NEW YEAR THOUGHTS ABOUT THE FUTURE-1
Created | Updated Jan 27, 2017
NEW YEAR THOUGHTS ABOUT THE FUTURE-1
The hopes that the end of the Cold War over a quarter of a century ago might finally lead towards world peace have proved fallacious and much the same kind of popular discontent with the governing establishment that fatally undermined the Soviet Empire has inspired widespread ‘grass roots’ protest elsewhere, along with hopes for real change that have resulted in the current unsettled and unpredictable state of the world.
ENGLAND AND EUROPE
We should not be surprised, therefore, if some of our less sympathetic European neighbours see Brexit as just another example of the English withdrawing from Europe in its hour of crisis in order to look after themselves first and abandon Europe to its fate. But in my half-century of being ‘wedded’ to France, the fact that the “English” have always been able to withdraw from the Gothic Horrors of continental experience has usually been seen in France seen as a piece of enviable good fortune for the English, for the only option for the French is to withdraw into their extensive areas of thinly populated “outback”. As one French lady said to me after the Trump victory, the French still like to see themselves as ‘Gauls’ at heart ever ready to melt away from the long reach of any ruling establishment based on Paris, Brussels or even New York or Washington.
Moreover most ‘enlightened’ French people see just how France has often gained from this English capacity for stepping outside the mainstream of History and carrying on as one united folk along a path shaped by the common sense of one common people working together in the interests of one commonweal. For a recurring theme of French History has been the periods of exile in England that shaped the future visions of men like Voltaire, Louis Napoleon, and more recently those “Free French” exiles who went on to build the new post-war France and the EU, notably Jean Monnet and Charles De Gaulle.
It often seems somewhat unfortunate to the English, however, that these French exiles have usually seized on the idea that our ‘ways and means’ could be adapted to serve a French tradition of top-down government that imposes some half-hearted unity on its complex patchwork of what Voltaire described about 40 different ‘peoples’. And General De Gaulle was mostly dismissive about the important work being done by as part of the Free French organization in London during the war by Simone Weil, who looked at those very fundamental problems that had turned the French people into Henri Amouroux’s “people of disaster” in 1940. For Simone Weil seems to have found in London at war the crucial role of the spirit that she had been striving to understand. In December 1942, for example, she wrote to her parents from London: “In one way, both the people and things here seem to me to be exactly as I think I expected them to be, and in another way perhaps better. Lawrence somewhere describes England with the words ‘humour and kindness’, and one meets these two traits everywhere in the small incidents of daily life…Especially kindness…People’s nerves are tense, but they control them out of self-respect and a true generosity toward others.”
And there were British people who were interviewed during the referendum campaign who refused to balk at the prospect that England or Britain might have to ‘stand- alone’ once again in a world once more reduced to turbulence, insecurity and conflict.
THE CHARACTER OF ENGLAND
For, as the Oxford University Press book “The Character of England” pointed out in 1947, this idea that there is something particularly special about England goes all the way back at least to the works of William Shakespeare, and it still seemed relevant in to quote an English historian who wrote in 1585 “The English had always been, and at present were, a free people, such as in few or no other realms were to be found the like, by which freedom was maintained a valiant courage in that people”; and to add that “Philip of Spain, Louis of France, Bonaparte, William II, and Adolf Hitler- each made the same challenge, and each evoked the same response. This valiant courage …has never been very far beneath the surface of the English mind, and the soil which nourished it has never been exhausted.” For underpinning the strength of a “free people” had always been an “instinctive understanding of the fact that the greatest threat to liberty of the individual comes from too great a concentration of power at the centre; and that the most direct way of escaping the tyrannical exercise of power is to exercise it oneself”.
Furthermore it still seemed appropriate to quote John Stuart Mill who “… was expressing…a truth which is fundamental to the English way of life and which differentiates it sharply from that of most other countries. Whether it has been a matter of internal organization of English society, or of the growth of English influence abroad, the impulse of life in England has always come from below; it has never been imposed from above. And it is this impulse, its direction rather than its force, the fact that it derives from the community (and from the individual within the community) rather than from government, which has given so much flexibility to English political thought, and which has enabled far-reaching social changes to take place without undue disturbance and without any break in the long continuity of English life.”
And by general consensus the “impulse” to Brexit mostly came from below, possibly because of the changes that were already foreseeable in 1947. For Professor Ernest Barker, wondered whether the portrait drawn in this book might be too heavily based on the England of yesterday. That had been the England of “the home”, each home responsible for managing its own affairs. But under the impact of two world wars it was possible that “the way ahead” lay through the “development of national life and national government”.
“If this is the tendency of our times, we are facing a change greater than any revolution or reformation in our history; we are beginning to abandon the tentative and experimental method of the past- the accommodations and the compromises- the mass of individual skills, the amateur efforts, and the voluntary activities- the general structure of the English habitat…into a planned and managed economy of the pure central reason?...But experience is also a teacher: and one of the lessons of experience is that men are willing to accept in war what they are ready to refuse in peace. Nor are the habits of a nation, and its silent sense of its own way of life, so readily sloughed, even at the call of pure reason.”
And it seems possible that, after another seventy years of living in a world shaped above all by wars of various kinds, the Brexit vote was indeed a declaration of independence from the whole ganged- up complex of State establishments that have tried to manage the world since 1945.
