Edward Dutton - The Past is a Future Country (Societas)

In many of his verses, the celebrated English poet Philip Larkin (19221985) attempted to capture the dramatic changes in Western culture that had begun to crystallize by the 1960s. For this modest university librarian, who wrote a few lines every evening after work (Rossen, 1989, Ch. 1), it was as though an Old World was passing away and a New World was not merely being born but was living through the prime of its youth.

The Old World might reasonably have been called conservative or right-wing. It firmly believed in traditional religiousness, specifically Christianity and the kind of conservative morality with which this was associated. Sexuality was something taboo and shameful; only to be explored within Christian marriage for the purposes of having children. Backed-up by Christian teaching, males and females had clear and distinct roles, ordained by God. There was an accepted social order and this was not only natural but desirable. It was believed that people were very much unequal and that they, therefore, naturally divided into social classes in a hierarchy at the top of which sat the monarch and then God Himself who, of course, existed. In fact, recognizing that people were not equal was clearly positive for society as a wholebecause people would perform the roles of which they were the most capableand that was far more important than how individuals might feel . If the best people were placed in the correct positions, then society would be more likely to triumph in the battle over resources, influence, and power with other societies. After all, the English were, essentially, an extended family who wished to ensure that they were the wealthiest and most successful of all families in the world. And their motivation for doing this was, in part, that they perceived themselves to be Gods chosen people (Purchase, 2006, p. 101) and, thus, fully deserving of world dominance, which they pursued for the greater glory of God. There were variations, such as along social class lines, in the extent to which they conformed to the relatively puritanical lifestyle to which this gave rise. The morality of the lower orders was, in fact, a matter for constant concern (McEnery, 2004, p. 72). However, this was broadly how England, and other Western countries, could be described. This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall, Or as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands, as Shakespeare put it in Richard II (Act II, Scene I).

Around the time of World War I, this was the dominant way of thinking, though even by then it was beginning to be questioned. By 1963, it was beginning to fall apart as the culture turned to a liberal and left-wing way of seeing the world (Murray, 2012). This was characterized not only by a belief in the importance of equality, but also by an emphasis on personal freedom: on the right of the individual to live as he or she wished. Traditional religiousness, and the social order and system of morality which it upheld, began to be cast aside. The novel Lady Chatterleys Lover (Lawrence, 1960) by English writer D.H. Lawrence (18851930)privately printed in 1928 and banned in Britain for being obscenehad been published in the UK in 1960, resulting in an obscenity trial in which a Church of England bishop had argued in its favour (Mews, 2012). In 1963, this same bishopJohn A.T. Robinson (19191983), Bishop of Woolwich in southeast Londonpublished a book, Honest to God , in which he seemed to deny almost every Christian doctrine, including the literal existence of the Almighty (Robinson, 1963). By the end of the 1960s, male homosexuality was legal in England, abortion had been decriminalized, and there were growing campaigns for the rights of women and for the rights of ethnic minorities (see Goodhart, 2017).

The taboo on sexuality heavily declined over time. It became increasingly acceptable to get divorced, and even to commit adultery and to have illegitimate children. By 1994, there were female priests in the Church of England (Saunders, 18th March 1994). By the early 2000s, the ban on gays in the British army had been overturned (Jones, 2019), the age of homosexual consent had been equalized with that of heterosexual consent at 16 (Kilkelly, 2017), and by 2016 women were allowed in military combat roles ( BBC News, 8th July 2016). Then there was adoption by unmarried gay couples, which began in 2005 (Mulholland, 30th December 2005), gay marriage, legalized in Britain in 2013 ( BBC News, 17th July 2013), and, most recently, a campaign for equality for transsexuals, with the meaning of the word transphobia still needing to be explained to newspaper readers in 2009 (Tozer, 19th May 2009). This process, more broadly, has actually been termed the Great Liberalisation and it has paralleled public attitudes becoming increasingly accepting, across time, of these kinds of changes (Goodhart, 2017, p. 38).