When Britain faced the prospect of annihilation from Hitler's armies, George Orwell wrote a famous essay, The Lion and the Unicorn, urging his readers to unite in defence of their country. The ability of the British to defend themselves, he argued, had been undermined from within, by both right and left. The bewildered remnant of the old ruling class, and the intellectuals who recoiled from patriotic feeling and could not utter the word "England" without a sneer, were combining to betray their country to the Nazis. The instinct of the British people in the face of the threat was to resist it, since that is what duty and love both require. As Orwell saw, however, the muddled selfishness of the upper class and the snobbish sarcasm of their intellectual betters worked against the common people; the first making capitulation more probable, the second making capitulation look like a political virtue. Orwell's essay was a passionate attempt to show that the ordinary people were right. They could be trusted precisely because they were motivated by neither the self-interest of the upper class nor the self-righteousness of the intellectuals on the left, but by the only thing that mattered: an undemonstrative love of their country.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "When Britain faced the prospect of annihilation from Hitler's armies, George Orwell wrote a famous essay, The Lion and the Unicorn, urging his readers to unite in defence of their country. The ability of the British to defend themselves, he argued, had been undermined from within, by both right and left. The bewildered remnant of the old ruling class, and the intellectuals who recoiled from patriotic feeling and could not utter the word "England" without a sneer, were combining to betray their country to the Nazis. The instinct of the British people in the face of the threat was to resist it, since that is what duty and love both require. As Orwell saw, however, the muddled selfishness of the upper class and the snobbish sarcasm of their intellectual betters worked against the common people; the first making capitulation more probable, the second making capitulation look like a political virtue. Orwell's essay was a passionate attempt to show that the ordinary people were right. They could be trusted precisely because they were motivated by neither the self-interest of the upper class nor the self-righteousness of the intellectuals on the left, but by the only thing that mattered: an undemonstrative love of their country." in the context of "Roger Scruton, 'Brexit will give us back pride in our island roots', The Times (18 November 2017), p. 35" to mean that wisdom is timeless.