Month: September 2023

When Polonius gave this advice to his son Laertes, he clearly didn’t foresee the arrival of modernity.

I don’t think many modern banks would put that phrase at the top of their mission statement. You know, next to the requisite assurance that “our people are our most valuable resource”.

Nor are these the words that any governments and most families live by. Every modern economy I know floats on an ocean of debt, with many drowning in it.

And modern people like their gratification the way they like their coffee: instant. That’s why so many families happily borrow vast sums that are almost guaranteed to enslave them for ever, or even push them into bankruptcy.

When I was researching my 2010 book, The Crisis Behind Our Crisis, I found out that over the decade preceding the 2008 crisis personal indebtedness in America had been three times greater than personal income. What do you think of that, Mr Polonius?

(As an unrelated aside, Shakespeare based that character on William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, chief adviser to Queen Elizabeth and perhaps the second most powerful figure during her reign. The list of instructions Polonius issued to Laertes was based on a widely publicised letter Burghley wrote to his son Robert, who later succeeded him as Elizabeth’s Lord Privy Seal.

Polonius was seen at the time as a bitter satire on Burghley, which many proponents of an alternative William Shakespeare have since used as an argument. After all, a mere actor from Stratford wouldn’t have dared to make fun of an all-powerful statesman. Only a social equal, which is to say an aristocrat, could afford such audacity.)

However, what interests me today isn’t finance but culture. For our age is known not only for gluttonous borrowing of money but also for rapacious borrowing of culture, especially its more popular strata.

The two tendencies aren’t completely unrelated, for both owe much to globalisation. A worldwide financial system produces piles of virtual money and then shuffles the pack and deals virtual banknotes to various recipients. America leads the way there because she is in the unique position of having the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

Thus the Fed can inflate the money supply with reckless abandon, serene in the knowledge that the debt will be denominated in dollars, the currency it controls. What would happen should the dollar lose its exalted status doesn’t bear thinking about – and the Fed doesn’t.

Yet America also exerts a powerful gravitational pull in culture, especially the popular variety. This is felt particularly, though far from exclusively, in the Anglophone countries. Yet it’s hard not to notice that most Europeans who speak English as their second language do so in vaguely American accents and generally American idiom.

The geographic proximity of Britain is trumped by the pulling power of American films and TV shows, acting as tutors to aspiring employees of global financial institutions. Now, I don’t suffer from that popular affliction of European literati, knee-jerk Americanism.

My problem isn’t with America but with modernity, of which the US is one of the founders and the proud flagbearer. In fact, I think Britons have much to learn from Americans: their affable civility, entrepreneurial nature, relative lack of class envy.

I don’t even mind many Americanisms making their way into the English language… Well, I shouldn’t dissemble. I do mind it, but these days that’s like minding spells of extreme heat or cold. They are going to happen, so we might as well grin and bear it, pretending we don’t really mind.

As a general principle, all great languages have largely been formed by borrowings. English wouldn’t be English without its Germanic, French, Celtic and Scandinavian implants, and one could make similar statements about all modern languages.

The French created their Academy largely to combat that tendency, but that has proved to be like trying to keep the cork in a champagne bottle with its muselet removed.  However, people who love their language should indeed fight tooth and nail against some borrowings, while welcoming some others.

Unfortunately, most cultural trends are these days reductive, as opposed to expansive. Language is no different.

Thus some Americanisms add nothing to British English because they try to push out some perfectly good words that already exist. Thus, a shopping cart adds nothing to a shopping trolley, candy to sweets, period to full stop and so forth.

Yet some Americanisms are useful, especially when they introduce concepts borrowed from America, such as a drive-through restaurant. Other Americanisms expand British English by adding a useful distinction where none exists.

Thus an English friend of mine didn’t understand the word ‘gurney’ when I used it. “Do you mean a stretcher?” he asked. I did and I didn’t. A stretcher to me, after many years in America, is only a contraption on which patients are carried, whereas a gurney is one on which they are wheeled. Thus it was a gurney, not a stretcher, that I once spent several hours on in an NHS hospital.

