The Secret of England's Greatness

Is not the bible as Thomas Jones Barker's portrait of Queen Victoria suggests. I've been thinking about the greatness of Victorian Britain and the Britannic inheritance for a while now, after a couple of visits to the National Portrait Gallery. The "Expansion and Empire" room, dominated by Jones Barker's portrait of Queen Victoria presenting a bible to one of her African subjects is a refreshing antidote to the all-pervasive defeatism and propensity for self-abasement of today's Britons. The room contains portraits of various characters who were associated with Britain's imperial expansion in the late nineteenth century. Most of the gentlemen pose with a look of urbane dignity that seems ridiculous today. Indeed, I recently sat for a sepia photograph with fellow members of a sports team and we sniggered and giggled while trying to maintain mock-dignified Victorian poses. Even attempting that look of solid, gentlemanly earnestness was enough to send us into fits of laughter. We were all educated young men, almost all of us were English. We were aware, deep down, of our country's imperial past, and the chances are that most of us had grandfathers, great grandfathers and great-great grandfathers who would have felt no such uneasy self-consciousness if asked to pose for a portrait. In fact, the look of dignified earnestness would have come naturally to them. For us young Englishmen, who have had any pretensions to dignity, uprightness and gentlemanly behaviour sapped from us by the rotten and pervasive influence of a political ideology of "libertarianism" shared by MPs of both left and right, such pious posturing seems hilariously quaint.

In fact, "libertarianism" is a bit of a misnomer. Perhaps it's really a blend of nihilism and libertinism, which had its origins in the triumph of science and rationality and the horror of man's capacity for barbarity. Masked as a "rights and freedoms" issue by the likes of Roy Jenkins, this indulgent, promiscuous culture has eroded our capacity for earnestness. Why be earnest nowadays? We're all caught in the rat race, looking out for number one and focused purely on improving the material prosperity of our own lives and those of our close family. Any attempt at leading a life of moral integrity is ridiculed. Most youngmen can't look at a priest or a Scout leader these days without laughing subconsciously at their ridiculous attempt at piousness (perhaps the glut of writing about the guilt and sexual dysfunction caused by a Catholic education and the paedophile priest and Scout leader scandals have something to do with it too). Why bother with the effort of piety and self-sacrifice when you can just throw caution to the wind and engage in the wild promiscuity, binge drinking and drug taking with everyone else?

Acceptable behaviour and prevailing attitudes are really a matter of numbers and momentum. If there are enough people who believe that civility, self-sacrifice and other virtues are worthy ideals, then the majority of the citizenry will go along with them. This is the problem today. Examples of moral virtue are few and far between; they tend to be concentrated among the elderly. People who attempt a life of virtue are obstructed at every turn. Confounded and battered by the overwhelming hostility to their attempt at leading an edifying life, many of them simply give up and accept the prevailing circumstances. Witness the pitiable state of the Church of England. Like a cuckold husband, the Church reponds to falling attendance by prostrating itself before the people, and instead of standing firm by the fundamental tenets of Christian belief, it waters down the interpretation of the Bible in an effort to appease its leftist establishment critics. One suspects that most cuckolds eventually figure out that becoming more emasculated and impotent in the face of rejection is not a good strategy for boosting one's attractiveness. Those in charge of the Church of England don't appear to have grasped this, and perhaps it's one of the few areas where we could learn something from the Muslims, whose religion has none of the self-flagellatingly soppy defeatist drivel attached to it.

It was the capacity for self-restraint, the uprightness and the unashamed piety of the Victorians that made England great. Those values still live on in our subconscious, and appear occasionally, but only to serve the purpose of being mocked by the smug ultra-secularists and libertines. Perhaps the ferocity and duration of their assault on those values indicates that there's something powerful in them that they find objectionable and dangerous.

I suspect though, that the sheer emptiness and pointlessness of life in modern Britain is causing us to approach a turning point. It's clear that this smug mockery of earnestness and piety can't go on forever. Sometime sooner or later the self-satisfied satirists will run out of energy and some of the old earnestness and "piousness" will return. The question is, under what guise. A Christian revival isn't on the cards. Perhaps secular nationalism, but I doubt it. Our best hope is a revival of the liberal, free-trade, democratic tradition of the Victorians. The basic ingredients are there; disenchantment with the emptiness of modern life and a subconscious awareness of our glorious past. The difficulty is to mould them into a viable political idea which could work in the twenty-first century.