I heard two clarion calls last week. The first was uttered by Toby Young in the Weekly Sceptic podcast, in which he said that he hoped that somewhere the political philosophers are working on some sort of new ideology or religion or system which will enable us to eliminate the fashionable pseudo-liberal and pseudo-scientific cults of our time. The second was uttered by Eric Weinstein in a recent podcast with Chris Williamson (who happens to be English, though now in America): Weinstein suggested that Britain – he was not differentiating between English, Scots and Irish – should abandon all the nonsense and return to its major world-historical position.
Both of these clarion calls resonated with me. Before I comment on them, however, let me say something about the term I want to use, ‘England’. It winds up many. For half a century at least we have been told not to do what everyone used to do (what A.J.P. Taylor used to do) and use ‘England’ to mean ‘Britain’ or ‘English’ to mean ‘British’. But I think we ought to overcome our scruples and wind the clock and the prejudices backwards. I take ‘England’ to be something very simple. Let me define England as the homeland of the civilisation of the English language. Narrowly understood, this means the territorial England; but, of course, when we consider the most glorious eminences of the Scots or Irish of the last few centuries (Hume or Smith or Maxwell, Swift or Burke or Shaw or Wilde), we are not at all dealing with any other language than English – not even in Yeats or McDiarmid. I am half-Scottish myself (hence my name, which has St. Andrew emblazoned all over it), but have never hesitated to call myself ‘English’, as I am in the narrow sense, but also in the broader civilisational and literary sense.
So let us call ourselves English, all of us, without cavill, we British: indeed, anyone who is interested in defending this Pagan-Christian Island and its little imperial consciousness. Consciousness of empire has recently damaged several generations: all those who were embarrassed by Suez, and now all those who assault statues; but this actual and possibly inevitable post-imperial nausea has crippled the mind of the English, whose empire was always much more of an empire of ideas and institutions-directed-by-ideas than an empire in any ordinary sense. In 1878 Disraeli said, “No Caesar or Charlemagne ever presided over a dominion so peculiar.” John Morley called it an “artificial empire”. This sounds negative, but what he meant was an empire-by-art: an empire which had been forged in a language and a literature. Gladstone, Disraeli’s enemy, in an astonishing essay entitled ‘Kin by Sea’ suggested, also in 1878, that America, “at a coming time, can, and probably will, wrest from us [our] commercial primacy”. He was not worried. This is because he thought that America was the same thing as England. The only difference was that England had been made by praxis, by much historical experience, whereas America had been made by poiesis, by abstracting something out of that experience and making something new of it. (He used these Greek words. Those were better days.) It was all the same civilisation, “separated by a common language”, as Shaw once said.
Weinstein suggested that England has to overcome any momentary self-disgust, abandon the foolish politics of the moment, and return to its great historical position of being the guardian of the English language – in being able to use it with something like an original fluency and sense of truth – and of the English heritage which refers back to Shakespeare and Chaucer. At this point let me quote a line from Wordsworth, the sort of line that should make many of our contemporaries shake with shame:
We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spake…
This is from the sonnet, ‘It is not to be thought of’. Wordsworth wrote it in 1802. It was not to be thought of that England would be destroyed. Shakespeare was mentioned for the language. Wordsworth also mentioned Milton for his faith and morals. It was only a few years later that Admiral Lord Nelson told Lieutenant John Pascoe on the H.M.S. Victory to raise the signal “England confides that every man will do his duty”, and, since there was no code for ‘confides’, accepted the change to the stronger ‘expects’.
This is an apter saying than anything in Churchill or Shakespeare. We are not going to fight anyone on the beaches. We are not going to cry God for Harry, England and Saint George – well, certainly not Harry. Rather, we are going to do our duty, which is the duty England expects – which is to do whatever we can to preserve the traditions of England and the English language: the language by which we ruled over the world, not without some sin (Warren Hastings, etc.), but with the gentlest spirit yet seen abroad: “Never since the heroic days of Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master [as the Englishman]”, commented George Santayana a century ago. “It will be a black day for the human race when the scientific blackguards, conspirators, churls and fanatics manage to supplant him.”
