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Previously from Richard on Society and Culture:

Growing up—a period which, for a male, apparently lasts well into his fifties—I was nurtured on a diet of timeless English literature: Swallows and Amazons, The Famous Five, Winnie-the-Pooh, Alice in Wonderland, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The stories were exciting, the writing beautiful, the characters often exemplary. Only much later do you realise that, all the while, you were being formed and moulded by a culture that had an interest in you emulating these figures and their thoughts and deeds.

This was moral instruction without the heavy-handedness, the Tammy Faye & Jim deviancy, or the shuffling feet beneath public lavatory cubicles which is often associated with self-righteous moral instruction. Nobody interrupted Swallows and Amazons to explain the virtues of courage, resourcefulness, loyalty or self-reliance. They simply made those qualities attractive. The characters we admired provided models of desirable behaviour. Society benefited if we all went off and behaved like them.

Ransome’s children are remarkably autonomous. They organize themselves, make plans, accept responsibilities, solve practical problems, take risks, quarrel, reconcile, cooperate and experience consequences. Adults exist, but the children’s world isn’t continuously administered by them.

Blyton similarly presents children forming their own miniature society: friendship, loyalty, courage, ingenuity, independence, suspicion of illegitimate authority, keeping one’s word, protecting one’s friends. Nobody had to tell the young reader that these qualities were admirable. The narrative made them admirable.

Every culture produces characters; every generation chooses which of them to imitate; and somewhere between imitation and habit, we become ourselves.

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Aristotle insisted that character isn’t simply something at which we arrive fully clothed. Character is formed through habituation. We become just by doing just things, courageous by practising courage, temperate through temperate action. Virtues become dispositions through practice. In the Poetics, mimesis—imitation or representation—is fundamental both to human beings and to learning. We learn, in part, by observing and representing human action.

The West became very good at creating characters who might be useful to the survival of its civilisation.

Cervantes gave us Don Quixote, a man who reads stories and then constructs a personality from them. Alonso Quijano consumes stories of chivalry until their values, vocabulary, gestures, expectations and heroes provide him with a model of the person he wishes to become. He doesn’t merely enjoy literature. He performs it.

Hannah More grasped this more than two centuries ago. Her Shepherd of Salisbury Plain didn’t merely tell working people to practise thrift, industry, piety and familial responsibility. She embodied those virtues in a family and made their way of life admirable. The Shepherd’s material poverty is contrasted with a kind of moral abundance: order, affection, gratitude, self-command and usefulness. She was deliberately creating a model of desirable behaviour.

Of course there is an important caveat. More’s project wasn’t politically innocent. The Cheap Repository Tracts appeared amid the social and political anxieties of the 1790s, and More explicitly wanted popular reading that would counter radical and revolutionary literature. Character formation and social order were thus intertwined.

Schiller arrived at a related position in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. Political freedom could not simply be imposed institutionally; human beings themselves had to become capable of freedom, and aesthetic cultivation had a role in forming such people.

Such writers and many more understood that if you wished to preserve a particular kind of society, it was not enough to defend its institutions. You had to reproduce the kind of character upon which those institutions depended.

With so many great teachers, perhaps the modern Self, convinced of its own uniqueness, is actually one of Western civilisation’s greatest composite works: assembled from thousands of years of other human beings imagining, examining and performing different ways of being human.

There is a delicious paradox here. The modern Self is encouraged to believe that it is sovereign, authentic and unprecedented—my identity, my truth (or at least Meghan or Oprah’s) my journey. Yet it is also indisputiable that this supposedly autonomous modern Self is actually thrown into an inherited world—language, stories, moral categories, archetypes, manners, conceptions of courage, beauty, success, love, masculinity, femininity, virtue and rebellion. We project ourselves forward by selecting among inherited possibilities: this is the person I want to become. In the present we imitate, practise, discard and modify them. The great conceit of the modern Self is that it confuses selection for creation: because I have chosen the pieces, I imagine that I made them.

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This is why culture and history matter and this why the Progressives find tradition so dangerous to their ambitions.

Anyway, the question, therefore, isn’t whether human beings are formed. They obviously are. The question instead is whether they are formed by a culture rich enough to inspire, self-govern and appreciate our timeless achievements, or by institutions with a collectivist vision, powerful enough to construct them in advance.

