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Dreams of England: civilisation gained... and lost
Posted by diogenes on 2026-April-12 14:38:41, Sunday|
(Forgive the scrappiness of these notes.) Clive Bell, in his indispensable work on Civilisation, argues that what makes one epoch “more civilised” than another is not the numbers of truly civilised men and women in the society (which he calls the “civilised core”); this remains fairly constant. What determines the degree of civilisation is the varying influence that the civilised core wields on wider society in different epochs. Frederic Raphael, who wrote The Glittering Prizes, a sequence of plays written for television about a postwar cohort of Cambridge alumni (which featured some rather lovely full frontal boy nudity in one episode!), described Adam Morris, the protagonist of the series, in the following terms: Adam Morris (Benedict's School and St John's), Major Scholar; reading Classics and Moral Sciences. Father, solicitor; mother, housewife. Hopes to find in Cambridge a philosophy which rules all religion out of court and dreams of a world where reason will prevail. As well as unlimited sexual opportunity. Failing reason's victory, he will settle for sexual opportunity.To an extent, Adam Morris is representative of the postwar Oxbridge alumni, who went forth from Oxbridge and the universities generally, and influenced a whole society. Their belief in reason, and contempt for puritanism, fed into the postwar era of greater permissiveness. Their belief also led straight to the bien pensant postwar economic consensus which reigned until Margaret Thatcher. The primary issues were economic, material; government had a duty to abolish poverty, create a general sense of well-being, and ensure that each individual could lead the best life of which they were capable given their mental aptitudes. Many of the alumni were Marxist or Marxist-influenced, and hence emphasised social class. Even for those on the centre-right, a Keynesian consensus was accepted, very far from free market dogma. What was not to the fore were issues of identity, gender etc. Even when such issues began to be felt, they were addressed in terms of economics, e.g. equal pay. The postwar social democracy had a high degree of pluralism, that is, there were a large number of internally self-governing groups between the individual and the state: professional organisations, public corporations, trades unions, churches, universities, etc. As a result, groups tended to retain their traditions, for example boy choirs remained single sex. The overarching issues being economic, no one thought to challenge these traditions, which had little bearing on material issues. Pluralism is a neglected field, despite the contributions of G. D. H. Cole and Bertrand Russell. The idea of pluralist theory is that the way to secure individual liberty is through groups between the individual and the state. These provide solidarity over issues where the members of the group have things in common, enabling them, through the greater strength of the group, to protect themselves against state encroachments. Groups have the advantage over the state that (1) membership tends to be voluntary, whereas membership of the state is compulsory; you can exit a group (2) they represent only an aspect of the individual's personality, and do not speak for the rest. A union only speaks for the interests of the member as an employee; it does not interfere in the individual member's sex life. Groups arise in every organic and healthy society. The free market is far from spontaneous, and has to be imposed, which means group solidarity must be broken up. Thatcher accomplished this, and as a result the individual stood naked before the state. So a great deal of the liberty that existed in postwar society was a function of pluralism, and the rejection of free market dogma that was held responsible for the Great Depression. The world of the postwar consensus was a world in which I would find little to disagree with, except, perhaps, for Britain's foreign policy. Where it was deficient, it seemed to be going broadly in the right direction (for example, the abolition of the death penalty and the decriminalisation of homosexuality). I would have supported this consensus, perhaps rather to the left hand side of it, but still within the broad framework. I do not want to idealise this society. For example, racial prejudice was widespread (which is one reason why I would say I was on the left of the spectrum even within this postwar consensus). But it was better than what came afterwards. Part of this postwar society's culture was that childhood was not regarded as a sphere radically separated from adulthood. One learnt as one grew up, and one learnt fast. One's mistakes were ones own responsibility. The change in society's conception of childhood is perhaps the biggest change and one of the major contributors to the current hysteria. It seems to have happened in two waves, one from the right, and one from the left; the first native, the other drifting over from America. First, the native contribution. There is no doubt whatever that the beginning of the assault on sexual liberty came from the right. The first major piece of legislation which would impact pederasts was the Protection of Children Act 1978, and this was championed by Mary Whitehouse and Margaret Thatcher. In this way, the right sought to mark off childhood as a special area of concern and anxiety, and conceptualised childhood as a stage of life devoid of sexual pleasure or desire or legitimate sexual curiosity. A puritanism has always been present in English society, stretching as far back as the Society for the Reformation of Manners, and, before that, to the actual Puritans. But the next wave of child protectionism came from the left. Specifically, women educated at American universities came back to Britain with new attitudes, informed by the prevalent victim feminism that was gathering pace in the US. Its critique was rooted in the inequalities of power within society, particularly with regard to gender, and the supposed sexual power that men wielded over women and children. Sexual access to women and children was the most egregious instance of this power imbalance and the most objectionable form it took. A child protectionist ideology, already present and growing stronger as a result of the political victory of the right, was reinforced by a yank-inspired feminist ideology which drove the state to police sexual relations. Instead of a nuanced discussion of child sexuality, the ideology chose only to talk of rape, molestation and trauma. The trauma narrative has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, since children brought up with this ideology will find any sexual contact with adults traumatising. As a result of the pervasive anxiety over “pedophilia”, there is also far more anxiety over casual child nudity than there used to be. Society, which had begun to see boysexual men as human, instead chose to see monsters. Since all sides of the political spectrum drove this movement, it was perhaps bigger than any political ideology and so the move towards child protectionism should be seen as an independent force in itself. Against this new consensus, I maintain: - child contact with adult sexuality is not intrinsically harmful, and need have no long term consequences, particularly for boys - boys should be completely lacking in body shame. They should feel no need to hide their genitals before either males or females. (Girls should be free to be nude as well, though perhaps they are more “naturally” modest.) - the loss of the informal separation of boys and girls, and separate spheres, that prevailed before the era of neoliberalism, is to be regretted. - the tabloid press, which has driven child sex hysteria for much of this time, is a poison in the body politic, but so is the Guardian left with its feminist, child protectionist ideology Now, nothing is going to change very soon in Britain. The depth of the ideology which has been instilled in the rising generation is so great that we cannot expect any progress until our culture has shifted quite radically. I have told a story about how a society that was civilised, and getting more so, suddenly got worse, a story which loosely links together the political and economic changes with the broader cultural shifts. The next section should be “How we can regain civilisation”. But I will start out by confessing that I don't know the answer to that, assuming there is an answer. I shall just spell out my personal prejudices here. I cannot help but think that politics, to become civilised, needs to focus back on economics, on material issues. The concentration on material issues characterised politics when it was at its most civilised. (1) By shifting taxes to wealth rather than work we can provide the services to young people that they need without overburdening them with taxes, and give people the living standards that will both support families and be the foundation for the country's future prosperity; and a more prosperous country is one less prone to panic and hysteria. (2) The second thing I feel very strongly is that Britain must rejoin the EU and separate ourselves from America once and for all. We need to close the Yank bases and kick out the American servicemen. We need to scrap Trident, in order to become completely independent of the US. The more we gravitate to Europe, the more civilised we become, the more likely we are, when the great cultural change comes, to shift the dial in our favour through the recognition of the sexual rights of youth. It's a long road, and it won't happen tomorrow. It probably won't happen in my lifetime. Only the Greens are supplying these two points; and only the Greens are rejecting contemporary yank culture war rubbish in favour of focusing on the material issues (I love this guy!). If you've made it this far, thanks for reading!  |
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