OH, TO BE IN ENGLAND: The Thing That Swallowed Britain.

A doctor rushes to the side of a patient who has just collapsed on the way to the toilets in the emergency wing. He checks for signs of life—pulse, circulation, breathing. He has never seen the patient before. How serious, he wonders, could this be? The doctor calls out: “Does anyone know anything about her?” The senior nurse, who has just come over, looks shocked.

“Him!” she practically shouts at the doctor. “You refer to that patient as him!”

And the doctor thinks to himself: “So I’m supposed to check the patient’s pronouns before I check his pulse.”

This story—I heard it from the doctor himself, David Mackereth—illustrates a salient point about what I call the Thing, that combination of postmodern identity theory, religious fervor, pseudo-therapeutic “empathy,” dogmatic moralism, private bullying, and ritualized public humiliation which has swept through Western societies over the last decade. The Thing may seem an irresistible force, but in truth, it can only take possession of an institution if that institution has already lost its identity.

If an organization knows and cherishes its history, if it empowers its members, if they understand their role in society, their vocation and contribution to the common good—then it is significantly less likely to be captured by the Thing.

But when you talk to people in the National Health Service, or the labor movement, or the police, you hear an eerily similar account of what has happened: a forgetting of the social role that used to give that institution meaning; a transfer of power from those on the front line to a remote administrative class; vocation edged out by bureaucracy; pronouns instead of pulses.

The next update to Peter Hitchens’ The Abolition of Britain is writing itself these days.