Our Times

by A. N. Wilson

  Our problems have been different in the West, but we have witnessed the same dissolution and dissipation of a common culture. Solzhenitsyn could hope for a revival in religious belief which would act as a cultural glue. Such ideas had been abandoned in Britain as long ago as the 1840.2 What united Britain was not so much religion as a shared sense of identity and purpose, a shared sense which had been quickened and strengthened by the experience of the Second World War. It was part of the national myth that during the heroic summer of 1940 Britain had stood alone against the rest of the world, but it was a myth which also happened to be true. When it did so, it had intact an Empire, a vast industrial base at home, an unwrecked landscape, unspoilt townscapes, a rail network, a national Church, a class system, almost all of which, within a decade of the war coming to an end, would have faded, or actually been forcibly removed.

  Today, my Britain, the England of my mother and my father, no longer exists. This is a sentence which means something quite different, when written down in 2008, than it would have meant when written down half a century ago. Of course, history always moves on; and of course there is a tendency for an older generation is to think that change has been for the worse.

  In our times, however, something much more radical has happened. This book is certainly not advancing the proposition that all changes in the last fifty years have been for the worse. In terms of physical wellbeing, of medical and dental care, of opportunities for travel and cultural enrichment, the changes in the last half-century for the great majority in Britain, and in the West generally, have been material improvements. But nearly all the major changes have been destructive of the common culture. One obvious example, taken from the very middle of our times, is the so-called Big Bang on 27 October 1986. Thereafter, more money came into London than at any period in its history. But, almost overnight, the City of London, that institution which had been central to the wealth of Britain as a nation from the late seventeenth century until our time, was no longer in the hands of British institutions or British families. Geographically, the Square Mile was still in the same place. The Thames still ran softly, but the song was no longer sung in English.

  The great dome of St Paul’s, emblem not only of Sir Christopher Wren’s belief in a rational, as well as a national Church, but also (from the famous photographs of its remaining through the smoke of the Blitz) an emblem of national solidity in the face of destructive threats from outside, this great dome itself was to be dwarfed by the huge American-style blocks and slabs which soared above the City’s skyline, to the dismay of the Prince of Wales and others. Within its walls, the cathedral church of the Diocese of London had become the chief meeting place of a sect, rather than the seat of a national Church. The liturgy of 1662, which had been part of the inner music of English heads and English ears since it was first authorised, was discarded in the late 1960s, as was any claim by the Church to utter the Common Prayer of the nation. No longer answerable to Parliament, the Church had an assembly of its own, the General Synod, in which it could conduct divisive discussions from which there appeared to be no retreat–gay bishops? women priests? The delay of the disestablishment of the Church did not mean that disestablishment was not inevitable. And with disestablishment would come a further weakening of any bond which might hold the nation in an imaginative and cultural knot.

  The Union between Scotland and England had been the beginning of the story of British Imperial greatness. Together, with occasional dramatic spats, the two nations had achieved remarkable feats–of statecraft, of philosophy, of engineering, of empire-building. In our times, like a married pair who wondered whether they had ever liked each other, they drift almost heedlessly towards separation, with a series of devolutionary measures which few of the electorate actually asked for, and probably even fewer actively desired.

  Here, then, are three areas–the ownership of the wealth in the City of London, the status of the Established Church, and the very Union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland–whose status is palpably different at the end of our times from what it was at the beginning. These factors make Britain less British, even before you have begun to consider the influence of mass immigration and membership of the European Union, or of the more nebulous but no less observable isolation of groups, classes, ethnicities, within our borders. During the Second World War, and in the times of economic austerity thereafter, we were–yes, it made sense to use the first person plural–we were an entity. The young men, of whatever social class, did National Service together. Rich and poor had received identical rations, fairly shared. With the coming of prosperity–prosperity which almost everyone must surely have welcomed–the problems began. The inhabitants of the British archipelago became a collection of classes and races and individuals, living side by side and for the most part trying to ignore one another. The only thing, in fact, which the indigenous population still had in common with all their fellow aliens on the strange little archipelago was the Queen herself. And one suspects, as she continued to go about Britain meeting her subjects and shaking their hands, that she had come to feel a stranger there, too. What had happened was that Britain, having undergone a series of stupendous changes, most of them, if measured in purely economic terms, improvements, had ceased to be anybody’s home.

  Part One

  Churchill and Eden

  1

  Old Western Man

  The travellers trotted on, and as the sun began to sink towards the White Downs far away on the western horizon they came to Bywater by its wide pool, and there they had their first really painful shock. This was Frodo and Sam’s own country, and they found out now that they cared about it more than any other place in the world. Many of the houses that they had known were missing. Some seemed to have been burned down. The pleasant row of old hobbit-holes in the bank in the north side of the Pool were deserted, and their little gardens that used to run down right to the water’s edge were rank with weeds. Worse, there was a whole line of the ugly new houses all along The Pool Side, where the Hobbiton Road ran close to the bank. An avenue of trees had stood there. They were all gone. And looking with dismay up the road towards Bag End they saw a full chimney of brick in the distance. It was pouring out black smoke into the evening air.1

  The Great War is over. The Ring of Power has been destroyed. As in Wagner’s Ring cycle which is one of its primary analogues, The Lord of the Rings concludes with Middle-earth passing into the hands of the human race. The Dark Lord and his power were destroyed when the ring itself was thrown into the Cracks of Doom in the Land of Mordor where the shadows lie. The Elves of the High Kindred, together with Gandalf the Wizard, take ship at the Grey Havens and pass out of our world. The Shire, the comfortable, rural world of the Hobbits, will no doubt return to some kind of normality, but it has been wrecked during the war and it is difficult to believe, amiable and strong as old Sam Gamgee is, that the Shire will ever be quite the same.

