Hence we individuals, who have a deep suspicion of government, have a yet deeper need for it. Government is wrapped into the very fibres of our social being. We emerge as individuals because our social life is shaped that way. When, in the first impulse of affection, one person joins in friendship with another, there arises immediately between them a relation of accountability. They promise things to each other. They become bound in a web of mutual obligations. If one harms the other, there is a ‘calling to account’, and the relation is jeopardised until an apology is offered. They plan things, sharing their reasons, their hopes, their praise and their blame. In everything they do they make themselves accountable. If this relation of accountability fails to emerge then what might have been friendship becomes, instead, a form of exploitation.
Our world displays many political systems in which the basic relation of accountability has either not emerged or been distorted in the interests of family, party, ideology or tribe. If there is a lesson to be learned from the so-called Arab Spring it is surely this: that the governments then overthrown were not accountable to the people on whom they depended for their resources. The Middle Eastern tyrannies have left a void in their wake, since there were no offices, no legal procedures, no customs or traditions that enshrined the crucial relation of accountability on which the true art of government depends – the art of government as we individuals understand it. In the Arab tyrannies there was only power, exercised through family, tribe and confession, and without regard to the individual citizen or to the nation as a whole. In such circumstances getting rid of one tyrant merely opens the door to the next one, while plunging the whole society meanwhile into chaos, as the bullies and the fanatics seize their chance.
In everyday life too there are people who relate to others without making themselves accountable. Such people are locked into the game of domination. If they are building a relationship, it is not a free relationship. A free relationship is one that grants rights and duties to either party, and which raises their conduct to the higher level in which mere power gives way to a true mutuality of interests. That is what is implied by the second formulation of Kant’s Categorical Imperative, which commands us to treat rational beings as ends and not as means only – in other words to base all our relations on the web of rights and duties. Such free relations are not just forms of affection: they are forms of obedience, in which the will of another person exerts a right to be heard. This, as I read him, is Kant’s message: sovereign individuals are also obedient subjects, who face each other ‘I’ to ‘I’.
There are other ways of expressing those truths about our condition. But we see them illustrated throughout human life: in the family, the team, the community, the school and the workplace. People become free individuals by learning to take responsibility for their actions. And they do this through relating to others, subject to subject. The free individuals to whom the Founders appealed were free only because they had grown through the bonds of society, to the point of taking full responsibility for their actions and granting to each other the rights and privileges that established a kind of moral equality between them.
In other words, in our tradition, government and freedom have a single source, which is the human disposition to hold each other to account for what we do. No free society can come into being without the exercise of this disposition, and the freedom that Americans rightly cherish in their heritage is simply the other side of the American habit of recognising the accountability towards others. Americans, faced with a local emergency, combine with their neighbours to address it, while Europeans sit around helplessly until the servants of the state arrive. That is the kind of thing we have in mind, when we describe America as the ‘land of the free’. We don’t mean a land without government; we mean a land with this kind of government – the kind that springs up spontaneously between responsible individuals.
Such a government is not imposed from outside: it grows from within the community as an expression of the affections and interests that unite it. It does not necessarily put every matter to the vote; but it respects the individual participant and acknowledges that, in the last analysis, the authority of the leader derives from the people’s consent to be led by him. Thus it was that the pioneering communities of America very quickly made laws for themselves, formed clubs, schools, rescue squads and committees in order to deal with the needs that they could not address alone, but for which they depended on the cooperation of their neighbours. The associative habit that so impressed Tocqueville was not merely an expression of freedom: it was an instinctive move towards government, in which a shared order would contain and amplify the responsibilities of the citizens.
When conservatives grumble against government it is against government that seems to them to be imposed from outside, like the government of an occupying power. That was the kind of government that grew in Europe under communism, and which is growing again under the European Union. And it is easy to think that a similarly hostile form of government is growing in America, as a result of the liberal policy of regimenting the American people according to moral beliefs that are to a certain measure alien to them. But this would be a mistake, and – because it is a mistake that so many conservatives make – it is time to warn against it.
Government emerges in small communities as the solution to a problem of coordination. Rules occur, not necessarily as commands delivered by some central authority, but as conventions spontaneously adhered to by everyone – like the conventions of good manners. Nobody objects to the local judge or law-maker who is accountable to the people because he is one of them, or to the local planning committee that invites everyone to have an equal say in its decisions. Hayek and others have studied these forms of ‘spontaneous order’, of which the common law – the great gift that we English-speakers share – is perhaps the most vivid instance. And their arguments suggest that, as societies get bigger and incorporate more and more territory, more and more distinct forms of life and occupations, so do the problems of coordination increase. There comes a point at which coordination cannot be achieved from below, by the natural willingness of citizens to accommodate the desires and plans of their neighbours. At this point coordination begins to require government from above, by which rules and regulations are laid down for the community as a whole, and enforced by what Weber called a ‘monopoly of violence’ – in other words a law-enforcing system that tolerates no rival.
