I’ve been listening to Malcolm Guite do the podcast rounds promoting his new book, Galahad and the Grail. Guite is a poet, an Anglican priest, an ardent admirer of the Inklings, and an academic who believes that Britain’s myths and legends can point us toward truth and beauty. His gregarious nature makes him a joy to listen to and his thoughts on the intersection of enchantment and Christianity often move me to tears - but in a recent episode of Shifting Culture, Guite said something that left me dispirited.
To summarize, at the end of the episode, Guite veers into politics to say that the issue of immigration is being used by racist right-wingers to divide people. He acknowledges that people have genuine concerns about housing and employment and that the government could handle it better, but the problem, in his view, is not the small boats (meaning the dinghies migrants use to cross from France to England), but the big boats (meaning the yachts of billionaires). Because the Arthurian legends themselves draw from diverse sources and because the British people were formed out of earlier peoples who came from elsewhere, Guite believes that diversity is Britain’s strength.
To hear a beloved champion of British myth parrot the same slogans we hear from the suits of the World Economic Forum and the puppets in Downing Street felt disorienting. Perhaps it weighs on Guite that his government considers a love of folklore, of Tolkien and Lewis, to be a red flag for reactionary sentiment so he feels the need to head-off accusations of thoughtcrime. But to hear one of Britain’s foremost mythic thinkers echo the globalist dogma of the ruling class left me reeling.
A N.I.C.E. Slogan Come to Life
More immigrants are believed to have come to Britain since 1997 than came to Britain in the entire 1,000 year period before.
This is not a natural continuation of Britain’s oldest stories; it is engineered demographic change of a scale and speed unprecedented in history. It means that today Britain is forced to constantly confront the question of who they are and what a nation even is: is it an inherited people with a distinct culture or an economic zone open to the world?
The Matter of Britain emerged from the conflict between Celtic Britons and the Anglo-Saxons over centuries of violence, exchange, and integration, and was later taken up by Anglo-Normans and shaped by French literary influence. So, clearly, the Britain that birthed the Arthurian legends was not a hermetically sealed silo that knew nothing of the world; Arthur’s court even drew individual knights from far beyond Europe. This seems to lead Guite to believe that objections to mass immigration are therefore untenable - but every modern nation arose from the intermingling of earlier peoples. Britain's history of invasion, displacement, and resistance is a story found in virtually every population in the world and is reflected in their myths, so why is this universal truth only used to undermine the West’s self-determination?
Further, the idea of Britain as a “nation of immigrants” is imprecise: Britain’s historical migrations were far smaller, involved neighboring European groups, were finite, and were followed by relative stability for nearly a thousand years. Post-1945 immigration to Britain is a radical break; it is orders of magnitude larger and faster, and brings people from around the world into a democratic welfare-state with little assimilation pressure and where the establishment views its own history as something problematic to deconstruct.
And it is the very billionaires Guite dislikes that benefit the most.
Mass immigration is scab labor - crossing a picket line - on a global scale. It depresses wages by inflating the labor pool, while straining public services, burdening the taxpayer, increasing housing costs, increasing violent crime, exacerbating wealth inequality, and eroding social cohesion. The overwhelming majority of people arriving in Britain today are not refugees fleeing catastrophe. And it is a warping of the Gospel to equate it to “love thy neighbor” because mass immigration is a dehumanizing system of exploitation. Genuine love means refusing to believe the modern lie that people are interchangeable units to be swapped around the world to make the rich richer with no regard for the damage it does to people and places.
“Diversity is Britain’s strength” is a N.I.C.E. slogan come to life.
N.I.C.E. – the National Institute of Co-Ordinated Experiments - is the organization using progressive, technocratic strategies to remake the world for the supposed betterment of humanity in C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength - a book Guite said contains a passage that was an inspiration for Galahad and the Grail. And the slogan “diversity is Britain’s strength” would be useful to N.I.C.E. just as it is useful today to the managerial regime overseeing the managed decline of Britain.
“Diversity is our strength” is one of the great disenchantments of modernity: it eats away at the invisible threads that bind us to one another and ultimately makes us less human. It is a slogan that persuades ordinary people that their natural instinct to preserve their inheritance is bigoted and regressive, while surrendering their cultural inheritance is the utmost virtue. It is a slogan beloved by those who have much to gain from robbing a people of their solidarity by persuading them they are merely an accidental assemblage of random people that need have no loyalty to the past or duty to preserve what they received.
When Guite admits the government could have handled immigration better in regards to jobs and housing, it is such a technocratic worry that it sounds like the kind of sanitized objection NICE would tolerate from the public in order to safely vent off discontent. But is this really all the British people are allowed to be concerned about – jobs and housing? As if the current situation could be made tolerable if the tinkering of government experts to engineer civic utopia was more efficient? What of community and belonging? What of deep roots and shared story?
Guite laments that Britain’s old tales no longer serve as a shared symbolic language, but is this really a surprise when so many of the people now in Britain have no ancestral connection to the land? Nearly a million people in Britain today do not fluently speak English. Mass immigration is a culture transplant; people bring their cultures with them and this shapes their economic, political, and social behavior in ways that remake their new country. These behaviors and beliefs do not quickly fade, studies show they persist onward into successive generations of immigrant descent. Studies also show that significant cultural and ethnic diversity is not a societal strength; mass immigration erodes the conditions that make assimilation possible by facilitating fragmented monocultures. And part of what newcomers bring with them is their own cultural stories that, quite understandably, mean more to them than the stories of a foreign land.
