Right? I'm not British (thankfully), and I don't know much about the inner workings of British culture like say a British citizen would but all I kept thinking to myself was "Is it wrong to be patriotic?". Like you mentioned the taxi driver, my first thought was "seems like a normal take to have" but OT wants to shape it as "unsympathetic alcoholics who really loves shouting racial slurs at dinner parties".
There's a famous quote by Orwell that discusses this:
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.
Orwell does,
in the essay this quote originates, suggest reasons for this; the stagnation of the Empire, technological changes, a general distrust for intellectuals by the English ruling classes.
Of all, there is something be said of the last point. England's greatest minds have in ways been common sense types and sentimentalists, a mindset that does not appeal to intellectuals. Our philosophers, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Mill, Spencer all have a spirit of compromise (though dogmatism lays beneath that superficially open surface). It is a fair to say liberalism was 'discovered' in England, as with Empiricism. We like the facts, not the speculation. We make do with what can see and live with what works. We allow for the discomfort of a humbled pride give way to comfort and common ground. I admit to finding most English philosophers a drudge to read for this reason.
Contrast this with German philosophy, which is more epic, more grand, more romantic, than anything English philosophy ever produced. There is no English Kant, no English Hegel, our philosophers do not concern philosophy- barring perhaps Berkeley- with big and final questions, which for the English are the answers for the individual to discover. We like to collect ideas, make up practical systems, and let the reader work out the rest. Even Hume, who seems nihilistic, has this spirit of conservativism, and there have been arguments that he was only suggesting what philosophy cannot do rather than revealing any metaphysical truth. He was no radical, preferring the company of Edmund Burke than Thomas Paine.
In modern philosophy, you can still see this mentality in Mary Midgley (a prominent critic of scientism), and in John Gray (a Millian liberal disguised as a Schopenhauerian). Scruton is an exception. His influences are all German, however, and he rarely refers English philosophy except to criticise. Michael Oakeshott reflects the English conservative tradition far better, for better and for worse.
We are, sometimes rightly, despised by other philosophers for this because it undermines the idea of a truth founded on humanist aspirations, for when someone says you are entitled to your opinion and I to mine, there is a hidden sneer involved, as though what one says does not really matter, that life is not to be taken seriously, that it should all be forgotten about. (Schopenhauer, who loved English culture, is the notable exception).
This is one of the compromises one must make to live in traditional English democracy, and it does not appeal to an intellectual for whom a supposed search for truth, a worship of ideas, of wishing to be right is a main drive. The common English intellectual would prefer the life and death battles you may have found in France or Soviet Russia than the secure, and ultimately stifling nature of English debate. AN Wilson said English intellectuals in 70s and 80s desired the English government to treat them like how the Soviets treated Solzhenitsyn. That way, they would have known how important they are.
Our state church, in the
Via Media, also encouraged this need for compromise. There is no sense of absolutism and dogmatism (has any other Christian church be so indifferent to people disagreeing with its main tenets?) that is found in other denominations. If you are a little more Catholic, go high church; if you are a little more Evangelical, go low. However, never commit fully to one or the other. That is the reason John Wesley and John Henry Newman were unable to stay confided within its walls.
It is worth mentioning Newman. Of all men from the Victorian period, he is the one who least tied to his time while remaining so important to it. He seems this way because, well, he seems far more principled to his conscience, than he is with social manners and with the getting on with the world. He looked over the facts, followed his own reasoned argument, and out of principle and compassion, left his cushy number in the Church of England for ostracism. Catholic conversions happened often in England, but Newman’s conversion was of importance because it was not done out of a fear of death like Ben Jonson or marital needs like Graham Greene; Newman’s justification was well thought out, reasoned, and done
intellectually. Even the opponents of Catholicism gave Newman their respect. Strachey’s
Eminent Victorians, a book Orwell would be thinking about when writing of English-hating intellectuals, treats Newman with so much praise that it sticks out in a book that is hatred for everyone else. Joyce in
Portrait declared Newman the greatest Englishman. Orwell felt English intellectuals had a soft spot for Catholicism simply because it was not the Church of England.
This liberal spirit is in our two greatest writers, Shakespeare, and Dickens, who, not by coincidence, are also the two greatest writers of character. The spirit of Shakespeare is a spirit of agnosticism. Shakespeare has his opinions but the reason he stays so widely read is because he gives every character his own say. There is no judging in Shakespeare, you are who you are when Shakespeare gives you a speech.
Dickens is the same. Chesterton described him as a real
"democrat". Not in the political sense, but because Dickens thought every man as interesting:
Dickens then had this English feeling of a grotesque democracy. By that is more properly meant a vastly varying democracy. The intoxicating variety of men -- that was his vision and conception of human brotherhood. And certainly, it is a great part of human brotherhood. In one sense things can only be equal if they are entirely different.
That Shakespeare and Dickens are funny writers is also worth noting. Humour makes fools of everyone. When you make a good joke, you bring out a truth. Intellectuals are, barring the best like Joyce, not funny people. They are serious. They want to be taken seriously. If you do not take them seriously, well they may just die. A well-timed joke can kill any intellectual.
While many modern English intellectuals today are liberals, they are not of this carefree attitude, for that would be mistaking political thought for a spiritual feeling. One is liberal in attitude and practise, but not in politics. Political ideas are merely guises for power and status. Intellectuals today advocate for socially liberal policies because the masses do not. They support troons because it makes folks uncomfortable. There is no freedom in
'the new toryism'.
The English succeeded without intellectuals, and they hate it. Our Darwin is no Goethe, our Dickens no Proust, but we have done all right otherwise. We show the rule that a self-admiring intellectual may be on paper prove himself right, but in the general business of the world, he is ill fit.
Thom Gunn put it best:
That though the mind has also got a place,
It’s not in marvelling at its mirrored face
