From Roger Kimball:

A month or two ago I wrote piece in this space on the Archbishop of Canterbury called “Rowan Williams, public embarassment.” That reflection was occasioned by His Grace’s opinion, expressed in the course of an interview with Emel, “The Muslim Lifestyle Magazine,” that “the United States wields its power in a way that is worse than Britain during its imperial heyday.” Obviously, the Archbishop (who once described himself, correctly, as “a hairy leftie”)
meant it to sting (what could be worse for a leftie, hirsute or not, than being “imperial”?). As I pointed out, however, being compared to Imperial Britain would, by any ordinary standard of civilization and achievement, be high praise indeed. Everywhere Britain went, I noted, she “brought the rule of law, better education, better physical infrastructure, better health and hygiene, improved literacy, greater freedom, and greater civility.” Indeed, whenever anyone brings up Imperial Britain, I think of George Santayana’s observation about “The British Character” in his book Soliloquies in England, published in the early 1920s. “What governs the Englishman is his inner atmosphere,” Santayana wrote, “the weather in his soul.”

Instinctively the Englishman is no missionary, no conqueror. He prefers the country to the town, and home to foreign parts. He is rather glad and relieved if only natives will remain natives and strangers strangers, and at a comfortable distance from himself. Yet outwardly he is most hospitable and accepts almost anybody for the time being; he travels and conquers without a settled design, because he has the instinct of exploration. His adventures are all external; they change him so little that he is not afraid of them. He carries his English weather in his heart wherever he goes, and it becomes a cool spot in the desert, and a steady and sane oracle amongst all the deliriums of mankind. Never since the heroic days of Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master. It will be a black day for the human race when scientific blackguards, conspirators, churls, and fanatics manage to supplant him.

Where is Santayana when you need him? What, I wonder, would he have had to say about Archbishop Williams’s declaration earlier today that the adoption of Islamic Sharia law in Britain is “unavoidable.” In a widely reported lecture on BBC radio 4 the Archbishop called for a “constructive accommodation with some aspects of Muslim law” and said that Britons must “face up to the fact” that some of its citizens do not “relate” to the British legal system. “Constructive accommodation”: let’s see, I guess that is British English for “spineless capitulation”?

Full article here.