as i write, highly civilized human beings essay

So deep does this feeling go that for a hundred years past the officers of the British army, in peace time, have always worn civilian clothes when off duty. The higher commanders, drawn from the aristocracy, could never prepare for modern war, because in order to do so they would have had to admit to themselves that the world was changing. Economically, England is certainly two nations, if not three or four. The reason why the English anti-militarism disgusts foreign observers is that it ignores the existence of the British Empire. The old-style 'proletarian'--collarless, unshaven and with muscles warped by heavy labour--still exists, but he is constantly decreasing in numbers; he only predominates in the heavy-industry areas of the north of England. They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. The British ruling class were not altogether wrong in thinking that Fascism was on their side. What it does link up with, however, is another English characteristic which is so much a part of us that we barely notice it, and that is the addiction to hobbies and spare-time occupations, the privateness of English life. And yet the gentleness of English civilization is mixed up with barbarities and anachronisms. That is not to say that the future is fixed, merely that certain alternatives are possible and others not. The sole result was that they brought back a hatred of all Europeans, except the Germans, whose courage they admired. A person who has grown up in a council housing estate is likely to be--indeed, visibly is-- more middle class in outlook than a person who has grown up in a slum. The Italians adopted the goose-step at about the time when Italy passed definitely under German control, and, as one would expect, they do it less well than the Germans. google_ad_channel ="2035086929"; After 1918 there began to appear something that had never existed in England before: people of indeterminate social class. There is a sort of back-handed admission of this in the dislike which nearly all foreigners feel for our national way of life. Remarks like 'They can't run me in; I haven't done anything wrong', or 'They can't do that; it's against the law', are part of the atmosphere of England. A Scotsman, for instance, does not thank you if you call him an Englishman. And of the last war, the four names which have really engraved themselves on the popular memory are Mons, Ypres, Gallipoli and Passchendaele, every time a disaster. But the famous ‘insularity’ and ‘xenophobia’ of the English is far stronger in the working class than in the bourgeoisie. Here are a couple of generalizations about England that would be accepted by almost all observers. 2. But this is also the only art that cannot cross frontiers. Before the Boer War they prepared for the Zulu War, before the 1914 for the Boer War, and before the present war for 1914. Decades before Hitler was ever heard of, the word 'Prussian' had much the same significance in England as 'Nazi' has today. My mother killed herself when I was 12. And considering what energy the self-made men possessed, and considering that they were buying their way into a class which at any rate had a tradition of public service, one might have expected that able rulers could be produced in some such way. But in all societies the common people must live to some extent against the existing order. Imperialist sentiment remained strong in the middle class, chiefly owing to family tradition, but the job of administering the Empire had ceased to appeal. Only when the results of his policy became apparent did it turn against him; which is to say that it turned against its own lethargy of the past seven years. No politician could rise to power by promising them conquests or military 'glory', no Hymn of Hate has ever made any appeal to them. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well-placed bomb, he will never sleep any the worse for, Swift, Orwell, and King: Standing against the Injustices of Their Times. The wealthy shipowner or cotton-miller set up for himself an alibi as a country gentleman, while his sons learned the right mannerisms at public schools which had been designed for just that purpose. In the working class patriotism is profound, but it is unconscious. Are there really such things as nations? They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. Both the NEW STATESMAN and the NEWS CHRONICLE cried out against the Munich settlement, but even they had done something to make it possible. At any normal time the ruling class will rob, mismanage, sabotage, lead us into the muck; but let popular opinion really make itself heard, let them get a tug from below that they cannot avoid feeling, and it is difficult for them not to respond. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well-placed bomb, he will never sleep any the worse for it. I'd rather stay at home, They have to satisfy these tastes in the face of astonishing, hypocritical laws (licensing laws, lottery acts, etc. From that time onwards it has been next door to impossible to induce young men of spirit to take any part in imperial administration. It is rooted deep in history, and it is strong in the lower-middle class as well as the working class. There is no popular poem about Trafalgar or Waterloo, for instance. So deep does this feeling go that for a hundred years past the officers of the British army, in peace time, have always worn civilian clothes when off duty. It needs some very great disaster, such as prolonged subjugation by a foreign enemy, to destroy a national culture. Since the fifties every war in which England has engaged has started off with a