Peter Hitchens Abolition of Britain Part 6 – Culture

Peter Hitchens book The Abolition Of Britain was one of the first to challenge the gradual takeover of British institutions by the politically correct class. Their modus operandi has been to introduce small changes incrementally, ostensibly to either protect our own personal best interests or to further the welfare of the wider community, but in reality achieving ever greater control of citizens’ lives with the further objective of policing the parameters of permissible political discourse. One change for the worst that Hitchens identifies is the degradation of traditional cultural values.

According to Hitchens a major factor in our cultural decline has been the influence of television. He accuses it of ‘helping to spread false ideas about society, through propagandist drama’ which has lead to ‘a national conformism among the young, in taste, humour, morals and politics’. As a consequence ‘the feverish, unsettling changes’ it has brought about have weakened people’s attachment to their ‘traditions and institutions, liberties and independence’ that has resulted in a ‘slow motion coup d’etat’.

Hitchens acknowledges that the British cultural revolution has so far been free of direct violence to people. Instead he argues that violence has been done ‘to institutions, to traditions, ways of doing things and to language’. In so doing ‘we have abolished the very customs, manners, methods, standards and laws’ which have restrained us from the ‘sort of barbaric behaviour that less happy lands suffer’. He believes that ‘the cultural battle, ignored by most politicians, is often more decisive and important than the noisier clash of parties’.

Hitchens draws attention to the long legacy of cultural conservatism which only began to break down in the 1960s. As a consequence this allowed ‘progressive’ cultural iconoclasts to reconstruct society ‘so that the most abject conformism appears to be rebellious and safely undisciplined’. This dissemblance allowed genuine individualism to be branded as ‘merely eccentric, barmy or contemptible’ resulting in a ‘soap-watching admass conformist society, happy to deride free thought and suppress heresy’.

Hitchens specifically addresses the devaluation of language ‘stripped of its literary references where almost nobody has heard of Cranmer or Tyndale, and Shakespeare is considered too rich a mixture for our young’. Similarly architecture ‘once full of messages of authority and faith, is now lumpish and unhistorical’ reflecting the worship of ‘money, power, technology, even of ugliness itself’. He eulogises a past when Britain was a ‘multinational state, though not a multicultural one’ in which people ‘understood authority and respected it without grovelling to it, for it was also a society of individualists’. In contrast he laments the present time which ‘in a generation, all this has been demolished, concreted over, reformed out of existence’.

He rightly denounces the supposedly Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher as a ‘false dawn’ since neither she nor her party were ‘interested in morals or culture’, believing instead in ‘the cleansing power of the market’. As a result she unwittingly ‘helped to destroy many of the things Conservatism once stood for’ and was ‘unable to reverse a single part of the cultural revolution’. In power the Tories could come up with nothing better than ‘the brute force of the market’, a materialistic outlook that ignored ‘patriotism, morality, tradition and beauty, elevating the businessman to the role of bishop’.

Fortunately, some of Hitchens fears have not come to pass. He predicted that ‘unfair referendums in which the BBC is not required to show balance’ would be held to ‘rush the country into the Euro and into proportional representation’. As it turned out the New Labour government was never able to commit to joining the Euro, and the referendum to introduce a PR system was lost as the British people voted overwhelmingly to retain the first past the post system. He speculated on whether the British people ‘any longer possess the will or the identity’ to resist Britain’s immersion in a European superstate, or whether they will ‘sink, exhausted and grateful, into the mushy embrace of the new Europe’. Reassuringly, the British public decided to leave the European Union altogether, so this threat has at least been lifted for the foreseeable future.

Peter Hitchens analysis of the cultural decline of Britain is broadly correct. The mainstream media has become debased and degenerate, continually pandering to the baser elements in society. The BBC, once synonymous with high minded cultural values, has been transformed into a mouthpiece for multicultural, politically correct, conformist group-think. Barbarous architecture is widespread, repulsive genres of ‘music’ such as rap, hip-hop and trance are promoted uncritically, and sensationalised, celebrity obsessed, gutter journalism has become the norm. Although Peter Hitchens is for the most part right on many issues, one subject he largely ignored was the impact of large scale third world immigration, with its consequential undermining of traditional British cultural values, social cohesion and sense of shared community.

