Patriotic history harmful to pupils; St George’s Day celebrations cancelled over spurious health and safety concerns; postal voting fraud on epidemic scale; Britain being carved up by Brussels into a set of regions of which the parts of some lie across the Channel.… With each day comes news of some fresh assault on the body-politic of this once great country.
What is the cause of this spiral of self-destruction into which Britain seems lately to have chosen to descend?
How could such a once justly proud nation so speedily have reduced itself to a herd of bewildered sheep being tamely led by a pack of Scottish sheep-dogs acting upon the silent whistles of some far-off European shepherd?
As the light of freedom and democracy grows daily ever dimmer on these shores, I am minded of some pertinent remarks on this subject made by C.K. Chesterton at the end of his book, What I Saw in America. At the very end of the final chapter, entitled 'The Future of Democracy', Chesterton observes:
"There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man. That is a perfectly simple fact which the modern world will find out more and more to be fact. Every other basis is a sort of sentimental confusion, fully of merely verbal echoes of the older creeds….The world cannot keep its own ideals. The secular order cannot make secure any one of its own noble and natural conceptions secular perfection. …
"So far as … democracy becomes or remains … Christian , … democracy will remain democracy. In so far as it does not, it will become wildly and wickedly undemocratic. Its rich will riot with a brutal indifference far beyond the feeble feudalism which retains some shadow of responsibility or at least patronage. Its wage-slaves will either sink into heathen slavery, or seek relief in theories that are destructive not merely in method but in aim; since they are but the negations of property and personality [-- post-modern deconstruction? DC].
"Eighteenth-century ideals, formulated in eighteenth-century language have no longer in themselves the power to hold those pagan passions back. … Men will more and more realise that there is no meaning in democracy if the universe has not a significance and an authority that is the author of our rights. Owls and bats may wander where they will in darkness, and for them as for the sceptics the universe may have no centre; kites and vultures may linger as they like over carrion, and for them as for the plutocrats existence may have no origin and no end; but it was far back in the land of legends, where instincts find their true images, that the cry went forth that freedom is an eagle, whose glory is gazing at the sun."
It seems these days it is only the eagle that any longer does. The lion and unicorn are far too busy watching Big Brother.
Comments (4)
I think you all miss the point. Chesterton (and I assume therefore David) is saying Christianity is the root of England's culture and only a return to true Christianity can revive its culture. I agree but this places the need for personal change as well as social change. But without the 'cult' (i.e. common worship of God) there can be no 'culture'.
Posted by ChrisC | May 6, 2008 3:08 PM
Posted on May 6, 2008 15:08
David,
This self-destruction has been a long time in the making. Its seeds were planted long ago. We are merely reaping the harvest.
The basis of society is the family. Without the family a society or country cannot reproduce itself physically or spiritually or culturally. Since most white children are born outside marriage and most white marriages end in divorce, the English will soon become extinct.
Posted by William | April 30, 2008 8:41 PM
Posted on April 30, 2008 20:41
We have become acquiescent.
We have succumbed to the Europhiles, the multiculturists, the PC-mongers; we have become servile to government.
We have traded our freedoms for an easy life, for food on the table, for holidays abroad, for the trappings of a modern comfortable society.
Finally, great Britain UK has lost its self-belief in its willingness to accommodate alien cultures and values, to give succour to tyrants and terrorists, lest we offend.
Posted by mike | April 29, 2008 7:35 PM
Posted on April 29, 2008 19:35
To quote the Bard:
"Come the three corners of the world in arms, and we shall shock them; naught shall make us rue, if England to itself be but true."
The centuries since that speech was penned have surely helped to confirm its accuracy. As the historian, Paul Johnson, has pointed out, in his history of the English race, "The Offshore Islanders", there was nothing certain about our survival, there were a dozen points in our past where we simply [could] have become one more extinct people, as with so many other groups in history.
As Johnson points out, once upon a time, the English language was simply the tongue employed by the inhabitants of an out-of-the-way island, separated from the European mainland. French, Italian, and Latin were the languages of diplomacy, science, commerce, etc.
The difference between what our language was then, and what it is now, is a measure of our achievement and our potential.
As John Milton said, speaking after a civil war in which a belief in our decline had led us to take the unprecedented step of trying and executing the King, the English are not below the highest point to which the human capacity can soar to (I cannot guarantee that the phrasing is correct, but the sense certainly is).
Those who learn something from history can go on making it.
Posted by Peter Davey | April 29, 2008 5:41 PM
Posted on April 29, 2008 17:41