Winston Churchill, here depicted during the war years, was the most glorious epitome of the traditional stoic British character. His main personal weakness: an excessive fondness for drink.

Agencie France Presse: The number of British women arrested for drunk and disorderly behaviour has soared over the last five years, with some regions reporting a tenfold rise in offences. The problem of women drunks is particularly bad in the West Midlands, where arrests increased from 59 arrests in 2003/2004 to 731 in 2007/2008, according to police figures.

The British Character

By Theodore Dalrymple
City Journal, Autumn 2008

Edited by Andy Ross

When my mother arrived in England as a refugee from Nazi Germany, shortly before the outbreak of World War II, she found the people admirable. By the time she died, two-thirds of a century later, she found them rude, dishonest, and charmless. The human qualities that people valued and inculcated when she arrived had become mocked, despised, and repudiated.

My mother had admired the people's manner. The British seemed to her self-contained, self-controlled, law-abiding yet tolerant of others no matter how eccentric, and with a deeply ironic view of life that encouraged them to laugh at themselves and to appreciate their own unimportance in the scheme of things. The English were polite and considerate, the self-confident took care not to humiliate the shy or timid, and even the most accomplished was aware that his achievements were a drop in the ocean of possibility.

Appearances in Britain could deceive. The British despised intellectuals, but were long at the forefront of intellectual inquiry. They were philistines, yet created a way of life in the countryside as graceful as any that has ever existed. They had a state religion, but came to find religious enthusiasm bad form.

The orderliness and restraint of political life in Britain also struck my refugee mother. The British leaders were not giants among men but they were not brutes, either. The nearest they came to the exercise of arbitrary power was a sense of noblesse oblige, and the human breast is capable of far worse sentiments. Politics was, to them and the voters, only part of life, and by no means the most important.

Many remarked upon the gentleness of British behavior in public. Homicidal violence and street robberies were vanishingly rare. British pastimes were peaceful and reflective. Vast sporting crowds would gather in such good order that sporting events resembled church meetings.

British behavior when ill or injured was stoic. I remember working in a general practice in a small country town where an old man called me to his house. I found him very weak from chronic blood loss, unable to rise from his bed, and asked him why he had not called me earlier. "I didn't like to disturb you, Doctor," he said. "I know you are a very busy man."

I found his self-effacement deeply moving. It was not the product of a lack of self-esteem, nor was it the result of having been downtrodden by a tyrannical government that accorded no worth to its citizens. It was instead an existential, almost religious, modesty, an awareness that he was far from being all-important. It was a moral requirement that emotion and sentiment should be expressed proportionately, and not in an exaggerated or self-absorbed way. A man has to think of others, even when he is dying.

Gradually, but overwhelmingly, the culture and character of British restraint have changed into the exact opposite. Extravagance of gesture, vehemence of expression, vainglorious boastfulness, self-exposure, and absence of inhibition are what we tend to admire now. To control oneself for the sake of the social order, let alone for dignity or decorum, is seen as both personally and socially harmful.

I have spoken with young British people who regularly drink themselves into oblivion, passing first through a prolonged phase of public nuisance. To a man (and woman), they believe that by doing so, they are getting rid of inhibitions that might otherwise do them psychological and even physical harm. The same belief seems universal among those who spend hours at soccer games screaming abuse and making threatening gestures.

Lack of self-control is just as character-forming as self-control: but it forms a different, and much worse and shallower, character. Once self-control becomes a vice to avoid at all costs, there is no plumbing the depths to which people will sink. The little town where I now live when in England transforms by night. By day, it is delightful. By night, however, the average age of the person on the street drops from 60 to 20. Charm and delight vanish.

By no means coincidentally, the young British find themselves hated, feared, and despised throughout Europe, wherever they gather to have what they call "a good time." They turn entire Greek, Spanish, and Turkish resorts into B-movie Sodoms and Gomorrahs. They cover sidewalks with vomit, rape one another, and indulge in casual drunken violence. In one Greek resort, 12 young British women were arrested recently after indulging in "an outdoor oral sex competition."

No person with the slightest apprehension of human psychology will be surprised to learn that as a consequence of this change in character, indictable crime has risen at least 900 percent since 1950. In the same period, the homicide rate has doubled, despite the fact that the proportion of the population in the age group most likely to commit crimes has fallen considerably.

Before the English and British became known for self-restraint and an ironic detachment from life, they had a reputation for high emotionalism and an inability to control their passions. The German poet Heinrich Heine, among others, detested them as violent and vulgar. It was only during the Victorian era that they transformed into something approaching the restrained people whom I encountered as a child and sometimes as a doctor. The main difference between the vulgar people whom Heine detested and the people loathed and feared throughout Europe (and beyond) today is that the earlier Britons often stood in the forefront of human endeavor.

The moralization of the British in the nineteenth century was the product of intellectual and legislative activity. So, too, was the reverse movement. For 100 years or more in Britain, the popular view was that public drunkenness was reprehensible and the rightful object of repression. Several changes then came: officials halved the tax on alcohol, intellectuals attacked the idea of self-restraint, universities unapologetically began to advertise themselves as places where students could get drunk often and regularly, and the government claimed that increasing the hours of availability of alcohol would encourage a more responsible drinking culture.

So I say to Americans: excoriate sin, especially in public places.

Theodore Dalrymple, a physician, is the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
 

AR  Quite right too. Excoriate drunkenness as mercilessly as drug addiction, or smoking.