A cake is a cake: the making of a nation
The notion that we come from nothing, are nothing, and have nothing to be proud of is an arrogant and shallow retort to anything resembling British patriotism.
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There is a new sentiment that we so often hear about, especially of late, that there is no such thing as a Briton, or that nothing can really be called British. That ‘British’ is the delusion of a jingoist fever-dream, whipped up by demagogues, or ‘Russian trolls’, to pervert the masses into a nationalistic fervour. Egged on by a media and intellectual class who, in the words of George Orwell would feel more shame standing for the national anthem than stealing from a church donation box, pathologically dislike anything British. A recent onslaught of this messaging was brought on by the success, and subsequent failure, of the England national team in last summer’s Euros, a tournament steeped in each form of progressive messaging. England, we were told, wouldn't have done so well if it weren't for immigration. 'So shut up, bigot, and enjoy the bread and circuses'.
The notion that we come from nothing, are nothing, and have nothing to be proud of is an arrogant and shallow retort to anything resembling British patriotism. Its inherent nihilism and oikophobia is backed up by a flawed understanding of the British story, made in either ignorance or bad faith depending on the actor. I wrote ‘the British story’, for that is what I believe a nation to be. A nation is a story. A story of people. A long, continuous, unbroken chain that stretches from the time you are reading this, all the way back to the dawn of man. It is the story of our fathers, their fathers, their fathers before them and so one for about two millennia.
There are those who deny this perspective on what a nation is, or at least those who find it disagreeable. Detractors of the national story will adopt a simple, effective, and ironic logical stance, to conflate a lack of complete purity with a denial of existence outright. I am not typically one to label social progressives as ‘the real racists’, but the applicability in this occasion is quite humorous.
They will point out that this island’s original inhabiters vanished without a trace, not too long after building Stonehenge. Then they will direct your attention to the fact that the island was then settled by Celts, supposedly originating in the Iberian peninsula. Then onto the Roman Empire, the Anglo-Saxon’s being a migratory group, and it is true, obviously. The Franco-Norman aristocracy did, for centuries, control the highest level of English society. Danes did in fact control vast swathes of England. No serious historian doubts this.
Through the logical prism of purity, this is a difficult axiom to deny. The historicity of these events is unquestioned. However, the entire prism is flawed, and its findings equally so. It is a prism without sentiment, steeped in ruthless pragmatism and scientism, a common folly of the intellectual class.
Another common mistake, especially when dealing with European civilisations, is to make the appeal that nations are built on ideas. For civilisations which formed prior to the Enlightenment, this is a laughable proposition, and one which ignores a schism in the nations of the world that requires recognition. There are two types of country; old-world and new-world. The new-world nation is one formed out of Enlightenment principles; the USA being a key example. A nation built on federalism, republicanism and masonic liberalism. France too, despite being older than England, was reborn in the Enlightenment as a nation of continental radicalism: liberty, equality, and brotherhood. Old-world nations are far simpler to identify. They are not beacons of thought, ideas and Enlightenment scientism, they are collections of peoples and stories, a mere reality.
An old-world nation isn’t about from where its people evolved, or where the story begins. It is not concerned with ideas of conception, revolution, or the glory of individual men. It is the simple and salient fact that each story, and the myriad of unbroken chains it carried, ended up here. In Britain, calling themselves British, or English, Scots, Welsh and Irish. All of these stories come together in a location, here.
We are a mixture. But we are a precise mixture. A thing is the sum of its parts; a cake is a cake.
A cake is not flower, eggs and frosting. It It is the specific sum of its components. What we consider to be the British people is a cake. It is a mixture of the Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Roman, Norse and Franco-Norman. That is our cake.
Each is a story, the destinies of men whose destination was this little island of ours.
Each person is at the end of a line, a line that extends from the present day to the dawn of man. We are the inheritors of our story, of the destinies and destinations of our ancestors. We are entrusted with maintaining the chain, keeping what is unique on this island, and passing it on unharmed.
The late conservative thinker Roger Scruton once said that conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.
That is our connection to our home, the understanding that what we have is something that is good, decent, virtuous and worthy of protection. It is a connection that no amount of disparagement or social engineering can break. Because it is us. It is our story, our chain, our cake.
