The condition of modern Britain is such that it calls to mind one of the dreariest pieces of literature it has been my misfortune to read. It is the novel Erewhon, authored by a tedious scribbler named Samuel Butler.
Erewhon (an anagram of “Nowhere”) was originally published anonymously. I had no problem understanding why—Butler’s writing style was, to my 13–year–old mind, so ponderous and the pace of the action so slow the book seemed an ideal antidote to insomnia.
Moreover, the plot seemed utterly idiotic. In my opinion, satire needed to have some basis in reality. After all, what was the point of satire, I asked my English master, if it was quite unrecognizable as such.
Erewhon, he explained, satirized various aspects of Victorian society, including anti–crime policy, health care, and religion. I found this a somewhat dubious contention. True, the Victorians were odd, but I could not believe they were quite as odd as Butler made them out to be.
In Erewhon, for example, criminals were treated as if they were ill, while sick people were treated as criminals. Erewhonians were, moreover, terrified of machines and banned them from their country on the grounds they were potentially dangerous.
In any event, my English master didn’t share my low opinion of the book and we plowed doggedly through Erewhon for an entire mind–numbing trimester. At last, examinations done, I put the distasteful experience entirely out of my mind.
Imagine, then, my surprise when I discovered Erewhon was not at all a work of satire, but rather a work of prophecy—complementing, if you will, George Orwell’s 1984.
Indeed, Erewhon is alive and well and flourishing in modern Britain. In fact, Samuel Butler’s bizarre vision appears to have taken over from the Authorized (King James) Version of the Bible and The Book of Common Prayer as the source of the country’s animating philosophy.
Britain’s sick are treated as criminals—as a quick visit to the average National Health hospital amply demonstrates. And the country’s mistrust of machinery is evidenced in the tiny ‘kiddy kar–type” motor vehicles so many British car owners are obliged to drive.
As in Erewhon, the British approach to crime these days is therapeutic rather than punitive. Criminals are treated as victims of a cruel and unjust society. Only 1 in 12 burglaries are ever solved and only 1 in 12 convicted burglars get any jail time
Crime victims in Britain, by contrast, are treated as criminals. Recently, police warned a woman who used a table lamp to ward off an attack by a violent burglar that if the criminal filed a complaint she would be prosecuted.
Homeowners are routinely warned by the police not to protect the windows of their garden sheds with chicken wire. Burglars might hurt themselves while breaking in—eaving the homeowner liable to prosecution.
A couple of years ago an elderly farmer was sentenced to life in prison for shooting two men, killing one of them, when they threatened him while breaking into his remote farmhouse. The farm had been broken into seven times before and the police had demonstrably been unable to provide timely assistance.
The farmer legally owned the gun. The two men had long criminal records. After a vast public outcry the sentence was cut to five years’ jail. But the farmer, after serving three years, was refused parole (normally automatically granted) on the grounds he was “a danger to burglars.” Go figure.
Britain’s Chief Rabbi, Lord Sacks, has actually done the figuring. Commenting on the recent riots in The Wall Street Journal, he ascribed them to a “tsunami of wishful thinking that swept across the West.”
“Britain is the latest country to pay the price for what happened a half century ago in one of the most radical transformations in the history of the West,” Lord Sacks wrote, “In virtually every Western society in the 1960s there was a moral revolution, and abandonment of its entire traditional ethic of self–restraint.
“’All you need’, sang the Beatles, ‘is love’. The Judeo–Christian moral code was jettisoned. In its place came: “Whatever works for you.” The Ten Commandments were rewritten as the Ten Creative Suggestions. Or as Allan Bloom put it in The Closing of the American Mind: ‘I am the Lord Your God. Relax.’
“You do not have to be a Victorian sentimentalist to realize that something has gone badly wrong since. In Britain today, more than 40 percent of children are born outside marriage. This has led to new forms of poverty serious government spending has failed to cure. In 2007, a UNICEF report found that Britain’s children are the unhappiest in the world. The 2011 riots are one result …”
Lord Sacks’ diagnosis of the ills afflicting Britain (and the rest of Europe, for that matter) applies equally to America. The difference is that here religion has not yet entirely been eliminated from the public square. Here religion is still clinging on—albeit by its fingernails—while in much of Britain, says Lord Sacks, “religion is a thing of the past.”
The solution the Chief Rabbi proposes is nothing less than a repeat of what the Anglican world knows as “The Catholic Revival”—the movement that transformed both Britain and America in the early Nineteenth Century.
In the 1820s, the state of society was similar to the present. It was unsafe to walks the streets of any major city for exactly the same reasons they are dangerous places today.
“What happened over the next 30 years was a massive shift in public opinion.” Lord Sacks writes, “There was an unprecedented growth in charities, friendly societies, working men’s institutes, temperance groups, church and synagogue associations, Sunday schools, YMCA buildings, and moral campaigns of every sort …
“The common factor was the building of moral character, self-discipline, willpower, and personal responsibility. It worked. Within a single generation, crime rates came down and social order was restored. What was achieved was nothing less than the remoralization of society—much of it driven by religion.”
One should not cavil, but that final sentence is true only in part. The remoralization of society was driven entirely by religion. The author of Judeo–Christian virtue is the loving God who created us, and, thus, it is immutable. When human beings define virtue and morality, the subject is inevitably open to debate. The results are rarely pretty, as we have seen here in the West. Often the consequences of human definitions of virtue and morality are appalling—viz. Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and numerous other godless dictatorships. GPH✠
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