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Continuing our series on social cohesion, thinker Richard Neat takes off his Michelin-starred chef’s hat and writes one of the most persuasive cases for conservatism I’ve ever read. It isn’t a simplistic, sloganistic article full of clichés such as “We need a smaller state!” or “Get the government out of our lives!” Nor is it a Thatcher-Reagan tribute act worshiping the “power of the free market”. It’s something far more subtle and far more special. It’s about liberty, and the institutions we need to practise the lost arts of responsibility, judgment and decision. In a work of great nuance, Richard examines the conditions for continued community in a world assailed by two completing ills, uber-consumerism and all-encompassing bureaucratisation, that, each in their own way, remove the individual from the realm of self-thought.

It’s a wide ranging, intellectual exercise which takes in education, philosophy, and the effect of post-war politics first on the the community and then on the individual who is left to navigate a soulless, atomised world where the only institutions left are federalised civil servants. I have a feeling that this piece will be some importance for years to come. - Daniel Clarke-Serret (Editor, Guerre and Shalom)

An interview with Richard Neat:

Final chapter of Richard Neat’s “Observations from the Kitchen” serialised on Guerre and Shalom:

“What sort of human being does a free society require - and are our institutions still capable of producing him?” by Richard Neat

Let us begin with one of modern conservatism’s favourite targets, one as easy as hunting dairy cattle with rifles equipped with telescopic sights: the teachers’ unions. The quarry is so deliciously deserving. We spend fortunes upon education, create ministries and departments, multiply qualifications, professional standards and administrative posts, and then discover that an alarming number of adults appear less capable of governing themselves than previous generations who enjoyed far less formal instruction. The customary political argument then begins: one side demands more money, the other demands more accountability, while both quietly accept that education is chiefly a system for producing employable workers and measurable outcomes.

But that is already to surrender the central question. The older purpose of education was not merely to prepare a person for employment. It was to form the kind of human being capable of living freely and well. The Greek ideal of paideia meant the cultivation of the whole person: reason, judgment, courage, moderation, civic virtue and the capacity to participate in the life of the polis. Education prepared a citizen not simply to earn a living, but to govern himself and, with others, to share in governing the community.

Humboldtian Bildung carried this idea into the modern liberal world. Bildung is self-formation: the development of individuality and character through the active encounter between a human being and a varied world. Wilhelm von Humboldt understood that this development required freedom. A person whose choices are continually directed toward officially approved ends may become orderly and useful, but the faculties of judgment, initiative and responsibility remain stunted. Human capacities develop through exercise. We learn judgment by judging, responsibility by bearing responsibility, self-restraint by restraining ourselves, and freedom by exercising freedom.

John Stuart Mill inherited precisely this concern. Individuality, for Mill, was not a decorative luxury added to a liberal society after the serious work had been completed. It was one of the principal conditions of human development. A person does not acquire character by having every important decision made for him. Even error has educational value. The possibility of choosing wrongly is part of being free; remove that possibility and we have not perfected liberty but abolished it.

The intellectual genealogy is therefore clear: Greek paideia, Humboldtian Bildung and Millian individuality all assume that a free society depends upon persons whose faculties have been formed through use. This gives us the governing question: What sort of human being does a free society require - and are our institutions still capable of producing him?

We tend to speak of liberty as though it were principally a constitutional arrangement: limits upon state power, protected rights, elections, independent courts and freedom of expression. All are indispensable. Yet they are not sufficient. Liberty is also an achievement of character. A constitutional order can guarantee a sphere of freedom; it cannot guarantee that citizens possess the judgment, courage and self-command required to inhabit it.

A free society therefore depends upon internalised social regulation. Most decent conduct does not begin with the fear of prosecution. I do not refrain from cheating my neighbour because I have calculated the probability of conviction. I refrain because one simply does not behave that way. The rule resides within the person rather than above him. Where conscience fails, a second layer appears: reputation, embarrassment, loss of respect, exclusion, disappointing one’s family, being thought dishonourable. Only after conscience and social opprobrium fail need coercive law become the backstop.

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«....cuisine of bewildering technicality, some say avant-gardiste, where the Tian of Crab and Skate with Veloute of Cucumber is in itself an enigma, such an object of fascination that we hesitate to undo it. No irony here, just a vague sense of powerlessness in the face of a desire for perfectionism». Gault Millau Magazine.

