Britain needs a moral core

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”.  

The need for this spiritual dimension … is even recognised by British Army doctrine

In addition to people living with “the most enormous inner contradictions without any discomfort”, France had lost the recognition of the need to stay tuned into the “soul” and that greater realm watched over by God, along with everything that goes with it: moral integrity, seeking virtue, adhering to the truth (for Weil this didn’t necessarily mean going to church — she was highly critical of organised religion and the Catholic Church). As a result, Weil defined the role of the Free French movement “as being the country’s spiritual guide” to restore truth seeking and moral coherence as lodestars for the country.  

The need for this spiritual dimension — which British society increasingly shows it has entirely forgotten, if not disdains — is even recognised by British Army doctrine. As detailed in publications such as the Army Doctrine Publication Land Operations and UK Defence Doctrine, which I and my fellow officer cadets had to wrestle with at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, effective fighting power is defined as being composed of three interdependent components.

There is the Physical Component — comprising the tangible means to fight, such as personnel, equipment and training. Then there is the Conceptual Component — the intellectual foundation underpinning how forces operate and fight, encompassing the likes of doctrine, military concepts, accumulated knowledge and innovation. 

Finally, there is the Moral Component — that intangible element that spurs motivation and cohesion, including leadership, morale, ethical foundations, team spirit and a willingness to endure and fight on against the odds. 

Army doctrine notes that while the three components are mutually supportive, it is the moral component that is the most important. But that intangible element is very hard to manage with no religious base whatsoever. 

But that is where the UK finds itself today. Our prevailing institutions — especially academia and the media — offer bad jokes, deconstructionism, and feel-good slogans as the prevailing components of British life, while our legislators cheer on legislation pushing abortion up to birth and assisted suicide. Both go against Weil’s point that a human being has roots through participation in the life of a community that preserves “treasures of the past” and “expectations of the future”.   

It’s a shocking indictment for the country that likes to tout itself as the source of Magna Carta, common law and civil liberties — and also likes to mock the French. But at least the French, as demonstrated by Weil, continue to have some capacity for self-reflection and asking hard questions of themselves.

A reccurring theme in the novels of controversial French writer Michel Houellebecq is the decline of Christianity in France and around Europe, and the impact this has had on societies. 

“The last thirty years of European history had been marked by the massive and amazingly rapid collapse of traditional religious beliefs,” Houellebecq writes in The Possibility of an Island. “In countries like Spain, Poland and Ireland, social life and all behaviour had been structured by a deeply rooted, unanimous and immense Catholic faith for centuries, it determined morality as well as familial relations, conditioned all cultural and artistic productions, social hierarchies, conventions and rules for living.”

But, he adds: “In the space of a few years, in less than a generation, in an incredibly brief period of time, all this had disappeared, had evaporated into thin air.”

As anyone familiar with Houellebecq’s writing will know, he is not a fan of what has filled the void and is, in his view, tearing communities apart. His description of modern society as a “machine for destroying love” is one of his most succinct and withering observations. 

Houellebecq is also (in)famous for depicting in Submission how Islam may well fill the void — he conjures a scenario in which an Islamic party manages to win the vote and take control of the French government.  As recently demonstrated by the heft of the Muslim vote in the Gorton and Denton by-election that helped give the Greens victory, there is just as much, if not more, chance of the UK going the way of Houellebecq’s satirical proposition.

Perhaps people don’t think that’s a problem. Perhaps it isn’t and shouldn’t be for a developed country in the 21st century. Religions come; religions go. Admittedly even Houellebecq, far from demonstrating himself to be Islamophobic in Submission, as his critics clamour, offers a more nuanced picture: France actually starts to run more effectively under its Islamic government. 

Either way, I can’t help finding it ironic that here in the UK, after centuries of the establishment getting its knickers in a twist about Catholics, the state, and much of its populace, appear to meet the proposition of Islam becoming the religious base of the UK with a shrug of the shoulders. Which takes us back to Weil:

To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul,” Weil wrote. “Every human being needs to have multiple roots. It is necessary for him to draw well-nigh the whole of his moral, intellectual and spiritual life by way of the environment of which he forms a natural part.

Good luck managing that in the spiritual desert of UK 2026.