Yet we all have our linguistic bugbears, and mine is the word ‘student’. The way it’s increasingly used in Britain, especially in the media, doesn’t add any new nuances. It destroys an existing one.

To a Briton, a student goes to university or some other higher educational institution, whereas a pupil goes to school. That distinction doesn’t exist in America, where both groups are known as students. Yet the frequency at which our TV presenters mention ‘school students’ suggests that before long the important word ‘pupil’ will become extinct.

Borrowed Americanisms aren’t the only, nor even the principal, culprits there: the British shrink their own language perfectly well on their own with no outside help necessary. This is what I wrote in an earlier book, How the West Was Lost:

“The warning signals are ringing throughout the English-speaking world. Kevin says ‘masterful’ when he means ‘masterly’ – beware! A good word is on its way to perdition. Jill is ‘disinterested’ in classical music – woebetide ‘uninterested’ (not to mention classical music). Gavin thinks ‘simplistic’ is a more elegant way of saying ‘simple’, ‘fulsome’ is a sophisticated version of ‘full’ or ‘naturalistic’ of ‘natural’ – English is coming down to a size where Modmen can handle it comfortably. Trish thinks ‘innocuous’ means ‘innocent’ – in a few years it will. And it is not just words; whole grammatical categories bite the dust. Present Indefinite, where is your brother Subjunctive? Trampled underfoot by Modman and the education he has spawned.”

Whenever one objects against such linguistic impoverishment, a modern ignoramus will utter a platitude like “Language develops”. It no doubt does. But in the past languages developed to become bigger and richer, whereas nowadays the vector is pointing towards smaller and poorer.

We could analyse this degeneration in the terms of general cultural decline. But that would take some effort. Blaming Americans is so much easier, and we know it has always worked in the past.

Three quarters of Church of England priests believe that Britain is no longer a Christian country, says a recent survey.

Being fashionably non-judgemental, the holy fathers, mothers and others didn’t state for the record whether they regarded that situation as negative or positive. But, seeing that only about one per cent of Britons attend Anglican churches, one can’t accuse them of ignoring the evidence before their eyes.

So Britain is no longer Christian, says the Church of England. Yes, but is the Church of England? That survey, along with many others, comes close to answering that question, and not to the satisfaction of those who, unlike three quarters of Britons, still believe in God.

Let me rephrase that, for it’s possible to be a Christian and still shun the Church of England. Catholic churches are chock a block every Sunday, and fundamentalist congregations are popping up like mushrooms after a sun shower.

Obviously those confessions offer things the C of E no longer does. The polled priests weren’t asked to explain, but their responses to other questions provide all the answers anyone would need.

You see, being a religious Christian means not only worshipping Jesus Christ but also venerating Christian doctrine as the translation of Christ’s commandments into a general view – and way – of life. Alas, the C of E gives compelling evidence of its adherence to a different doctrine, that of secular woke modernity.

Thus a majority of priests would love to officiate same-sex weddings. They also see nothing wrong with extramarital sex, homo- or heterosexual.

This sort of thing goes against explicit injunctions in both Testaments, with Christian doctrine fleeing for cover. I suppose, if pressed, those priests would say that such things are so widespread that there’s no point trying to resist them.

But it’s not a priest’s job to resist or promote secular trends. His job is to judge them in the light of Christian doctrine. Such, at any rate, is the theory. The practice, however, is very different.

Priests seem to be doing things the other way around. They judge Christian doctrine by secular standards and favour changing it if it falls short. One of the respondents attributed that inversion to the “pressure of justifying the Church of England’s position to increasingly secular and sceptical audiences”.

One has to assume that people who attend a church service are neither secular nor sceptical, at least not irreversibly so. They may have their doubts, and it’s the priest’s job to dispel them.

Those doubters certainly hope for such reassurance, for otherwise they wouldn’t find themselves in church. Yet somehow I don’t think playing lickspittle to every faddish perversion around is a good way for a priest to reassure his wavering parishioners.

