From Extraversion to Intraversion

When challenged to assert itself in relation to strong displacing cultures like Islam our ‘home’ culture struggles to show confidence in itself or even to know itself for what it is. It finds it almost impossible to articulate itself coherently, usually, when pressed, asserting insipid liberal ideas to do with rights and identities. Attempts to assert ourselves abroad merely exhibit brittleness and aggression as in the case of our football fans and we end by apologising for our whiteness, our maleness, the religion that informed our culture or for our flag.

The irrepressible nature of cultures that are confident, enterprising and successful overflows as an effusion. In an almost evolutionary process creative energy overflows into empire. This seems to have happened naturally and spontaneously in the case of the Romans, the Spanish, the Dutch, the Belgian, the French and the British. This is very different from seeing empire as merely an exercise in a vindictive desire to subjugate, exploit and punish other nations. It was rather that Europe bred something very potent which was hard to contain. Of course, if one insists on talking about morality, such empires can become wicked or good but are more usually a mixture of both.

Could it be said that British culture needed such extraverted and expansive activity to express itself at its best (in its exports of legal systems, long-tested political and administrative institutions and muscular Christianity) and that, now that the empire has been stripped away, our lack of confidence in what we are is due largely to introversion and an inability to be expansive? We needed the extraverted, enterprising or even missionary nature of empire to know ourselves for the very impressive thing that we are. Empire was a natural expression of self.

This is not to advocate renewed imperial pretensions but simply for an acceptance that we once had an excellent culture which proved itself to be so and is the last thing to be ashamed of. All of the creative energy that engendered it now has no object and is turned inwards just as energy is turned inwards in someone suffering from depression. This is the case with our ‘white’ culture. The only stance permitted it is an apologetic and self-flagellating one. It’s sin? ; to have been so successful because of what it was. Those qualities which once marked it out as fit for dominion are now precisely those for which mark it out most for opprobrium. It’s like an old lion now humiliated by a public who take pleasure in baiting it in a zoo from behind the safety of high railings.

Salvation must lie in turning the energies outwards towards the world in new ways remembering rather than repressing those things which made us great.