by James Jeffrey, The Critic
The UK continues to miss the wood for the trees. It frets over the size of its military. It frets over its lack of economic dynamism. It frets over the loss of civil liberties such as freedom of speech. All of these concerns are valid, but they pale in the face of the existential malaise that afflicts this country. The UK has no spiritual depth; it is a moral vacuum. The country’s default mode nowadays is flippancy and irreverence toward everything (we have always prided ourselves on our supreme “banter” that other nations can’t manage).
In her book The Need for Roots, the French writer, political activist and mystic Simone Weil wrestled with the question of why France fell so easily to the Germans at the start of WWII. Writing while exiled in London and working for the Free French movement, she said the country had crumbled because it had lost its spiritual dimension. As a nation, the French had nothing of depth and value to coalesce around; hence the Germans had walked all over them — while a sizeable number of the population willingly turned collaborator.
As others have noted, while the UK prides itself on its WWII performance, we never had to undergo the stress-test of how we would have responded had the Nazis managed to get boots on England’s soil. The English Channel saved us from having to face this uncomfortable question that confronted the French. I am not sure we would have done as well as we like to think.
“What was everywhere, was moral incoherence,” Weil wrote of the state of France in 1940 when Germany invaded, noting especially the absence of “the spirit of truth” and the prevalence of “the spirit of vanity and falsehood”.