Why Britain has become such a degenerate country

I wrote the following regarding the British judge who let four Somali women free after they had committed a gruesome racial attack on a young Englishwoman on a street, on the grounds that as Muslims they were could not be held accountable for their behavior under the influence of alcohol:

This is not an event in the life of Britain. This is the rotting of the stinking corpse that once was Britain. And there’s much rot in the corpse of a great nation, many, many victims yet to come, incalculable human misery, yet to come.

Lydia McGrew quoted the remark at her blog. This led to a further thought and I sent it to her. My own e-mail with its tentative and exploratory ideas would not be worth posting in itself; I post it only because it leads to Lydia’s much more cogent and informed thoughts on the reasons for Britain’s decline and collapse.

I wrote:

How much of the rotten quality of today’s Britain comes from the “English disease,” male homosexuality, which is so widespread among English elites? It seems to me that a plausible case could be made that the English effeteness which metastasized as the tolerant openness to everything that is destroying Britain is organically related to English homosexuality. I’m not suggesting that homosexuality is the essential cause; all these modern liberal developments would have happened, one way or another. But in the English case, it seems to me that the particular flavor of their disgusting liberal cowardice and unmanliness which has made the British elites so utterly contemptible would seem to bear a relationship to the English disease. The British elites are all either actual homosexuals, or “spiritual” homosexuals.

What do you think? Maybe not an idea worth pursuing.

Lydia McGrew replied:

I’m inclined to think that both the British excessive openness to homosexuality (which has been around for a long time) and the British openness to immigration are perversions of the British idea that runs like the saying of Terence: “I am a man; nothing human is alien to me.”

The British always, even in the days of Empire, prided themselves on being able to assimilate anything. There was this tremendously strong British oeuvre that could handle all manner of oddities and somehow transform them into charming parts of the overall British mix. It’s their own version of the “melting pot” idea in America, but not the same.

What has happened in the late 20th century and early 21st, very much in contrast to the early 20th, is that the multiculturalists and homofascists have seized upon this British desire to be able to handle anything, not to be closed to any human experience, and have sold the British a faux version thereof. I know you dislike Mark Steyn, but he has an interesting rant on the difference between multiculturalism and what he calls the real multiculturalism of the British Empire. What he doesn’t, I think, realize is that the former was pushed on the British as if it really were the latter, as if it were authentically British.

Two other factors I think have played an enormous part in this process. The first, perhaps unexpectedly, is the British overemphasis on having a sense of humor. The British have always taken their humor far too seriously. This has played out in over-tolerance for homosexuality, because it was viewed as funny. It is has made it hard for them to oppose with moral fervor and seriousness what is happening to their country.

The second influence has been the leftist victory and the complete British capitulation to an arguably totalitarian government after World War II. That’s been rather stunning, because the Brits used to have a sturdy independence and a hatred of bureaucracy and government meddling and standardization. Somehow, WWII with the rationing, etc., softened them up, and they never recovered.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 09, 2011 12:17 PM | Send