Scruton on the Death of England

On mourning what we have lost:

That everything in life, including ourselves, our families, our loves, our relationships, our communities, our cultures and our countries are all transitory is a given. But we tend to live as if this were not the case. Things that we really love and value we tend to want to continue forever. But as George Harrison once put it, “All things must pass”.

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

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

I grieve over the fate of the once great West, and the places I have spent most of my time in: Australia, America and Europe. Others also lament the decline of their own nations. One such figure is the late Roger Scruton. He often wrote about his beloved England and how he was witnessing its tragic collapse.

In 2000 he penned England: An Elegy (Bloomsbury). While focusing on just this one nation, much of what he says there can be applied to other parts of the West. Here I simply want to offer some quotes from the volume. In his Preface he writes:

“What follows is a memorial address: I speak of England as I knew it, not as the country might appear to the historian. My intention is not to add to the store of factual knowledge, but to pay a personal tribute to the civilisation that made me and which is now passing from the world.”

Various chapters look at such things as 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, the demise of England is not due to external forces so much as inward decay. Self-loathing, guilt-tripping, and a determined repudiation of the past are all part of this.

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

He admits of course to the country’s many weaknesses and defects. He lists some, but then he says, “I find myself confirmed in the desire to praise the English for the virtues which they once displayed, and which they were taught even in my youth to emulate.” He continues:

This does not alter the fact that these virtues are rapidly disappearing. Having been famous for their stoicism, their decorum, their honesty, their gentleness and their sexual puritanism, the English now subsist in a society in which those qualities are no longer honoured – a society of people who regard long-term loyalties with cynicism, and whose response to misfortune is to look round for someone to sue. England is no longer a gentle country, and the old courtesies and decencies are disappearing. Sport, once a rehearsal for imperial virtues, has become a battleground for hooligans. Sex, freed from taboos, has become the ruling obsession: the English have the highest rate of divorce in Europe, regard marriage as a bore, are blatantly promiscuous and litter the country with their illegitimate, uncared-for and state-subsidised offspring.

 

Gone are the congregations and the little platoons. Gone are the peaceful folkways — the children’s games, parlour songs, proverbs and sayings — that depended on a still remembered religious community. Gone are the habits — the stiff upper lip, the aloof sense of duty, the instant assistance to the stranger in distress — that went with imperial pride. Gone are the institutions — the village shop, the market, the Saturday-night dance, the bandstand in the park — through which local communities renewed themselves.

 

None of that should surprise us. The loss of traditional virtue and local identity has occurred throughout Europe and its diaspora.’ England was part of Christendom, one branch of a spiritual tree which was struck by enlightenment and died. The global economy, the democratisation of taste, the sexual revolution, pop culture and television have worked to erase the sense of spiritual identity in every place where piety shored up the old forms of knowledge and local custom fortified 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 loci, globalisation and the loss of sovereignty bring a crisis of identity. The land loses its history and its personal face; the institutions become administrative centres, operated by anonymous bureaucrats who are not us but them. The bureaucratic disenchant-ment of the earth has therefore been felt more keenly in England than elsewhere. For it has induced in the English the sense that they are really living nowhere.

 

The institutions and customs that I have described depended on England being a somewhere and a home. They have therefore been dismantled, either by corruption or decree. What is curious, however, is not the decay of England, which is matched by the decay of France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Ireland. It is the fact that England has been forbidden — and forbidden by the English. Venerable customs and wise institutions are under threat or already 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 can still be discerned seems fated now to arouse 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 which first made toleration into a public virtue has espoused a new form of intolerance, which, while permitting and even encouraging breaches of traditional morality, seeks to enforce a common code of ‘political correctness’. Any activity connected with the hierarchy and squirearchy of Old England is now likely to be persecuted or even criminalised: not only hunting and gentlemen’s clubs, but uniforms, exclusive schools, old ceremonies, even the keeping of national customs and the display of the national flag.

The forgetting of history, or the rewriting of history, is a major part of how nations die. Says Scruton:

Peter Hitchens has written, in this connection, of the abolition of Britain. The story he tells, however, is a specifically English story, and it is doubtful that the same fervour of repudiation has been heaped on 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 tale of crime and exploitation; Scots and Irish children learn, by contrast, self-vaunting national legends, as well as the intricacies of national history. Unlike the Celts, English students come to the university with no knowledge of their national heroes, and only the vaguest awareness of what happened before their time. Nelson, to the majority of them, is Nelson Mandela, and Wellington no more than a boot. They have learned that Englishmen were involved in the slave trade, but not that England, the country, set an example to an astonished world by outlawing it. Nor do they learn about the thing which made this possible – the heroism of a Royal Navy devoted to its sovereign and able through its fortitude to ‘rule the waves’.

 

The forbidding of England is a strange phenomenon and one that is hard to explain. The country was always victorious in war, and was not impoverished even by the loss of its empire. No outside force compelled it to relinquish its national pride and culture. The process came from within, and seemingly without resistance….

 

It seems much more as though the English emerged from two world wars in a condition of moral fatigue. An inheritance is a burden that must be taken up. An overwhelming sense of guilt seemed to paralyse the country – guilt at its own successes, and an awareness of their cost. A culture of repudiation arose not only among intellectuals, but in every area of civil life….

He goes on to speak of “the effective disenfranchisement of the English” resulting from two extraordinary changes, both the outcome of sustained mendacity and subterfuge: the transfer of sovereignty to European institutions and the devolution of political power.” He explains:

It is only with a measure of irony that English law could now be described as the law of the land. Not only has endless legislation effectively marginalised the common law, English courts are required to apply European directives, regardless of native precedent. For the first time in their history, the English are ruled not by judgements but by decrees. Devices which, from the beginning, ensured that nobody could gain sovereignty over England without becoming subject to the English law, have been finally set aside. The English are no longer a sovereign people, and their law is no longer their own.

 

Again, the pressure towards this outcome has come from within —from businessmen wedded to the global economy, from bureaucrats in love with administrative power or programmed to carry out some defunct project of ‘reform’, and from progressive intellectuals who regard national loyalty as a crime against enlightenment. Those who have voiced opposition to the unaccountable bureaucracies and tinpot tribunals of the European Union have been dismissed as chauvinists, reactionaries or ‘Little Englanders’, while the process of union itself has been decked out in the same trappings of ‘historical inevitability’ with which Communism was imposed on the Russians and National Socialism on the people of Germany. Vague talk of `subsidiarity’ does nothing to alter the fact that the English are finally, after a millennium of resistance, subject to jurisdiction from abroad. And this political disenfranchisement is also a disenchantment of their country.

 

The sadness that accompanies his witness of the decline of a beloved nation is evident throughout this book. And it is a sadness that most of us have as we also see our own countries, and the West as a whole, seemingly in free fall. It is one thing to grin and bare it as foreign enemies seek to ransack your culture. But when it is in fact an act of national suicide, that is so much more distressing and harder to take.

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

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