We are not all that decadent - Samuel Brittan Financial Times 28/12/05

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We are not all that decadent Samuel Brittan Financial Times 28/12/05 The greatest of British philosophers, David Hume, writing in the mid-18th century wryly observed "To declaim against present times and magnify the virtue of remote ancestors, is a propensity almost inherent in human nature." About the same time the English writer Oliver Goldsmith declaimed in the The Deserted Village:- "Ill fares the land to hast'ning ills a prey / Where wealth accumulates and men decay." This vein of thought goes back a long time. Nostalgic critics in Imperial Rome lamented the decay of stern republican virtues. Before that Plato compared the indulgences of his fellow Athenians unfavourably with the self-denial of the neighbouring Spartans. One great man who had no truck with lamentation for a golden past was Winston Churchill. In the first volume of his History of the English Speaking Peoples (published in 1956 but mostly written before World War Two) he remarked: From the year 400 [when the Romans left Britain] until the year 1900 no one had central heating and very few had hot baths... For 1500 years British people lived in the cold of unheated dwellings, mitigated by occasional roastings at gigantic wasteful fires... As for baths they were completely lost until the middle of the 19th century. All through this long, bleak, intervening gap cold and dirt clung to the most fortunate and highest in the land. But still the lamentations go on. The disappearance of the old literary culture and its replacement by a visual one was lamented in the early 1960s by the Canadian sociologist Marshal McLuhan, well known for coining "the medium is the message". In 1967 the British economist E.J. Mishan published a book, The Cost of Economic Growth, which was a mixture of sound logical argument and personal prejudice, on the drawbacks of pursuing an ever higher GDP. The latest example of cultural conservatism is a book entitled Decadence edited by Digby Anderson and published by the Social Affairs Unit. The editor proclaims on the first page: "Britain, Europe and the United States are decadent in a special sense of that word. They have traded in an old morality that served them well throughout their civilisation for a new, experimental quasi-morality." In place of "courage, love, fairness, honesty and prudence" we have the "bogus virtues of equality, anti-discrimination, environmental concern, self affirmation, a caring attitude and a critical mindset". Not surprisingly the bete noire of many of these writers is John Stuart Mill, the 19th Century English philosopher who espoused both freedom and the pursuit of happiness. Decadence was launched towards the end of this year together with the American journal, The New Criterion, whose September issue contained a special section on Britain Today and was introduced at the same London launch. In fact there is so much overlap between the book and this issue of the journal that they are best considered together. The contributors to the latest decadence literature make their main comparisons with the early or middle 20th Century. One of the best known is Theodore Dalrymple, a police doctor celebrated for his exposures of the life of the criminal underclass. Dr Dalrymple mentions how his French wife was struck 25 years ago by "the comparative uninterest, even of the rich, in material comfort and pleasure". Among other earlier virtues were "politeness, lack of self-importance, stoicism, fortitude, emotional self-control and an ironic detachment from their own experience, especially when it was unpleasant". Many cultural conservatives are nostalgic for the old English "stiff upper lip". Dr Dalrymple cites a patient in his late 70s whose wife's neurotic compulsions were making his life impossible. "Why did you stay with her?" he asked. Because, he said: "I made a promise in church 50 years ago. And I meant it." He also describes how in his own childhood it was regarded as a moral discipline not to eat between meals even if you were hungry. "The fact that you sometimes refrained from eating when you were hungry, and were sometimes obliged to eat when you were not hungry, taught a very important lesson, namely that your inclination of the moment was not the only thing to be consulted in making the decision how to act." The only way to make an objective judgment would be to allow a present day citizen to go back 50 years and judge whether he preferred the conformism of the 1950s to today's jumble of conflicting ideas and values. A citizen of that period would also have to be transported to the present day. The exercise would have to be performed for a random sample of several thousand. Even if it could be carried out there is no guarantee that a consistent judgment would be obtained. So it is difficult to get beyond a subjective judgment. Some of the writers on decadence are honest enough to provide material for a contrary view. David