Once-Great Britain

I cannot vouch for the accuracy of Theodore Dayrymple’s screed about the decline and fall of Great Britain, but it rings very, very true. In fact, it reads like a description of phenomena that are happening in America. 

For example, he notes:

[I] read in the press that a survey had concluded that about one in six or seven of the adult population in Britain—9 million people—was functionally illiterate.

On this score America rates with Britain. In truth, it bests Britain. In our great nation, 21% of adults are illiterate and 54% read below 6th grade level. And, what with school closings and mask mandates, that number is sure to rise in the future. 

Explaining that Britain no longer has a manufacturing economy, or even an agricultural economy, Dalrymple notes that it has a service economy. He chooses as an example a Polish woman who works the front desk in a luxury hotel. And who does so with proper decorum and aplomb. She is happy to do her job, but Dalrymple avers that the average home grown Brit would never be able to do the job as well.

And that means that the undereducated masses who are produced by the public school system cannot really do the work needed in a service economy. 

Worse yet, many young Brits feel that much service work is beneath them. In a country that led the world in gentility, young people no longer wear any uniform with pride:

Nevertheless, many Britons remain singularly unfitted, by education and culture, for work in a service economy. The qualities that the Polish receptionist exhibited are not widespread, let alone universal, in the British population that is not economically active—or in the population that is economically active. To take one small indication: her willingness to wear with pride her uniform. 

What’s wrong with uniforms? Obviously, in a therapy culture wearing a uniform compromises one’s ability to express oneself and to feel creative:

The British, educated in a system that values self-expression above any form of correctness or correctitude, from spelling to modes of address, now regard the requirement to dress in a way not chosen by themselves as an assault on their freedom of expression. The possibility of pride in a uniform (if they are civilians) is thereby denied them. Therefore, they always subvert any prescribed mode of dress by some little (or even great) deliberate slovenliness—by an undone collar or tie, or by wearing socks or shoes of a color that clashes with the rest of their outfit. Their pride in their freedom, their ego, is thereby salvaged. In slovenliness is freedom, and pride is taken in not taking pride.

Why do they do this? The reason is simple. Unkempt dress and sloppy appearance are signs of superior mental health. The same is true about the misuse of language. Does this not sound somewhat familiar?

British culture was based on decorum and propriety. See Downton Abbey. And yet, today, no one follows rules, beginning with the rules of proper language usage. And no one is allowed to correct anyone's bad grammar.

But educationists in Britain have long waged war on the idea of a standard language, and generally have prevailed. Rules of grammar are arbitrary; no way of speaking is superior to any other.

Again, we can measure the extent of Britain’s decline when we consider, without offering too much explanation, that an important twentieth-century philosophical movement, called analytic philosophy, rejected the notion of gazing at big Ideas in favor of analyzing the way ordinary people use ordinary language.

This would not matter were there no ideological resistance to teaching a standard language and pronunciation in parallel to the local way of speaking, which pupils could then adopt as necessary, without losing their local dialect. But such instruction would constitute an assault on their self-esteem, for it suggests that they needed to learn something even as basic as how to talk. And since practically everyone learns to talk in some manner, and none is superior to any other, pedagogical interference has no justification. The pupil gets the impression that he has nothing to learn (a lesson easily extended to other fields) and the teacher that he has nothing to teach, which relieves him of responsibility as well as any chance of being judged wanting. The Polish receptionist was not the victim of such nonsense. She knew that her task was to make herself understandable to customers; a Briton with a strong regional accent would think that it was the duty of the customer to understand him or her.

Again, in a country that revolutionized the practice of good manners and gentility, such cultural habits have fallen into disuse. They are on life support, sustained only by Polish receptionists:

The Polish receptionist had another advantage not frequently found among the British: a knowledge of how to address people, in a friendly, polite, but not overfamiliar manner, an implicit knowledge that derives from a culture rather than from formal training. In her position, a young Briton would often be either obsequious or, more likely, resentful—determined to prove that a cat may look at a king. Even answering the telephone in an appropriate manner appears beyond the capacity of more and more Britons. Worse still, the gracelessness of modern British culture is not merely spontaneous but has an ideological edge to it, such that many come to regard any refinement of speech or manners as artificial, a manifestation of social injustice. The more vulgar the conduct, therefore, the more authentic and politically virtuous; a downward spiral. A service economy with a labor force that thinks like this is a service economy without service.

Ah, yes. Propriety and decorum signal social injustice. I need not explain this. All good Americans embrace the same deviant values. 

Dalrymple implies that this breakdown of good behavior derives from a tendency to copy bad American cultural habits. It comes from the notion that each culture has a right to its own habits, and that none are better or worse than any other. 

Having long absorbed, both subliminally and consciously, the doctrines of multiculturalism—that no way of being is superior to any other—they logically conclude that the way they are is as good as the way anybody else is, and therefore that no one has any justification for demanding change of them. If multiculturalism requires us to accept others as they are, it has the corollary that others must accept us as we are: an attitude much in evidence when young British people gather in foreign resorts, where they are (rightly) feared and detested. If drinking and debauchery are part of our culture, who has the right to gainsay it?

Does this all spell the decline of Great Britain as a world leading nation? And does it show us how our cultural influence has damaged other people in other parts of the world. 

One would like to think that Britain is holding out against the rising tide of multicultural perversity and decadence, but apparently, such is not the case. Apparently, America has become a cultural toxin.

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