After America - Mark Steyn [100]
That’s an important distinction. Once it’s no longer accepted that something is wrong, all the laws in the world will avail you naught. The law functions as formal embodiment of a moral code, not as free-standing substitute for it. Beating up a 96-year-old isn’t wrong because it’s illegal; it’s illegal because it’s wrong. Not offering your seat to a 96-year-old isn’t illegal at all, but it’s also wrong. And, if a citizen of an advanced western social democracy no longer understands that instinctively, you can pass a thousand laws and issue a million ASBOs (the “Anti-Social Behavior Orders” introduced by Tony Blair) and they will never be enough. British society has come to depend on CCTVs—closed-circuit cameras in every public building, every shopping center, every street, even (in some remote rural locales) in the trees. In some cities, traffic wardens have miniature cameras in their caps to film ill-tempered motorists abusing them for writing a ticket.31 Britain is said to be home to a third of all the world’s CCTVs, and in the course of an average day, the average Briton is estimated to be filmed approximately 300 times.32 So naturally the Croydon trolley had a camera, and it captured in vivid close-up the perpetrator attacking his victim. And a fat lot of good the video evidence did Mr. Chaudhury.
Churchill called his book The History of the English-Speaking Peoples—not the English-Speaking Nations. The extraordinary role played by those nations in the creation and maintenance of the modern world derived from their human capital. What happens when, as a matter of state policy, you debauch your human capital? The United Kingdom has the highest drug use in Europe,33 the highest incidence of sexually transmitted disease,34 the highest number of single mothers,35 the highest abortion rate;36 marriage is all but defunct, except for toffs, upscale gays, and Muslims. A couple of years ago, the papers reported that stabbings are so rampant in British schoolyards that a company that specializes in military body armor is now manufacturing school blazers lined with Kevlar.37 For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what LBJ’s Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population.
American exceptionalism would have to be awfully exceptional to suffer a similar expansion of government and not witness, in enough of the populace, the same descent into dependency and depravity. As the United Kingdom demonstrates, a determined state can change the character of a people in the space of a generation or two. When William Beveridge laid out his blueprint for the modern British welfare state in 1942, his goal was the “abolition of want,” to be accomplished by “cooperation between the State and the individual.”38 In attempting to insulate the citizenry from the vicissitudes of fate, Sir William succeeded beyond his wildest dreams: want has been all but abolished. Today, fewer and fewer Britons want to work, want to marry, want to raise children, want to lead a life of any purpose or dignity. “Cooperation” between the State and the individual has resulted in a huge expansion of the former and the ceaseless withering of the latter.
For its worshippers, Big Government becomes a kind of religion: the church as state. After the London Tube bombings, Gordon Brown began mulling over the creation of what he called a “British equivalent of the U.S. Fourth of July,” a new national holiday to bolster British identity.39 The Labour Party think-tank, the Fabian Society, proposed that the new “British