The other night, I was watching television with my mother and one of those nanny state anti-smoking adverts came on. I don't smoke and never have but I enjoy the smell of tobacco and was adamantly against the smoking ban imposed in 2007 and think that it should be repealed. Anyway, the advert went through the usual process: the cynical manipulation of a parents' guilt by having a child in the back seat of the car (an ethnic minority, naturally) exposed to a cloud of "invisible" smoke; the narrator then went through some spurious statistics about the malefits of smoking, and then he drove off and presumably the child died of a number of smoking-related diseases and the whole tragedy could have been avoided if only the father had given up smoking.
Maybe I was in a foul mood but I said afterwards: "do you know, there is now nothing about this country that I think is good." Whereupon my mother said: "well, why don't you go and live in Afghanistan then, where everything is as it was in biblical times?" That gratuitous display of ignorance notwithstanding, do I not have a point? Secularists, atheists, politically correct do-gooders and all manner of other riff raff might have a happy time of it, but I certainly don't like living in a country in which rampant promiscuity is the norm, of easy recreational drugs, of mass immigration, of imposed multiculturalism, a nanny state where we're being constantly reprimanded for over-eating, smoking, and drinking too much; where a suburban town has, say, five denominational churches that are half empty, and one mosque with a new extension.
Oh, it would be nice if we could go back to the days when we were a homogeneous people with one Church.
Well I like living in the UK. I think modern Britain is a great place to live.
ReplyDeleteI think you underestimate the human capacity to turn trivial differences into yawning chasms of utter alienation. Within a year of living in a homogenous society, you would find it not so homogenous. Also, you would probably be murdered. Although you despise tolerance, your very life depends on it, and the older societies of which you write were far less tolerant and far less peaceful than our current blood-soaked and deeply contentious world. There is no paradise in the past. There is no paradise now. There could be a paradise in the future, but whether you will see it depends on what you do now. Live in compassion and love for others, cultivate wisdom, take up the cross, and you have a chance.
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