Chesterton writes a good essay called “The Price of Patriotism” which makes the following simple argument – that it is right to identify with the triumphs of one’s national ancestors, no matter what the braying pseudo-rationalistic naysayers babble; but by the same coin it is right to identify with the moral failures of our forebears. We ought to feel a species of reflected glory from and pride in the first, and a sorrow and repentance for the latter. If we want the first, we must have the second.
This is plainly tangentially relevant to some discussions of the present moment, where the extremes of each side of the discussion demand a wholehearted focus on one aspect or the other – “I’ve never done any slave trading – but I did win two World Wars!” vs “Our nation has only ever done evil, and we must all feel perpetually miserable about it, flagellating ourselves and our public squares” – but the issue is of general interest. The present spasm will pass in due time, and everyone will find the public vandals a historic embarrassment, to be brushed under the carpet – but of course, they are us. The troubled issue of our relationship to our ancestors never end, precisely because the lineage never truly ends. The Greeks now truly are the heritage of Mycenae and Minos. The hybrid stock of the British Isles really does carry the spirit of the Witengamot and the Conquest and the Levellers and Wellington and Nelson in the deep chests beneath their knobbly and forgettable faces. You are still more likely to go to Oxbridge with a Norman surname than with a Saxon – the past is never truly gone.
And indeed nations, peoples, are a mystical incorporation – I would say they are so in a genuinely mystical sense, but even the pragmatist must recognise that the role of common identity, between the past, present, and future, is vital to any sort of collective action. There must be a sense that my interests extend beyond myself or at broadest my household, if I am to exert myself to the uttermost for my neighbour in war or famine. The Idealist may appeal to the Brotherhood of Man, but the Pragmatist knows that this is a weak folk story, and stronger legends are needed. A shared history and common future is the strongest legend yet discovered, whether at the national or religious level. (To me, I should add, this is because all such legends point to the True Legend, the City that cannot be shaken.)
But how are we to perceive the past? Are we to take our standard from the latest critical retelling of history? Are we to take it from the braying Britannians in their double-breasted jackets? (I mean no disrespect to double-breasted jackets, of course.) Ultimately all things are defined by the True Standard, but for my pluralistic audience, let me offer three pragmatic measures by which we engage with our past, which is also our mystical present.
First, and most naturally, there is moral intuition. Intuitions are not wholly trustworthy, and change quickly based on an expanded dataset (it is very common to see people’s view of abortion change once they have learned some basic embryology; they move from indifference to the embryo to passionate defence of it). Yet intuitions are what we have in lieu of a coherent public imaginative and moral world. The true British centrist statistically believes in funding the NHS and hanging paedophiles, and views a little like those are prevalent in virtually every society ever. Even that greenhouse for pederasts, Classical Greece, abhorred the forcible rape of minors. Even the great sceptics of government in the American Revolution believed in some sort of charitably free healthcare for the poor. Randolph of Roanoke spent his estate on buying land for his emancipated slaves. Moral intuitions are surprisingly hardy, for all our fears of moral relativism; the problem is not that we cannot intuit right and wrong, it is that we do so intuit and then do not follow through.
When we bring our moral intuition to bear on the past, we will be horrified by the action of every Jacobin, and yet admire Danton’s courage, loathe Marat’s grossness, and have a cold respect for Robespierre’s recognition that man is a religious being. Danton was a Big Heart serving an awful cause – so was John Bell Gordon. Our intuition goes further than the summary of individual persons, of course – when we discover that the Jacobins were genocidaires, we will become French Royalists in that moment, at least for that moment.
If we are British, then, when we look at British history, and honestly attempt to learn it, we will find horrors aplenty – the treatment of Ireland for 271 years from 1558-1829 comes to mind most prominently, whether Drogheda or land theft or the Popery Laws – but also begin to exercise caution at our new self-loathing legend. Britain was, by any standard, a mild colonial power across much of its empire; we will damn its crimes, but reluctantly acknowledge that there are always hegemons, and that in historical comparison, Britain has less to be ashamed of than many of its contemporaries. Indeed, we will see the nearly unique feature of British hegemony that it often intentionally furthered humane ends by state power – the extirpation of the slave trade, or of sati, come quickly to mind. The Jesuits of South America were heroic intercessors for their Indian neighbours, but that was a private power; but it was Victoria Regina who pressured her Prime Ministers to maintain frigate squadrons off the African coast.
