Great Britain on the World Stage

During a recent trip to the UK, I had a chance to take in some treasures at the British Library: an early manuscript of Beowulf, Shakespeare’s First Folio, one of four early copies of the Magna Carta, and some song lyrics and sketches by members of the Beatles. On my way back to Waterloo station, I came upon the Francis Crick institute. Then I got to thinking about a few other Brits: Sir Isaac Newton, Sir Andrew Lloyd Weber, J. M. W. Turner.

The Brits have been busy.

I haven’t even mentioned Florence Nightingale, Queen Elizabeth I, Charles Darwin, Dames Judi Dench and Julie Andrews, and dozens of British poets, novelists, and playwrights, from Geoffrey Chaucer and Jane Austen to John Keats and Agatha Christie.

How did this little island play such an enormous part on the world’s stage?

Play to Your Strengths

England’s success in a variety of realms is worth considering, even if you are not a proud Brit. All of us can benefit from the lessons that this “little nation that could” can teach us about progress.

Let’s start with the way many bookish Brits have leveraged the treasures of the English language.

I don’t think I’m the first person to remark on the value of the English language’s extraordinary history. English, believe it or not, is a Germanic language, brought (in the form of much earlier dialects) to the British Isles from various regions of the continent in the vicinity of modern-day Germany. Only a fraction of the original Germanic lexicon has survived to the modern day, but our current version of English still has plenty of Germanic words. The vast majority of the 100 most commonly used contemporary English words, in fact, can be traced back to these early Germanic dialects. Many of these common words—good, man, and others—are monosyllabic. English also has been a voracious borrower of words from other languages, expecially French, Latin, and Greek. Many of these words are polysyllabic. The distinction may seem esoteric—unless you happen to be a poet. The variety enhances versification and is a boon to anyone who writes regular verse (iambic pentameter, for example), and England has had a lot of great poets, including not only Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Keats, but also John Donne, John Milton, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and many more. Even to prose writers, such as Austen and Virginia Woolf, this variety of single syllable and multi-syllable words makes it relatively easy to shape sentence rhythms.

The extensive borrowing, greatly enhanced by exploration and colonization, continued for centuries all the way up to the present day. (For the record, colonization in the Americas, India, and elsewhere also came with a disturbing amount of destruction, but borrowing words is comparatively innocuous.) As a result, English has not only a variety of mono- and polysyllabic words, but also an enormous lexicon, or stock of words, so writers often can choose from dozens or even scores of synonyms. If we want to describe a policy that some committee has made too unwieldy with conditions and exceptions, we don’t have to settle for complex, we can call that policy convoluted, baroque, or, my favorite, byzantine. The variety of synonyms allows writers to express nuances of meaning while also controlling their tone and register. It’s the difference between playing music with any of the different instruments in a symphony orchestra and playing with a kazoo or illustrating a scene with a palette of paints and trying to do the same thing with a box of Crayolas. (Even burnt sienna can take you only so far.)

British writers, in short, have been blessed with an embarrassment of riches in the vast and diverse lexicon of the English language. They seized the opportunity and created some of the greatest literature in the history of the world—probably more classics per capita, so to speak, than any nation its size or larger.

The Power of Tradition

There’s another reason Great Britain has been punching above its weight class, and it can be seen in a famous quotation from one of its greatest minds.

Explaining why he was able to see so far in the realm of science, Isaac Newton famously said that he “stood on the shoulders of giants.”

Tradition can create a kind of momentum in science and other realms. Thanks to Newton, as well as the scientists who preceded and succeeded him, the English have had good reason to think of themselves as leaders in the scientific tradition. Discovery is in their DNA. (I’m pretty sure that’s what Francis Crick would have said, anyway.)

I spoke to a colleague, a physicist who has more scientific knowledge in one of his neurons than I do in my entire brain, and he expressed a similar opinion (though with much more factual basis). Dr. Patrick Motl, the dean of the School of Sciences at Indiana University Kokomo (where I work), took me all the way back to Roger Bacon (c. 1220-1292) and William of Ockham (1285-c.1348), English pioneers of scientific thought. Bacon, for example, advocated for learning about the world through experimentation, a foundational scientific concept that we take for granted, but many earlier thinkers did not. Ockham is most famous for Ockham’s razor, the idea that the simplest explanation for a phenomenon is most likely the correct one—or as Ockham put it, rather less memorably, “Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate” ("Plurality must never be posited without necessity”). I can’t help but think that Ockham, if he had come up with a snappier line, could have secured a lucrative endorsement from Gillette, but he was preoccupied with science—typical Brit.

The scientific tradition in Britain went on (and on and on), thanks to the work of other groundbreaking thinkers, including Francis Bacon (1561-1626), Newton (1642-1727), Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), Edmond Halley (1656-1742), Darwin (1809-1882), Alan Turing (1912-1954), Crick (1916-2004), and Stephen Hawking (1942-2018), along with many others.

I believe that the power of tradition helps to explain England’s preeminence in literature and theatre, as well. If your countrymen include Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Wordsworth, and Tennyson, you almost feel as if you should carry on your daily conversations in iambic pentameter. The English rightly take pride in their brilliant literary and theatrical traditions, and they want to preserve and extend them.

A Society for Learning

England did not depend on tradition to carry it to greatness, however. In 1660, in the midst of the Scientific Revolution, a group of British scientists had just finished listening to the astronomer, mathematician, and architect Christopher Wren (“So many polymaths!” as Dean Motl put it) give a lecture, and someone had an idea: maybe it would be a good idea to form a society for the advancement of science, and so they did. A few years later, after it had received its second royal charter, it took on the name of the “Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge.” Today, the Royal Society, as it is commonly known, is still going strong.

Connecting thinkers is a powerful way to advance knowledge because they learn from one another. The Royal Society took this exchange of knowledge to another level when it launched Philosophical Transactions, an early example of what today we know as scholarly journals, publications created by and for experts such as professors. It also gave us something called “peer review,” in which experts evaluate one another’s work to ensure it is sound before it is disseminated.

Tools That Other Countries Can Build and Wield

Great Britain’s success may look like a marvel, but it has been built with tools that other countries can wield (and, in some cases, have wielded). The Brits have a rich language; other nations have similarly valuable natural resources or locations. Every nation has traditions and can build others. Italy and Germany, for example, have strong musical traditions, as do parts of Africa and Latin America. Finally, any country can build an infrastructure to support science, the arts, and more. The Royal Society is only one example; others include the National Institutes of Health in the United States and the Korean Academy of Science and Technology in South Korea and the Indian National Science Academy in India.

Yes, we can and should admire Great Britain, and then we should go out and follow its example.