Brave New Britain
The twentieth century saw the rise of numerous dictatorships. While different in many ways, all such regimes have one thing in common: they all believe that their ideals and aims are absolutely correct, and, as such are not only unquestionable, but that the government itself can enact any law against anyone it like because they are simply right, even when it flies in the face of their own beliefs and aims.
Britain’s Labour government is just one such a government. No, it has not set up any gulags, work camps, etc., nor is it executing people. It is subtler, more patient. Its plan of social engineering will have reached absolute fruition in fifty years, not five, but at the end of that time brave new Britain will contrast to traditional Britain as Communist China contrasted to Imperial China.
Sooner or later, all revolutions must deal with their contradictions, and Labour’s radicalism has led it to the point where it is necessarily immersed in contradictions. Contradictions in society appear when there is a breakdown of accepted norms. The 18th century – often referred to as the Age of Enlightenment – which was supposed to be the century in which reason replaced religion, was effectively the age in which an extraordinary proportion of Europeans were engaged in mystical pursuits, and in which séances and mystical healing were regulars even behind the closed doors of some governments.
Modern political revolutions are aided by the fact that Western society is inherently contradictory. I do not refer to the idea of multiculturalism (though there one can detect contradiction by the use of “cultural” and “ism”), but rather to the stuff of daily life – diet chocolate bars; walking machines in gyms for people who refuse to walk 3 blocks before hailing a taxi; lipsticks given away with magazines aimed at eight year olds; etc. Small coffee is “Tall,” and “collateral damage” indicates, as we all know by now, not damaged building, but the number of people killed during a military strike or campaign.
We are all becoming fluent in Newspeak, the language of the party George Orwell called “Ingsoc,” (an abbreviation of “English Socialism”). In Newspeak, words no longer have their familiar meaning. Hence Labour’s “multicultural” revolution is, like China’s Cultural Revolution, absolutely anti-culture; it works in the name of Britain and the British, but is fundamentally anti-British (and especially anti-British establishment).
Another accomplice to modern political agitation and revolution is, as I have already alluded to, that our modern individual-orientated “culture” is in league with government, sometimes, though not always, literally. We are busy creating our own 1984s. Think of the social networking website, MySpace. Once signed up on Myspace I set up a photo, some blurb about me (whether true or not) and collect “friends” like baseball cards. I also delete my friends as I like, leaving no trace of them in my life. The messages they have posted to me – once viewable by all – disappear. When I send a message, my photo goes with it for all to see, but when I change my photo on my page, it changes everywhere. Messages I posted a year ago suddenly have the new photo. The old one is gone, erased. It never existed. And I can be anyone I want, it would seem. Oscar Wilde is particularly active on MySpace, as are a number of other dead people.
Overhauling a society has rarely been easy, but today in the West it seems as about as easy as it can get, because, despite his suspicion of “government,” the Westerner (the white man or woman) has an uncomfortable feeling that he is in a sense a member of the elite, and – through his train of P.C./Ingsoc thought – the government, the wrongdoer. He is cyber Big Brother controlling his personal profile Web-world, and with abbreviated web-speak – “lol” – and an inadequate grasp of the English language he speaks Ingsoc naturally – “my bad,” “it’s like so you know,” “just doin’ my thing,” “that’s cool;” throw in the usual liberal platitudes – “I think everyone should just get along,” “we’re multicultural” – and your home – with the door left unlocked and the windows wide open.
The more we become our own personal Big Brother the more we want to identify with the victim. It’s Stockholm syndrome. We buy coffee for five dollars a cup knowing full well that the African farmers get next to nothing for it, and then complain about the injustice of the world. Westerners are the only people who would march in the streets to get illegal immigrants permanent residence of their country, but won’t march to help the nation’s poor, whose jobs the newcomers end up taking. Similarly, the British seem to routinely take it on board themselves to reenact (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6490625.stm) the hundred mile marches that slaves were forced to endure, unable to admit that their ancestors were enslaved too. And all the while there are women and girl slaves sold into prostitution all over Britain.