Peter Hitchens Abolition of Britain Part 5 – Permissiveness

Peter Hitchens is one of the foremost critics of the British politically correct establishment, noted for its reflex group think orthodoxies and addiction to virtue signalling. Twenty years ago he wrote The Abolition of Britain, one of the first books to challenge this creeping authoritarianism. One trend he deplored was the rise in sexual permissiveness that occurred from the 1960s onwards.

Thus he condemns ‘the top shelves of newsagents that now sag with explicit pornography’, ‘mainstream newspapers which cheerfully display half clothed women’ and ‘bare breasts that are now so common on television’. He does not confine himself to his distaste for male titillation but also attacks ‘magazines for well-off, educated, professional women packed with blatant articles about subjects that were once judged to be so intimate that few would have dared mention them even to a doctor’.

He asserts that ‘millions of people probably shudder inwardly when they catch sight’ of this kind of material but they know that ‘it is not respectable to make a fuss’. He exposes the double standard whereby the feminist MP Clare Short condemnation of Page Three is endorsed by the ‘fashionable world’, whilst the equally forceful protests of the conservative Christian Mary Whitehouse are ‘ignored as embarrassing, suburban and repressed’.

Hitchens cites the impact of the Lady Chatterley trial in 1961, widely recognised as having kick started the permissive society, and the Oz schoolkids issue trial a decade later, seen by many as the high watermark of let it all hang out freewheeling bohemian sexual liberation, before feminism took hold. Also being prosecuted at this time was the Little Red Schoolbook, described by Hitchens as a ‘manual of sexual licence for the young’. However, in the view of the publisher the issue at stake was ‘not sex education for young people, but the ability of any people to question authority’. According to Hitchens much of the advice being offered in the book ‘would be issued at government expense to schoolchildren less than twenty years afterwards’.

Hitchens quotes the aims of supporters of publications such as the above as being to abolish ‘undercover puritanism, the more relaxed people were in sex, the healthier the community would be’ and to criticize ‘the lack of dissemination of sexual education’. He concluded that these trials were ‘the last futile skirmish in a lost war’ against pornography and authority in general. As a consequence ‘television, radio and the cinema realized that the restraints were off’ leading to ‘nakedness, explicit portrayals of sex, liberal use of swear words, homosexuality and prostitution’ tentatively at first but ‘quickly becoming so commonplace that they ceased to count as news’.

Hitchens points out that the growth in material which he clearly considers objectionable was facilitated by the passing of the Obscene Publications Act, which included a provision of ‘literary merit’ a phrase he considers to be ‘utterly subjective’. This was exploited ‘to justify the breaking of old taboos’ in which the ‘arbiters of the new morality believed that one’s sexual life did not need to be regulated either by law or conscience’. He observed that ‘the fiercest resistance to this change ‘came from the lower middle class and the respectable working class’ who believed ‘most passionately in order, hierarchy and morality, because they live closer to the edge of chaos’.

Hitchens makes some valid points as the vast majority of pornography is degrading in nature, both to performer and viewer. Promiscuous sexual activity can be a physically risky activity because of the spread of contagious diseases, as well as being spiritually and mentally demeaning by setting a low value on physical intimacy. But at no time in the modern era have there been laws against fornication and adultery. Instead, until the 1960s, there were strong social and religious taboos against such behaviour, although often breached by mostly the higher and lower classes in society.

Virtually all pornography is now on line, and thus is mostly invisible except to those (mainly males) who actively seek it out. Also, the amount of casual exposed flesh of young attractive females has largely been curbed in most of the mainstream media outlets as a result of feminist pressure. The real issue at stake here, which Hitchens does not properly address, is the extent to which the state should intervene in the sexual behaviour of its citizens. He rightly condemns the growing authoritarianism of the left in personal matters, but seems content for the state to prohibit those activities which he personally finds objectionable. Not for the first time this leads him open to charges of hypocrisy and double standards.

Normal sexual attraction towards good looking members of the opposite sex should never be stigmatised. It must surely be possible to allow for a more wholesome interest to be fostered that avoids the debasement of pornography on the one hand, and the kind of prudery endorsed by Peter Hitchens, or the puritanism and repression sought by feminists. At the present time those on the extremes appear to be monopolising the debate at the expense of the vast majority with a normal healthy sexual interest.

