WHEN THE SELF-POLICING REGIME of morality breaks down, the state
must take charge of the mess and rescue the victims—both the
unwilling victims, like the fatherless children of casual
relations, and the willing ones, who have chosen dependency on the
state as the easy option.
Faced with this situation, many conservatives feel inclined to
blame the liberal establishment, which has devoted so much energy
to undermining moral norms and inherited institutions. But although
ideas have consequences, ideas are also the consequences of other
things. The demoralization of society is the effect of many causes,
only some of which belong in the realm of ideas. Prolonged peace,
unprecedented abundance, social mobility, contraception, drugs, and
stimulants — all these have a predictable effect in weakening the
bonds of society. And to those well-known temptations we must add
the effects of recent technology: human brains are now saturated by
ephemeral messages, while human relations have been transferred
from real to virtual space. Sexual love is notorious for changing
its locations and its style. But we have entered a new situation in
which much of this love occurs in the realm of electronic signals.
We should not be surprised if this virtual love often looks like
hatred. Virtual space is Mercurial, demonic, a space of
transformations that we cannot control. Living with your eyes fixed
to that space, you acquire a mentality that has no real precedent
in the annals of mankind. Young people therefore find it hard to
envisage the future as something for which they are accountable,
and which requires them to make sacrifices on its behalf.
The problems we confront cannot be solved by philosophy, since
they lie deeper than thought. Even if we defeat the liberals in
debate, refuting to our satisfaction the labyrinthine arguments of
Rawls and the clever-dick challenges of Dworkin and company, it
cannot conceivably change what most concerns us. No doubt it was
perfectly reasonable for conservatives, at the time of the New
Deal, to warn against the growth of state power and the erosion of
individual responsibility. Looking back, we can feel the pull of
their arguments and recognize there was much truth in what they
said. But we must also recognize that their arguments made no
difference, just as the arguments of Hayek in postwar Britain — so
manifestly superior in power and scope to the arguments of the
paltry figures like Harold Laski, who packed Hayek off to America
— made no difference. State power continued to grow.
And such is the situation today. State power increases and
individual responsibility declines, regardless of whether liberals,
socialists, or conservatives are in government; regardless of the
social and political legacy; and regardless of which intellectual
faction seems to be winning the battle of ideas.
Moreover, we should recognize that this process is not strictly
a phenomenon of developed nations. The dependency culture arose
simultaneously in Europe and America, and the traditional family
disintegrated right across the Western world. The “decline of the
West” may not be the inevitable process described by Spengler in a
famous book of that title that first appeared in 1918. But it is
certainly not a process that can be tied to any particular nation
or any one form of national politics. Nor is it a process that can
be arrested in the realm of ideas or easily deflected by affirming
traditional values against the liberal alternative.
Moreover, the expansion of the state into every area of our
lives and the steady contraction of the sphere of personal
responsibility have produced a new order of things — one that
makes it very difficult for us conservatives to communicate with
those whom we hope to influence. So many of our arguments and
insights depend upon the old order of virtue, on the old moral
assumptions, and on the old conception of the human being as a free
and responsible agent. Yet those old things have gone, and we look
foolish if we do not recognize the fact. It is not just that
society has changed; the human being has changed with it. We belong
to the same species as Homer, Aquinas, and Mozart. But we are also
products of social interaction and change our nature according to
the context in which we grow. Our societies are now radically
different from those observed by Burke, Maistre, Tocqueville, and
Hegel, and the thoughts of those great men, whatever their
intellectual value, will not enable us to construct a conservative
politics suited to our needs today.
We have to accept that it is no longer possible to govern young
people by the methods that were used to govern and influence the
young of my generation. Exhortation, example, the stories of saints
and heroes, the life of humility, sacrifice, penitence, and prayer
— all such moral influences have little or no significance for
them. And although from time to time they encounter obstacles, and
perhaps experience real love, real jealousy, real fear, and real
grief, these emotions are not available to them in the regular
doses and predictable circumstances in which they were available to
us.
SO WHAT SHOULD CONSERVATIVES BE DOING? This is the last of my
regular articles for The American Spectator, so let me
conclude a happy period of my life with a few observations for
future use. Our work, it seems to me, consists in what Plato called
anamnesis — the defeat of forgetting. We cannot ask young
people to live as we lived or to value what we valued. But we can
encourage them to see the point of how we lived, and to
recognize that freedom without responsibility is, in the end, an
empty asset. We can tell them stories of the old virtues, and
enlarge their sympathies toward a world in which suffering and
sacrifice were not the purely negative things that they are
represented to be by the consumer culture but an immovable part of
any lasting happiness. Our task, in other words, is now less
political than cultural — an education of the sympathies, which
requires from us virtues (such as imagination, creativity, and a
respect for high culture) that have a diminishing place in the
world of politics.
Of course, we should do our best to control the growth of the
state and to make it more difficult to depend upon its constant
expansion. We should seek, through whatever avenues remain, to
rebuild our education system with knowledge rather than
“self-esteem” as its product. There are a hundred small-scale ways
in which we can help the next generation not to fall completely
into the trap that is being prepared for it. But there is no way, I
fear, to destroy that trap entirely. For it is built from human
ingenuity and baited with our own desires.