Predicting our current situation, Aldous Huxley spoke of a society populated by abnormal people who act normally because they are immune to the outrageous perpetuated by society itself, because of their social conditioning:
These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted, still cherish ‘the illusion of individuality,’ but in fact they have been to a great extent deindividualized. Their conformity is developing into something like uniformity. (Brave New World Revisited, p. 20)
Perfectly illustrating this delusion, I saw a young man, recently, who was wearing a tee-shirt bearing the slogan, “I am an individual,” underneath which ran a list of qualities that supposedly made him, the wearer, an individual. ‘Fashion’ – which has replaced style – is itself predicated on this delusion. It says I am an individual who can express himself like everyone else. My individuality is endorsed by big business, big brands, so I can’t be wrong – right? We have finally reached the age in which we are so cut off from tradition and continuity that, stranded in the unbearable now of an insecure existence, we crave the endorsement of the mass that we supposedly reject.
Contradictions run through Western and especially British society. In Britain, religion (especially the Christian religion) is thought of as primitive and superstitious, because it has, it is claimed, been disproved by Darwin’s theory of evolution. Yet, at the same time, Western society rejects the implications of evolution: dog eat dog, the survival of the fittest, adapt or die, et cetera. Instead, it legislates against the strongest, the established, etc., taxing the middle classes, or establishing “positive discrimination” (note the contradiction). It is the inversion of Darwinism.
In the West the very notion of the “nation” is eroding. Most troublingly, the cultural language of manners, and established social norms, have already been worn down. Look at a photo of young men or women of a century ago and compare it to one of today’s young men and women and the contrast is shocking. All nobility (and this is a quality that was once found in the working class as well) is gone. Most young people seem so lacking in self-control or self-awareness that they can’t even stand or sit straight. Problematically from a governmental perspective, gone too is the natural allegiance to the nation. There is only an allegiance to Me, Myself, and I.
Increasingly Orwellian, the Labour government has found a solution to this problem, it would seem. Indoctrination must be everywhere and from the moment of conception. Labour is now trying to push through legislation that will require daycare centers, nurseries, and child minders to evaluate and aid the development of babies and young children from birth to the age of five, so that they (the infants) meet targets in no less than 69 categories. For example, babies up to 11 months of age will have to show proficiency in gargling, cooing, etc. According to information posted online by Britain’s National Literary trust, at the age of 3, children should be able to perform a number of very specific tasks, including “pinch some food into a fish tank to develop manual dexterity.”
So far innocuous and idiotic. However, Labour’s political agenda will be introduced to children of 3 years and 4 months (notably an age when most children still believe in Father Christmas), at that point being taught lessons in “citizenship,” meaning, in reality, not British culture but the cultures of recent immigrants to Britain. Information posted by the National Literary trust suggests that by the age of 5 or 6, children should be “aware of their own needs and sensitive to those of others’ cultures and beliefs.” Note the wording. British children are to be aware of “their own needs,” e.g., the need to use the bathroom, or to get a drink of water. It is fundamentally secular and individualistic, rooted in a culture of “me.” British children are to be made aware of the culture of others, not their own. As Melanie Philips of the Daily Mail newspaper has said, “it has turned citizenship into a programme to remake not just national identity but to create a new type of human being from whom all politically incorrect views have been removed.”
As ghastly as this seems, we are less likely than ever before to see the public outraged enough to act. Our brave new world will not be imposed on us by the government, but will be a social contract between the citizens and the government, and it will have been bartered in a firm but friendly manner. Thus the government is currently trying to push through the Equality Act, a law that would make it illegal to discriminate against homosexuals. Significantly, the government has refused to allow Catholic adoption agencies to opt out, and, as such, they will be legally required to adopt out babies to homosexual couples, even though it may – and almost certainly would be – against the wishes of the mother. Conservative MP Bill Cash has said that the Labour government has ”given more preference to those who stand for gay rights than those who are concerned with conscience, with family and with religion,” but he is missing the point. In the new social contract, ‘conscience,’ ‘family,’ and ‘tradition’ will all have a line drawn through them.
Our relationship to family, and especially to children is changing for the worse. It used to be said that children should be seen but not heard, and this sentiment was eventually seen as indicating that the children were not valued. Today children are valued – though this “valuing” of children has tragically turned too many of them into a product in our consumer-driven, “me first” society, with wealthy women from Britain and elsewhere buying babies from Mafia organizations on the European continent. Apparently babies sell for about 20,000 pounds (approximately 40,000 U.S. dollars), and are produced to order, with the criminal leaders impregnating vulnerable women in countries such as Romania, then feeding and housing them until they give birth to the product. Natalie Clarke of the Daily Mail quite rightly says this “sounds like something that might have happened in Hitler’s Germany.”
