Is Britain still a country where "authority is this great looming nonsense"?

[BrainGlutton]

In the BBC documentary [url=]Life of Python, one of the Monty Python team – I think it was Eric Idle – commented that (going from memory) , “Authority in Britain is this great looming nonsense, and you’re not allowed to laugh at it, except quietly among yourselves. It’s like we – the schoolmasters, the clergy, the govermnent officials, the military officers – have all the answers and you have to listen to us.”

If true, that might well be the most important and telling of all cultural differences between the UK and the U.S. We’re world-famous for disrespecting authority even when we obey it.

Was it true when Idle was young? Is it still true? If so, will it ever change?

[Wallenstein]

Thankfully it’s on its way out… but that’s thrown up a whole load of social isses.

Basically, people complain that

[ul]
[li]there’s no respect for the police, so criminal run wild[/li][li]no respect for the law / judiciary (who are out of touch etc)… meaning punishments are not taken seriously[/li][li]schools are in chaos[/li][li]social fabric collapsing blah blah blah[/li][/ul]

Reading the Daily Mail or Telegraph letters pages to get an idea.

There’s a genuine problem though… as people begin to question the right of politicians, policemen, teachers etc to impose order on society, they tend to throw the good out with the bad.

A good way to measure it is to look at the relative house sizes compared with e.g. 1950s… doctors still make good money, as do judges, but teachers / priests / politicians do not occupy the massive houses they used to.

[Ximenean]

[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
In the BBC documentary [url=]Life of Python, one of the Monty Python team – I think it was Eric Idle – commented that (going from memory) , “Authority in Britain is this great looming nonsense, and you’re not allowed to laugh at it, except quietly among yourselves. It’s like we – the schoolmasters, the clergy, the govermnent officials, the military officers – have all the answers and you have to listen to us.”

If true, that might well be the most important and telling of all cultural differences between the UK and the U.S. We’re world-famous for disrespecting authority even when we obey it.

Was it true when Idle was young? Is it still true? If so, will it ever change?
[/QUOTE]
That kind of Nanny State government was in its death throes even as Eric Idle or whoever it was spoke, if it ever existed to the extent he makes out. It’s certainly not like that now. Britain is a reasonably meritocratic place these days.

I’m not sure what you mean about Americans being “world famous for disrespecting authority”. They’re not famous for it round here. Funnily enough, the French are famous for it, and yet they accept (and perhaqs even expect) far higher levels of government intervention than Anglo-Saxons would.

[kellner]

[QUOTE=Usram]
I’m not sure what you mean about Americans being “world famous for disrespecting authority”. They’re not famous for it round here.
[/QUOTE]
I’m a bit surprised, too. I’ve never heard that idea before. Actually the I’ve often been surprised by the amount of veneration of the “best of all systems” and its institutions.

[Der_Trihs]

[QUOTE=kellner]
I’m a bit surprised, too. I’ve never heard that idea before. Actually the I’ve often been surprised by the amount of veneration of the “best of all systems” and its institutions.
[/QUOTE]
Americans are convinced that they are famous for loving freedom/disrespecting authority. AFAIKT the idea is famous only inside America.

[BrainGlutton]

[QUOTE=Usram]
That kind of Nanny State government was in its death throes even as Eric Idle or whoever it was spoke, if it ever existed to the extent he makes out. It’s certainly not like that now. Britain is a reasonably meritocratic place these days.

I’m not sure what you mean about Americans being “world famous for disrespecting authority”. They’re not famous for it round here. Funnily enough, the French are famous for it, and yet they accept (and perhaqs even expect) far higher levels of government intervention than Anglo-Saxons would.
[/QUOTE]

N.B.: “Acceptance of nanny state” != “respect for authority.”

[BrainGlutton]

[QUOTE=Usram]
I’m not sure what you mean about Americans being “world famous for disrespecting authority”.
[/QUOTE]

What I mean is, it’s always OK to laugh at authority-figures here. A great deal of our popular culture and media are based on that assumption. Poles apart from (what Idle characterizes as) the British “except quietly among yourselves” attitude. Applies only to people – Old Glory, the Constitution, etc., are not “authority figures” in the sense I’m using the term.

