Ian Jack - What defines England in the age of Brexit? Its self-pity
NB: An interesting essay. It reminds me of something I have always had difficulty understanding: the strange attraction many people have (especially culturally or ethnically defined groups) for thinking of themselves as victims. Victim-hood seems to be some kind of badge we like to wear to make our presence felt. Nowadays the more powerful we are the more we need to beat the drum of our victimisation. What idiocy. DS
I wish you’d stop talking about ‘the English’,” my wife, who is English, said. “There are all kinds of English people. We aren’t all Jacob Rees Mogg. I resent the idea that we can all be lumped together, that we’re all in some way to blame.” Of course, she was right. Only recently have I begun to talk about “the English”. I’ve lived in England for getting on for 50 years – admittedly in London, the country’s least representative place – and most people I know and like are English; none of them is Jacob Rees-Mogg. The crisis has brought on this bad habit.
Among Brexit’s several causes, the most prominent is English nationalism, and it is easy, though mistaken, to proceed from that abstraction to the more concrete idea of the people who believe in it, and label them “the English”. The Irish writer Fintan O’Toole does it in Heroic Failure, his new book on Brexit, and he apologises for his lapse in the introduction. The phrase “the English”, O’Toole writes, isn’t meant to describe a “complex, contradictory and deeply divided people”, but merely attempts “to explore a mentality … the strange sense of imaginary oppression that underlies Brexit”.
How does a nation begin to understand itself? Who supplies the understanding? In the past, some societies that had just been released from colonialism, and still to develop strong traditions of writing and publishing, often took their analyses and insights from elsewhere. For example, a visitor to India in the 1960's – even more so to Pakistan – would struggle to find a good modern account of the country that was written by anyone who lived there. He relied instead on visiting writers such as VS Naipaul and Geoffrey Moorhouse, whose judgments were often contested in the countries they described as flawed or superficial, but who nevertheless affected how locals, as well as visitors, saw the place.
Famously, Naipaul observed the ordinary sight of public defecation. “Indians defecate everywhere,” he wrote, in a rhythm that echoed Winston Churchill’s most famous speech. “They defecate, mostly, beside the railway tracks. But they also defecate on the beaches; they defecate on the hills; they defecate on the river banks; they defecate on the streets; they never look for cover.” And yet the squatting figures (“as eternal and emblematic as Rodin’s thinker”) never appeared in novels, feature films or documentaries. Naipaul felt that to an Indian eye they were invisible, but perhaps the truth was that they were accepted as inevitable – as a fact of impoverished life... read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/15/england-brexit-self-pity-writers-country
I wish you’d stop talking about ‘the English’,” my wife, who is English, said. “There are all kinds of English people. We aren’t all Jacob Rees Mogg. I resent the idea that we can all be lumped together, that we’re all in some way to blame.” Of course, she was right. Only recently have I begun to talk about “the English”. I’ve lived in England for getting on for 50 years – admittedly in London, the country’s least representative place – and most people I know and like are English; none of them is Jacob Rees-Mogg. The crisis has brought on this bad habit.
Among Brexit’s several causes, the most prominent is English nationalism, and it is easy, though mistaken, to proceed from that abstraction to the more concrete idea of the people who believe in it, and label them “the English”. The Irish writer Fintan O’Toole does it in Heroic Failure, his new book on Brexit, and he apologises for his lapse in the introduction. The phrase “the English”, O’Toole writes, isn’t meant to describe a “complex, contradictory and deeply divided people”, but merely attempts “to explore a mentality … the strange sense of imaginary oppression that underlies Brexit”.
How does a nation begin to understand itself? Who supplies the understanding? In the past, some societies that had just been released from colonialism, and still to develop strong traditions of writing and publishing, often took their analyses and insights from elsewhere. For example, a visitor to India in the 1960's – even more so to Pakistan – would struggle to find a good modern account of the country that was written by anyone who lived there. He relied instead on visiting writers such as VS Naipaul and Geoffrey Moorhouse, whose judgments were often contested in the countries they described as flawed or superficial, but who nevertheless affected how locals, as well as visitors, saw the place.
Famously, Naipaul observed the ordinary sight of public defecation. “Indians defecate everywhere,” he wrote, in a rhythm that echoed Winston Churchill’s most famous speech. “They defecate, mostly, beside the railway tracks. But they also defecate on the beaches; they defecate on the hills; they defecate on the river banks; they defecate on the streets; they never look for cover.” And yet the squatting figures (“as eternal and emblematic as Rodin’s thinker”) never appeared in novels, feature films or documentaries. Naipaul felt that to an Indian eye they were invisible, but perhaps the truth was that they were accepted as inevitable – as a fact of impoverished life... read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/15/england-brexit-self-pity-writers-country
