Monday, February 18, 2008
Being British
Janet Daley is so right, multiculturalism is all about self-loathing and vulgar attempts to invent a British identity are wildly inappropriate. We are not a revolutionary republic like France, nor, like America, a society of people who, the slaves apart, chose to settle there. If that inspires us to ask the question, 'who are we?'.... well, the owl of Minerva flies at dusk and you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone. Who were we? The British. Make of that what you will. I find it quite consoling but I wouldn't turn it into a constitution or a questionnaire written by Jack Straw. On the other hand, I suppose the Royal United Service Institute had a point when it said our lack of identity made us a soft target for terrorism. Stricken by anomie, we'll just blame ourselves. But the identity we did have was unspoken and unwritten. It just felt like something. For me, it felt like a wry smile and shake of the head shared with a stranger who had also just glimpsed the vanity and folly of human existence in a street in, say, Huddersfield. It was enough. And it still happens.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
Dead right - and it does, to an astonishing extent, still happen. There must be something very durable about this 'imagined community' of ours. But is it British? Has any of us (apart from immigrants perhaps) much actual sense of being British, as against English, Welsh, Scottish? More of a constitutional fiction than a felt reality I'd say (there isn't even a British law).
ReplyDeleteblimey! one benefit of the internet is you can be reminded why you don't buy a certain newspaper without having had to buy it.
ReplyDeleteBritishness. I have a passport, that's all that matters to me about being British. I am English (sub-group, Southern), European, and inhabitant of the Greater World.
Whatever you call it there is something malignant gnawing away at our core which is hell bent on our destruction. I have no idea what we can do about it, but we will have to do something or we're done for.
ReplyDeletePart of being English meant you were free to stand up to a policeman as your equal and tell him to get lost if you were not breaking the law.
It's maybe not gone completely, but it's a risky thing to do now.
Some forms of idiocy are circumstantial, perhaps, but considerable nevertheless: a wry smile and shake of the head shared with a stranger - is a fine thing, especially in Huddersfield, provided you don’t get mugged first.
ReplyDeleteOnce the champion of the liberties of Europe, England is no longer favoured with wry smiles and the persistent powers of the luck of the devil. This is The Age of the Common Man, a land of multi-cultural ghettos and inner-city slums, of professional moneyed classes , and absurdly pretentious lifestyles. A land marked out for its final moment of humiliation. Its democracy, above all, has become a gesture of abasement, mirroring the dejected spirit of a people no longer infected with ideals of conquest and exploration.
What we are witnessing here is the death of a great civilization. The death of something that once sailed to the ends of the earth - the metamorphosis from arbiters of nations into a consumer culture with no real sense of its own purpose. A house divided against itself which builds idols in the image of football heroes but which has neither visions nor dreams to add.
Dreamy
Dear Miss Dreamy, what form will this 'final moment of humiliation' take, d'you think? And does it include america?
ReplyDeleteI favour the idea that it will be a long drawn out self-immolation.
If the nod happened in Manchester over a derby weekend. Vanity and folly, my eye. You would as likely have your head split open by either side. No point of a bit of discreet blue tie waving in those circumstances.
ReplyDeleteBut actually having the debate is part and parcel of the GB identity. It has been going on one way or another since the Romans withdrew. So, there must be some pleasure had from it.
Pygmalion, GBS 1913, hinges on it.
Having spent about 3 decades living in Huddersfield, against my will, i can attest to that shared nod of sane horror.
ReplyDeleteEngland - like Haroun al Raschid's Baghdad in one of Neil Gaiman's Sandman stories - is passing out of the physical world and into fiction, where it will continue to live. The physical England has been destroyed and cannot, i think, come back: the landscape has been too deeply defiled, the language corrupted, the people brutalized. But i note the survival of England in, for example, 'Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell', in the Harry Potter books, and i'm sure there will be others.
Two of the most classically English people i know aren't English: one is Indian, the other Finnish. This thing that was England has passed into the depths from whence it came.
Englishness is still alive, it is Englishness that is about roots, and fundamental values - not this 'Britishness'. (I suppose similar things can be said about being Scots, Welsh and Irish - probably even Cornish.) Britishness is just a convenience. It is primarily an invention for the benefit of incomers, so that they feel they belong.
ReplyDeleteThe Gov. thinking is in a mess because they won't accept this. They should be teaching those settling in the south to deride northerners, and those in the north to mistrust southerners. then they really might stand a hope in hell of belonging.
