A Culture vs. an Absence

A clash of cultures is exploding onto English streets, resulting in at-times armed warfare, and yet, only one of the warring groups seems easily definable. That is to say, the English culture is so self-denying that it seems difficult to define. What are English values in 2024? It certainly appears that the political class in England can’t define them.

Values are rigid and exclusionary, and therefore not to be uttered, never mind worth defending. To some, Britain is merely a block of land, not a place with its own people. If you hold that worldview, then there is no reason at all to resist an invading group, no reason to close borders. Those within are inferior to those without and are thus easily replaced with foreign betters. If those within have a checkered history that you abhor, then their replacement is desirous.

This is the stance of the political leaders in Britain who are deciding her fate. It is the stance that has led to a hoard of migrants being let through the gate, who have no desire to acclimate to British culture and in fact seek dominion over it.

Part of the problem is that a systemic self-hatred and self-ignorance in England have gripped too many. The Muslims know who they are and what they believe—I’m not sure we can honestly say the same about the English.

“We don’t want this” in response to present circumstances isn’t enough. You cannot define oneself by an absence. Likewise, you cannot fight for an absence. “Lack of Islam/Muslims/immigrants” will only go so far. A country needs more than that to motivate and unify its people. It needs a value system and common bond, which has historically come through a shared Faith.

A country that is tearing down the statues of its heroes is necessarily going to be most receptive to a future that is unlike its past. If the ideal future is defined only by its rejection of what was and what is, then it will be either literally or at least perceptually foreign. If culture is the cultivation of the soil from which men grow, as John Senior asserts, then it cannot merely be self-denying. We do not and cannot grow from absence. Yet this is the entirety of the modern leftist vision. What’s better is what is over yonder—foreign or merely new and exotic. The desire for the new is merely the hatred of the norm. It’s better simply by not being us.

In this landscape, England has no hope of repelling an invading culture or religion. America is at risk of embracing the same self-loathing posture—statues have already fallen, after all, but the group responsible is a much smaller segment of the population than it is in England. When this poisonous ideology of self-hatred spreads, it becomes parasitic on its host. It destroys the nation whose resources it pillages, without realizing that destroying societal supports will eventually affect the demolitionists themselves.

The Englishmen on the streets are those who still remember something of a British culture, and who are therefore clashing against the Muslim invaders. Soon, the latter will have no opposition remaining, in England and other Western nations. They will merely move into the void left behind after the relativistic ideology of ‘tolerance’ has widowed out the last fibers of what once was. A nation that is too ashamed to teach its children of its history is already doomed. Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, and the rest of the Islamic world are perfectly comfortable teaching their kids who they are and what their history is. To them, shame over ancestry is a ludicrous notion.

For the English to fight back effectively against the cultural collapse and simultaneous invasion that they face, they need to recall who they are. The Faith would (and has historically) provide a set of values, unity, direction, and stability. England will be adrift until she can find that rudder again.