A journey to traditionalism (and a comment on British atheism)

Janet R. writes:

My own journey to the views of VFR started after I read an article in Harper’s Magazine shortly after September 11 which basically said that political correctness had gone too far and that Western civilisation is superior. One of the examples given was the treatment of women, but the article also dealt with art and music.

I had been so brainwashed over the years that the views expressed struck me like a bolt of lightning; a revelation! From then I started reading Mark Steyn and then Melanie Phillips and finally I arrived at your blog. Your views are quite a shock for people who have been indoctrinated in political correctness all their lives, but people need to start somewhere. Doesn’t St. Paul say that people need to be fed on milk before they can take meat?

In my own case the journey might have been made easier because I was born in the early 1950s and I do remember a period when it was automatically given that Western culture was superior. Anyone born after the 1960s doesn’t even have that cultural reference. Also, 25 years ago I left Britain to live in Brazil, and I was shocked each time I visited Britain by the decline in morals and principles bought about by a mixture of the welfare state, atheism, and immigration. The decline has been so incremental and pervasive that I don’t think that most people living in Britain are even aware of it.

Now I even agree with you about women and voting. I have come a long way!

LA replies:

“Welfare state, atheism, and immigration.” That’s a very good way of summing up the ills of Britain, though of course any triad of baddies is going to be too short. It’s unusual for conservatives to include atheism among the leading ills of a society, but it definitely applies in Britain’s case. I’ve written before how, in the mid 1990s, I started to become aware of a chill coming from British media and many British people. It was the chill of atheism. Britain has adopted atheism as its unofficial creed, verging on its official creed—with, it now seems, the whole EU doing the same, given the official attack on those who criticize Darwinism as enemies of human rights. But there’s something about the British, their rejection of philosophy and first principles, their utilitarianism (what other people could have given birth to Darwinism, which reduces all the phenomena of life to the barest utilitarianism?) that seems to dispose them particularly to atheism.

Furthermore, in this connection, I do not think it is a coincidence that in exact step with their atheism, half the British elite are attempting to destroy Britain as a country and culture, while the rest of the elite and of the British people seem to have lost any will to preserve Britain as a culture and country, a process of which I’ve given numerous examples here.

As the ultimate example (so far), let us recall the recent story about the couple who had their 11 year old foster son taken away from them, along with any right to have foster children in the future, because they refused to sign a document committing them to teach the boy that homosexuality is a good thing. Has there been any PC horror to equal that? I didn’t comment on that story other than to quote and link it. What could one say about such a happening? There are evils so extreme that to condemn them in words would be to trivialize them. Such evil is the work of the officially atheist society that Britain is becoming. It may still have an established Church, but the governing philosophy of that Church and of the whole society is non-discrimination, and the ideology of non-discrimination begins with the rejection of God and the transcendent.

Chris B. writes:

My life was also changed for the better by VFR.

“… the ideology of non-discrimination begins with the rejection of the transcendent.”

And is exchanged for a mindless pageant of the world: Multiculturalism. I think it is a form of decadent sensuality, “Look at the vibrant diversity, it titillates my senses with its fragrant foreignness.” Seeing as though in a godless universe the only thing that can confer meaning is other people. And the more people the better. Perhaps that is the underlying psychological reason?

Indeed Britain is in a bad way. You have written that it could still “rise again” but I’m not sure what you base this on. Put it this way, if all the Poles decide to stick around there’s really nothing left for them to assimilate into.

Check this out:

“When Aleksander Kucharski arrived in Britain from Poland, he expected he would get a first-class education. He was accepted at a Roman Catholic state school which boasts one of the best academic records in the country and is recognised by Ofsted as outstanding. But after two years he is so disillusioned that he has gone home to his old school, saying his British classmates were interested only in shopping and partying.”

LA replies:

“Look at the vibrant diversity, it titillates my senses with its fragrant foreignness.”

Those are almost exactly the terms in which Plato describes the democratic polis (or what we would call advanced liberalism) in Book VIII of The Republic, which is must reading for conservatives.

“Seeing as though in a godless universe the only thing that can confer meaning is other people. And the more people the better.”

That is a quintessential traditionalist insight.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 29, 2007 09:03 PM | Send