England expects that every man will do his duty. Again, as with ‘England’, I think we should not cavil at the word ‘man’. For this is a man’s job. It might well be done by women, too. But it is a man’s job. We should admit that we mean man-in-the-sense-of-masculine rather than man-in-the-sense-of-male. Our entire masculine sensibility has been assaulted by conspirators, churls and fanatics who have sought to feminise the entire order. Does anyone remember that it was standard in the 19th Century to advocate something, to approve of it, by calling it ‘masculine’? Coleridge, in a book he wrote in 1830, made the point clearly: it was not femininity that should be despised but effeminacy. He did not fear the ‘opposite’ of masculinity but its ‘contrary’. Well, we live in a very contrary and a very effeminate world. A world of safety – and safety run riot. Again, how many of you know that St. Paul predicted that we would be in the end times when much was made of safety? Let me quote the First Letter to the Thessalonians:
But of the times and the seasons, brethren, ye have no need that I write unto you. For yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord cometh as a thief in the night. For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape. But ye, brethren, are not in darkness, that that day should overtake you as a thief. Ye are the children of light, and the children of the day: we are not of the night, nor of darkness. Therefore let us not sleep, as do others; but let us watch and be sober.
1 Thess. 5.1-7
The English should be children of the light, should watch and be sober. We should avoid enthusiasm, including sectarian enthusiasm, revolutionary enthusiasm, and climate-covid-equity enthusiasm. In fact, we should condemn them. We should revere our civilisation, relatively, knowing it is not perfect, but defend it, absolutely.
What of Toby Young’s call for a new political philosophy? Well, I know some political philosophers, and read their writings, and my first thought is, in Jordan Peterson’s always pertinent response, “Good luck with that!” I do not suppose that anything will come of innovation. We may leave innovation to the scientists favoured by Weinstein. But there is another task, the reconstructive one, which is to never forget that ‘England’, as I define it, is a unique consequence, in Europe, of the standard northern European compound of at least four significant traditions: the Greek, the Roman, the Hebrew and the German. The Greeks gave us beauty and clarity and ideals and an endless desire to understand everything. The Romans gave us law, order, tradition and a capacity for imperial hypocrisies which could ensure a certain sort of peace in the world. The Hebrews gave us God, another sort of law, also liturgy, a reverence for holy scripture, and a certain sort of prophetic moral intensity not found elsewhere. The Germans gave us the freedom found in the forest, as Tacitus and Montesquieu thought: that original disinclination to be bothered by others, that desire to be lord of one’s own castle, the sensibility which is a better basis for liberalism than any creed of toleration or care. Christianity brought the first three together, in sublime manner, and preserved for us Greece, Rome and Israel as sources or origins, to which we could return; and then Christianity was received into an essentially German mind. And this, no matter how awkward or pagan, or confused, and made gentle by rain and sheep, is the English mind: in its strength and weakness. It runs from the vice of being so committed to the Anglican middle way that the Church will compromise away its entire inheritance – this is what we are seeing at the moment, Welby – to the virtue of feeling superior to everyone else because we are trying to engage with them as equals – superior because not superior, willing to descend from kingly dais to the fool’s step, to make mock and shake hands.
Political philosophy, then, has to be reconstructive, deeply reactionary: reconstructive of an entire civilisational inheritance against the dangerously dissolvent fashions of this very brief and foolish age.
There is no simple way of doing this. It is inclusive of historical variety, and bitterly opposed to the accommodations of the last 10 years, responsibly opposed to the accommodations of the last 60 years, and conscientiously opposed to the accommodations of the last 200, even 500 years: while nonetheless retaining a Weinsteinian sense that some of what we call ‘progress’ has been good in morality (for instance, in no longer murdering one’s enemies, as the Saxons were prone to do), and in machinery.
There are layers evident to everyone in what can be done.
The libertarian/liberal level is worthy, but shallow. Freedom is empty, and is always coloured by whatever tradition it emerges out of. Breaking the tax-and-control nexus would be something, but is not much by itself.
The national conservative level is better, a level higher. It recognises community and tradition, but even it does so abstractly. We need something concrete.
What we have to do is talk about this community and this tradition – which means this language and law. And this means engaging in a great Reconjunction, a restoration of our roots. These roots are not abstract, not found in ideals (we can throw the mere ‘British values’ of our politicians into the waste paper basket), but found slumbering in the past like great Titans, Jupiters, Leviathans and Beowulfs. It is the assemblage of Greek, Roman, Hebrew – that is, Christian – and then German, as filtered through our eccentric Dickensian language, that provides all the political philosophy we need, and knowing all of this well is the way to restore a sense that England is worth anything in this world.
Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
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