Today “Guerre and Shalom” is honoured to welcome culinary superstar Richard Neat as a guest contributor. Richard was the youngest recipient of 2 Michelin stars for his establishment Pied à Terre in London’s Charlotte Street. His second recognition by Michelin in 1999 was for his restaurant in Cannes where he became the first Englishman to receive the honour in France. Richard honed his talents under the mentorship of Raymond Blanc at Manoir Quatre Saisons in Oxfordshire, Joel Robouchon at Jamin in Paris and Marco Pierre White at Harveys in London. His full and fascinating biography can be found at www.richardneat.blogpsot.com. He is opening a new restaurant at the award-winning “Retreat” in Atenas, Costa Rica in February 2025.

In Richard’s own words, his years in London were followed by “a nomadic life”. Having lived five years in Cannes, he went on to spend two years in India, two years in Moscow, two years in Marrakech, Morocco and the last eighteen years in Costa Rica where he currently lives with his English interior designer/antiques dealer girlfriend. At the time of writing, he can be found in Bali, Indonesia.

Outside of food, Richard has many interests from photography to philosophy to art to politics to chess which he plays at just below Masters level. Richard describes himself as a “18th century Burkean conservative and fanatically pro-Israel. In every conflict they’ve been forced to fight it has been morally unambiguous, good versus bad, civilization versus barbarity”.

Importantly for us, Richard is also passionate about writing, which includes 2 books, one of which is entitled “Observations in the Kitchen: A Backward Look.” In his fantastic debut article for “Guerre and Shalom”, Richard writes about the profound effect of travel on his philosophy and world perspective. Enjoy.

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“Travel as an Education” by Richard Neat (the Nomadic Chef)

[Image: A photograph taken by Richard Neat in Ahmedabad]

A brief summary of the epic travels of Voltaire’s Candide might be how he profited by acquiring an education of sorts, at least an experiential one, along with a certain development and growth as a human being. He also eventually suffered disillusionment. It all sounds rather familiar. My own wanderlust is probably the result of five tough years in a subterranean kitchen in London’s Charlotte Street, earning Michelin stars, obsessing over the consistency of a chicken jus or the crispness of a pastry cover, though rarely glimpsing daylight, let alone the innumerable wonders that the world had to offer. And there it might have ended, until one day, I was overcome by a strange fear that I might wake up at the age of sixty having never seen the world, so days after receiving my second star, I did the logical thing and announced that I was leaving.

It’s not that I hadn’t left my country before, I had in fact spent two years in Paris with the legendary Joel Robuchon at his iconic Restaurant Jamin in Rue de Longchamp. Not only was this the finest education a young cook could receive, it was also the best education for any young person simply by being in Paris. You might say, the tastiest cultural amuse-bouche one could hope to enjoy. No friends, no money and every weekend off, though as a consolation the Louvre had a free entrance on a Sunday, so I found myself there every week, exploring every room, enjoying a crash-course in the ‘occasional genius of mankind.’

Anyway, after my Herculean efforts at my Pied-a-Terre Restaurant in London, I set off on my journey around the world, hawking my skills in places as varied and diverse as India, France again -but in my own restaurant- Morocco, Russia and lastly Costa Rica. Since arriving at this final destination, I’m still living out of a suitcase as I find myself traveling three months of the year through Europe and Asia, accompanying my girlfriend as she sources antiques for her furniture store in Costa Rica’s capital, San Jose.

So travel remains a constant feature of my life, though we’re enjoying it slightly less each year as governments around the world use Keynesian techniques to add layer upon layer of bureaucracy to the travel industry. Thankfully, we retain a shared passion for photography, the beautiful and the remarkable, whether by the hand of God or by man, which more-or-less provides the justification for suffering the ignominy of airport security.

We believe that once at our destination, it’s wise to sniff out the old town, as there seems to be a deliberate, or maybe demonic, uglification of much of modern life. The horizontal landscape of cities are now identical, where the same twenty corporations are camped out on everyone’s best bits of commercial real estate, all peddling their ghastly, indistinguishable products. There seems to be a lot of concrete, too many garish plastic signs, endless advertisements, too much functionality. This makes the old cultural and natural treasures even more important, though not simply because of their aesthetic merits, simply because you have to explore the history of a people to really appreciate them. Their religion, their cultural mores, their definitions of good and bad. Progressives from the Enlightenment onwards have tried to malign tradition, the irrational, incomprehensible bits that have supposedly ‘created monsters,’ though these incidentally are the same traits of ‘a people’ that Fichte, Herder, and others had thought defined our glorious distinctiveness.

