Theodore Dalrymple has a terrific article in the City Journal, the magazine of the American Manhattan Institute think tank, which goes some way towards explaining just why British society has degenerated into its sullen and unthinking infantilism. He reflects on the apparently perplexing fact that Britons who lived through the death and destruction of the Second World War remember it nevertheless as the best time in their lives -- a time that George Orwell managed to fix in the national imagination in a way that came to define the British character -- and concludes that this is because the defence of the country against Nazism provided meaning and purpose. This sense of national unity, however, was translated after the war into the collectivist programmes of the welfare state, causing the economist Friedrich von Hayek to write his counterblast, The Road to Serfdom.

But what happened to the British, argues Dalrymple, was far worse than even Hayek imagined. The unrealisable utopian welfare project resulted in nothing less than a collapse of all the values that had made the British so admirable, as he catalogues in this devastating litany:

‘A sense of irony is the first victim of utopian dreams. The British tolerance of eccentricity has also evaporated; uniformity is what they want now, and are prepared informally to impose. They tolerate no deviation in taste or appearance from themselves: and certainly in the lower reaches of society, people who are markedly different, either in appearance because of the vagaries of nature, or in behavior because of an unusual taste they may have, especially for cultivation, meet with merciless ridicule, bullying, and even physical attack. It is as if people believed that uniformity of appearance, taste, and behavior were a justification of their own lives, and any deviation an implied reproach or even a declaration of hostility…

‘The British are no longer sturdily independent as individuals, either, and now feel no shame or even unease, as not long ago they would have felt, at accepting government handouts. Indeed, 40 percent of them now receive such handouts: for example, the parents of every child are entitled not merely to a tax reduction but to an actual payment in cash, no matter the state of their finances. As for those who, though able-bodied and perfectly able to work, are completely dependent on the state for their income, they unashamedly call the day when their welfare checks arrive “payday.” Between work and parasitism they see no difference. “I’m getting paid today,” they say, having not only accepted but thoroughly internalized the doctrine propounded in the Beveridge Report, that it is the duty of the state to assure everyone of a decent minimum standard of life regardless of his conduct.’

In short, the legacy of the welfare state, argues Dalrymple, has been to render the once lion-hearted British people servile, having surrendered control over much of their lives to the state, thus reducing the choices they are still able to make to ‘sex and shopping’:

‘No wonder that the British have changed in character, their sturdy independence replaced with passivity, querulousness, or even, at the lower reaches of society, a sullen resentment that not enough has been or is being done for them. For those at the bottom, such money as they receive is, in effect, pocket money, like the money children get from their parents, reserved for the satisfaction of whims. As a result, they are infantilized. If they behave irresponsibly—for example, by abandoning their own children wherever they father them—it is because both the rewards for behaving responsibly and the penalties for behaving irresponsibly have vanished. Such people come to live in a limbo, in which there is nothing much to hope or strive for and nothing much to fear or lose. Private property and consumerism coexist with collectivism, and freedom for many people now means little more than choice among goods.’

This profound cultural de-moralisation, this disintegration of the British character, goes a long way towards explaining why British society has become as sentimentalised as it is selfish, as irrational as it is irreligious and as uncivilised as it is uneducated. Given this calamitous decline, the current general election frankly has about as much relevance to the great issues of the day as playing a pinball machine on Brighton Pier.

Posted by melanie at April 18, 2005