series of disasters, after which the situation has been saved by people comparatively low in the social scale. As a positive emotion it is stronger in the middle class than in the upper class – the cheap public schools, for instance, are more given to patriotic demonstrations than the expensive ones – but the number of definitely treacherous rich men, the Laval-Quisling type, is probably very small. At the moment when it seemed likely that England might be invaded, Anthony Eden appealed over the radio for Local Defence Volunteers. We are a nation of flower-lovers, but also a nation of stamp-collectors, pigeon-fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon-snippers, darts-players, crossword-puzzle fans. But their dislike of standing armies is a perfectly sound instinct. Both of these punishments are obscene as well as cruel, but there has never been any genuinely popular outcry against them. The hanging judge, that evil old man in scarlet robe and horse-hair wig, whom nothing short of dynamite will ever teach what century he is living in, but who will at any rate interpret the law according to the books and will in no circumstances take a money bribe, is one of the symbolic figures of England. George Orwell England Your England But they have a certain power of acting without taking thought. In the general patriotism of the country they form a sort of island of dissident thought. They had to FEEL themselves true patriots, even while they plundered their countrymen. A truly corrupt class would have done this without hesitation, as in France. There is no question about the inequality of wealth in England. date: 2001-05-12 & L. Well within living memory it was common for ‘the redcoats’ to be booed at in the streets and for the landlords of respectable public houses to refuse to allow soldiers on the premises. At the time of the Spanish Civil War, anyone with as much political knowledge as can be acquired from a sixpenny pamphlet on Socialism knew that, if Franco won, the result would be strategically disastrous for England; and yet generals and admirals who had given their lives to the study of war were unable to grasp this fact. Necessarily so, because society as it was constituted had no room for him. It is safe to let a paper like Peace News be sold, because it is certain that ninety-five per cent of the population will never want to read it. Only half a million people, the people in the country houses, definitely benefited from the existing system. His "Modest Proposal" was a strong satirical attack against British imperialism in Ireland, though, and the extreme poverty, hunger and oppression faced by the inhabitants of that island. To understand Fascism they would have had to study the theory of Socialism, which would have forced them to realize that the economic system by which they lived was unjust, inefficient and out-of-date. I won't complete that relationship. By 1930 millions were aware of it. There they sat, at the centre of a vast empire and a world-wide financial network, drawing interest and profits and spending them – on what? 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. What was it that at every decisive moment made every British statesman do the wrong thing with so unerring an instinct? Yet at the moment of writing it is still possible to speak of a ruling class. And like everything else it can change only in certain directions, which up to a point can be foreseen. Over against the Nazi Storm Trooper you have got to set that typically English figure, the hanging judge, some gouty old bully with his mind rooted in the nineteenth century, handing out savage sentences. They are ‘only doing their duty’, as the saying goes. Moreover, the tendency of small businesses to merge together into large ones robbed more and more of the moneyed class of their function and turned them into mere owners, their work being done for them by salaried managers and technicians. For long past there had been in England an entirely functionless class, living on money that was invested they hardly knew where, the ‘idle rich’, the people whose photographs you can look at in the Tatler and the Bystander, always supposing that you want to. It is very rare to meet a foreigner, other than an American, who can distinguish between English and Scots or even English and Irish. That could not happen if these people were the cynical scoundrels that they are sometimes declared to be. And even the distinction between rich and poor dwindles somewhat when one regards the nation from the outside. After all, the English have absorbed a quarter of the earth and held on to it by means of a huge navy. What is to be expected of them is not treachery, or physical cowardice, but stupidity, unconscious sabotage, an infallible instinct for doing the wrong thing. A military parade is really a kind of ritual dance, something like a ballet, expressing a certain philosophy of life. Spaniards are cruel to animals, Italians can do nothing without making a deafening noise, the Chinese are addicted to gambling. But in any calculation about it one has got to take into account its emotional unity, the tendency of nearly all its inhabitants to feel alike and act together in moments of supreme crisis. Throughout its vast extent, nearly a quarter of the earth, there were fewer armed men than would be found necessary by a minor Balkan state. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. It is rooted deep in history, and it is strong in the lower-middle class as well as the working class. This fact had been known to millions of people for years past, but nothing ever came of it, because there was no real urge from below to alter the system, and those at the top had trained themselves to be impenetrably stupid on just this point. They are inveterate gamblers, drink as much beer as their wages will permit, are devoted to bawdy jokes, and use probably the foulest language in the world. It is obvious, of course, that even this purely private liberty is a lost cause. Men like Clive, Nelson, Nicholson, Gordon would find no place for themselves in the modern British Empire. But the general weakening of imperialism, and to some extent of the whole British morale, that took place during the nineteen-thirties, was partly the work of the left-wing intelligentsia, itself a kind of growth that had sprouted from the stagnation of the Empire. But this ignores the considerable agreement that does unfortunately exist between the leaders and the led. The ‘realism’ which is preached in Japanese and Italian newspapers would horrify them. Hitler and Mussolini rose to power in their own countries very largely because they could grasp this fact and their opponents could not. It is quite true that the so-called races of Britain feel themselves to be very different from one another. At normal times it is deeply dishonest. They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. google_color_text = "000000"; This essay is as perfect as it is possible for an essay to be. Yes, there is something distinctive and recognizable in English civilization. However much one may hate to admit it, it is almost certain that between 1931 and 1940 the National Government represented the will of the mass of the people. But at the same time modern industry is so complicated that it cannot get along without great numbers of managers, salesmen, engineers, chemists and technicians of all kinds, drawing fairly large salaries. Not at all, merely that it will tell them to do the same thing. google_color_url = "CC0000"; After 1918 there began to appear something that had never existed in England before: people of indeterminate social class. It is a fact that any rich man, unless he is a Jew, has less to fear from Fascism than from either Communism or democratic Socialism. As people to live under, and looking at them merely from a liberal, negative standpoint, the British ruling class had their points. The Vichy government, if it survives, is bound to introduce a stiffer parade-ground discipline into what is left of the French army. The working man's heart does not leap when he sees a Union Jack. The intellectuals who hope to see it Russianized or Germanized will be disappointed. ____ 2) It is true that they aided them to a certain extent with money. Above all, it is not the case in the new townships that have developed as a result of cheap motor cars and the southward shift of industry. After all, they belonged to a class with a certain tradition, they had been to public schools where the duty of dying for your country, if necessary, is laid down as the first and greatest of the Commandments. Jonathan Swift and Martin Luther King never compromised their principles even if it might have been practical and expedient to do so, while George Orwell admitted to having done so once, only with great reluctance and regret. The policeman who arrests the 'red' does not understand the theories the 'red' is preaching; if he did his own position as bodyguard of the moneyed class might seem less pleasant to him. Dare one pretend that there is anything in common between people with £100,000 a year and people with £1 a week? Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. It must be admitted that so long as things were peaceful the methods of the British ruling class served them well enough. Till recently it was thought proper to pretend that all human beings are very much alike, but in fact anyone able to use his eyes knows that the average of human behaviour differs enormously from country to country. One rapid but fairly sure guide to the social atmosphere of a country is the parade-step of its army. What was it that at every decisive moment made every British statesman do the wrong thing with so unerring an instinct? It is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes. On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time. Politicians who would make cringing speeches about 'the duty of loyalty to our conquerors' are hardly to be found in English public life. Few able men went east of Suez if there was any way of avoiding it. Except for a brief moment in 1920 (the 'Hands off Russia' movement) the British working class have never thought or acted internationally. The higher commanders, drawn from the aristocracy, could never prepare for modern war, because in order to do so they would have had to admit to themselves that the world was changing. One thing that has always shown that the English ruling class are MORALLY fairly sound, is that in time of war they are ready enough to get themselves killed. Still, the Empire was underdeveloped, India slept in the Middle Ages, the Dominions lay empty, with foreigners jealously barred out, and even England was full of slums and unemployment. By 1920 nearly every inch of the colonial empire was in the grip of Whitehall. To an increasing extent the rich and the poor read the same books, and they also see the same films and listen to the same radio programmes. Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there. The gentleness of English civilization is mixed up with barbarities and anachronisms was! Private life making a deafening noise, the Chinese are addicted to gambling the outside common people must live some... Civilization is mixed up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky and. 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