Nice to have a mention of Huddersfield, Bryan.
ReplyDeleteYou guys seemed to know what English meant when you were united in attacking America(ns)!
ReplyDeleteIs it back to self-loathing now, eh, Phil?
One great thing about being a perennially adolescent nation is that we don't spend so much time looking back. I'm out into the garden today, looking forward to spring. It's 60 degrees Farenheit here (an inconvenient, but quite pleasant, truth) and everything is alive and hoping to bloom.
Don't worry, be happy, ye ancestral blighters!
I don't understand the the Royal United Service Institute's point. The bods at the yard see intelligence as the key, and it is difficult to disagree with them; the last thing you want to do is getting fretful and shutting up radical voices and driving them underground.
ReplyDeleteIf we want to become a little less disoriented, stressed, fretful and fearful maybe we should stop pulverising other people's countries but I doubt if the RUSI would understand this line of thought. I go to other countries where they don't have these habits (like the Republic of Ireland) and they aren't fretting about their way of life being violently overrun. Objectively speaking, neither should we, but if we want the peace of mind...
For myself, I have no problem at all sensing a lively British identity--maybe its living in Brighton; this low-temperature angst seems to be part of it and maybe reflects our Tutonic/Protestant influences.
I'm with Susan. The more you look at an idea like this the more impossible it becomes to define so why not just get on and enjoy. Orwell, after all,
ReplyDeletewrote of the decline of the English murder. God knows what a British one would have involved. I suspect an idea like this enjoys a makeover every time a great crisis emerges. It lasts for a while afterwards, then fades, until the next moment arises. The idea is fading now for all sorts of reasons, not the least being the now-rapid passing of the WWII generation. I don't think sentimental blather about "this ruined land" has much to do with it.
Still, this idea of looking someone in the eye, straight up, no funny business, chap to chap, ship to ship. It's so very, er, British that I couldn't help laughing.
Actually Britain does have a clear identity - the perennial loser. Read any British newspaper or blog and you will soon be confronted with a living Victor Meldrew. Face facts - we just love wallowing in self-pity.
ReplyDeleteIf you eliminate smoking and gambling, you will be amazed to find that almost all an Englishman's pleasures can be, and mostly are, shared by his dog. We're still open to fresh ideas and look outwards to the world to do our business. We accommodated the Poles far more readily than would a Frenchman, a German or a Chinaman would. And one of the wealthiest men I know, who now has ventures in China and Brazil, says annually on his birthday that he is another year older and deeper in debt. He comes from a town quite close to Huddersfield too.
ReplyDeleteNo Susan, self-loathing always gives way to attacking americans.
ReplyDeleteI thought we'd insulted you out of it - come back for some more?
Sounds like perfect weather for gardening, Susan. Enjoy!
ReplyDeleteSusan was sulking in McDonalds, gorging herself on Daddy Burgers, but after all even an American can only devour so much dead animal before feeling the stir of intellectual life, and a desire to return to the life of the mind. Luckily she possesses rare insight into other cultures, as well as a huge bloated gut.
ReplyDeleteself-loathing always gives way to attacking americans.
ReplyDeleteOn the contrary, the two go hand in hand. A great deal of British anti-Americanism seems to stem from a revulsion that the Americans have the bad taste to believe in themselves.
i say we arm the Muslims and use them as cannon fodder against the Americans. We've been fighting the wrong people all along.
ReplyDeleteAnother beautiful day in America! What can I say, Elberry & Phil? It's sunny, the cardinals are at the feeder, the dog is keen for a long walk, and I have a bead on a very good job ... I'm happy, and I wish you guys were too. No ill will from me 'cause it's a big waste of time.
ReplyDeleteRandy, it's good to see you commenting here. I was getting worried about the pneumonia. Hope you are much better now.
As my dad used to say, I'm "about half," Susan. So to speak, if you will, as we are not, to tell the truth, speaking but writing. In any event, it seems to me that, by and large, the worst, as it were, is over.
ReplyDeleteHappy, Susie B, like a child can be happy at play.
ReplyDeleteHow marvellous for you.
Philip, Susan's seemingly harmless activities are in fact just an excuse for her to get her huge, luscious tits out to scare the bejesus out of the locals.
ReplyDeleteThat, elberry, explains everything. How naive can an Englishman be! And just when I thought she was having us on she turns out to be a serious person after all!
ReplyDelete