Then the surveys found that more than a third of Anglican priests support assisted dying, although I have to debunk the rumour that many of them are also inclining towards human sacrifice as a sacramental practice. Until further verification this rumour has to be dismissed as purely speculative.

Again, what matters here isn’t the purely secular debate about the advisability of euthanasia. A broad range of opinion exists, both pro and con. The advocates talk about the unbearable suffering of terminal patients, the objectors express a very realistic fear that, if euthanasia is legal, sooner or later it will become compulsory.

Priests are welcome to engage in such arguments, but only as private individuals in the afterhours. Their day job is to state the doctrinal position of euthanasia, which is that it constitutes the taking of life that’s neither for doctors to take nor for patients to give up.

Suicide, assisted or otherwise, is a sin worse than murder because it’s the only sin that can’t be repented. That’s why murderers aren’t denied Christian burial on consecrated grounds, but suicides are.

By condoning euthanasia, priests are guaranteed to repel more potential parishioners than they attract, but the clergy don’t seem to be concerned about that. Pledging allegiance to woke fads, however perverse, is all that matters.

All told, you shouldn’t be surprised that over 80 per cent of priests would back the appointment of a woman as Archbishop of Canterbury. One has to commend them on having their logical faculties intact.

After all, if female priests have been ordained since 1992 and female bishops consecrated since 2014, it would be both churlish and illogical to oppose a woman as Archbishop of Canterbury. But the timelines are telling.

The march of change is going from a measured walk to a jog to a sprint. Female priests had to wait 22 years before they could try on purple vestments. Another seven years, and 80 per cent of priests would welcome a female Archbishop of Canterbury. Since the current holder of that post reaches the mandatory retirement age in two years, if I were a betting man I’d give you good odds on the Lady Archbishop in 2025.

Moreover, two thirds of priests would be willing to get rid of the current practice of the clergy being allowed to reject female bishops. The odds in favour of a woman at Canterbury are becoming prohibitive. However, St Paul had a dim view of this idea, as can be inferred from his epistles.

For example: “But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.” And elsewhere: “Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law. And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.”

If it is a shame for women to speak in a church, it’s even a greater shame for them to speak to a church. This would seem to put paid to the concept of female priesthood, but only for those who attach any value to Scripture and doctrine, which group manifestly doesn’t include most Anglican priests.

Then there are 26 seats in the Lords currently reserved for Church of England archbishops and bishops. While most priests don’t want to put an end to that practice, over 60 per cent favour some sort of reform, mainly to open the Lords to other denominations and faiths.

Actually, adherents of other denominations and faiths are already represented in the Lords, but only Anglican prelates get their seats automatically on the strength of their religious posts. That’s how it should remain for as long as the Church of England remains established, but here logic fails the respondents.

Mercifully, most of them don’t yet go along with Jonathan Aitken, the former Tory (!) minister, then a jailbird, who is now an Anglican priest. He said that the “whole House of Lords is an illogical structure.” Hence, “The bishops are an illogical part of an illogical structure.”

Which logic would that be? Exactly the same as that behind the Church conducting homosexual weddings, condoning suicide, welcoming female leadership and in general jumping on the bandwagon of woke modernity.

The same logic, in other words, that explains the empty pews in Anglican churches. Are those priests trying to talk themselves out of the job?

What with thousands of migrants, legal or otherwise, arriving every day, Britain needs to hang out a FULL sign, like some popular motels.

However, in the eyes of our influential lumpen intelligentsia, such a sign would be tantamount to saying THIS COUNTRY IS RACIST. The only way of avoiding that capital charge would be continuing to welcome the supposedly invaluable cultural contributions made by arrivals from places like Somalia and Libya.

That’s settled. Alas, the problem of overcrowding isn’t, not to mention the demographic incidental of more and more Britons looking like Somalis or Libyans.

Not only is that problem not solved, but an innocent observer may think it unsolvable. He’d be wrong though, for that’s where the NHS comes in.

