Scruton on the Death of England

On grieving what we have lost:

That everything in life, including ourselves, our families, our loves, our relationships, our communities, our cultures, and our countries, is all impermanent is a given. But we tend to live as if this is not the case. The things we truly love and value, we want to make last forever. But as George Harrison once said, “All things must pass.”

Our lives and our world will soon come to an end. The Bible speaks of these realities as well. In James 4:14 we read, “What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes away.” And Hebrews 13:14 says this, “For here we have no continuing city, but we seek the city that is to come.”

My youth is over. My wife is gone. My life will soon be over. And many things I loved will one day no longer exist. But we can and should appreciate the good things we have known. And that can include cultures and nations. Patriotism can be a good thing, and sorrow for a country that was once great but is now in decline is also appropriate.

I mourn the fate of the once great West and the places where I spent most of my time: Australia, America and Europe. Others also mourn the demise of their own nations. One such figure is the late Roger Scruton. He wrote often about his beloved England and how he witnessed its tragic demise.

In 2000 he wrote England: An Elegy (Bloomsbury). Although he focuses only on this one country, much of what he says there can be applied to other parts of the West. I will simply quote a few passages from the book. In his preface he writes:

“What follows is a commemorative speech: I speak of England as I knew it, not as it appears to the historian. My intention is not to add to the stock of factual knowledge, but to pay a personal tribute to the civilisation which made me and which is now disappearing from the world.”

Several chapters look at things like English character, culture, religion, law, society, and government. But here I want to focus on his final chapter, “Epilogue: The Forbidding of England.” As with so many other Western nations, England’s downfall is due less to external forces than to internal decay. Self-hatred, guilt, and a determined rejection of the past are all part of it.

The chapter begins with these words: “England consisted of the physiognomy, the customs, the institutions, the religion, and the culture that I have described in these pages. Almost all of it has died. To describe something as dead is not to call for its resurrection. Nevertheless, we are on dangerous ground.”

He admits, of course, that the country has many weaknesses and faults. He lists a few, but then he says: “I feel confirmed in the desire to praise the English for the virtues which they once displayed, and which they were taught to imitate even in my youth.” He continues:

This does not change the fact that these virtues are rapidly disappearing. The English, famous for their stoicism, their decency, their honesty, their gentleness, their sexual puritanism, now live in a society in which these qualities are no longer honored—a society of people who regard long-standing loyalties with cynicism and who react to adversity by looking around for someone to accuse. England is no longer a gentle country, and the old courtesies and rules of propriety are disappearing. Sport, once a rehearsal of imperial virtues, has become a hooligan’s battlefield. Sex, freed from taboos, has become the reigning obsession: the English have the highest divorce rate in Europe, regard marriage as boring, are downright promiscuous, and pollute the country with their illegitimate, unkempt, state-subsidized offspring.

The communes and the small platoons are gone. The peaceful folk customs are gone — the children’s games, parlor songs, proverbs and sayings — that depended on a still-remembered religious community. The habits are gone — the stiff upper lip, the detached sense of duty, the immediate help to the stranger in need — that went hand in hand with imperial pride. The institutions are gone — the village store, the market, the Saturday night party, the bandstand in the park — through which local communities renewed themselves.

None of this should surprise us. The loss of traditional virtue and local identity has occurred all over Europe and the diaspora. England was part of Christendom, a branch of a spiritual tree that was struck by the Enlightenment and died. The global economy, the democratization of taste, the sexual revolution, pop culture, and television have worked to erase the sense of spiritual identity wherever piety sustained the old forms of knowledge and local customs reinforced the moral sense.

Nevertheless, the new media culture has been a particular misfortune for the English. When your fundamental loyalty is to a place and its genius lociGlobalization and the loss of sovereignty bring with them an identity crisis. The country loses its history and its personal face; the institutions become administrative centers, run by anonymous bureaucrats who do not us But them. The bureaucratic disenchantment of the earth has therefore been felt more strongly in England than elsewhere. For it has given the English the feeling that they really live nowhere.

