Here we are again, watching the BBC’s breathless coverage of a cave rescue in Southeast Asia, where plucky British divers are once more sent to fetch children from the clutches of nature. The latest episode: the daring plan to extract the last two missing survivors from a flooded cave in Laos, with the rescued children themselves assisting in the operation. It is a story that rouses the heart, but also the bile of those of us who see in it the Decline and Fall of the British Empire reduced to a kind of underwater babysitting service.
Let us not mistake heroism for statecraft. These divers are brave, no doubt. They risk their lives in tight, dark passages, mud and water up to their nostrils, to save children who made a poor choice of playground. But why are British men the go-to problem solvers for the world’s geological misadventures? Because, my dear reader, we have an overdeveloped sense of duty and an underdeveloped sense of priority. While our own bridges crumble, our schools rot, and our hospitals creak under an ageing population, we dispatch our finest to fish out the offspring of strangers in a socialist republic that would otherwise spit on our flag.
Yet the spectacle is irresistible. The rescued boys, pale and gaunt, emerge blinking into the flashbulbs, their faces a canvas for the world’s pity. And now they help plan the next phase, as if they were veteran commandos. It is the Rome of the gladiators: the mob loves the show, never mind the cost. We have become a nation of emotional procrastinators, using these micro-dramas to avoid the macro-decay of our own civilisation.
The Victorians, for all their faults, knew better. They built empires, not rescue teams. They sent out missionaries and gunboats, not divers. And when they did engage in such operations, it was to save a fellow Englishman, not to burnish a hashtag. Today, we are the global first responders, a role that flatters our vanity but empties our coffers. The Laos cave rescue is a perfect allegory: we are so busy saving others that we have forgotten how to save ourselves.
Mark my words. The intellectual decadence of the West is nowhere more evident than in this addiction to humanitarian grandstanding. We have elevated the rescuer to the status of secular saint, while ignoring the systemic failures that make such rescues necessary. Why are children playing in caves in Laos? Because they have no proper schools, no safe parks, no functioning welfare state. And why should that be our problem? Because we have the technology and the nerve, and they have the tragedy and the need.
Do not mistake me for a cold-hearted misanthrope. I wish those children well. I applaud the divers. But I also wish we could channel this same energy into rebuilding our own society. Every pound spent on a diving operation in Laos is a pound not spent on a lifeguard for a British beach. Every headline about the ‘heroic rescuers’ is a headline not written about the crumbling of our own coastal defences.
We are the world’s cave divers, yes. But we are also the world’s bankrupt squires, selling our last family silver to pay for the adventure. The Fall of Rome was not caused by barbarians; it was caused by a loss of focus, a sense of imperial mission replaced by a global holiday. We have become the holiday-makers of international relations, ever ready for a thrill, ever unwilling to tend our own hearth.
So raise a glass to the cave boys of Laos. But also raise a voice for the cave we have dug for ourselves. The two are not unrelated.
