by Marcus Walker, The Critic
A battle for the soul of our nation
What doth it profit a man to gain the whole world but to lose his soul?
Christ posed that question to his disciples, and Thomas More explored it further with Sir Richard Rich, who betrayed him for the attorney generalship of Wales. “It profiteth a man nothing to gain the whole world and lose his soul, Richard … But for Wales?”
Well, I need to pose the same question to the right, as the alienation of almost an entire political movement from Britain’s cultural custodians is leading to a worrying indifference towards our cultural institutions, and sometimes delight in their woes. What does it profit us to lose our souls?
The problem is well documented. Every one of our cultural institutions has fallen to the left, not in an old-school gentle way but with the zeal of the true believer whose desire is to give no quarter to other views.
The litany is long. Museums which insist on denigrating their collections and the forebears who collected them; films and plays that hammer the past and pretend it was the multicultural idyll we inhabit now, whose stars delight in flying across the world to tell us to preserve the environment; a national church whose sermons and public pronouncements hit all the left-wing touchstones of Brexit, net zero, migration, capitalism; universities whose courses have been “decolonised” and made contingent on Marxist thinking, whose right-wing academics have been purged and whose students face cancellation or expulsion from the institution if they don’t conform on certain key issues.
As every schoolboy knows, every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and the right has been reacting. Cultural institutions are not just boycotted but campaigned against. Films go unwatched, whilst the companies that produce them are increasingly distrusted and abused. Calls grow — amongst Conservatives! — for the Church to be disestablished and its bishops removed from the House of Lords, whilst monthly stories of the closure of humanities faculties in universities across the country are met with, at best, indifference and often undisguised glee.