Alienation

Anyone who has visited my apartment would suspect that I am something of an Anglophile. They would be right. On the walls, they would find pictures of village scenes, a map of the London Underground, reproduction posters for RMS Aquitania and the Night Scotsman, a mirror from a pub, and more. Someone reading my bookshelves will find many mysteries and thrillers by British authors, from Buchan to Sayers, Allingham, P.D. James, Dick Francis, Conan Doyle, Frederick Forsyth, and John le Carré, among others. Other favorite authors include Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Bernard Cornwell, Churchill, George MacDonald Fraser (Flashman), P.G. Wodehouse, Richard Adams (Watership Down), A.A. Milne, Kenneth Grahame, Robert Louis Stevenson. I enjoy reading British history and watching documentaries about it. Much of my favorite music is British: Ralph Vaughan Williams, The Scottish Psalter, Anglican hymns, hymns written by Charles Wesley. I listen often to The Rolling Stones and Van Morrison. I like English-style beers, Scotch whisky, bangers and mash, fish and chips, etc. And that's not exhaustive. I am an Anglophile, but mostly, I think, of a Britain past rather than the one since, maybe, the 1990s, when I was last there. Carl Trueman, who grew up in England, writes "The England I Knew Is Gone":

Leslie Poles Hartley famously dubbed the past “a foreign country.” This summer, for the first time, I sensed that the present can be one too. My annual visit to the land of my childhood and youth exposed me to a culture very different from the one that nurtured me. Growing up as a grammar schoolboy in 1970s and ’80s England, I absorbed the importance of personal restraint; emotional self-control in public; privacy; acting with honesty and fairness, even to one’s own hurt; and respecting others regardless of their social status or opinions. At the level of society, such personal values promoted freedoms—of speech, of religion, of expression. All of that is gone, at least from the class that presumes to define the country’s mores and morals. ....

England exemplifies the political shape a country takes when expressive individualism grips the imagination of its ruling class. It is impossible for any culture to allow everyone to be who they want to be, from transgender activists to traditional Christians. Somebody therefore has to bring order to the potential chaos, and as expressive individualism tends strongly toward the transgressive, with its core notion that personal authenticity lies in breaking with the herd (that is, the social expectations of the past), the culture-makers will typically favor those who want to demolish received ideas and traditions deemed stumbling blocks to self-realization. This turns morality on its head. Yesterday’s virtues have become today’s oppressive vices, as the moral register has shifted in a psychological direction—most notably in the trivialization of trauma, which in some cases has come to mean little more than “somebody somewhere said something hurtful about me.” Sadly, the Church has often proved little different. ....

And this is not an English monopoly. It is a Western malaise. .... (more)

Carl R. Trueman, "The England I Knew Is Gone," First Things, August 27, 2026.