Is it slightly disgraceful to be an Englishman

[roger_thornhill]

In his essay ‘The lion and the unicorn: socialism and the English genius’, George Orwell writes: “England is perhaps the only country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful about being an Englishman.”

Does this still hold true today, more than fifty years after Orwell wrote it? If so, does this reveal any important trait in English people?

[SolGrundy]

Only “slightly?”

[eleanorigby]

Why would Orwell have said that?

I am not up on my Orwell, so cannot debate this.

Perhaps it was said shortly after the Suez affair?

color me clueless!

[smiling_bandit]

I imagine that most countries have their various cranks who despise their own country. By definition, these tend to be either attracted to extreme nationalistic or extreme leftist causes; the latter tends to object in no uncertain terms that our nation is being punished blahblahblah. The former has similar language but dissimilar motive; for them it’s often not the nation but the evil government/elite/conspiracies. In the case of western leftists, the lanaguage has often bled to a small degree into the prejudices of the elite.

[BrainGlutton]

@eleanorigby

Why would Orwell have said that?

I am not up on my Orwell, so cannot debate this.

Perhaps it was said shortly after the Suez affair?

color me clueless!

He wrote it in 1941 – when Britain had been the world’s leading colonial-imperial power for more than a century, and, therefore, the Evil Empire in the eyes of left-wing intellectuals. But the characterization goes deeper than that. Putting the OP’s quote in context – from Welcome // George Orwell // www.k-1.com/Orwellcountry=us/work/essays/lionunicorn.html:

The stagnation of the Empire in the between-war years affected everyone in England, but it had an especially direct effect upon two important sub-sections of the middle class. One was the military and imperialist middle class, generally nicknamed the Blimps, and the other the left-wing intelligentsia. These two seemingly hostile types, symbolic opposites - the half-pay colonel with his bull neck and diminutive brain, like a dinosaur, the highbrow with his domed forehead and stalk-like neck - are mentally linked together and constantly interact upon one another; in any case they are born to a considerable extent into the same families.

<snip>

It should be noted that there is now no intelligentsia that is not in some sense ‘left’. Perhaps the last right-wing intellectual was T. E. Lawrence. Since about 1930 everyone describable as an ‘intellectual’ has lived in a state of chronic discontent with the existing order. Necessarily so, because society as it was constituted had no room for him. In an Empire that was simply stagnant, neither being developed nor falling to pieces, and in an England ruled by people whose chief asset was their stupidity, to be ‘clever’ was to be suspect. If you had the kind of brain that could understand the poems of T. S. Eliot or the theories of Karl Marx, the higher-ups would see to it that you were kept out of any important job. The intellectuals could find a function for themselves only in the literary reviews and the left-wing political parties.

The mentality of the English left-wing intelligentsia can be studied in half a dozen weekly and monthly papers. The immediately striking thing about all these papers is their generally negative, querulous attitude, their complete lack at all times of any constructive suggestion. There is little in them except the irresponsible carping of people who have never been and never expect to be in a position of power. Another marked characteristic is the emotional shallowness of people who live in a world of ideas and have little contact with physical reality. Many intellectuals of the Left were flabbily pacifist up to 1935, shrieked for war against Germany in the years 1935-9, and then promptly cooled off when the war started. It is broadly though not precisely true that the people who were most ‘anti-Fascist’ during the Spanish Civil War are most defeatist now. And underlying this is the really important fact about so many of the English intelligentsia - their severance from the common culture of the country.

In intention, at any rate, the English intelligentsia are Europeanized. They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the general patriotism of the country they form a sort of island of dissident thought. England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God save the King’ than of stealing from a poor box. All through the critical years many left-wingers were chipping away at English morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always anti-British. It is questionable how much effect this had, but it certainly had some. If the English people suffered for several years a real weakening of morale, so that the Fascist nations judged that they were ‘decadent’ and that it was safe to plunge into war, the intellectual sabotage from the Left was partly responsible. Both the New Statesman and the News Chronicle cried out against the Munich settlement, but even they had done something to make it possible. Ten years of systematic Blimp-baiting affected even the Blimps themselves and made it harder than it had been before to get intelligent young men to enter the armed forces. Given the stagnation of the Empire, the military middle class must have decayed in any case, but the spread of a shallow Leftism hastened the process.