  The literary fortunes, and reputation, of the author of The Lord of the Rings find no parallel. Reviewing it for The Nation on 14 April 1956, Edmund Wilson, while dismissing J. R. R. Tolkien’s (1892–1973) great work as ‘balderdash’ and ‘literary trash’, made the strikingly false prophecy that the book would appeal only to British literary taste.2 Of all the works published in England during the early to mid-1950s, The Lord of the Rings made by far the most world-wide appeal, translated into dozens of languages and, even during the author’s lifetime, becoming, among the Californian hippies of the late 1960s, a quasi-religious text. Gandalf lives, they proclaimed on their T-shirts.

  Tolkien was an unlikely hippy guru. Of South African parentage (his father was a bank clerk) he was brought up in Birmingham, attended King Edward’s School and Exeter College, Oxford. From an early age his passion was for language. As a child he had stared at the coal trucks bound for Wales and had been fascinated by the words painted upon them, so unlike the Germanic languages, English and Afrikaans and German, to which he had been accustomed–Nantyglo, Senghenyd
d, Blaen Rhondda, Penrhwceiber and Tredegar. Soon he was inventing languages with all their morphology and syntax, as well as imagining the mythologies they carried with them.3

  Much of the epic which made him famous concerns a war in which ill-equipped, small individuals are pitted against forces of monstrous darkness. The Lord of the Rings is among the best war literature. Not only the vast battles, but the tiredness and hunger of the common solider on his long, wet, nocturnal marches are unforgettably recreated. Tolkien lost most of his school friends in the First World War and his epic is a story of unremitting loss and pessimism. As for almost all who fought in it, or lived through it, the First World War was the great calamity from which his generation never recovered. By the time of the Second, he was a professor of philology at Oxford, a medieval scholar of great brilliance. After decades of creating the private languages and mythology which had been part of his inner life since childhood, he had enjoyed, in 1937, the success of a children’s story, The Hobbit, and by using the same characters but setting them against the mythic background he had for so long imagined, Tolkien, over a twelve-year slog, and against the demands of his teaching and research, had finished one of the great masterpieces of twentieth-century literature. Rayner Unwin, son of the publisher Stanley Unwin, collected the typescript on 19 September 1952. The first volume, The Fellowship of the Ring, was published in 1954, the next, The Two Towers, some time later in the same year, and The Return of the King in 1955. Many of the critics and pundits during those years would have shared Edmund Wilson’s intellectually snobbish opinions–would have shared them, that is to say, if they had so much as noticed the books’ publication. The BBC dramatised it in 1956, by the end of the decade it was beginning to be translated, but the phenomenal success, the sales of millions, did not take off until it was published in paperback in the United States of America in 1965.4

  The popularity of the book among the young of that generation would surprise only those who saw a contrast between their appearance, and manner of life, and that of Tolkien himself. He was a reclusive, extremely conservative Roman Catholic of austere morals. They supposedly practised free love and wore flowers in their hair. But neither believed in the future. He had seen his world, the old world, wrecked by the perpetual fear that a Third World War might eliminate the world of nature itself, destroy the planet.

  Tolkien stands toweringly above the new authors of the new Queen’s reign. True, the old troupers–Ivy Compton-Burnett, P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie–continued to write a slim volume each year as if to reassure their fans that the world they had created still existed on some plane. Of those who began to be published in the post–Second World War era, none has Tolkien’s weight of pessimism or majesty of vision. He rightly dismissed the idea that his epic was an allegory. Otherwise Sauron would have to be a mere code for Hitler, and The Ring for the atomic bomb. The whole book is much bigger than any such trivial matching could ever suggest. It is a story of a world wrecked, gone forever, destroyed. No one supposes that Sam Gamgee and his wife, Rose, courageous as Sam has been, will ever repeat the glory, still less rise in his Hobbit life, to the levels of tragic grandeur known in the heroic days of Theoden, King of the Golden Hall, or of the cruel, majestic quasi-Byzantine courts of Gondor. Those glory times are forever over. Literature was left to perky, cheeky chappies, Lucky Jim setting fire to his bedding with cigarettes, finding Room at the Top by marrying the boss’s daughter, wowing the avant-garde audiences of Look Back in Anger with his realism. Their antics did not really survive the decade in which they first appeared. They were ephemera.

