England Lets Go

And: Pope Francis Lied; Thiel's Antichrist; Machiavelli's Uses; Jimmy Swaggart RIP

Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy in “Never Let Me Go” (2010)

Did you know I’ve been writing this newsletter for five years now? I hadn’t even noticed until I went looking for an old essay I wrote about a strange Japanese movie, and saw that I published it here in 2020.

What made me search for that piece was finishing, on the flight back from London yesterday, the Kazuo Ishiguro novel Never Let Me Go, and doing so in the context of the slow suicide of Britain. Last night, lying in the dark trying to fall asleep, it hit me hard that we are seeing the end of England — that it is happening now, and will be irreversible, perhaps within my own lifetime. Indeed, it will have happened over the course of my lifetime, which began in 1967. The immensity of that overwhelmed me, and I very nearly came to tears. And it’s not even my country! But if you love the English language, and the culture of the English people, it kind of is. In any case, the disappearance of England as a land of a distinct people, with a particular history, would be a world-historical catastrophe.

And that is precisely what is happening now.

Demographically, on present trends, the United Kingdom will cease to be majority white British at some point in the 2060s. It is folly to think that a Britain inhabited by a majority of people with no ancestral link to that land and its culture will remain British in anything but a nominal sense.

This is not a claim about race per se. Indeed, as we saw at Glastonbury, vast numbers of white British people despise their own people and culture. My view, as you know, is that no European nation can remain itself without a living link to the Christian faith that formed those nations. But one does not need to endorse that view to recognize that human beings are not interchangeable. One doesn’t become British by virtue of receiving citizenship, and saluting “British values,” whatever they are. One becomes British — or French, or Italian, or even Egyptian — in the same way a garden grows from seeds: by careful cultivation, over time.

The acclaimed English novelist Kazuo Ishiguro came to Britain from Japan as a boy, and never left. His novels are deeply English, because though Japanese by birth and ethnicity, he was thoroughly assimilated into English culture. It can happen! But he is 70 years old, and arrived at a time when Britain’s culture was more confident, and in which the presence of foreign-born people in Britain was tiny.

This is no longer the case. According to the 2021 UK census, 41 percent of London residents were born outside of Britain, with 28 percent that number born outside of Europe. In what sense can the capital of Britain be said to be British? Or if it is today, it won’t be for much longer? The story is the same in other major UK cities. Over one in four residents of Birmingham, the second-largest city in the UK, was born abroad; the number of foreign-born residents in Manchester is one in three. Very many of them are Muslim, of course.

The question I cannot answer, as a foreigner, is why the British are acquiescing in their own demise as a people. The other night in London, a downcast Englishman said to me, “I keep thinking that finally, they’ve gone to far, and now the English will rise up. But it never happens. I wonder if we even have it in us.”

I put that question yesterday to an English cleric friend. “No,” he said, “we don’t have it in us.”

Kazuo Ishiguro’s work sheds light on English submission. On the flight back from London yesterday, I finished reading his 2005 novel Never Let Me Go, which I will talk about here with spoilers, given that the book has been out for 25 years, and was made into a film in 2010. If you don’t want to have plot points revealed, stop reading now.

The book is a dystopian novel set in 1990s Britain, in the wake of biotechnological breakthroughs in the 1950s leading to cloning. The narrator is Kathy, a woman in her thirties who is a “carer” for people who donate their organs, including her friends Tommy and Ruth. They were all raised in Hailsham, a posh boarding school where they live with other clones. They are being raised to give their lives as organ donors for others. This is why they were created. They all know this at some fundamental level, and accept it as their fate.

Reading the novel, I kept thinking: “Why don’t they rebel? Why don’t they run away?” But that, it seems, is Ishiguro’s point. His greatest novel, The Remains Of The Day, is about the immense human cost of accepting one’s lot in life, and of the price of being dutiful. Ishiguro explores that same theme in Never Let Me Go. We never learn if there is a police-state apparatus that would capture the clones if they tried to escape being organ-harvested, because it never occurs to Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth to run away or in any way to defy their fate. They never ponder the monstrous injustice of having been created to provide spare parts for others.

Does it need saying that this story takes place in a thoroughly post-Christian Britain? Christianity is not only noticeable from its absence. It shows up in how the clones are expected to have sex with each other, though they are sterile. That is, their “guardians” expect that they will breed with each other like animals, and are warned to be careful with it only because sex can do unpredictable things to one’s emotions. Just like today, eh?

When I arrived home yesterday, I thought about that post from five years ago, about the film, Woman In The Dunes. It’s about a Japanese entomologist who is on an expedition to a seaside town in rural Japan. He misses the bus back to the city, and has to spend the night as the guest of a local woman who lives in a dwelling constructed in a deep sand pit. And then he wakes up the next morning to something awful:

But he can’t leave. He discovers to his horror that the villagers have trapped him to force him to live with the widow. The pit is too steep to climb out of. Much of the narrative is about Junpei’s futile attempts to free himself from his circumstances. Meanwhile, he, like the woman, has no choice but to keep digging, or they will be suffocated by sand.