It is clear that the special position of the English intellectuals during the past ten years, as purely negative creatures, mere anti-Blimps, was a by-product of ruling-class stupidity. Society could not use them, and they had not got it in them to see that devotion to one’s country implies ‘for better, for worse’. Both Blimps and highbrows took for granted, as though it were a law of nature, the divorce between patriotism and intelligence. If you were a patriot you read Blackwood’s Magazine and publicly thanked God that you were ‘not brainy’. If you were an intellectual you sniggered at the Union Jack and regarded physical courage as barbarous. It is obvious that this preposterous convention cannot continue. The Bloomsbury highbrow, with his mechanical snigger, is as out-of-date as the cavalry colonel. A modern nation cannot afford either of them. Patriotism and intelligence will have to come together again. It is the fact that we are fighting a war, and a very peculiar kind of war, that may make this possible.

Relating this analysis to the contemporary situation in the U.S. would . . . well, it would belong in another thread.

[BrainGlutton]

BTW, when you read the above, remember that Orwell himself was a left-wing intellectual all his adult life.

[roger_thornhill]

@BrainGlutton

BTW, when you read the above, remember that Orwell himself was a left-wing intellectual all his adult life.

And the left’s fiercest critic (see for example his withering analysis of the poitical chicanery of the Soviets and other left-wing political groupings in Homage to Catalonia).

He was particularly severe on communists, mocking ‘the “Communism” (his quotation marks) of the English intellectual’ as ‘the patriotism of the deracinated’ (‘deracinated’ means ‘uprooted’).Orwell contends that communism is popular among intellectuals because it is ‘something to believe in… a church, an army, an orthodoxy, a discipline’. (Both quotations from An Age Like This, 515.)

The distinction between nationalism and patriotism made by Orwell, among others, should be noted:

@Orwell 'Notes on nationalism' (300-01)

By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force upon other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.

In similar vein, the philosopher Joseph Agassi describes patriotism as ‘a kind of altruism’ and nationalism as ‘group egoism’.

[BrainGlutton]

@smiling bandit

I imagine that most countries have their various cranks who despise their own country. By definition, these tend to be either attracted to extreme nationalistic or extreme leftist causes; the latter tends to object in no uncertain terms that our nation is being punished blahblahblah. The former has similar language but dissimilar motive; for them it’s often not the nation but the evil government/elite/conspiracies. In the case of western leftists, the lanaguage has often bled to a small degree into the prejudices of the elite.

Don’t forget those cranks who despise their own country for religious reasons – e.g., the British Catholics Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton. (If you don’t believe Chesterton despised Britain, read his poem Lepanto – http://www.bartleby.com/103/91.html. “The cold Queen of England is looking in the glass . . .”)

[roger_thornhill]

I think it would be news not only to me, but to CKC himself.

It was imperialism above all things that the older Chesterton found most anathematic. Indeed, he viewed it as the mortal enemy of patriotism, which was something by contrast that he held a lifelong and passionate affinity for.

In his essay ‘The Patriotic Idea’, Chesterton voices his disapproval not of patriotism but of the intelligentsia’s lack of rigour as well as their lack of values and passion:

‘Because the modern intellectuals who disapprove of patriotism do not [recognise the common needs of humanity], a strange coldness and unreality hangs about their love for men. If you ask them whether they love humanity, they will say, doubtless sincerely, that they do. But if you ask them touching any of the classes that go to make up humanity, you will find that they hate them all. They hate kings, they hate priests, they hate soldiers, they hate sailors, they distrust men of science, they denounce the middle classes, they despair of working men, but they adore humanity. Only they always speak of humanity as if it were a curious foreign nation. They are dividing themselves more and more from men to exalt the strange race of mankind. They are ceasing to be human in the effort to be humane.’

Here he is reminiscent, among others, of Dostoyevsky, who wrote (a little earlier in 1879) in The Brothers Karamazov: ‘The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular.’ (Compare again Linus, who said, ‘I love mankind; it’s people I can’t stand.’)

In the same essay, Chesterton reasserts the position of the nation, contrasting its permanence with the transitory nature of empires:

‘[W]hen all the colonies of England have gone the wild way of the colonies of Spain, when some strange and sudden Waterloo has made the little dream of Beaconsfield (i.e. Disraeli) as mad as the great dream of Napoleon, something will remain, I am very certain, which matters more than all these levities. There will still be men who will die for England.’

