Turnabout thoughts in and out of season

American conservatives long admired England as the homeland of Civilized Standards. Russell Kirk wrote a whole book on America's British Culture because he wanted to refute multiculturalism. It's worth noting though how their ideas of civilized standards now operate:

• They've awarded their top literary award, the Booker Prize, to an unusually disgusting piece of illiterature.
• Recent revisions to their hate-crime laws, together with existing harassment laws, seem likely to solidify the status of saying homosexuality is bad as a criminal offense. [UPDATE: the High Court has confirmed that a man who holds up a sign that says "Stop immorality. Stop homosexuality. Stop lesbianism." and is assaulted by hecklers who throw him to the ground and rip the sign from his hands has thereby committed a crime.]
• A top official commission has asked the police to investigate a television talk-show host for a newspaper column he wrote in which he truthfully -- though harshly and one-sidely -- referred to Arabs as "suicide bombers, limb amputators, women repressors." The man has also been suspended from his job.

What happened? Civilized Standards are a good thing, but today they just don't work as a final standard. The Brits have preferred to avoid ultimate issues because they might lead to unpleasantness, relying instead on habit, moderation and social convention -- "civilized standards." That's fine if you have a settled class structure, an established Church, and a population that mostly stays put for a thousand years and more. When those things disappear settled standards go too, unless there's something definite to anchor them, and all that's left is the desire to avoid unpleasantness. As a result, avoiding any suggestion that there are standards becomes the only standard. That isn't enough for civilized life, though, so in the end the cult of Standards -- "internationally-recognized standards of human rights," for example -- becomes the enemy of any civilized existence. You can't do things well if you don't know what you're doing, and in life there's no substitute for having a definite position on what life is all about.