That describes our condition. Of course, to say as much is not to undermine the complaint against modern government, which has become too intrusive, too determined to impose habits, opinions and values that are unwelcome to many citizens, and too eager to place obstacles in the way of free enterprise and free association. But those effects are not the result of government. They are the result of the liberal mind-set, which is the mind-set of a substantial and powerful elite within the nation. The business of conservatives is to criticise the ones who are misusing government, and who seek to extend its remit beyond the limits that the rest of us spontaneously recognise. Conservatism should be a defence of government, against its abuse by liberals.
This cause has been damaged by the failure of many conservatives to understand the true meaning of the welfare state. During the 20th century it became clear that many matters not previously considered by the political process had arrived on the public agenda. Politicians began to recognise that, if government is to enjoy the consent of those who gain no comparative advantage from their social membership, it must offer some kind of quid pro quo. This became apparent in the two world wars, when people from all classes of society were required to fight and if necessary to die. Why should they do this, if membership of the society for which they risked their lives had brought them no evident advantages? The fundamental principle was therefore widely accepted, that the state has a responsibility for the welfare of its more needy citizens. This principle is merely the full-scale version of the belief adhered to by all small societies, that people should be cared f
or by the community when they are unable to care for themselves.
The emergence of the welfare state was therefore a more or less inevitable result of popular democracy, under the impact of total war. If the welfare state has become controversial in recent times it is not because it is a departure from some natural idea of government. It is rather because it has expanded in a way that undermines its own legitimacy. As we know from both the American and the European examples, welfare policies may lead to the creation of a socially dysfunctional underclass. Sustained without work or responsibilities from generation to generation, people lose the habit of accounting to others, turn their backs on freedom and become locked in social pathologies that undermine the cohesion of society.
That result is the opposite of the one intended, and came about in part because of the left-liberal belief that only the wealthy are accountable, since only they are truly free. The poor, the indigent and the vulnerable are, on that view, inherently blameless, and nothing bad that arises from their conduct can really be laid at their door. They are not responsible for their lives, since they have not been ‘empowered’ to be responsible. Responsibility for their condition lies with the state. The only question is what more the state should do for them, in order to remedy the defects of which state benevolence is in part the cause.
But that way of seeing things expresses a false conception of government. The responsibilities exercised by government are rooted in the accountability of citizens. When government creates an unaccountable class it exceeds its remit, by undermining the relation on which its own legitimacy depends.
The left-liberal mind-set has therefore led to a conception of government that conservatives view with deep suspicion. In the left-liberal world view – and you see this magisterially embodied in the philosophy of John Rawls – the state exists in order to allocate the social product. The rich are not really rich, because they don’t own that stuff. All goods, in left-liberal eyes, are unowned until distributed. And the state distributes the goods according to a principle of ‘fairness’ that takes no account of the moral legacy of our free agreements or of the moral effects of a state-subsidised under-class.
On the left-liberal view, therefore, government is the art of seizing and then redistributing the good things to which all citizens have a claim. It is not the expression of a pre-existing social order shaped by our free agreements and our natural disposition to hold our neighbour to account. It is the creator and manager of a social order framed according to its ruling doctrine of fairness and imposed on the people by a series of top-down decrees. Wherever this conception prevails government increases its power, while losing its inner authority. It becomes the ‘market state’ of Philip Bobbitt, which offers a deal to its citizens in return for their taxes, and demands no loyalty or obedience beyond a respect for the agreed terms of the deal.3
But such a state no longer embodies the ethos of a nation, and no longer commands any loyalty beyond the loyalty sought by the average chain store. As in the social democracies of Europe, public displays of patriotism, of shared allegiance and pride in the country and its history dwindle to a few desultory spasms, and the political class as a whole begins to be looked upon with sarcasm and contempt. Government ceases to be ours and becomes theirs – the property of the anonymous bureaucracy on which we all nevertheless depend for our creature comforts.
This change in the phenomenology of government is striking. But it has not yet been completed in America. Ordinary Americans are still able to see their government as an expression of their national unity. They take pride in their flag, in their military, in their national ceremonies and icons. They look for ways to ‘join in’ the American venture, by giving time, money and energy to local clubs of their own. They want to claim ownership of their country, and to share it with their neighbours. They take time off from their conflicts to reaffirm a shared social and political heritage, and still regard the high offices of state with respect. In crucial matters, they believe, the President does not represent a political party or an ideology but the nation – and that means all of us, united in the spontaneous order that brought us together in this land.