According to a popular myth, our fully nationalised health service is the envy of the world. However, so far no advanced country has imitated our dear NHS, which goes to show how slow on the uptake they are. After all, Britain isn’t the only country stuffed to the brim by migration and transmogrified by demographic shifts.

So all those Germanies and Frances could do worse than study the NHS’s achievements in combatting that problem. The underlying principle is simple: the more people are denied medical care, the more of them will die, and the slower will be population growth.

Easier done than said: in come the waiting lists. More than half of people who died in England last year were on on them, the NHS waiting lists. That’s 340,000 dying without medical care, 60 per cent of all deaths in England and a 42 per cent increase on the year before.

One can confidently expect those numbers to go up: the NHS waiting list currently stands at 7.6 million, and many of them will die before seeing an NHS doctor. You might think this is too drastic a way to slow down population growth, but hey, whatever works.

In parallel, the demographic problem is also tackled head on. For most of those patients writhing in pain on waiting lists come from the lower and more ethnic strata of the population. I don’t know if the NHS is doing all this on purpose, but I fail to see how differently it would discharge its business if it were.

This programme is unfolding against the background of NHS staffs taking on more and more administrators, directors of diversity, facilitators of optimisation, optimisers of facilitation and other indispensable experts.

At the same time the frontline medical staffs are shrinking, as is the number of hospital beds. Yet those who use such data as proof that the NHS is failing are missing the point. Doctors and nurses are only essential to save lives. When the unspoken aim is to curtail population growth, directors of diversity are much more important.

Yet to give credit where it’s due, doctors are also doing their level best to advance the same noble end. As government employees, they are all unionised. And as union members, they go on strikes. That’s what union members do.

Over the past few months junior doctors have been on strikes for weeks. (For the outlanders among you, a junior doctor in Britain doesn’t have to be especially young. The term only means he is a level below consultant.)

Now a junior doctor with four years’ experience earns £71,000 a year, plus another 20 per cent to sweeten his pension fund. Hardly penury, one would think, though I’d agree they deserve more, considering the years of training they undergo and the hours they put in.

But how much more? The junior doctors, prodded by their union, won’t budge from a demand for an extortionate 35 per cent rise, as opposed to the 9 per cent offered by the government.

The government refuses even to consider anything like 35 per cent, which gives Labour spokesmen an opening to accuse it of apostasy from the true religion of the British: the NHS. They then mention in passing that a Labour government would reject such a demand too.

Consultants wouldn’t be left behind either. Although their average annual pay is £134,000 (plus often several times that in private practice) they too go on strikes periodically.

Meanwhile, the waiting lists are swelling up, and thousands of people are dying with no doctor or nurse anywhere in sight.

At least, they can go to their Maker happy that our medical care is free at the point of delivery. The demiurge of the NHS has been served, the population growth has been checked.  

About 70,000 Ukrainians and perhaps twice as many Russians are estimated to have been killed so far in Russia’s bandit raid.

Some anti-war, anti-Putin Russian journalists weep for the dead Ukrainians, but they also mourn the untimely passage of “our boys” while still regarding them as murderers.

A certain Mail columnist, who can’t be accused of being anti-Putin, doesn’t regard dead Russian soldiers as murderers. He feels pity for them because “they had no choice”.

That’s simply false but, unlike his other lies, this one might have resulted from ignorance rather than bias. First, many Russian combatants are contract soldiers, which is to say volunteers. They actively chose to invade someone else’s country and kill everyone standing in their way.

Yet even the recruits had any number of ways to dodge conscription. One such was to leave the country, which has been done by tens of thousands of young Russians who’d rather not die just yet. Another, cheaper, way was simply to move somewhere else within Russia and not register with the local recruitment office – again a popular trick.

The third way was to ignore the conscription notice, declare conscientious objection and accept a light prison sentence, usually about a year. That’s a hard option, but one could argue it’s still preferable to killing and being killed.

All that aside, what is the moral, specifically Christian, position to take for someone like me, who regards Putin’s war as criminal and hence every Russian soldier as a murderer? Should I still pity those youngsters who died fighting for their beastly cause?

