The British Empire was the brightest light in Western Culture.  The English language alone—with all its variations and nuances rises above and is more beautiful than any other.  Think Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, the Romantics, the Victorians, and the Moderns in Literature.  Ask the Irish about the English language.  Arguably, they are among its best purveyors, from Swift all the way through Yeats and C.S. Lewis.

British Common Law, which was hard fought for (see Runnymede), set the standard for freedom in the world.  A man’s home became his castle.

Both my grandfathers served in WW1. My father served in WW2.  He was awarded an MBE.  An old friend’s father was in the RCAF.  He flew a Spitfire and was shot down.  He was actually in—and survived—the Great Escape.  An old girlfriend’s father was 19 at Dieppe.  Luckily, he survived, but spent the remainder of the war as a POW.  I can only imagine what these young men went through, but both of them, whose strength I admired, managed to raise beautiful families and have successful careers, despite the horrors they had been through.  There was never a doubt in their minds that ours was the most advanced culture in the world and they were willing to die for it.

Everything these men fought for has been given away by feckless politicians, but it is not their inheritance to squander.  They should be hanged for treason.  I have no doubt my forefathers are rolling over in their graves.  It breaks my heart.

Think Hogarth, Gainsborough, Reynolds, Blake, Turner, Rossetti and the PRB in Art.

Musically, think Purcell, Handel, Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Holst, and Britten, all the way to such contemporary greats as Mark Knopfler.

British scientists from Bacon and Newton to Watt, Bell, and Turing brought us into the modern world.

The Anglosphere is the most civilized culture in the history of the world.  All first-world countries in the world are descended from the British Empire.

Britain’s freedom, like a sunny day, has attracted all kinds.  From the glorious Handel to the dregs of Marx.  Hopefully, the latter is burning in hell.  His sickness is worse than the plague.

Mid 19th century, before On the Origin of Species, Matthew Arnold wrote Dover Beach.  He mourned the loss of faith, which was the inevitable conclusion of the Enlightenment.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Faith is now entirely a personal matter.  It is the foundation of, but no longer drives our culture.  The relentless wave is now the invasion of lesser cultures.  We have opened the door to our own ruination, but even as the facts stare us down, we refuse to close it.
Will the most advanced civilization in the world’s history fall to barbarians? Not wholly, but surely.