Peter Hitchens Abolition of Britain Part 4 – Marriage

Nearly twenty years ago Peter Hitchens wrote his book The Abolition of Britain, a well timed riposte to the politically correct takeover of British institutions that had incrementally occurred during the previous quarter century or so. One issue he raised of much concern was the undermining of marriage through ever easier divorce, with the consequential huge increase in broken families resulting in serious damage to the upbringing of children.

Peter Hitchens describes the family as ‘the greatest fortress of human liberty, proof against all earthly powers’ than can ‘defy the will of authority, the might of wealth, and is the most effective means of passing lore, culture, manners and traditions through the generations’. He claims that leftists, with their addiction to state control and indoctrination, have always mistrusted the family since they ‘cannot control what goes on there, what ideas are taught, and what loyalties are fostered.’ Hitchens continues ‘full family independence would leave people free to cling to individual ideas of conscience’ adding that ‘the freer a society is, the more it leaves the family alone’.

Within traditional society ‘the family for all its faults, was one of the main pillars of the older British culture, including the idea than an Englishman’s home is his castle’. Hitchens deprecates the trend during recent decades which has resulted in ‘the least individualistic generation in known history’ through which ‘the growing child is much more easily influenced by his own age group, themselves under pressure from TV programmes, advertisers and fashion.’

Hitchens notes that ‘English marriage law was one of the oldest and most inflexible in the Christian world’. He then goes on to describe the measures that were gradually and incrementally introduced to make divorce easier, which are outlined in more detail in this previous post http://bit.ly/1U3ecFB It should be remembered that the early divorce reforms in the 19th century were openly discriminatory towards women. However, in more recent times the outcome of divorce law changes has impacted mainly on men.

So according to Hitchens we now have a situation where a husband could be ‘ordered from his own home without any suggestion that he had behaved violently towards his wife’. Courts increasingly failed to enforce husbands’ rights to visit their children, whilst the Child Support Agency was created with powers to compel a husband to provide maintenance to his wife. These recent innovations sent a clear signal that the state ‘was on the side of the wife, whether she was in the right or in the wrong’. As a result the overwhelming majority of petitions for divorce are now made by wives. This strong anti male bias remains the same today except that the state can now forcibly evict men from their homes much more easily by means of a Domestic Violence Protection Notice.

Hitchens cites the traditional view of the Church of England, still promoted as recently as the 1950s that ‘nothing but lifelong monogamous marriage can adequately establish home life; provide for the birth, nurture and training of a family of children over a period of years’. Opponents of weakening the divorce laws warned that ‘the abolition of blame would lead to divorce by consent’. So instead of being a public promise to society, wedding vows now became ‘a private contract that could be broken at will’. Hitchens noted the ‘revolution in views of chastity and constancy’ that had taken place in society since the 1960s, one consequence of which was to undermine the foundations of marriage.

As a result of these changes in sexual morality, and the relaxation of divorce laws, the British public ‘stopped disapproving of divorce in public’. This contrasts with the rumpus in the mid 1950s, generated by the affair between Princess Margaret and the divorced Captain Townsend, in which she was pressurised to carry out her ‘royal duty as upholder of traditional morality’ by deciding not to marry, despite being very much in love with him. Hitchens noted that within little more than a decade it became ‘bad manners’ to insist on what had formerly been the ‘cultural consensus in favour of lifelong marriage’, now replaced by a ‘new morality in which any assembly of children was reclassified as a family unit’.

Hitchens is right in identifying the impact and disruption that easy divorce can have on children and a stable family life. But he never explains why a married couple should be expected to stay together in a relationship that has clearly ended, once their children have reached adulthood. Easy divorce, which has now become firmly rooted, places the feelings of married couples, but mostly wives, above the interests and upbringing of children. Because of the unacceptable level of broken homes it is essential that divorce should once again be made difficult, so long a there are still children under the age of eighteen to consider. Once the children have reached an age to look after themselves, the state should no longer have any interest in whether a couple stay together in a marriage, and they should be free to divorce or separate without undue hindrance.