First off I would like to apologize for making my readership wait with baited breath for so long before releasing this first session with Schulze. I hope you will still find the time to read through my report and post any comments y'all might have. I will shoot any particularly interesting remarks back to my source and hopefully a productive dialogue will emerge.
Secondly, I would like to thank my good friends Matt, Scott, and Kerry for the hospitality they showed me during my visit to Newcastle. If this post seems a bit brief, it is because they were more enthusiastic in welcoming up North than participating in potentially controversial political discourse.
This post is my summary of their collective beliefs and is not in any way representative of my own. Now you have no excuse for being overly nasty in your comments.
The Newcastlers are not ignorant or bigoted in any way, in fact two of them are going through a Master's program in education currently with the goal of becoming secondary school teachers. I preface my report with this statement because their views, I suspect, will run very contrary to that of my classmates. They do not hold any prejudiced attitudes towards non-English people, in fact recognizing most gratefully the contributions immigrants can make to British society overall, but that does not stop them from positing some concerns about the recent trend in surging immigrant numbers. They are not concerned with losing jobs or moral erosion or whatever jazz colors the immigration debate in America. No, their concern is anchored to the concept of cultural preservation.
Now I know it seems like the height of hypocrisy for the British of all people to be concerned with the preservation of British culture. These are the very people which conquered numerous peoples and led to the purging of an untold amount of cultural practice and knowledge around the world. However, denying the modern British access to a concern shared by numerous peoples is unjust.
England, unlike America with its Melting Pot persona, has for nearly all of its modern and not-so-modern history been a nation-state, that is a political entity populated by a particular ethnic group. England was the home of the Anglo-Saxons. Anything popularly portrayed as "English" such as commonwealth law, the House of Windsor, cricket, etc. was invented by these pale, proud, German orphans. This single population group accounted for 95+% of the total demography of England until the mid-20th century. That's when the sons and daughters of the Mother Country started knocking and coming "home" shortly followed by everyone else as Globalization shrunk the world.
Now as I mentioned before my friends are perfectly cool with immigrants coming over, kicking their feet up, queuing up for the NHS, whatever. Heck, some of their best friends are not English. However, according to some recent reports (EDIT: I never bothered to corroborate their facts and figures) the population of recent immigrants is set to overtake the English sometime in the next century. Anglo-Saxons will no longer be the dominant ethnic group and a hefty chunk of the population will only be first or second generation English subjects. The possibility that England would no longer be the home of the English and that proper English culture might be tangibly influenced by their new fellow citizens could become a reality. An England without "real English." This is what concerns them.
Now when other peoples begin to lose their homeland or the practices which define their particular culture it is the common liberal artsy response to jump to their aid. Free Tibet! I Yield for Kurds! A Place Called Oaxaca Actually Exists and It Needs Your Help! My friends have little faith that anybody will ever sympathize with their supposed plight. This immigrant population trend cannot be interrupted without radical and unethical action or the election of a BNP government, impossibilities all because of the afore mentioned up right nature of my friends. Unfortunately, not everyone in England shares their temperament. Supposedly we will all be alive to see how it plays out.
*I know I've used the terms English and British somewhat loosely in this post. Deal with it.
I am going to post my own qualms with their theory early. 1) By morphing into this imperial culture in the first place, shouldn't the English get shackled with their dominions? 2)A similar phenomena happened to Classical Greece during the transition to the Hellenic Age. They still seemed okay for a couple centuries longer.
ReplyDeleteAh, but attempts to integrate the barbarian Germans tore Rome apart. The legions failed for lack of discipline and the empire dissolved from the edges.
DeleteIt also can't help that a ton of these new immigrants, moving to a secular, common-law country, hail from open or effective theocracies. You recall the attempt three years ago to get criticisms of religion labeled hate speech? There's cause for self-preservation responses when facing a cultural invasion on that level.
Isn't calling back to the now-dissolved British Empire just sins-of-the-father bullshit? If not, I demand right of return to the Russian Steppe.
I was alluding more to the perpetuating of Greek culture after the rise of Macedon than the Roman Empire. Not only did Hellenism persevere after the dismantling of the Classical Greek political schemes, but it even expanded. Bastions of Greekyness have been found as far away as India, and the those pesky Romans made sure that Europe was inundated with facsimiles of naked, wrestling athletes.
DeleteThe second point is a very large concern as well. It seems like every couple of months Yahoo is publishing an article presenting figures that point towards some theocratic political agenda of North African immigrants.
I agree with the "sins-of-the-father" sentiment to an extent, but to me it is more of a "sins-of-my-angsty-teenager-self." No matter how hard he tries, George Dubya Bush will never shake off the stains left by a college career marked by sub-par cheer leading and full on coke abuse. Was the Empire "just a stage" of England's development that can be forgiven?
What I wanted to get at was that the dramatic cultural shifts that result from major demographic changes don't always have a happy ending. Even if the nation survives its older denizens might not be entirely happy with the way things turned out, and survival is not a historical guarantee.
DeleteThere does seem to be a huge problem with people either not actually knowing what they're getting into when they move to western Europe. As much as I can sympathize with the desire to escape from agriculturally-feeble, rights-negative countries at any cost, it is not unreasonable to ask that immigrants adapt to the new culture instead of demanding that it adapt to them. There are things that the new host country can and should do to expedite this process, but there has been a disturbing tendency amongst Muslim immigrant populations, for example, to form ethnic enclaves that quickly become no-go zones for local police as religiously-inspired mob justice takes hold. That needs to stop happening, or the rest of the population will react to expel them and be completely justified in doing so.
Saying that the Empire was a teenaged mistake that Britain needs to atone for is a cognitive hiccup. Britain isn't a person, it's a collective of persons, and most of the ones that currently inhabit it weren't alive for the Empire. They're faultless in that regard; there's nothing to forgive them for. In my ethical evaluation of the situation they have the standard responsibility of people in a situation of luxurious excess to funnel their surplus resources to those living in critical condition--provided they do it in a productive manner that doesn't undermine industry in the afflicted area--and that's it. Any implication that they ought to martyr their economic or social stability in the name of former British territories because they "owe it" to them is ridiculous and properly met with derision.
PS: Also, the next grouping of Sessions with Schulze will be out real soon. They deal with the Irish and Scottish perspectives on living under English hegemony. Remember, not all colonies were abroad.
ReplyDelete