And this is my Candidean moment of clarity that allows me to understand that the universalization of values and aspirations is truly repugnant. Instead, we should concede just one universal rule which is to pledge to never to do harm to another person's body nor property (I would also extend this courtesy to the rest of the sentient animal kingdom).

Recep Erdogan, the fascist President of Turkey, was absolutely right when he told a 10,000 strong crowd of Turks living in Germany that “assimilation is tantamount to a crime against humanity,” but not for the subversive reasons he imagined. Nobody disputes that Turkey has an incredibly rich, extraordinary cultural heritage (I’ve been to this wonderful country a half-dozen times) that must be protected from the banality of an anti-culture that aspires to recruit the malleable global denizen and clothe him in the same football shirt, oblige him to drink the same soda, eat the same hamburger and worship the same gods from the pantheon of Sports and Entertainment deities. Yet the specific Turkish values and traits that Erdogen thought should be guarded from assimilation are valid, authentic and meaningful only in Turkey, amongst other Turks, a truism that Herder articulated over two hundred years ago with the insight, “every nation speaks in the manner it thinks and thinks in the manner its speaks.”

Cultural exceptionalism can only be maintained by a robust defense of what the late English philosopher Roger Scruton so brilliantly defined as, ‘the first-person plural,’ in other words, the group of people who have lived amongst the ideas and objects their entire lives. On a recent trip to India, I travelled to Gujarat to visit the Modhera Sun Temple and Rani Ki Vav. They were extraordinary and provoked a feeling of awe, emotion and humbleness, yet I knew I could only enjoy them at a level of the dilettante, as to really appreciate them in their entirety, I would have to have been born a Hindu. Trips to Egypt, Indonesia, the entire length of Italy, have only reconfirmed the idea that the cultural treasures, political ideals, the religious insights and the devotional art their gods demanded are too precious to be compromised by the exigencies of the Health Care and Uber industries.

There are so many responsibilities of belonging, not least the participatory aspect of a ‘we-ness’, something that both Condorcet and Montesquieu recognized in their belief that a democratic system required the contribution and vigilance of an educated, enlightened citizenry, not only to function, but survive. Its about democratic duties and obligations rather than the trite and easily abused notion of democratic rights. Countries should be understood as something other than geographical expressions, they are places where history forged the present.

An argument of sorts could be made that the bits of the world that people are fleeing from to get to the West, the countries Trump so eloquently described as ‘shitholes’, could be transformed by developed nations implementing more humane trade and foreign policies, thus invalidating the urge for migration and these huge population transfers. This is of course assuming that the proud people of these countries should want to emulate the torturous history of the West to arrive at a comparable place to which we presently occupy, at least on occasion. Because, other countries, other peoples, if they stopped to think about it might not actually wish to imitate the West’s historical trajectory as even the most cursory reading of our blood-soaked, fratricidal history, informs us that there are many sequential and probably unreplicable episodes that created the Geist which in turn allowed the West to achieve its momentary global preeminence. In contrast, I love the story of Joshua ben Gamla, the first century Jewish priest who ordained that Jewish children from the age of six or seven should be educated. By this simple (?) act, he conferred a gift upon his people that elevated education and literacy to an absolute, this seminal fact provides a more plausible explanation for Jewish exceptionalism rather than the crude and bromide idea of a cabal of manipulative people sitting in a smoke-filled room, plotting the demise of their host countries. Culture matters and it has long term consequences.

In brief, its been a privilege to travel, to see and enjoy other peoples, to hear their stories through their rich and varied histories. I’ve always tried to be respectful to the peoples who have played host to me, worn long-sleeved shirts around the religious sites, ate their food, never asked for spaghetti carbonara in Nepal, nor Mexico City, never shook-people-down and paid whatever price was asked of me -even in Arabic bazaars. I’ve also made sure to tell them that what was exceptional, was actually exceptional. I’ve done all that and then - as the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten said, “to whom may I speak if nobody has my kind of ears” - returned home to excitedly discuss my travels and observations with someone with my kind of ears.

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