The question isn’t as straightforward as it may seem. On the one hand, I root for the Ukraine’s victory, which in the context of this moral dilemma means wishing for the death of as many Russian soldiers as possible, ideally all of them.

On the other hand, the ultimate moral authority I recognise commanded that we love not only those we like but even our enemies: “But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you, bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you.”

This is the kind of situation that inspired Chesterton’s aphorism: “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”

Difficult indeed. As a Christian, I’m supposed to love those Russian soldiers even though I consider them to be the enemies of everything I hold dear. At the same time, as simply a decent man, I want the Ukrainians to kill many, preferably all, of them. So should I mourn their death or rejoice in it?

It may appear that, in this case at least, Christianity is at odds with decency. Since someone like me has to regard such a contradiction as impossible a priori, do let’s try to get to the bottom of this conundrum.

Loving our enemies doesn’t presuppose pacifism. Christianity doesn’t renounce war – provided it’s just.

Augustine put forth, and Aquinas developed, the doctrine of just war, yet even that isn’t quite clear-cut. They both believed that, though killing may be necessary in defence of a just cause, it’s still a sin. A redeemable and forgivable one, but a sin none the less.

This dovetails with Christ’s commandment to love our enemies. For it’s precisely such love that makes the sin of just killing redeemable and forgivable.

The English language, with its unmatched genius for nuance, lends us a helping hand by serving up two verbs, ‘like’ and ‘love’, where, say, French and Russian make do with only one. This is an important nuance because, while we like people for something, we love them in spite of everything.

In that sense, any old love approaches the Christian ideal, but without quite reaching it. For Christian love, like Christ’s kingdom, is not of this world. It lives in a different, higher, realm. Christian love may coincide with the profane variety or even with simple liking, but that would indeed be only a coincidence.

One sine qua non of Christian love is prayer for the salvation of the soul, his own, his neighbour’s – and even his enemy’s. This is also implicit in another commandment: “And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul.”

Killing the body is thus distinct from killing the soul. The former, though sinful, may be necessary; the latter is impossible and, by inference, undesirable.

I think this ties up all the loose ends: the doctrine of just war, killing that may be necessary while still remaining sinful, the nature of Christian love that doesn’t preclude killing in a just cause provided we pray for the souls of our killed enemies. (The same line of thought, incidentally, applies to the issue of the death penalty.)

In that – and only in that – sense, even if a Christian regards Russian soldiers as enemies, he may indeed mourn their death. Does it then justify what I called, with my inability to resist puns, ‘mortal equivalence’?

My reply to that question is an unequivocal, resounding “yes and no”. For there is a catch there somewhere.

The Russian anti-Putin journalists who drew the wrath of their colleagues by expressing pity not only for the Ukrainians but also for “our boys” killed by them, aren’t Christians. One failing of the Russian opposition to Putin is that it’s atheist almost to a man.

That makes their sentiment both ambivalent and deplorable. If we remove the Christian component from that pity, it becomes tantamount to wishing that those Russian boys hadn’t died. However, had they lived, they would have persisted in their grisly mission by killing Ukrainian soldiers, torturing and castrating POWs, kidnapping children, murdering, raping and looting civilians.

Moreover, if not enough of them die, Russia may win her unjust war and, in all likelihood, step it up by attacking NATO members and risking a global catastrophe. That’s why anyone who hopes that Russia loses this war, must rejoice in the death of every Russian soldier.  Such jubilation may not be nice, but then neither is Putin’s war.

You can see how what I call mortal equivalence (equal pity for the dead on both sides) means different things depending on who is talking. It also means different things in the two realms, sacred and profane. This is the kind of moral dilemma that can gore an unbeliever with its horns.

Yes, Chesterton was right: Christianity was indeed found difficult and left untried. Yet those who have tried it nevertheless, have found a surer way out of moral and intellectual cul-de-sacs in this life. They may also find salvation in the other, everlasting, life, but that’s not up to them to decide.