Guy Aitchison (Bristol, OK): The perennially gloomy Peter Hitchens posted a longish “manifesto” in yesterday's Mail lamenting everything wrong with modern Britain and calling for the remedies needed. He hopes these will be delivered by whatever right-wing party takes over when Cameron’s “Tories at last shuffle off their mortal coil”.
It reads like a handy catalogue of the fears and phobias of middle Britain: from ill disciplined feral youth to power hungry Brussels bureaucrats. I bring it to your attention because I think it represents a certain way of thinking about politics and governance not limited to paranoid Daily Mail readers. It is an analysis which tends to focus not on legal and institutional structures but on the moral fabric of society and the individual.
For hundreds of years this approach was expressed in political argument through the idea of “virtue”. The success and happiness of a nation, so the argument goes, is crucially dependent on the virtue of the sovereign. Republican Rome was believed to have declined due to its governing citizens’ loss of virtue, while the subjects of virtuous monarchs were thought to be the happiest and most prosperous. So for Hitchens, and other conservatives who think according to this long-standing paradigm, the problem for today can be put in terms of “how do we inculcate virtue in a corrupt society that has lost its moral bearings?”.
In the absence of “a new John Wesley” to “remoralise” us through a 21st century evangelical revival, Hitchens argues that we need “the removal of obstacles which prevent people from living as they would like to, and as they ought.” This is to be achieved through a combination of more autonomy for the individual, encouraged by an end to welfare dependency and withdrawal from the EU, but also more powers of coercion for policemen, prisons and teachers.
Leaving aside my own disagreements with Hitchens on these issues I am surprised that he leaves the issues of democratic reform and political engagement out of his manifesto. "Classical republican" thinkers from the Romans down to Machiavelli, saw strong institutions that drew active allegiance and a vibrant civic culture as one of the most powerful ways of inculcating virtue. This was because they believed that allowing people to actively debate and participate in how they are governed promoted individual moral agency and an unselfish dedication to the "public good".
Maybe Hitchens' failure to make the point shows that for all his self-regard he himself is not immune to the decline and fall he diagnoses. And maybe there's something to be said about resurrecting the idea of "virtue" after all...