Pryce-Jones recollects that his grandfather, serving in the Boer war, had seen a man condemned to "field punishment number one, which involved tying a soldier accused of cowardice in the face of the enemy tied to the wheel of a gun in action, and he had commanded the firing squad set up for a prominent Boer commander who had been captured." No wonder "as an old man, distinguished in his stiff collar and regimental tie" these memories troubled him. If these are the underside of the traditional values I can only say good riddance. At least the atrocities in Iraq these are widely condemned as a betrayal of western values and not passively accepted in the name of good discipline. There is one feeling which nearly all cultural conservative writers seem to have in common. This is a deep seated hatred of everything to do with "Europe" which goes far beyond a reasonable critique of the EU social and economic model. There is a chest beating patriotism, either for British or occasionally "English speaking" values to the detriment of others which I find distasteful. Pryce-Jones condemns Tony Blair for boasting about incorporating the Charter of Human Rights into British law. The convention in question has nothing to do with the EU and goes back to the Council of Europe which was established many years before. My own criticism of Blair is that he has gone back on human rights in his obsession with keeping the populist media happy. I can grumble as well as anyone else about inconveniences of modern life. Whenever I hear the word "online" I feel like screaming at the organisations who try to bully one into doing everything from buying a train or theatre ticket to reading a government policy document in that way. The result is that only executive summaries are read and short termism and dumbing down, which we all pretend to deplore, are encouraged. Nor am I happy to see the disappearance of the adverb "well" and its replacement by the adjective "good" as in "How are you today?": answer: "good". I also mourn the disappearance of the accusative "whom" and its replacement by the ubiquitous "who" as in "Who do you believe?". But then I reflect that the English language was almost certainly changing far more quickly in Shakespeare's time. A casual inspection would suggest that there are more serious book shops than 50 years ago and more young people can be seen reading books in trains and buses to the detriment no doubt of evening paper sales. My own view is that for all the maddening irritations of computerised existence there has never been a better time in which to live. Nevertheless liberals and social democrats ignore cultural conservatism at their peril. There is indeed some political crossover in complaints about decadence. There are elements in them, such as hostility to commercialisation, and distrust of globalisation, which strike a chord among the old left. Tony Blair, who has a keen sense of the political wind, has responded for instance with his so-called "respect" agenda. On balance, however, complaints about decadence are more likely to be found among Conservatives with a capital "C". Some of my friends would simply call them "the authoritarian right". This may seem slightly unfair. But it is a fairly small step from deploring modern mores and manners to wanting government "to do something about them". This is especially true if you believe - as most cultural conservatives seem to do - that there are absolute values which should prevail over mere human preferences. Modern cultural conservatism, like so much else, has its origins in the US. It arose from a group of neoconservative intellectuals, prominent among them Irving Kristol, who had become disillusioned with the Great Society programmes of Democratic administrations designed to combat poverty and discrimination. But being of a communitarian frame of mind they were also unwilling to adopt the thorough going individualism of many free market political economists and would have strongly repudiated Margaret Thatcher's famous remark that "there is no such thing as society". They wanted to show how Republicans could embrace the welfare state while remaining true to their basic instincts. A new generation of US neo-conservatives has since arisen who have shifted the emphasis to foreign affairs and have come out strongly in favour of American intervention to spread democracy worldwide. Attempts have been made to construct a British form of neoconservatism which its exponents would like the Tory party to adopt, eg. Neoconservatism by Douglas Murray, also published by the Social Affairs Unit. But although it’s a brave try, I do not think it works. American neo-conservatives, however misguided, are optimistic and forward looking - one only has to look at their celebration of elections in Iraq. On the other hand British cultural conservatism, is inherently nostalgic and pessimistic. Nevertheless supporters of Enlightenment liberalism need to remain on their guard.
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