So Ghana has passed its anti-LGBTQ+ bill, and Whitehall is in a froth. The Foreign Office tuts, flags a ‘human rights breach’, and issues a sternly worded communique. How very Roman of them, sending centurions to lecture barbarians on proper conduct.
But the barbarians are not listening. They never do. And this is the crux of the matter: the West has spent two centuries exporting ‘universal values’ only to discover they are about as universal as a Cornish pasty in the Sahara.
The great tragedy of the modern era is that we have mistaken our own provincial obsessions for eternal truths. Ghana’s parliament, in its muddled and populist way, is merely reminding us that the world is not a single moral universe but a collection of tribes, each with its own taboos. The British elite, seated in their Islington kitchens, cannot fathom that someone in Accra might not care for their refined sensibilities.
But that is precisely the point. The fall of Rome was not a single event but a slow dissolution of a universal culture into local fragments. We are watching that process again.
And the clever, condescending people in London who think they can reverse it with a stern letter are the very ones hastening the decline. The Empire is dead. Ghana has just told us so.
And perhaps that is not a bad thing.