[Beware_of_Doug]

Another difference, IMHO, is that American authority is not a “great looming nonsense.” It’s more like a million officious individuals who take it as their patriotic duty to hamper, fetter, preach and harangue. Our authority has a face – of many shapes and colors, all furrowed, beady-eyed and scowling.

[GorillaMan]

As others have said, Eric Idle is talking about a place and a time which no longer exists. It comes from a time when National Service was still a recent memory, where corporal punishment in schools was accepted, and before the point at which people started to realise that not every bureaucratic job was guaranteed for life.

While many of us still find Python very funny, it’s also with an awareness that they’re depicting a world which no longer exists. On the other hand, our world is one directly descended from theirs, which may explain why the connections to the comedy can still be made so readily.

[Ximenean]

[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
What I mean is, it’s always OK to laugh at authority-figures here. A great deal of our popular culture and media are based on that assumption. Poles apart from (what Idle characterizes as) the British “except quietly among yourselves” attitude.
[/QUOTE]

It has always been OK to poke fun at authority figures here, too, as in any liberal democracy. That’s what makes them liberal. Although admittedly things are freer now than they ever have been. I don’t see anything particularly American about disrespecting authority, Eric Idle’s, er, idle theorising about the British psyche aside, unless you’re saying that current levels of irreverence have been the norm in the USA from 1776 onwards.

[BrainGlutton]

[QUOTE=Usram]
. . . unless you’re saying that current levels of irreverence have been the norm in the USA from 1776 onwards.
[/QUOTE]

In theory yes, in practice no. Things in general didn’t really start to loosen up until, say, the '50s – which still puts us ahead of the relative to the Brits!

Of course there are still limits. No recruit in basic training will laugh openly at his DI; and if you laugh at your pastor, why are you going to church at all? But, say, schoolteachers, even in private schools, have to learn to endure a lot more mockery open and secret than their predecessors did. And “civil servant” has never been as prestigious a career, here, as it traditionally has been in Europe. and “bureaucrat” is hardly used at all except as a term of abuse.

[Ryan_Liam]

I’m guessing BrainGlutton has never ever heard of HaveIgotnewsforyou

[Bytegeist]

I have a question that I think fits this thread. It’s mostly for any older Brits who are listening.

One of the Pythons — I think it was Cleese — noted kind of proudly in some interview that they’d been making fun of Margaret Thatcher all the way back in their Flying Circus days. And sure enough, there’s at least one episode where they take a good swipe at her.

But Thatcher wouldn’t be prime minister for another decade yet. What had she done already by the early 70s to provoke such unscientific claims about the structure of her central nervous system? That “brain” swipe got a big laugh from the studio audience, so she must have been saying or doing something really dumb or unpopular around that time. Her activities of that period, according to Wikipedia:

. . . She moved to the Shadow Treasury Team after 1966.

Thatcher was one of few Conservative MPs to support Leo Abse’s Bill to decriminalise male homosexuality, and she voted in favour of David Steel’s Bill to legalise abortion. However, she was opposed to the abolition of capital punishment and voted against making divorce more easily attainable. She made her mark as a conference speaker in 1966 with a strong attack on the taxation policy of the Labour Government as being steps “not only towards Socialism, but towards Communism”. She won promotion to the Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Fuel Spokesman in 1967, and was then promoted to shadow Transport and, finally, Education before the 1970 election.

When the Conservatives won the 1970 general election, Thatcher became Secretary of State for Education and Science. In her first months in office, forced to administer a cut in the Education budget, she was responsible for the abolition of universal free milk for school-children aged seven to eleven (Labour had already abolished it for secondary schools). This led to one of the more unflattering names for her, “Thatcher Thatcher, Milk Snatcher”. Recently released Cabinet papers show that she spoke against the move in Cabinet, but was forced, due to the concept of collective responsibility, to implement the will of her fellow ministers. This provoked a storm of public protest. She also successfully resisted library book charges.