Having a baby is, of course, becoming less of a miracle or a natural joy, and more of a consumer choice. Some fertility clinics in the U.K., Australia, and the U.S. have begun to offer an egg-freezing service for women. Most commonly eggs are frozen by women undergoing cancer treatment, and who want to preserve their eggs so that they can have a child or children once the treatment is over, and the body in a normal state of health. That is perfectly understandable. However, it is reported that about 1 in 5 women are freezing their eggs in order to have a baby later on in life for “social reasons.” Sadly, with babies being manufactured through the abuse of women (out of sight and out of mind to the consumer), or British women storing their eggs for “social reason” on the one hand and the government planning to indoctrinate babies from birth and up, we are seeing the social contract that is ushering in, if only abstractly, the baby factories of Huxley’s Brave New World, through which Huxley’s society is engineered. As Britain erodes its culture, and abandons teaching its history, and its citizens reach not for the euphoric highs of Soma but for alcohol at every opportunity, living for the rootless cool, “living for the weekend,” brave new Britain is a world leader – alas.
Comments
I didn’t read all of your essay, but I have this to say:
Here it is 11:30. I am in eastern Alabama, Anniston, to be exact. The retired couple I’m staying with expect me to be at home by 10 PM because, as we all know, nothing but evil happens after that. I am beginning to realize just how absurd Protestantism truly is. Never before was 10 PM considered “late”. Their idea of “community” is shuttering the windows at 9 PM, and gossiping about the neighbors. America is truly a SICK SICK SICK society.
As for “contradictions”, the ultra-Protestant lady of the house REFUSES to accept the term “Theotokos”, that is, that Our Lady Mary is the Mother of God. Therein lies the first contradiction of the Protestant “faith”.
That is, Protestants are inherently anti-Christian, and despite their going to bed at 9 PM, they are going to HELL.
And good riddance.
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Heh! Mr Capp, that reminds me of something Garrison Keillor appended to his “Lake Wobegon Days”. He tells an apocryphal story of a German-American Lutheran who returns in secret to his parents’ house at around age 50, and he posts his own “95 Theses” on their front door. The one you reminded me of went something like this:
“Because you always went to bed at ten, I stayed up until 4 AM drinking gin and smoking, and given the courage might have cut off my right arm, that also being something your never would have done.”
And then this one, the last one:
“You ask why I never call and never visit. I don’t need to call, because I hear your voice in my head day and night, and I will hear your voice until I die, and then after I die you will say, “I TOLD you this would happen”...and then something EVEN WORSE will happen...”
Funniest spoof of the Protestant mindset ever written.
But I hope Mr Capp was at least half-joking about those people going to Hell. Protestants like them don’t need any more encouragement to contemplate Hell.
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Two days in a row with an outstanding article, first against atheism, now against The New Decadence.
Orwell was the better literary artist, Huxley the better prophet. _1984_ is better written; _Brave New World_ is the better prognosis.
The conservative principle: Human community and society are held together by history, habit, custom, tradition, ceremony, and consecration. Take these away, and humans become simian. (The “far right” has other principles.) Some history, habit, etc. are bad. The leadership with prudence will improve them with care, not abolish them.
How the conservative principle will adapt to the age of the geo-market—a market necessary for prosperity—remains to be seen.
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A quite astute assessment of the efforts of “government"to destroy society and its norms to build something “better” and more manageable.
What I would like to know, is, who the people or interests are, that drive this effort? Especially since it seems to be a long term process, with benefits to those who are directing this effort not available in the short term or even during one persons lifetime.
And since the drive works as well to destroy the typical “kinship bond”, by which one does things to benefit his own offspring, what is the motivation of the actual persons promoting this abomination in human evolution?
Or do these epople have a secret recipe to shield themselves and their offspring from this indoctrination?
Any ideas?
BTW. Andy Capp and John Ball, what does your infantile diatribe against Lutheranism/Protestantism have to do with Mr.Miller’s article? Seems you are just trying to divert attention from Mr.Millers thoughtful observations.
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<<Andy Capp and John Ball, what does your infantile
diatribe against Lutheranism/Protestantism have to do
with Mr.Miller’s article?>>
To quote from the article:
<<Sooner or later, all revolutions must deal with their
contradictions>>
Do you see the connection, Mr Hoermann?