The hopes that the end of the Cold War over a quarter of a century ago might finally lead towards world peace have proved fallacious and much the same kind of popular discontent with the governing establishment that fatally undermined the Soviet Empire has inspired widespread ‘grass roots’ protest elsewhere, along with hopes for real change that have resulted in the current unsettled and unpredictable state of the world.
ENGLAND AND EUROPE
We should not be surprised, therefore, if some of our less sympathetic European neighbours see Brexit as just another example of the English withdrawing from Europe in its hour of crisis in order to look after themselves first and abandon Europe to its fate. But in my half-century of being ‘wedded’ to France, the fact that the “English” have always been able to withdraw from the Gothic Horrors of continental experience has usually been seen in France seen as a piece of enviable good fortune for the English, for the only option for the French is to withdraw into their extensive areas of thinly populated “outback”. As one French lady said to me after the Trump victory, the French still like to see themselves as ‘Gauls’ at heart ever ready to melt away from the long reach of any ruling establishment based on Paris, Brussels or even New York or Washington.
Moreover most ‘enlightened’ French people see just how France has often gained from this English capacity for stepping outside the mainstream of History and carrying on as one united folk along a path shaped by the common sense of one common people working together in the interests of one commonweal. For a recurring theme of French History has been the periods of exile in England that shaped the future visions of men like Voltaire, Louis Napoleon, and more recently those “Free French” exiles who went on to build the new post-war France and the EU, notably Jean Monnet and Charles De Gaulle.
It often seems somewhat unfortunate to the English, however, that these French exiles have usually seized on the idea that our ‘ways and means’ could be adapted to serve a French tradition of top-down government that imposes some half-hearted unity on its complex patchwork of what Voltaire described about 40 different ‘peoples’. And General De Gaulle was mostly dismissive about the important work being done by as part of the Free French organization in London during the war by Simone Weil, who looked at those very fundamental problems that had turned the French people into Henri Amouroux’s “people of disaster” in 1940. For Simone Weil seems to have found in London at war the crucial role of the spirit that she had been striving to understand. In December 1942, for example, she wrote to her parents from London: “In one way, both the people and things here seem to me to be exactly as I think I expected them to be, and in another way perhaps better. Lawrence somewhere describes England with the words ‘humour and kindness’, and one meets these two traits everywhere in the small incidents of daily life…Especially kindness…People’s nerves are tense, but they control them out of self-respect and a true generosity toward others.”
And there were British people who were interviewed during the referendum campaign who refused to balk at the prospect that England or Britain might have to ‘stand- alone’ once again in a world once more reduced to turbulence, insecurity and conflict.
THE CHARACTER OF ENGLAND
For, as the Oxford University Press book “The Character of England” pointed out in 1947, this idea that there is something particularly special about England goes all the way back at least to the works of William Shakespeare, and it still seemed relevant in to quote an English historian who wrote in 1585 “The English had always been, and at present were, a free people, such as in few or no other realms were to be found the like, by which freedom was maintained a valiant courage in that people”; and to add that “Philip of Spain, Louis of France, Bonaparte, William II, and Adolf Hitler- each made the same challenge, and each evoked the same response. This valiant courage …has never been very far beneath the surface of the English mind, and the soil which nourished it has never been exhausted.” For underpinning the strength of a “free people” had always been an “instinctive understanding of the fact that the greatest threat to liberty of the individual comes from too great a concentration of power at the centre; and that the most direct way of escaping the tyrannical exercise of power is to exercise it oneself”.
Furthermore it still seemed appropriate to quote John Stuart Mill who “… was expressing…a truth which is fundamental to the English way of life and which differentiates it sharply from that of most other countries. Whether it has been a matter of internal organization of English society, or of the growth of English influence abroad, the impulse of life in England has always come from below; it has never been imposed from above. And it is this impulse, its direction rather than its force, the fact that it derives from the community (and from the individual within the community) rather than from government, which has given so much flexibility to English political thought, and which has enabled far-reaching social changes to take place without undue disturbance and without any break in the long continuity of English life.”
And by general consensus the “impulse” to Brexit mostly came from below, possibly because of the changes that were already foreseeable in 1947. For Professor Ernest Barker, wondered whether the portrait drawn in this book might be too heavily based on the England of yesterday. That had been the England of “the home”, each home responsible for managing its own affairs. But under the impact of two world wars it was possible that “the way ahead” lay through the “development of national life and national government”.
“If this is the tendency of our times, we are facing a change greater than any revolution or reformation in our history; we are beginning to abandon the tentative and experimental method of the past- the accommodations and the compromises- the mass of individual skills, the amateur efforts, and the voluntary activities- the general structure of the English habitat…into a planned and managed economy of the pure central reason?...But experience is also a teacher: and one of the lessons of experience is that men are willing to accept in war what they are ready to refuse in peace. Nor are the habits of a nation, and its silent sense of its own way of life, so readily sloughed, even at the call of pure reason.”
And it seems possible that, after another seventy years of living in a world shaped above all by wars of various kinds, the Brexit vote was indeed a declaration of independence from the whole ganged- up complex of State establishments that have tried to manage the world since 1945.