Her term was marked by many proposals for more local education authorities to abolish grammar schools, of which she approved, and adopt comprehensive secondary education, even though this was widely perceived as a left-wing policy. Thatcher also saved the Open University from being abolished. The Chancellor Iain Macleod wanted to abolish it to save money and he viewed it as a gimmick by Harold Wilson. Thatcher believed it was a relatively cheap way of extending opportunities to adults who had missed out on university education when they were younger.

Pretty tame stuff. If this is all the fodder the Pythons had on her, she wouldn’t seem to be worthy of ridicule on the air, for a national audience. But as mentioned, ridiculing her got a big laugh.

So, what had she done?

[fortytwo]

[QUOTE=Bytegeist]

So, what had she done?
[/QUOTE]

She first came to attention of the British public as Education Minister in 1970, so my guess would be the “milk snatcher” episode. It was quite a big issue at the time and very controversial. Looking at the time scale of her new job in government, 1970 - 1974, and the air date of that particular MP programme (Nov 1970) it seems likely that the milk snatching would still be topical. In the grand scheme of things it seems small beer now but it wasn’t then. She did most of her damage to the country when she actually became prime minister, fortunately for her MP had finished by then.
…

I think lessening respect for Authority/ Establishment in the UK has been going on for 40 years or more, since television became common household appliances. Once we began to see current affair programmes, fly on the wall documentaries, satirical comedy shows and lastly the Royals trying to show how “normal” they are.
These programmes generally gave authority a hard time showing political sleeze, police wrongdoings,etc.etc.

To pick up on what one comedian says is just ludicrous.

And this:

@BrainGlutton

If true, that might well be the most important and telling of all cultural differences between the UK and the U.S. We’re world-famous for disrespecting authority even when we obey it.

To be world famous for something the world has to know about it, and I’ve never associated Americans with being renowned for being disrespectful. Plenty of other things, yes, but not that.

[BrainGlutton]

[QUOTE=Vetch]
To be world famous for something the world has to know about it, and I’ve never associated Americans with being renowned for being disrespectful. Plenty of other things, yes, but not that.
[/QUOTE]

Not necessarily disrespectful, just not automatically deferential. I got the “world-famous” impression from George Orwell’s 1943 essay, “Mark Twain: The Licensed Jester”:

Although Mark Twain produced a surprising variety of books, ranging from a namby-pamby ‘life’ of Joan of Arc to a pamphlet so obscene that it has never been publicly printed, all that is best in his work centres about the Mississippi river and the wild mining towns of the West. Born in 1835 (he came of a Southern family, a family just rich enough to own one or perhaps two slaves), he had had his youth and early manhood in the golden age of America, the period when the great plains were opened up, when wealth and opportunity seemed limitless, and human beings felt free, indeed were free, as they had never been before and may not be again for centuries. LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI and the two other books that I have mentioned are a ragbag of anecdotes, scenic descriptions and social history both serious and burlesque, but they have a central theme which could perhaps be put into these words: ‘This is how human beings behave when they are not frightened of the sack.’ In writing these books Mark Twain is not consciously writing a hymn to liberty. Primarily he is interested in ‘character’, in the fantastic, almost lunatic variations which human nature is capable of when economic pressure and tradition are both removed from it. The raftsmen, Mississippi pilots, miners and bandits whom he describes are probably not much exaggerated, but they are as different from modern men, and from one another, as the gargoyles of a medieval cathedral. They could develop their strange and sometimes sinister individuality because of the lack of any outside pressure. The State hardly existed, the churches were weak and spoke with many voices, and land was to be had for the taking. If you disliked your job you simply hit the boss in the eye and moved further west; and moreover, money was so plentiful that the smallest coin in circulation was worth a shilling. The American pioneers were not supermen, and they were not especially courageous. Whole towns of hardy gold miners let themselves be terrorized by bandits whom they lacked the public spirit to put down. They were not even free from class distinctions. The desperado who stalked through the streets of the mining settlement, with a Derringer pistol in his waistcoat pocket and twenty corpses to his credit, was dressed in a frock coat and shiny top-hat, described himself firmly as a ‘gentleman’ and was meticulous about table manners. But at least it was NOT the case that a man’s destiny was settled from his birth. The ‘log cabin to White House’ myth was true while the free land lasted. In a way, it was for this that the Paris mob had stormed the Bastille, and when one reads Mark Twain, Bret Harte and Whitman it is hard to feel that their effort was wasted.