[Alessan]

It’s a common tendancy - intellectualssuffer from it more than most - to divide the entire world into two groups: victims, and agressors. The basic assumption is that if one does not qualify for the former, then it must automatically be considered the latter. This applies not only to individuals, but also to groups, organizations, and countries. Therefore, if any group cannot see its nation as a victim, it is forced to consider it an agressors, and as such, it must be despised.

Of course, this only happens in states with a history of introspection and a culture of self-criticism; intellectuals elsewhere will always find a way to award the mantle of victimhood to their homeland.

[Sarah_Woodruff]

I had a loverly reply, but it got ate.
Anyways:
Is it slightly disgraceful to be an Englishman?
No, no it isn’t. But that is my gut reaction, as someone who is 50% English.
I think it’s a peculiarly English question, though.

As to The Lion and the Unicorn, I would say that English society is vastly changed since the Second World War. As Orwell highlights, in 1941 there were major inequalities in wealth and standards of living, the British Government was struggling with the idea of India as an independent nation, and then you have the class thing:

Year after year the Beaverbrook press assured us in large headlines that THERE WILL BE NO WAR, and as late as the beginning of 1939 Lord Rothermere was describing Hitler as ‘a great gentleman.’ And while England in the moment of disaster proved to be short of every war material except ships, it is not recorded that there was any shortage of motor cars, fur coats, gramophones, lipstick, chocolates or silk stockings.

There was a lot to criticise in 1941.

What I find interesting is the fact that it’s now slightly disgraceful to approve of Socialist tenets.

[Rune]

Wasn’t that what Orwell would term “oikophobia” (oiko= house, phobia=fear). Oikophobia strictly means someone who has a pathological fear of houses or homelike environments. Orwell heisted the clinical expression to describe someone who hates his country for thereby to say he thought it was a sick & irrational thought or feeling.

Anyway since the sixties and seventies such pathological hatred has become mainstream amongst the misnamed “progressive” left. Hate whitey. It’s an industry. It’s hip. It’s fun. But above all. It’s entirely without risk.

@Susan Sontag

The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions — which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.

@Sartre

To shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there remain a dead man, and a free man; the survivor, for the first time, feels a national soil under his foot.

[Bryan_Ekers]

@Sarah Woodruff

What I find interesting is the fact that it’s now slightly disgraceful to approve of Socialist tenets.

We’ve since had a chance to see socialism taken to its violent dictatorial extreme, culminating in the collapse of the Soviet Union.

[roger_thornhill]

QUOTE=Wooders]What I find interesting is the fact that it’s now slightly disgraceful to approve of Socialist tenets.
[/QUOTE]
Approve of them. These days ‘socialism’ itself is a dirty word. As far as I’m concerned, lefties have to deal with the intractable problem of equality (whose? which?). Something righties like me (whatever that darn political assessment thingie says I am) don’t bother ourselves much about, as we rant on about freedom!

@Rune

Anyway since the sixties and seventies such pathological hatred has become mainstream amongst the misnamed “progressive” left. Hate whitey. It’s an industry. It’s hip. It’s fun. But above all. It’s entirely without risk.

This cowardly and violent action has a longer history. Orwell again in his’Notes on nationalism’

Transferred Nationalism…

3. COLOUR FEELING. The old-style contemptuous attitude towards “natives” has been much weakened in England, and various pseudo-scientific theories emphasizing the superiority of the white race have been abandoned. Among the intelligentsia, colour feeling only occurs in the transposed form, that is, as a belief in the innate superiority of the coloured races. This is now increasingly common among English intellectuals, probably resulting more often from masochism and sexual frustration than from contact with the Oriental and Negro nationalist movements. Even among those who do not feel strongly on the colour question, snobbery and imitation have a powerful influence. Almost any English intellectual would be scandalized by the claim that the white races are superior to the coloured, whereas the opposite claim would seem to him unexceptionable even if he disagreed with it. Nationalistic attachment to the coloured races is usually mixed up with the belief that their sex lives are superior, and there is a large underground mythology about the sexual prowess of Negroes.

Is he taking the piss or what? Too many absinthes perhaps!

[roger_thornhill]

@Wooders

What I find interesting is the fact that it’s now slightly disgraceful to approve of Socialist tenets.

