The British Disease

It's Sanity.

Jonathan Rauch from the July 1996 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

But try to imagine a British Unabomber, or a British David Koresh, or a British Jim Jones (the preacher who, in 1978, led his followers to mass suicide in the jungle of Guyana). A mad-scientist politician like Newt Gingrich, drunk on his own theories of history, or a cornpone egomaniac like Ross Perot, drunk on himself, finds no quarter in Britain. Screaming Lord Sutch, the leader of Britain's Monster Raving Loony Party (which actually beat the dismal Tories in a by-election last year), basically has his wits about him. Even the Labour Party is reverting to sanity, for lack of anything better to do. You say Lady Thatcher was idea-obsessed and contemptuous of limits? Yes, but look what happened to her. The gray suits swallowed her whole.

The Fountain of Middle Age

I have never been a big believer in character as the root of national difference. Across borders, people, I have always thought, differ much less than the regimes--the governments, policies, and institutions--which they live under. Britain stands as something of a rebuke to that belief. Institutionally, it looks more like America than does almost anyplace else. Under the Tories, its economic and social policies are much like ours. Yet every day I became more keenly conscious of a cultural gulf between them and us. And the main source of that differentness is simply that most ordinary Britons, faced with an array of options, will instinctively draw back from the more extreme ones, whereas a sizable minority of Americans will go for broke.

So the British do not build Microsoft or Apple or whatever. They do not have Hollywood and Las Vegas. They also do not call themselves "Freemen," hole themselves up in a Montana ranch house, and declare themselves at war with the FBI and, come to think of it, the whole damn world.

They reap some benefits in this bargain. Liberty-obsessed Americans preach endlessly about freedom and rights. Yet, at the level of individuals and everyday life, it is the British who are more likely to leave smokers, atheists, and witches in peace, provided such deviants do no harm. The Brits do not rush to view the odd racist or flag-burner as an intolerable social threat, any more than they rush to make him a messiah or a self-help best- seller. They do not shoot abortion doctors or yell about school prayer. They understand, certainly better than we, that moral disapproval need not always be expressed in terms of moral outrage.

God knows, they can be silly and run over the top, especially where royalty and animals are concerned. But they are embarrassed by such excesses. Whereas recently, when the Texas attorney general announced that "history will record the modern-day tobacco industry alongside the worst of civilization's evil empires," he seemed innocent of any inkling that he was ludicrous.

Setting America's teeming madness beside Britain's muttering mundaneness, I could not help wondering whether the British may not, in the end, have made the safer deal. Which is not to say--heaven forbid!--that I would want to be British. I am not even sure, in the end, that I would like to see Americans tone down some of their crazier outrages, because that would probably mean also toning down American exuberance. The whole world benefits by having a very large, very free, and quite mad country smack in the middle of it. Whatever experiments humanity needs to try, it can try here. I feel middle- aged in Britain. In America, I feel young.