A few years ago, I was walking along a street in England with a friend when a group of rather loud and punk-looking young men started hooting at us. What they said was unintelligible, but one of them strode over to me and blocked my path, put his face in mine and stood there a moment or two, just staring in my face, before rejoining his companions. He said nothing. The purpose was to intimidate me, to make me afraid of him, and it worked.

At the 2005 Tolkien conference in Birmingham, there were people present from 35 different countries. We were cautioned not to go anywhere at night in Birmingham unless we were accompanied by someone local who would know where it was safe to go.

I traveled with an English companion to Mass through a neighborhood which, like so many others, was full of litter and graffiti and looked more like a Morroccan market in an old movie than an English city. My companion cautioned me to keep the windows rolled up, and we fairly sped through the neighborhood to the church. She said it was a Somalian area.

In a small city in the Midlands, we parked the car and had to walk a block or so to a friend’s flat. Ours were the only uncovered feminine heads anywhere. Loud talk from fellow pedestrians contained no word of English, nor was there a single English word on any store sign. Except for the modern English architecture of the flats, we might have been in a foreign country.

Yet—and here’s the thing—my English friends spoke of England’s pluralistic society with an almost teary-eyed pride. You could hear “God Save the Queen” playing in the background. You couldn’t walk on the streets at night at all, you could barely walk in many areas during the daytime, you were subject to insults and bullying constantly—but they were proud of it all. Like the pride they had in their “free” healthcare. One English woman of my acquaintance in Coventry had to wait eight weeks for surgery when she had painful multiple ovarian cysts, which may have been malignant for all she knew, but another woman I knew in Oxford went to the doctor in search of a tubal ligation in order to make conception impossible; her surgery was scheduled for the following Tuesday. And finally, a friend who is an English doctor in Birmingham had to wait five months for surgery to remove an intestinal blockage—a condition that calls for emergency surgery by any civilized medical standards. But all of them were proud of English healthcare.

Just as they were proud of how open England is to all immigrants, how the religious and cultural heritage of immigrants is protected by English law; proud of council housing, their welfare system and their “classless”; society. I made the mistake of referring to someone who was of obvious Indian descent as “Indian.” I was immediately corrected: “No—he’s English.” And they seemed unable to resist the addendum: “Americans always judge people by their race, but the English do not.”

But the common denominator to all this was pride—national pride. A pride not at all different from that English pride of Victorian days and stratified classes with hard-drawn demarcation lines and a tendency to regard as “foreign” anyone who was not a white Anglo-Saxon protestant whose family had been in England for at least eight generations. The cast of characters has changed, but it’s the same play. Hitler’s nationalism embarrassed English nationalism into changing the cast, but it’s the same pride-driven plot.

A society given to an outwardly directed and wholly horizontal view of things can hardly be blamed for lack of introspection. England is a country without mirrors. There is a constant compulsion to compare themselves favorably, though completely irrationally, with other countries and cultures (“American” racism is no less irrational than Anglican “Catholicism”). There is an amazingly aggressive pursuit of righteousness—economic, political, social, you-name-it—that does not convince, that only serves to reveal a terror of guilt, of moral culpability in any sin against “Equality”. Yet a kind of pathos dominates the atmosphere of their intellectual conversation, and one realizes, almost with a little shock in the face of such earnestness, that they actually have no clue about what equality is. And they seriously don’t have a clue about why those classes and nationalities within their borders, those on whom they bestow their conjured magnanimity, should regard England with such contempt, and sometimes, even hatred.