The Morlocks Come Out in London

By Theodore Dalrymple

Perhaps the best fictional representation of what is going on in England right now is The Time Machine, written more than a century and a quarter ago by H. G. Wells and never out of print since it was published.

In the novella, set in the distant future, humanity has separated into two branches, the Eloi and the Morlocks. The Eloi are the effete, gentle, soft vegetarians. They live above ground and play by day. But when night falls, the Morlocks emerge. They live underground, do all the work to keep things going, are aggressive and carnivorous, and prey on the Eloi for food.

The Eloi are so frivolous that they do nothing to defend themselves from the depredations of the Morlocks. When daylight returns, they return to their harmless little games, as if nothing had happened during the night, though some have been captured and eaten. They are too weak and unserious to do anything else.

I am an Eloi, a creature of a British civilization that has made itself defenseless against the Morlocks, who are (unlike those in The Time Machine) of two types—the endogenous and the exogenous. The former are the kinds of people who have been rioting; the latter are the Islamist kind. They want to replace the Eloi, who have just about managed, up to now, to keep control of society.

Wells was born into humble circumstances, but it so happens that he was also born a genius. Because of his sympathy with the poor, he was a socialist; but trained as a biologist, he never believed that all people were biologically equal and became a fervent eugenicist.

I confess that when I look at the people rioting, the youngish men, I feel almost as if they were of a different species from myself. They seem brutish, their faces bone and bristle. Their ugliness, however, is not biological or hereditary; it is an ugliness of soul, an antinomian ugliness. As Satan on his expulsion from Heaven said: “Evil, be thou my good,” so these people on their expulsion from anything resembling civilization have said, “Ugliness, be thou my beauty.”

Their hideousness is educational, social, cultural, spiritual. It is not merely that the endogenous Morlocks are unrefined; they hate refinement, which they associate with the Eloi. If anyone should think that I am exaggerating, let me show him a few places in England, and he will be convinced in five minutes. In fact, many of the younger Eloi are turning into Morlocks: the Eloi have failed to reproduce themselves not merely biologically but culturally.

What will the Eloi do when the riots cease? They will pretend that the endogenous Morlocks do not exist, that there is no brutishness problem in British life, and that when, for example, foreign resorts refuse to take British tourists because of their repellent behavior, it means nothing and has no wider significance.

As to the exogenous Morlocks, the Eloi will appease them, and indeed try to welcome even more of them into the country than have already come, hoping that this will satisfy them. When I look at Keir Starmer, I see the Eloi.

 

First published in City Journal