The moral suicide of the British people

Writing from Britain, Margaret S. draws a vivid and terrible portrait of a society destroying itself, destroying its young people, through its rejection of all higher truth, and its resulting immorality and selfishness:

Laura W. may be right about boys developing hopelessness. [See the long discussion on “Lesbianism, feminism, and masculinity.”] I was, until recently, a district nurse in the UK, and am certified in child and community health. Most of the children I saw with attention deficit disorders, hyperactivity, etc, were boys and most of their parents actually asked for Ritalin. People would bring their son to the surgery saying, “He’s hyperactive and I want something for it.” My experience has been that many of the little boys given Ritalin at 6 or 7 or 8 are the same young men who ten years, or less, later are at increased risk of early death whether through suicide or accident due to reckless behaviour (everything from drug-taking to joy-riding).

I think this hopelessness of young men is a “catching up” with girls—the young male equivalent of anorexia. (I don’t agree that girls starve themselves literally to death to emulate size zero models even though some of those models are anorexic themselves). I think the ‘average’ anorexic girl is terrified of growing up and sometimes I wonder if boys are too in their different way. It’s horrific how many kids just don’t “see” themselves in the future and I worry that some boys don’t want to become men just as girls who starve themselves into perpetual prepubescence don’t want to become women. Boys “act out” and steal cars and destroy things; girls “act in” and destroy their own bodies but it’s quite possibly the same thing in the end.

Children grow up with no sense of anything beyond themselves and no framework for dealing with their wants and needs and fears. It’s sad enough when adults are so lonely, scared and full of fear and failure that they get drunk, take drugs and sleep around, but there are no words to describe the tragedy of children doing it, and they most certainly do. We see people around 30 now with Korsakoff’s psychosis which used to be a disease solely of hard drinking men in late middle-age. We see people in their teens with cirrhosis of the liver. The amount of drinking you have to do to develop those is quite terrifying; to have Korsakoff’s psychosis at 30 you need to have been drinking heavily since ten! St. Paul said, “whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things,” yet almost everything that was fair and just a couple of generations ago, let alone 2,000 years ago, is nasty and oppressive and a target for ridicule today. Somehow everything innocently noble children could aspire to has been eradicated. I suppose because nobility means believing in something larger and more important than oneself, whether God or country, and that in turn means restraint and self-denial which are the things that modern people can tolerate least. Was it Chesterton who said the man who stands for nothing will fall for everything? Our society has done that spectacularly. Imagine showing something like “Mr Smith Goes To Washington” to most people nowadays, they would fall about hooting like owls at the lameness of believing in right and wrong and lost causes.

I think the 1950s were a pretty good decade to be a young woman. You could go to university, enter most of the professions, travel and wangle a flat with your best friend if your parents trusted you. If you were a bimbo your parents did you the favour of keeping it quiet by keeping you at home. All in all, young women in the 1950s had a huge advantage over every generation of young women since, because they had to make choices about marriage, motherhood and careers; they were not fed the lie that they could have everything.

The lesbian mother is a sad but all too typical example of a modern parent, ie, the woman who thinks she can and should have everything. I have seen so many children made miserable because their separated/divorced parents just couldn’t hold off on sex until the children had left home. One of my last patients was a 15 year old girl who came to me for a pregnancy test result. She volunteered that the boy she was with “makes me feel really sick” so I asked her why she was taking such chances with her life and health, and the gist of a long, aggressive reply was that “everyone else” was doing it, but she didn’t mean her peers, she meant her parents. She listened to her mother and her boyfriend every night on the other side of the wall and her father wouldn’t send his girlfriend home for the two nights a month she spent with him. It was terribly, terribly sad. She expected nothing from her mother and I believe the abusive relationship she was in was some kind of twisted plea for attention from her father. I am so very, very glad it was the last conversation of that sort I’ll ever have. Everyone involved in child-health knows that successive boyfriends, especially live-in ones, are detrimental to the child emotionally. Everyone except the parents.

