The Brutish Empire

After listening to some of these moronic, conscienceless thugs being interviewed on NPR yesterday, I have to say this seems about right.

What was striking about the NPR interviews was that even the interviewer, who obviously wanted to treat this story as one of “oppressed underclass vs. oppressive society” was genuinely appalled by the animalistic morons he was talking to. They, for their part, had no sense that they were full of “rage” about something. They weren’t even particularly poor. They frankly admitted they could afford the stuff they were stealing. But hey! Why “bovver” when they could just smash somebody’s window and steal the stuff. Nobody was stopping them and it was a bit of a lark, so they and their mates said they would probably keep going until somebody stopped them. No sense at all of the people they were were hurting. No awareness of any obligation to the community in which they lived. Sheer predatory animalism functioning the lowest possible level of eating, excreting, and copulating.

Oddly, that’s just the vision of the human person put forward by the “Naked Ape” materialists whom we have all been taught for decades are freeing us from all that silly dogma about humans in the image and likeness of God.

Cult determines culture. Post-Christian Britain has embraced the anti-Christian vision of the human person as a sort of two-legged cow or dog whose highest aspirations ought to be drink, food, and sex in a universe where all that matters is my personal feelings of the moment. Meet mere physical need and you have fulfilled your total obligation to the formation of a healthy human being. Most Britons still resist this inhuman attempt to reduce the populace to dumb beasts. But enough have responded to the conditioning that there are now mobs of feral thugs living out this subhuman vision of the human person. The problem is not that they long for something higher and feel thwarted. The problem is that they long for nothing higher and feel nothing. As Fr. Tim Finigan puts it:

If “my view” is all that matters in every subject at school, then by the time you reach Year 11 there is no pressing reason why you should not burn cars, throw stones at police and cycle round to loot shops if that is what meets your needs during the summer holidays.

Happily, repentance is always possible and England can learn from her mistakes. I hope we learn too.