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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32498 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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The United Kingdom is unique not because its longstanding ruling class have survived in some degree of power (the same is true in Western Germany, in most of Italy, in much of Spain, to some extent in the Low Countries and Scandinavia) but because the caste system that once defined British society persists.

That's exactly what's unique about the United Kingdom (and to a certain extent Scandinavia). You were just too polite to mention the war.

Famously, the United Kingdom has not been invaded for almost a thousand years.

Consider the great powers of Europe. Germany was defeated twice, bombed to rubble, and then occupied for half a century (in name in the West, in brutal fact in the East). It's one thing to lease your family's old fortress to the National Trust, and it's another to have it bombed by a thousand Flying Fortresses. The English nobility have enjoyed centuries of stability and wealth that allows them to pass great fortunes through the generations. The Uradel has had no such luck. In the 20th C alone, reparations, war taxes, the Soviets, and the Lancaster have reduced their great estates to merely an estate car for the monthly summer in Sylt.

The fate of the French aristocracy is obviously not a head scratcher. Even if we look only at the past century, while the French won both world wars, the experience was almost as ruinous as it was for the Germans.

We can continue. The Low Countries were churned to mud by trench and shell, and then occupied by the Germans. The Italians and the Spanish had poverty, Mussolini, and Franco.

The endurance of the British aristocracy is not due to a quirk of the British national character, but merely the result of a half century of war. In the rest of Europe, the PMC is all that's left.

There is no fellow feeling between castes in Britain. There is, to some extent, shared allegiance to some cultural or political institutions - the monarchy, the military, the flag. There is a shared mythos, shared legend, aspects of common identity - like the pastoral fantasy, an obsession with gossip, a fondness for queueing, firm politeness, a strange and unique sense of 'fairness' that I've written about here before.

In the very recent past there was. Even in the 60s, the commoners would address a lord with deference. Whenever the royal anthem was played, people would stop and stand. People would say "I know my place" without irony.

The recent decoupling of the British aristocracy from the rest of Britain is also not a quirk of the British national character. The rest of Britain was culturally colonized by American individualism and self-creation. We carpet bombed their airwaves.

Wasn't England invaded in 1688?

I suppose you can say that it was an invasion 'only' targeting the ruling dynasty and not the nation as a whole.

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