  Tolkien’s friend Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) enjoyed fame on several levels (children’s writer, radio evangelist) but wrote his most lasting work as a literary scholar. He, like Tolkien, had been through the First World War, and lived with a sense of finished cataclysm. On 11 May 1954, C. S. Lewis, after a lifetime at Oxford, was elected to a new chair at Cambridge, becoming Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English. His inaugural lecture, entitled ‘De Descriptione Temporum’, spoke of a great gulf between the modern world and everything, pagan and Christian, which had gone before. In the old world, as he saw it, rulers wanted to ‘forestall or extinguish widespread excitement…They even prayed (in words that sound curiously old-fashioned), to be able to live “a peaceable life in all godliness and honesty” and “pass their time in rest and quietness”. Now–instead of rulers, there were “leaders with” (I suppose) what people call “magnetism” or “personality”.’ Modern art was the first in history to be unintelligible–the Cubists, Picasso and T. S. Eliot are cited as examples. Did any of Lewis’s Cambridge audience believe him when he said, ‘I am not in the least concerned to decide whether this state of affairs is a good or a bad thing. I merely assert that it is a new thing’? Thirdly, he cites the un-christening of Europe. They now lived in a post-Christian age. Fourthly, the world was mechanised.

  Lewis paraded himself as belonging to the last generation of Old Western Man, the last generation who had anything in common with Jane Austen or Sir Walter Scott. His was an unbroken tradition from Homer–‘I might almost say from the Epic of Gilgamesh’–to the modern world. ‘Surely the gap between Professor Kyle and Thomas Browne is far wider than that between Gregory the Great and Virgil? Surely Seneca and Dr Johnson are closer together than Burton and Freud?’.5

  Was Lewis just posturing, or was there some element of truth in what he had to say? Was one of the reasons that Britain would find it so confusing to adapt to life in the post-war era not merely that it had lost an Empire, but that it had also, in common with the other countries of the West, lost contact not just with individual authors or works of art from the past, but with a shared self-defining culture? Certainly the days were already fast disappearing in the mid-fifties when a shared knowledge of Latin and Greek could be expected of European audiences. By the end of our times, when knowledge of even one play by Shakespeare was no longer required by public examiners of sixteen-year-olds, it might have been felt that some very radical change indeed had taken place.

  In 1965, two years after Lewis died, A. J. P. Taylor, his old colleague at Magdalen College, Oxford, completed his superbly readable English History 1914–1945. This energetic story saw the Second World War as, among other things, the period when Britain had embraced modernity. ‘Before the war Great Britain was still trying to revive the old staples. After it, she relied on new developing industries. Electricity, motor-cars, iron and steel, machine tools, nylons and chemicals were all set for expansion…The very spirit of the nation had changed.’ He saw the heroes of the world wars not as the generals or the dictators, nor even Churchill, but the people of Britain themselves.

  Traditional values lost much of their force. Other values took their place. Imperial greatness was on the way out; the welfare state was on the way in. The British Empire declined; the condition of the people improved. Few now sang Land of Hope and Glory. Fewer even sang England, Arise. England had risen all the same.6

  It is a magnificent ending for a book, written during the optimistic years of Harold Wilson’s premiership by a popular and populist don who saw the world going his way. If social cohesion is measured in terms of ‘motor-cars, iron and steel, machine tools, nylons and chemicals.7 then Britain in the mid-1950s looked set for improvement. If societies, however, require shared mythologies, ideologies, folk memories, to help them cohere and to live through times of crisis, then perhaps the pessimism of Tolkien and Lewis was prophetic.

  Throughout our period, the polarities expressed by these two positions become more and more irreconcilable. On the one hand politicians, economists, industrialists and some moralists point to ever-increasing prosperity, and greater freedoms. On the other there is the sense that the Shire has been wrecked, that a tall chimney is belching smoke into its previously unsullied air and that, at the same time, the old tales are being forgotten, the old songs no longer sung. Capitalism could produce just as effective a block on the past as could the facel
ess dictatorship of Orwell’s 1984 where even the nursery rhyme ‘Oranges and Lemons’ is a distant, and a forbidden, memory.

  Karl Popper’s great work of social science, The Open Society and Its Enemies, was written in New Zealand during the Second World War. Born in Vienna in 1902, Popper had been a teenaged Marxist, but the emergence of the twentieth-century dictatorships filled him with distrust of utopianism. The two chief objects of his opprobrium were Plato, the utopian who had created in his Republic a prototype of totalitarian control, and Hegel, the godfather of Marx and Marxism. Popper looked forward to a post-war world in which, with the horrors of fascism behind them, Europeans could build an open society. The open society was not for Popper an alternative Utopia, it was something which was coming anyway: the only alternatives were hateful systems denying freedom.

  The lesson which we…should learn from Plato is the exact opposite of what he tries to teach us… Arresting political change is not the remedy; it can never bring happiness. We can never return to the alleged innocence and beauty of the closed society. Our dream of heaven cannot be realized on earth. Once we begin to rely upon our reason, and to use our power of criticism, once we feel the call of personal responsibilities, and with it, the responsibility of helping to advance knowledge we cannot return to a state of implicit submission to tribal magic.8