Britain’s long history does not require its people today to surrender to the modern dogma that demands mass immigration. To love the old tales and the distinct land and peoples from which they arose is not to be a bigot or a xenophobe who wants to seal the borders or a zealot who makes an idol of the nation. And opposing unfettered immigration in no way implies hatred or violence of any kind; in fact, a true love of cultural diversity will find mass immigration an insult to human dignity. Immigration can be a good thing if done right; cultures and groups naturally mingle and evolve over time, but that does not mean they should be forced into chaotic dissolution.
A Tale Wielded as a Weapon
The lie of our age is that everything must be dissolved: a nation is just a social construct; a people is just a demographic category; tradition is problematic; marriage, family, even the body, are infinitely malleable because the world is just meaningless chemical interactions on a pointless rock hurtling through empty space. It is a worldview that ultimately breeds nihilism.
But, as Guite often reminds us, and as the Inklings knew, these old myths know more than we do. Part of the premodern worldview vouchsafed within them is that cultures, lands, and peoples are real things, not flimsy social constructs to be endlessly redesigned and dissolved. The truths contained in the old stories call upon us to remember deeper ways of knowing - and because these stories shape us, the way we interpret them today matters.
This is why it is troubling that one of Britain’s foremost guardians of myth seems to read the Matter of Britain as an endorsement of globalization and the modern project of dissolving all inherited loyalties. It feels disturbing for those in the ivory-tower to downplay the hardships experienced by the ordinary people of Britain - the loss of work, housing, community, and safety - and then to invoke those very people’s cultural inheritance as a reason they must accept the status quo.
Using the rich origins of the Arthurian legends to persuade people to accept elite edicts regarding mass immigration is like telling someone that if they enjoy a cozy fire in their hearth they can’t complain if that fire grows to engulf their entire house. It is a dangerous warping of the old tales in service of a brutal modern malevolence.
I can easily imagine John Wither, the Deputy Director of N.I.C.E., explaining how the organization intends to dig up Merlin and use him to more efficiently enact their plan: “It has been found desirable, ah, in the interests of social cohesion, that certain residual mythological attachments be retained in a carefully managed form so that their emotional energies may be redirected toward approved ends. After all, a population deprived of its legends may, ah, become restive and meddlesome, but a population permitted their legends - provided they no longer mean anything - can be governed quite comfortably.”
The stories of the past must not become a skin suit, like the lion skin draped over the donkey Puzzle in CS Lewis’s The Last Battle. This donkey-pretending-to-be-Aslan is used by the ape Shift to invoke the authority of the old stories while draining them of their meaning. After all, Shift didn’t ask the Narnians to stop believing in Aslan, he asked them to believe that Aslan now sanctioned what He had always before opposed.
The Matter of Britain does not sanctify the political machinations of today’s technocratic elite just because Britain’s own history – like the history of all nations – was one of many peoples becoming a people. Far from the Arthurian tales serving as tidy parables to be used by a modern state wanting to convince its citizens to accept an ever-increasing inflow of strangers, they began as stories of resistance against invasion. And a deep lesson of these tales is that precious things are not inevitable, they endure because they are loved enough to be guarded.
The old tales do know more than we do and if we are truly open to their wisdom we must be willing to hear what they actually say, rather than forcing them to parrot the slogans of our own age.
In Arthurian myth the land is often linked with righteous rule; if a ruler is bad then the land goes bad. Restoring broken hierarchy and healing deep metaphysical wounds is a recurring knightly calling, and one way the healing is enacted is by properly naming the wound and its cause – and this takes courage. To do it today may cost comfort, institutional approval, and even friendships. So be it. The old stories are full of men and women who accepted hardship in order to remain faithful to what was true.
In Galahad and the Grail Guite writes beautifully in ballad form so I thought I would end this essay in similar fashion, drawing from a line Guite wrote that reads: “I am the one the Spirit sends to heal both land and lord.”
To Malcolm:
The old tales that we cherish still
Know more than we can tell;
They speak of crowns and holy oaths,
Of men who stood and fell;
They teach that truth is never cheap,
Nor virtue won with ease,
And call us from the placid shore
To brave the wildest seas.
We are the ones the Spirit sends
To heal both land and lord;
The flower of chivalry still blooms
Where truth outranks reward;
Though friendship, fame, and ease be lost,
And hard the chosen way,
The realm is saved by those who trust
Courage will win the day.
Further Reading:
Narnia Against the Machine: Deep Magic for the Modern Age
How Fantasy Literature Lost its Soul: From Narnia to Nihilism
Love Thy Neighbor: A Christian Response to Mass Immigration
Artwork:
The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon by Sir Edward Burne-Jones.
The Arming and Departure of the Knights of the Round Table on the Quest for the Holy Grail designed by Sir Edward Burne-Jones
The Knight of the Flowers by Georges Rochegrosse
The Knight of the Holy Grail by Frederick J. Waugh