I think the poor girl with the lesbian mother is being attacked because she’s embarrassed people by having the moral fortitude to take a stand. People love the myth of tolerance because they think it means they don’t have to live up to anything and this lass is effectively shouting “the emperor has no clothes!” The very idea of an 18 year old raised entirely in a culture of ‘tolerance’ talking about right and wrong must be fundamentally frightening to people who have already fallen for everything and actually like wallowing around in comfy mindless amorality. Sometime back in the late ‘80s someone described a reprimand from the then Archbishop of York as being “mauled by a dead sheep” and I think that pretty well describes what’s happening to this girl. I hope with all my heart her strength of character holds out.

I suppose the answer would be a time-machine to take us back to Bedford Falls or Avonlea and keep us there Brigadoon-style but short of that I can’t imagine what we can do to reverse the rot. I think I am resigned to expecting decadence to slide into barbarism via Sharia and selfish enough to hope I’m dead before it happens.

LA replies:

This is a tremendous statement. I only take exception to Margaret’s last comment, which is an indulgence in despair that one should not allow to oneself, at least before other people.

- end of initial entry -

Laura W. writes:

I was so deeply moved by Margaret’s S.’s comments to you that I am going to be read them again several times. She so beautifully expresses the horror of childhood today.

I wasn’t sure what the economic status was of the children she saw as a community nurse. But, in case people think this phenomenon is confined to the working class or poor, I’d like to repeat my earlier statement that the same sort of parental neglect is common among the upper middle class and wealthy of this country.

Could I offer one small example? I have a friend who is a psychotherapist. She often tells me about her clients, in part as her own attempt to fathom their soullessness. One of her former clients was a little boy of eleven. Everyday this little boy, who had no siblings, returned home from school on the bus to an empty home. The large, expensive house was in a well-heeled suburban neighborhood, with big yards and trees and no one ever on the streets. When the boy walked into the house, he was terrified. Terrified to be all alone. His parents, who were both at their high-paying jobs during the day, were perplexed by their son. What was he afraid of? Why couldn’t he be reassured there was nothing to fear? After trying unsuccessfully to talk him out of the problem, they concluded he suffered from mental illness and took him to my friend. She gave them a prescription and then, over the course of several visits, performed some sort of novel eye-movement therapy (I think it’s a form of hypnosis.) She says he was cured. Today, he returns to that empty house alone.

Alan Roebuck writes:

I am moved by Margaret S.’s report from England, especially because I have a 3-year old son. She wrote:

I think the “average” anorexic girl is terrified of growing up and sometimes I wonder if boys are too in their different way. It’s horrific how many kids just don’t “see” themselves in the future and I worry that some boys don’t want to become men just as girls who starve themselves into perpetual prepubescence don’t want to become women.

Indeed, many children in Western society don’t want to grow up, and a big reason they don’t is the idea of the teenager. As I said in my essay on authority,

By definition, a teenager is a quasi-autonomous individual who combines much of the irresponsibility and immaturity of a child with much of the power and privileges of an adult.

Imagine being a teenager today: you have much of the power of an adult, and little of the responsibility. Why would you want to surrender the irresponsibility of teenagerhood for the more mature and sober life of an adult, especially when the idea that such is your duty to your God or your family has been abolished?

And this is in addition to the general abolition of meaning throughout Western society that renders life itself absurd.

We parents have a duty explicitly to warn our children about the destructive results of these evil ideas, and to encourage them (require them!) not to go along with the status quo.

Regarding her despairing last paragraph, I can only say to Margaret: remember the words of Lawrence Auster:

The starting point, the indispensable condition of any conservative or traditionalist movement, as well as of our personal spiritual survival, is that we say NO to the prevailing values of the liberal order and that we keep saying no, that we never accept them inwardly, even while recognizing the fact that they exercise effective control over society at present and that we may need to accommodate ourselves to them to a certain degree in our external interactions with society.

Trust in the Lord, and have courage!

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 15, 2007 10:14 PM | Send