Moral intuition, when married to real historical study, gives us the ability to “judge for ourselves”. Furthermore, when aimed at the worst crimes of our ancestors, it serves as a purgative, as a healthy form of patriotic repentance. Rather than framing our forebears in ideological categories – “Livingstone was a Colonialist and therefore a rotter!” – we judge their deeds by mankind’s moral sextant. We reckon our ancestors’ credit by reference to the bank of human wisdom, not the latest post-intelligent Post-Colonial theorem. We execrate the cold oppressions of the early Hanoverians, submitting those deeds to the sword – we then no longer need to be ashamed of the purge of the clans, though still sorrowful. By the same mark, though, we can celebrate the courage of George II at Dettingen – truly a national avatar, a monarch leading his men, wearing the red jacket he had worn as a stripling at Oudenaarde – “Bravery never goes out of fashion.”
Here we move into the second approach to our shared past – absorption into legend. We must have a trained moral intuition as well, if we are not to fall into asinine self-congratulation and self-delusion – but the moral intuition cannot root without rich subsoil. It judges, and then withers; it produces no flower; none of us can graze upon its crop. Legend is the subsoil – it is the half-remembered family history which defines us. The British legend has many heroes – sometimes these heroes even fought each other! Yet now they sit together in the Council of Our Dead. Thus Eliot:
We
cannot revive old factions
We cannot restore old policies
Or follow an antique drum.
These men, and those who opposed them
And those whom they opposed
Accept the constitution of silence
And are folded in a single party.
Whatever we inherit from the fortunate
We have taken from the defeated
What they had to leave us—a symbol:
A symbol perfected in death.
Montrose and Falkland stand beside the Diggers; Stephen and Matilda, who ravaged England utterly with their brilliance and virtue, sit together on the dais; Arthur and Lancelot are reconciled in Logres.
You must drink the Legend. You must stand with the Saxon remnants at Ethandune if you wish to have any worthwhile position on our national story; if you see such time-travelling as mere romanticism, you only show that your “taproot in Eden” is cut. You are a withered thing if you can only live in the present, or only go to the past to analyse or to hate.
The Legend, properly applied, will never cover the faults of the present. It will always spur us to prophetic denunciation and a desire to rebuild the slighted ruins of our nation. The Legend is as good a tool to fillet our wretched education system with as any number of outcome measurements – after all, we used to raise leaders like the Pitts, or Salisbury; churchmen of the quality of Spurgeon or Newman; once, nearly every workman had read or heard large sections of the Pilgrim’s Progress. The Legend damns our systems of education and training by showing us how sub-dwarflike our own leaders are, our own standards of knowledge are. I offer that as an example, and a negative one; but the Legend serves in each situation, and sometimes by casting a balmy glow upon our efforts. When one sees the strides in education made by Classically-inclined schools in poor, ethnically diverse parts of London, one remembers the schools for the poor of Renaissance England – that gave the sons of bricklayers a chance to become Poet Laureate.
Finally, historical sympathy is vital. This is different to moral intuition and the absorption of the legend. Moral intuition judges right and wrong; absorbing the legend gives us a trans-temporal narrative to inhabit, so we don’t wither; but historical sympathy makes us care. It is very hard to hate your ancestor – or to divinise them, either – if you know them. Virtually every soul is a chiaroscuro of colour, of black and white deeds, or dark thoughts but better doings, of good intentions leading to Hell. We might take a different attitude to statues of Cecil Rhodes if we stepped back from rioting – and counter-editorialising! – to imagine that Cecil Rhodes was once a man, not a statue. Why did he do what he did, both good and evil?
We have an especial duty to exercise this sympathy for our ancestors – because we are them. Their story is quite literally our story, and informs every lineament of the struggles of our time. If we cannot imagine what drove a Charles or a Cromwell, we cannot ever truly understand what drives us. If we cannot imagine the fears of both the Chartist and the Landlord – if we cannot travel to Australia with the transported Chartist and their Navy guard – if we cannot be both Grace Growden Galloway, that great Philadelphia Loyalist, and her Patriot persecutors (who were still English, then, for a few mort short years) – well, then, we have no sympathy for ourselves, and our posterity shall have even less. If we make them mere ciphers for ideologies, we make ourselves mere ciphers – only our ideologies are smaller and meaner than the ones we ascribe to them.
We own, whether we like it or not, the glories and horrors of our past. The worst Wimbledon-born electric-cycling SOAS student is baptised with the blood on the sand at Abu Klea. They have stood within the broken square – and they have stood. And I have butchered at Drogheda. There is no escape from our past; only an organic reclaiming can make sense of it all. I have offered some suggestion how.
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