The institutions and customs I have described depended on England being a home. They have therefore been dismantled, either by corruption or by decree. But what is remarkable is not the decline of England, which is accompanied by the decline of France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Ireland. It is the fact that England is proscribed—and proscribed by the English. Venerable customs and wise institutions are threatened or have already been abolished: the grammar schools, the old House of Lords, the Prayer Book and the English Bible, English weights and measures, English currency, local regiments, the Royal Tournament—every practice in which the spirit of England is still discernible seems now doomed to excite contempt, not in the world at large, but in the English. Moreover, the growing licentiousness of the English has gone hand in hand with a loss of liberty, and the country that first made tolerance a public virtue has embraced a new form of intolerance which, while permitting and even encouraging infringements of traditional morality, seeks to enforce a communal code of ‘political correctness’. Any activity connected with the hierarchy and feudal rule of Old England is now likely to be prosecuted or even criminalised: not only hunting clubs and gentlemen’s clubs, but uniforms, exclusive schools, ancient ceremonies, even the observance of national customs and the display of the national flag.

Forgetting history, or rewriting history, is a key part of how nations die. Scruton says:

Peter Hitchens has written in this connection about the abolition of Britain. The story he tells, however, is a specifically English story, and it is doubtful whether the same fervor of rejection has been poured out upon their institutions and their cultures by the Scots, the Welsh, or the Irish. English history is no longer taught in English schools, or taught as a story of crime and exploitation; Scots and Irish children are instead taught self-aggrandizing national legends, as well as the intricacies of national history. Unlike the Celts, English students come to university with no knowledge of their national heroes, and only a vague sense of what came before them. Nelson is Nelson Mandela to most of them, and Wellington a mere boot. They are taught that the English were involved in the slave trade, but not that England, the country, set an example to an astonished world by banning it. Nor do they learn what made it possible: the heroism of a Royal Navy, devoted to its sovereign and able by its very strength to “rule the waves.”

The banning of England is a strange phenomenon and one that is difficult to explain. The country was always victorious in wars and was not impoverished even by the loss of its empire. No outside power forced it to give up its national pride and culture. The process came from within and seemed without resistance….

It seems much more that the English emerged from two world wars in a state of moral fatigue. An inheritance is a burden to be borne. An overwhelming sense of guilt seemed to paralyze the country – guilt about its own successes and a sense of the price that had to be paid for them. A culture of rejection developed, not only among intellectuals but in every area of ​​civic life….

He then speaks of “the effective disenfranchisement of the English” as a result of two extraordinary changes, both the result of persistent mendacity and deceit: the transfer of sovereignty to European institutions and the decentralization of political power.” He explains:

It is only with a certain irony that English law can now be described as the law of the land. Not only has endless legislation effectively marginalized the common law, English courts must also apply European guidelines regardless of native precedent. For the first time in their history, the English are governed not by judgments but by decrees. Instruments which from the beginning ensured that no one could acquire sovereignty over England without being subject to English law have finally been set aside. The English are no longer a sovereign people, and their law is no longer their own.

Once again, the pressure for this outcome came from within—from businessmen wedded to the global economy, from bureaucrats in love with administrative power or programmed to carry out some failed “reform project,” and from progressive intellectuals who regard national loyalty as a crime against the Enlightenment. Those who have spoken out against the unaccountable bureaucracies and trinkets of the European Union have been dismissed as chauvinists, reactionaries, or “Little Englanders,” while the process of union itself has been dressed up in the same trappings of “historical inevitability” that were used to impose Communism on the Russians and National Socialism on the people of Germany. Vague talk of “subsidiarity” does not alter the fact that the English are finally, after a millennium of resistance, subject to outside jurisdiction. And this political disenfranchisement is also a disenchantment of their country.

The sadness that accompanies his witness to the demise of a beloved nation is clearly visible in this book. And it is a sadness that most of us feel when we see our own countries, and the West as a whole, seemingly in free fall. It is one thing to grin and bear it while foreign enemies try to plunder your culture. But when it is in fact an act of national suicide, it is so much more painful and difficult to stomach.

We need more Scrutons to stand up and defend what is worth defending.

(1836 words)