The woman is not unhappy there in the pit. This is her world, and she accepts it. She has a purpose in life. Junpei thinks that she is crazy, but eventually becomes attached to the woman, and becomes her lover. After much time, he engages his intelligence in discovering a way to draw water out of the sand at night, and becomes totally absorbed in perfecting his skill.

In the end, after years of living like this, Junpei has the opportunity to escape … but chooses not to. He realizes that he has found his rightful place there in the pit. To borrow Camus’s last line in his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus”: We must imagine Junpei happy.

But he is a prisoner and a slave! Why must we imagine him happy?

The answer is in the book that put me onto Woman In The Dunes, a volume that is as enigmatic as this existential parable: The Antimodern Condition: An Argument Against Progress, a thin, dense (but beautifully written), challenging book by a British academic named Peter King. I have no idea why, but the Kindle version costs fifty bucks, and the paper versions are even more. This book, first published in 2014, is not going to be a bestseller, but boy, is it unforgettable.

Explaining Junpei’s happiness, King writes:

He is not free in any modern sense. He is now free in the sense that he lives within an order that he can both understand and help to maintain…

This, says King, is what people require for happiness. Augustine famously said, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in You, O Lord.” King doesn’t discuss religion, but he does ponder the existential meaning of anxiety. Restlessness comes from an inability to be happy with where we are and what we have. Modern man likes to think that his happiness comes from an absence of limits. This, argues King, is why he is doomed to be unhappy. Only by living as a part of something that is greater than ourselves, and that requires our participation to continue, can we rid ourselves of angst.

There is a lot of wisdom in this, to be sure. And yet, after reading Ishiguro in light of the British people marching to their own dissolution with “Mustn’t grumble” front to mind, I thought about Woman In The Dunes (watch the trailer here), and whether or not the British are being cowardly slaves, or bravely accepting their historical fate, like the Elves departing Middle Earth at the end of The Lord of the Rings.

In Ishiguro’s novel, the existential plight of the clones is that they know that they were created to die, and to die young, in a particular way. Moreover, as Tommy and Kathy learn at the end, society didn’t even believe they were fully human — it couldn’t have done, else it wouldn’t have been able to treat them like nothing more than a source of organs. Their fates were sealed even before they were cloned. Their role in life was to serve the powerful. The architects of British society and culture had determined that theirs was life unworthy of life. The clones had been raised to accept their lot.

You might think that discovering the full truth of why they were created, and how they were deceived, would have made Tommy and Kathy want to flee, or in some way defy their guardians, and a ruling class that sees them like this. But it doesn’t — and I think that is Ishiguro’s point. There is something about these English people — like the tragic butler in The Remains Of The Day — that cannot conceive of being undutiful, whatever the cost to their own happiness.

In Woman In The Dunes, we come to see Junpei’s enslavement as something he turns into virtue, by accepting limits, and building a meaningful life within them. It’s a life he comes to love so much that when he has the chance to flee, he refuses. But in Never Let Me Go, the characters’ acceptance of their fate seems like a monumental defeat of the human spirit, representative of souls that had rebellion bred out of them by a culture that taught them conformity to the values of the cultured cannibals who ruled them.

When the Englishman mused sadly to me this week that he didn’t know if his people had it in them to rebel against what the ruling class was doing to them, he was asking a question that, I think, is present too in Ishiguro’s novel. During and after the Second World War, the famed stoicism and taciturnity of the British people came to be valorized by the rest of us. Stiff upper lip, and all that. Could it be that that same virtue has now been weaponized against them, such that they are all marching, ungrumbling, out of history?

I cannot accept that it will end like this. Then again, all the migrants in Britain are, shall we say, facts on the ground. They were not there fifty years ago, but they are today, and so are the children and grandchildren they have had. How is it that an ancient people willed itself out of existence like this (and the Britons aren’t the only ones)? After all, in the western Roman Empire, the state lost the capacity to keep the Germanic tribes out. That’s not what happened to Britain, and to Europe.

I have written in this space before about what the Polish dissident writer Czesław Miłosz, in his classic study of intellectuals under Polish communism, The Captive Mind, called “the Pill of Murti-Bing.” The concept comes from a 1927 dystopian novel by Stanisław Witkiewicz in which an Asian army overruns Poland, and conquers its people in part by giving them pills to assuage their anxieties over their condition. From The Captive Mind:

Witkiewicz’s heroes are unhappy in that they have no faith and no sense of meaning in their work. This atmosphere of decay and senselessness extends throughout the entire country. And at that moment, a great number of hawkers appear in the cities peddling Murti-Bing pills. Murti-Bing was a Mongolian philosopher who had succeeded in producing an organic means of transporting a “philosophy of life.” This Murti-Bing “philosophy of life,” which constituted the strength of the Sino-Mongolian army, was contained in pills in an extremely condensed form. A man who used these pills changed completely. He became serene and happy.

For Miłosz, Polish intellectuals who capitulated to communism and Soviet rule had taken the pill of Murti-Bing. It was what made their condition bearable. They could not stand to see reality, for if they recognized what was really happening in their country, the pain and shock would make life too much to take.

In our time, liberalism, multiculturalism, and wokeness are all Pills of Murti-Bing. I hope I’m wrong, but at this point, I don’t see any antidote.