In other words, ordinary Americans have a conception of government that is not only natural, but at variance with the left-liberal idea of the state as a redis-tributive machine. In attacking that idea, conservatives should make clear that they are reaffirming a real and natural alternative. They are defending government as an expression in symbolic and authoritative forms of our deep accountability to each other.
This does not mean that conservatives are wedded to some libertarian conception of the minimal state. The growth of modern societies has created social needs that the old patterns of free association are no longer able to satisfy. But the correct response is not to forbid the state from intruding into the areas of welfare, healthcare, education and the rest, but to limit its contribution to the point where citizens’ initiatives can once again take the lead. Conservatives want a society guided by public spirit. But public spirit grows only among people who are free to act on it, and to take pleasure in the result. Public spirit is a form of private enterprise, and it is killed when the state takes over. That is why private charity has disappeared almost completely from continental Europe, and is thriving today only in the Anglosphere, where common-law justice reminds citizens that they are accountable to others for the freedom that they enjoy.
Conservatives therefore have an obligation to map out the true domain of government, and the limits beyond which action by the government is a trespass on the freedom of the citizen. But it seems to me that they have failed to offer the electorate a believable blueprint for this, precisely because they have failed to see that what they are advocating is not freedom from government, but another and better kind of government – a government that embodies all that we surrender to our neighbours, when we join with them as a nation.
Notes
1 See the reports by Lunacek, Estrella and Zuber, Members of the European Parliament, which you can find presented and analysed on the site of European Dignity Watch: europeandignitywatch.org
2 See Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism, London, 2014.
3 See Philip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History, New York, Knopf, 2002.
4
– Dancing Properly –
Ancient Greek vases often show images of dancers, sometimes dancing in a chorus, sometimes dancing to ‘unheard melodies’ of their own. Their bodies have a peculiarly self-contained look: the limbs seem to radiate outwards from an inner source, and the face is often bowed, as though entirely absorbed in thoughts of its own. Dancing, these figures suggest, is an occupation of the whole person, and a display of the grace and completion of the soul. As the Attic tragedies indicate, dancing was the preferred way of presenting the community on stage, and the verses chanted or sung by the chorus are chanted or sung in time to complex rhythmical steps. Those steps both unite the chorus into a single social organism, and also impose an elaborate discipline, heightening our consciousness of the words and the solemnity of the occasion.
Dancing for the Greeks was not merely a part of the drama, a spectacle to be compared with the modern ballet. It was also a social occasion, though one in which men and women danced apart. Girls were educated in choruses. They learned to recite, to sing and to dance together; but they could not dance with men without risking their reputations. Sappho’s poems are perhaps addressed to other girls in her chorus. The chorus imparted an education that aimed to unite the soul and the body of the virgin in a single continuous image of marriageable grace.
The separation of the sexes in the dance survived in the Mediterranean into the days of my youth, and the Greeks were especially good at it, wearing their national or local costumes, and dancing in formation to the complex and often irregular rhythms that had been handed down through the centuries. The men would dance athletically in formations that often parodi
ed battle, and the women would follow, dancing with a kind of gentle hilarity that was a joy to watch.
Dance, as recorded on the Greek vases, shows human beings to be distinct from, and higher than, the other animals. It is, to use Nietzsche’s term, an Apollonian art, which fully acknowledges and bends itself to the ideals of reason. It is an orderly, reason- and rule-governed epitome of the virtues and graces needed for the long-term stability of society. Whether or not there was also a Dionysian version, and whether it was from that Dionysian version that the art form of tragedy emerged, is another matter. Maybe Nietzsche was right about that. But maybe he was wrong. Maybe, in writing The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, he was compensating for his own frustrated sense of being a sickly outcast. Maybe the Dionysian frenzy portrayed by Euripides in The Bacchae was something beyond dance and also beneath it – a lapse into the merely animal condition from which it is one purpose of the tragic experience to rescue us. In any event, I take the vases, the poems of Sappho, the tragic choruses, and the descriptions of music in Plato and others all to be pointing towards another view of dancing, as a point of ‘collective effervescence’, to borrow Durkheim’s beautiful phrase.1 The dance is a social activity, in which we exalt and idealise our rational nature. It shows freedom and discipline united in a single gesture, and at the same time made subject to the demands of social order.
Confessions of a Heretic Page 4