Approve of them? These days ‘socialism’ itself is a dirty word. As far as I’m concerned, lefties have to deal with the intractable problem of equality (whose? which?). Something righties like me (whatever that darn political assessment thingie says I am) don’t bother ourselves much about, as we rant on about freedom!

@Rune

Anyway since the sixties and seventies such pathological hatred has become mainstream amongst the misnamed “progressive” left. Hate whitey. It’s an industry. It’s hip. It’s fun. But above all. It’s entirely without risk.

This cowardly and violent action has a longer history. Orwell again in his ‘Notes on nationalism’

@Orwell

Transferred Nationalism…

3. COLOUR FEELING. The old-style contemptuous attitude towards “natives” has been much weakened in England, and various pseudo-scientific theories emphasizing the superiority of the white race have been abandoned. Among the intelligentsia, colour feeling only occurs in the transposed form, that is, as a belief in the innate superiority of the coloured races. This is now increasingly common among English intellectuals, probably resulting more often from masochism and sexual frustration than from contact with the Oriental and Negro nationalist movements. Even among those who do not feel strongly on the colour question, snobbery and imitation have a powerful influence. Almost any English intellectual would be scandalized by the claim that the white races are superior to the coloured, whereas the opposite claim would seem to him unexceptionable even if he disagreed with it. Nationalistic attachment to the coloured races is usually mixed up with the belief that their sex lives are superior, and there is a large underground mythology about the sexual prowess of Negroes.

Is he taking the piss or what? Too many absinthes perhaps!

Ah! That’s better…

[Sarah_Woodruff]

I don’t quite understand what you’re trying to prove. Are you wanting to discuss the English psyche, as such, or Socialism, or right/left politics as they are apparent in England? Because the lion and unicorn essay deals with all these and much much more besides.

[Fortean]

Meh. The one think with English commentators, whether they love the country or not, is their obsession to find something peculiar about it which cannot be applied to ANY OTHER COUNTRY ON THE PLANET – animal loving, food, stubbornness etc. Personally, I find this extremely irritating.

Hence according to Orwell English people have these weird thing of being slightly ashamed of their origin unlike, seemingly, any other country. Which is clearly major pants*; as we have seen, US-ers are divided along the same lines, plenty of French people envy various things they think the rest of Europe has that they don’t, plenty of other countries have mixed feelings about their own meddlings in colonialism and WWII.

The only unique thing (since I am an English commentator, I am obliged to go along the same lines) about the English is that most other countries tend to denigrate themselves by comparing themselves to others; whereas the English do it by separating themselves from everyone else in the world; peculiarity again. Oh yes, because we are an island race etc etc etc bleh bleh.

In short, I love my country, but find all attempts to somehow explain its inhabitants severely lacking.
*extremely unlikely.

[Wallenstein]

Part of the problem is that it’s not entirely clear what exactly it means to be “an Englishman”.

Certainly within the United Kingdom / British Isles, the Welsh, Scots and N. Irish appear to have a much clearer sense of identity as a result of being historically subordinate groups under overall English control.

It’s often been perceived to be the case that

English = British

However, although

Welsh / Scots / Manx = British

it is also the case that

Welsh / Scots / Manx != English

There’s a clear tension there, and it’s only recently (with Scottish and Welsh devolution, however limited) that a particularly English national identity has found a resurgence.

The re-appropriation of the Flag of St George is part of this reclamation of “englishness”, but it’s still associated for many people with the Far Right skinheads and so on.

[owlstretchingtime]

At a personal level I am with Cecil Rhodes on this one - to be born an Englishman is to win the lottery of life.

Poor old Eric Blair had a variety of problems with England. Firstly he felt a fish out of water - at Eton he was visibly and obviously of a lower class than the other boys - which created his resentment of the English class system (certainly as it existed pre-war).

He also had a general problem with all forms of conservatism. He was of the generation that belived that socialism was the only rational way forward and he found himself part of a country that aligned itself firmly against the “red bloc” (Cold war, Korea etc etc).

He should have stuck to selling books in Kentish Town.

[Wallenstein]

@owlstretchingtime

At a personal level I am with Cecil Rhodes on this one - to be born an Englishman is to win the lottery of life.

And to be born into the Church of England is to win the lottery of life after death