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@ Mr Hoermann, who wrote: “Andy Capp and John Ball, what does your infantile diatribe against Lutheranism/Protestantism have to do with Mr.Miller’s article?”
Ah. Mr Hoermann. First of all, let me reprise what our friend Adriana has often said, “THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE FUNNY, YOU CHOWDERHEADS!”
Now, that said, let me tell you:
1. I posted that bit from Garrison Keillor, about Lutheranism, BECAUSE I COME FROM THE SAME HERITAGE and I’m sharing a joke about it, TO SHARE WITH OTHERS OF MY GERMAN-AMERICAN LUTHERAN HERITAGE! (And/or with others who can get the joke.)
Good God.
Good God, do I have to spell it out?
Here, I will:
2. I was born and raised in Pennsylvania’s Upper Perkiomen Valley, where around 80 or 90 percent of my childhood friends were German-American Protestants, mostly descended from German religious dissidents of the 1700s. I was a Catholic (of recent English immigrant family), but in our Valley, the Catholics and Protestants all got along fine, BECAUSE of our old Pennsylvanian heritage of TOLERANCE, William Penn’s Quaker Colony, where EVERYONE who simply acknowledged “God” was welcome.
I remain deadly proud of this, to this day: My heritage from Old Pennsylvania, the Quaker colony where ALL monotheistic believers were welcome to live among each other in peace. My homeland, Pennsylvania, has the oldest Jewish cemetery in all America (Gratz cemetery, started in 1742, where several Jewish combat veterans of the American Revolution are buried.) And at 2nd and South Streets, in my Philadelphia, there is St Mary’s Church, where a plaque says,
“This is Holy Ground...here (at that ROMAN CATHOLIC Church!) in 1781, the captured flags of the British Army were laid at the altar.”
3. As I was saying, I grew up in the Upper Perkiomen Valley, among friends and neighbours who were 90 percent descended from German Protestants who fled to Pennsylvania for refuge and sanctuary in the 1700s. THEY ARE MY PEOPLE! So don’t you, or anyone, DARE insult them, or suggest that I would ever offend the people of my own native Valley.
4. And, SIR, Mr Hoermann, you spoke too soon. Because you didn’t know, that I spent my first year of school - at Kindergarten - in a Lutheran Church.
In my (Pennsylvanian) Valley’s school district, in 1968, there was a logistical problem. Our local Lutheran Church (founded in the 1700s) volunteered to give its edifice for the public school’s Kindergarten (children of around 4-6 years old) to go to school in.
So, I spent my first year of school - in the PUBLIC school of our region, mind you - I spent it in the basement of our local Lutheran Church.
Here is a photo of it. I spent my first year of school, in Kindergarten, 1968-1969, in this Lutheran Church in my Pennsylvanian Valley:
http://www.jelc.org/images/JELC_Front_Facade_-_2_small.jpg
...and consequently, until I was around nine years old, I thought I was a “Lutheran.” :-) :-) HA! HAHAHAHA!
And so was my mother’s father - Edwin Kaplin (1899-1965), my mother’s father was also a Lutheran, the son of a converted Berlin Jew. And my mother was a Protestant until she married my English-Catholic father and she converted in name - but my German-Jewish mother always remained largely Protestant in spirit.
SO, Mr Hoermann, please refrain from accusing me of making any (in your words)
“infantile diatribe against Lutheranism.”
You jumped to premature conclusions there, my Friend.
Funny thing is, that although I’m a nominal Catholic - and a 99 percent believing Catholic - a big part of me will always remain Protestant, for the sake of my belief in private conscience.
The biggest part of me believes in a universal Church of Christ, in my Catholic way - yet another part of me will always have some reservations about Roman Catholic temporal authorities, and part of me will always agree with Martin Luther’s divinely inspired words:
“Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders!”
So. SO, Mr Hoermann, WHAT do you say to me NOW? HMMM? :-)
(God bless you, Mr Hoermann, for provoking this continuing discussion in a Protestant way in which I, of all people, believe in...)
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Captivating article and well written.
What in the world is happening to Britain?
I won’t say the “H” word, but were the
Fascists correct when they railed against
the demise of Western culture and society?
Britain looks more like an occupied country
than the birthplace of classical liberalism.
As for the above whatchamacallits that hate
Protestantism, is that the type of charity
they teach you in the Churches you go to?
yikes!
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Christianity nearly destroyed western culture.
Bring back paganism.