[Driver8]

Not the 9 O’Clock News did not hold back from very harsh comedy at Margaret Thatcher’s expense in the early eighties.

House of Cards seemed like a pretty cruel satire of government as a whole, from the prime minister down. Indeed, I wonder if such a series that case the presidency in such a sadistic and cruel light could realistically be made in the United States. Maybe as an HBO special at best. I don’t think America is as completely hang-up free regarding parodying the presidency as the OP suggests.

[Captain_Amazing]

[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
Not necessarily disrespectful, just not automatically deferential.
[/QUOTE]

That’s not really what Orwell is saying in the essay, though. What he seems to be saying was that in the time and place that Twain was writing about…the American west at the end of the 19th century, was a land of opportunity, where somebody could start out from humble beginnings and become great. He’s not really saying that the American character is dismissive of authority. In fact, later on in the same essay, when he compares Twain to Anatole France, he points out, (bolding mine):

[quote]
Both men were the spiritual children of Voltaire, both had an ironical, sceptical view of life, and a native pessimism overlaid by gaiety; both knew that the existing social order is a swindle and its cherished beliefs mostly delusions. Both were bigoted atheists and convinced (in Mark Twain’s case this was Darwin’s doing) of the unbearable cruelty of the universe. But there the resemblance ends. Not only is the Frenchman enormously more learned, more civilized, more alive aesthetically, but he is also more courageous. He does attack the things he disbelieves in; he does not, like Mark Twain, always take refuge behind the amiable mask of the ‘public figure’ and the licensed jester. He is ready to risk the anger of the Church and to take the unpopular side in a controversy—in the Dreyfus case, for example. Mark Twain, except perhaps in one short essay ‘What is Man?’, never attacks established beliefs in a way that is likely to get him into trouble. Nor could he ever wean himself from the notion, which is perhaps especially an American notion, that success and virtue are the same thing.

In fact, his point in the essay was that Twain had the potential to be an iconoclast and a rebel, but had sold out; had made his sature “safe” for financial success and prestige.

[Pjen]

[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
We’re world-famous for disrespecting authority even when we obey it.
[/QUOTE]

In the USA :

Try disrespecting the Military in any form
Try disrespecting the NRA and its defence of the second amendment; but its OK to disrespect the ACLU and its defence of the rest of the Bill of Rights.
Try disrespecting proponents of capitalism.
Try disrespecting the police.
Try disrespecting the President (except Eisenhower, Nixon-pre-Watergate, Reagan, Bush I and II) [see the pattern?]
Try disrespecting Right of Centre (Neo-con) authoritarians- “you are un-patriotic”; but you are allowed to disrespect Left of Centre (Social Democrat) authoritarianism.

As far as the Military, Capitalism/Socialism, Police, Prime Minister/President of any persuasion, the UK has always been way ahead of the US both in Arts and in real life from the 1950s to date.

If you limit your disrespect to those persons identified as Commies, Misfits, Weirdos, Hippies, Punks, Foreigners, Liberal Democrats etc, then disrespect of authority is fine in the USA, but focus your disrespect on folk heroes of the lumpenproletariat as above, and such joy in showing disrespect disappears completely.

In my experience, living in both countries, there has been a much higher level of disprespect for all authority in the UK than in the US between the late fifties and the present.

For instance I would happily display Bumper stickers which are anti-church, anti-politicians, anti military, anti capitalism, anti police in the UK than in the US.

What it never slips into in the UK is total disrespect for all government functions and services as is the case with extreme libertarians etc..

[Wallenstein]

Compare “West Wing” to “House of Cards” or “Yes, Minister” for a warm’n’fuzzy vs. cynical approach to political authority.

Even when Americans criticise individual politicians, there is still a deep respect and deference to the offices and institutions of the president etc.

[yojimbo]

Washington behind closed doors was pretty hard hitting.

Most of American political satire that I’ve seen is pretty mild compared to the British variety. The Daily Show while very funny at times is no where near as hard hitting as shows like Spitting Image or many BBC TV and radio shows.