Those who have long been fans of The New Criterion, the American monthly which charts the depredations of the culture wars, will be heartened to find that as of last week it is now being published in Britain. Its first UK issue is packed with intelligent, well-written and pointed commentaries on the rout of British culture by such seasoned commentators on this melancholy phenomenon as Theodore Dalrymple, John Gross, Daniel Johnson, Peter Mullen, David Pryce-Jones and Andrew Roberts.

These and other writers chart the revolution which has progressively wiped out British virtues including -- as Dalrymple records -- politeness, lack of self-importance, stoicism, fortitude, emotional self-control ‘and an ironic detachment from their own experience, especially when it was unpleasant’ and redefined them as unpleasant and anachronistic. Pryce-Jones records the evisceration of British institutions; Johnson flays the narcissistic and culturally masochistic intellectual priestly caste; Mullen savages a Church of England which has replaced the Book of Common Prayer and the Authorised Version of the Bible by ‘dumbed down, politically correct prayers which sound as if they were written by a committee made up of Tony Blair, Karl Marx and Noddy’ and broadcasts on BBC Radio Four’s Thought for the Day such expressions of religious principle as a defence of voodooism.

For me, though, the most poignant essay is the one by Dalrymple, in which he recalls the selflessness, dignity and integrity displayed by his patients in a different age. After observing that it is still possible to find British cultural virtues in India (as a result of the Empire, which we must all despise) he notes that as a result he feels an instinctive sympathy with such Indians and concludes:

‘And this reassures me that my perception of what has happened so disastrously, so hideously in my own country is not merely the psychological product of embittered old age, in which the ancientry as a matter of course decry and deride youth as being nothing but the getting of wenches with child and stealing and fighting, but something more accurate and objective. And this in turn is depressing, for it means permanent exile and estrangement from the land of my birth, wherever I may live’.

The appearance on British shelves of The New Criterion means, however, that those who are trying to prevent Britain from making strangers of us all now have an outlet and an ally.

Posted by melanie at September 27, 2005