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Mr.Ball,
You really are intellegent for a 14 year old.
Quite impressive!
Oh by the way, I think Pennsylvanians
(your people) are a bunch of stuck up
puritan judaizers that don’t know when
its bedtime.
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It is a chilling picture, but why do you bother blaming
the government for it? These ridiculos choices (walking
machine for people who drive to the club, diet
chocolate bars, babies for sale) seem to be market
driven and a good demonstration to our libertarian
friends that the market is not the source of all that
is good and true, and that there are moral considerations
that trump the freedom of the market.
After all, it is people who choose the diet chocolate
bars (my take when they offer me saccharin for my
coffee is that I never take cream with it, and if I
do not take cream I can have all the sugar I want -
and if I feel fancy about it, turbinado sugar).
What you have here is a culture of consumers, who buy
whatever is offered, be it trendy vegetables, coffee
that has been pooped by a civet, babies, Pokemon toys,
clean consciences, spiritual awakenings on the cheap.
All in the supermarket where they pick and choose.
I am afraid that the role of the government in it is
rather limited, it just lets the market forces do their
work, and does nothing to remind them that they are
more than consumers.
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Very fine article. The decline of Britain has
been an ongoing subject of Theodore Dalyrymple,
Peter Hitchens, and others. But very few have
connected it with the rise and triumph of
reductinistic thinking. Yet these
concerns were being voiced as long ago by
Wordsworth and Coleridge,Keats, Blake,
and there has always been
an underground protest against the rigid, reductionistic and
nihilistic intellect. Read the works of Owen
Barfield! Read the autobiographies of Kathleen
Raine! Even look at the prophecies/warnings of
Toynbee, barely a generation ago, and now
totally forgotten! Britain once had a fine
educational system,
a society of manners and self-restraint,
an aristocracy. What is happening to Britain today is
an example of “the corruption of the best is the
worst” or “lilies that fester smell far worse than
weeds.”
Spiritual development is a necessity of societies
as it is of individuals. Those who fail to
progress spiritually fall behind into traps
of rigidification - “gods that age become
demons.” Said Stridberg. Western societies have
become demonic, and Britain is the leader
of this dark pack.
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“As ghastly as this seems, we are less likely than ever before to see the public outraged enough to act. Our brave new world will not be imposed on us by the government, but will be a social contract between the citizens and the government, and it will have been bartered in a firm but friendly manner.”
Just so, but where are the Tories and American conservatives in all this? American conservative forums are all a twitter right now over former (black) CNN employee Bernard Shaw saying opposition to immigration is racist. The “conservative” members of these groups are falling all over themselves chiming in that they aren’t opposed to mass immigration (that is, they aren’t “racist"), oh no, they’re just opposed to the ILLEGAL immigration, apparently because it offends their sense of order and propriety . I’ve pointed out in the past that the Senate has offered to relieve them of this particular anxiety by, in effect, legalizing all immigration, but they don’t seem to appreciate the point. Shaw is right, immigration is a racial/cultural policy, and it’s typical of present times that it is the liberal who is closer to the truth and the conservatives who are lying their asses off in defense of political correctness and its policy of destroying their society through immigration. The whole PC system rests on this “social contract” between feckless conservatives and the establishment.
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Yes, bring back the Britain of child labor sweatshops, the Britain that sent armies to conquer and occupy foreign lands, that played bizarre imperial games such as “let’s invent new nations” [the repercussions - we’re still dealing with], that prevented post WW1 Germany from feeding herself, that stood aside and giggled as her Irish slaves starved.
Man, the good old days!
Monarchy. Aristocrats. Empires. Good riddance.
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Hankest, they have turned the guns on themselves and are pulling the trigger on ever more arrogant and ambitious social experiments. They have the U.S. nation build for them.
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hankest...are you only capable of envisioning binary constructs?
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To Hankest:
“Christianity nearly destroyed western culture”. Huh? What planet have you been living on may I ask? To make such a statement surely means that your grasp of history is, shall we say, non-existent.
That you attribute to monarchy the sweatshops and miseries of the past in England shows that you are clearly unaware of the fact that the monarchy was killed in England in the 17th century. It took about 100 years for the protestants to finish it off but finish it off they did and established, in the time of Cromwell, the oligarchy which has ruled that sad land ever since.
Grab yourself a history book, dear heart. I suggest you begin with Hilaire Belloc.
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