The Deculturalisation of the English People
John Lovejoy

In Australia the author witnessed the sad fate of Aborigines who have had their culture and communal life shattered. He saw how, despite immense difficulties, the Aborigines cling to a shared identity and struggle to recover and breathe new life into a set of values and a way of life known to their ancestors. On his return to England, he saw the English facing a similar process of deculturalisation but lacking the will to resist or reverse it. The young have no sense of who they are or where they are from. The English are not doing those things that are necessary to maintain a distinct culture and way of life. English identity is neglected and being left to crumble. Worse still, Englishness is actively discouraged and in its place we are offered the glitter of an easy one-size-fits-all Western identity. Deculturalisation is revealed in the inability of many, and especially the young, to be able to answer the questions, Who am I? What do I believe? Where do I belong? Who am I loyal to? Everywhere we see the loss of communal values and perceptions. John Lovejoy gives reasons for the deculturalisation of the English and points to the remedy.

£6.95 - 80 pages - paperback - A5 - ISBN 1-903313-00-7

A sample chapter is reproduced below.
Much of the formatting has been lost in producing this extract.

The Basic Concept
I must find an easy place to begin to say what I mean. To this end, I refer again to my more recent experience of four and a half years in the Kimberley, in North West Australia, with a largely Aboriginal population. For most of that time I served as a stipendiary priest in the Anglican Church Diocese of North West Australia, although on arrival I was not in full-time paid service but had other paid employment as I have often had and as is the case just now.

It was there, among the Aborigines of the region, that I saw, in an accelerated and concentrated form, a vivid example of the danger of which I am going to speak. In other places, it was true, I had seen the traditional way of life of the local people under the stress and pressure of rapid change, but here was a people whose whole weay-of-life had dramatically collapsed, with results which were harrowing to see, being shown tangibly and visibly in alcoholism, violence, marital irregularity (by anybody's customs), degradation in speech - their own language having been lost beyond recall, and intensive pre-occupation with gambling. That was what was observable on the surface. Behind that was the progressive loss the whole mental and conceptual fabric, along with its indigenous spiritual sanctions in mythology, of the way of life which had doubtless enabled them to survive with a complete human existence for tens of millennia.

That was one particularly acute example where a whole people had lost their way of life with results both ugly and tragic - within a span of time which was almost covered by living memory.

More generally, I now assert that what I observed in one place can happen anywhere. Whatever the part of the world from which Man comes he has the same primary basic needs which must be met. Readily we rec-ognise the physical needs of food, drink, air, shelter; while we also acknowledge quite easily the emotional needs of the individual person for secure bonds of affection and esteem within his immediate relationships.

I now want to stress - and this as forcibly as I may - that it is a primary need of the human being that he grow up in and belong to a particular people sharing an inherited patterning of the mind which we call a culture or a civilisation. Bereft of this, the human indivi-dual cannot lead a fully human life. Instead, he will suffer mentally, emotionally, physically, and will become unstable in behaviour in ways which we might well recognise. Human beings are not 'programmed' by a set of genetically inherited instincts, but vitally require the moulding of the mind and spirit that is integral to the process of growing up within any particular civilisation or culture that truly functions as such.

For what I saw, then, in the case of the Aboriginal People of the East Kimberley in North West Australia, and for what can likewise easily happen to Men elsewhere, a single word is needed. That word, fittingly ungainly as it is, is Deculturalisation.

Deculturalisation, therefore, is largely what this letter is about, and it is a frightening disaster, which leaves individual men and women in a conceptual wilderness and in an unresolvable crisis of identity.
The individual can no longer answer such basic questions as:

"Who am I?"
"What do I believe?"
"Where do I belong?"
"Who am I loyal to?"

"What are our beliefs?"
"What are our origins"
"What is our destiny?"

The result of all this is degradation of every conceivable kind, including alcoholism; drug and solvent addiction; breakdown of human relations; violence; the assumption of borrowed mob identities; the decay of the gift of language; and the adoption of a wholly material-istic value system.

If that is all that I had to say, that I had observed these things happening to a small isolated population of erstwhile Mesolithic people on the other side of the world, then I would not be writing this Letter. It would be a matter for a report to be addressed to the Bishop of Northwest Australia and perhaps to be brought to the attention of the respective Governments in Perth W.A. and in Canberra. Such a report I did frame before I left. It was confidential and I did not retain a copy.

What is very much to the point is that when I returned to England, early in 1984, it began to dawn on me that the very same things, in principle, that I had seen in the East Kimberley were also happening to my own people, in my own Country. I am an Englishman. That is the reason for this letter. I wish to make the point very urgently that the English People, of which I am one, are in severe danger of what I have already called deculturalisation.