defending the partial vision of the place from its full reality, fixating on an imagined past, and simple bigotry.

At heart, both of these lies are the same. They let us hide in abstraction, inside our heads. The lie that place doesn’t matter lets us hide in universal theories that give neat answers to all our questions. The lie that we can adequately know a place lets us hide in meaningful stories that soothe our fears. Neither is good enough, but being good enough is difficult because we must learn to pay attention.

Paying attention is hard. The mind has a thousand tricks to help you to avoid it. Attention needs you to open up, sit still, and shut up. It is, in some ways, the opposite of action. Simone Weil, its greatest philosopher, illustrates the difficulty this way:

‘Most often attention is confused with a kind of muscular effort. If one says to one's pupils: "Now you must pay attention," one sees them contracting their brows, holding their breath, stiffening their muscles. If after two minutes they are asked what they have been paying attention to, they cannot reply. They have been concentrating on nothing. They have not been paying attention. They have been contracting their muscles.’

Political thinkers, always enamoured by action, tend to be like schoolchildren.

One way to learn to pay attention to a place is to look twice when you spot something that doesn’t fit the picture of it in your mind. For example, my mental image of the North is always of the hills. If you were to ask me to draw a northern scene, whether urban or country, then it would have lots of slopes. This is a partial picture, a lie. There are a lot of hilly places in the North, but plenty of flat places too.

If you pay attention to the relationships the cities of the North have to the hills, then you see something more interesting than the stereotype in my soul. Leeds does fit the idea of hill country. It is situated where the Pennines soften into the Vale of York, but most streets slope, and it grew to a city by trading hilltop wool. Manchester is different. The city is flat, sprawling densely enough to obliterate landscape, but the Pennines brood darkly on the horizon. It is not part of the hills, but it is close enough to talk to them, and this has been creative. York, though, is different again. Although distantly ringed by hills, it does not belong to them, like Leeds, or exist in tension with them, like Manchester. York is at the meeting of two rivers, the Foss and Ouse, and it this that shaped its history and still shapes its geography. Even more so, Hull shows that the way my heart associates hills and the North is a lie. Pancake flat, it is shaped only by its river, the estuary, and the beckoning North Sea.

Even this paragraph’s worth of attention can bring new things into focus: the rivers of York, the North Sea and Hull; and, more broadly, the way that the wilds still shape our cities. The defining feature of politics in our time has been how little of the world that it has managed to include. To remedy this, a politics of place must begin by nourishing attention.