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Sunset over Glasgow taken from Kelvinside
Photograph by
Ann Donaldson
Helen Mirren is right.
The UK has become
brutal and cruel
John Cameron
Moral rules restrain the worst in human nature and encourage the best
and, as we can see, kindness and compassion have now been replaced
by cruelty and sentimentality.
After his death, the reputation of Robert Maxwell was absolutely trashed and there was hardly anyone in the country without a tale to tell of his cruelty and dastardly deeds. But I worked for him for seven years and found him an invariably kind and generous employer and I always looked forward to my overnights in Headington Hill Hall.
I think Mirren is absolutely correct to comment that returning from abroad makes one all too aware of how brutal the UK has become with its all-pervasive incivility and cruelty. In ‘intellectual’ circles, verbal abuse is commonplace, insult is substituted for argument and anyone who dares to disagree is vilified as an ogre, a nutter, a fascist or all three.
Across the years I became used to everyone having an opinion on how I should run my church so it was a relief when the subject of teaching came up.
No-one at a dinner party ever told me how I should prepare a class for A-Level physics because very few people of my acquaintance knew anything about modern physics. Yet when ‘climate change’ appeared – a branch of physics so complex and with so many variables it is best understood via chaos theory – suddenly everyone was an expert. Not only that, if I dared to question one of Al Gore’s more extreme pronouncements – which is what physicists are supposed to do – I was branded a (holocaust) ‘denier’.
I became a non-person in the sense that ‘all’ scientists agreed with Al even though getting scientists to agree is like getting economists to agree and it is easier to herd cats. It is a level of abuse I have only encountered with religious fundamentalists and the entire subject has clearly been spiritualised and lifted out of the realm of rational debate. And yet the emotions involved are much worse in the UK than elsewhere because in the US or the continent people know the idea is based on inadequate computer modelling.
The internet in Britain appears to have unleashed a boundless reservoir of pathological bile which engulfs everything and everyone from the royal family down. Perhaps it has always been around, and certainly the British mob was historically brutish, so the social media may simply have provided a platform for what is already out there. But the uncontrolled internet has emboldened people to send vile messages to all public figures and bully the vulnerable with impunity under the shield of anonymity.
Civilisation has never been more than a thin veneer and it is unfortunate that British society in the late 20th-century binned Judeo-Christian moral values and put nothing it its place. Moral rules restrain the worst in human nature and encourage the best and, as we can see, kindness and compassion have now been replaced by cruelty and sentimentality.
After the death of Princess Diana an assembled mass cried empty tears for a stranger and the event became a televised excuse for an orgy of sentimentality. I felt for the first time in my life like a alien in my own country and wondered if a terrorist had spiked the London water supply and they had all gone completely bonkers. Theodore Dalrymple tried to analyse this weird episode in his book ‘The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality’, but I have to say that 15 years on it still gives me the creeps.
John Cameron is a physicist and former Church of Scotland parish minister
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