Half way through the 19th century, taking its cue from a phrase coined by Thomas Carlyle, the nation became occupied with the ‘Condition of England Question’. Industrialisation was dividing the nation, crowning the wealthy and crippling the poor in a way that intellectuals from across the spectrum acknowledged and feared. What profited it a nation if it became the wealthiest on earth, yet lost its soul in the process?
Plus ça change… Contemporary Britain may not (yet) have coalesced around a specific phrase but the genre is now well established and David Marquand’s “essay on Britain, now” is a worthy addition. His starting principle – that “hardly anyone has pointed out that [the crash] was also a crisis of the moral economy” – is highly questionable. Moral criticism of bankers and borrowers, regulators and politicians has been plentiful, one tributary among many others (expenses, child abuse, phone hacking, etc.) feeding a great raging torrent of ethical anxiety. That aside, Marquand’s vigorous insistence that this is a deep problem, not to be fixed by bureaucrats or technocrats, is right and welcome.
His essay is structured around five “antinomies” – honour vs. hedonism; history vs. amnesia; the public realm vs. the market state; fate vs. choice; open debate vs. charismatic populism – though the structure is loose and the argument meanders leisurely between fields, unconcerned by strict demarcation, all the time singing the same tune: Britain has changed, the once subtle but pervasive sense of honour, of history, of the public, etc. having given way to hedonistic, market–obsessed populism.
Put this way, the essay sounds little more than a jeremiad, which it is not. Marquand is clever, writes well and is seasoned with realism. He is under no illusion about the faults and failures of the Britain in which he grew up. He simply believes that the cure has turned out worse than the sickness.
That cure is, in effect, liberalism or, more precisely, the particular combination of market and social libertarianism that reshaped Britain in the ‘80s and ‘60s respectively. “The first stood for libertarian individualism in the economy, but for order in a limited state and traditional morality in personal conduct. The second championed order in the economy, but libertarian individualism in the personal sphere.”
Pursued separately, one of these might have worked well but, as Marquand rightly observes, each naturally consumes the conditions it presupposes (and requires). “Market individualists assumed that free choice in the economy would go hand in hand with respect for traditional morality. Moral individualists assumed that the ethic of ‘doing your own thing’ could be confined to the private sphere, while economic life was organized on (unspecified) collectivist lines… both assumptions turned out to be false.”
Marquand’s solution to this problem eschews the kind of detail that is essential to social policy but usually strangles essays of this genre. In its place, he attempts to build – or, at least, alert readers to the possibility of – a coalition of the willing, prepared to take up arms against the unholy trinity of choice, freedom and the individual. This is a coalition of interested parties, from Liberty and Unlock Democracy to the WI and the churches (Marquand is very positive about the role of religion, at one point writing that “we shall have to find a richer discourse, drawn largely (but not exclusively) from the religious traditions”, although is careful to out himself as an atheist).
But it is also be a political coalition. The book ends with pen–portraits of three figures from the across the spectrum – Edmund Burke, John Stuart Mill and R.H. Tawney – whose ideas, values and commitments were such as could enable their political descendants to work together but authentically, from within their own traditions, in pursuit of what he calls “a decent society”.
This may sound vague and hopeful but Marquand it probably right in deeming it necessary. A ‘post–liberal’ future, as some have called it (though Marquand does not), cannot be the preserve of any one party or tradition, not least since the problem itself it strewn across the political fields.
What does sound hopeful is the rhetoric that laces the book and draws it to a rallying conclusion. We are in danger of “sleepwalking towards a seedy barbarism”. Our present way of life is “unsustainable environmentally, emotionally and morally”. “We can’t go on as we are”.
“Seedy barbarism” is an apt, and witty, phrase which I shall use make use of, but “sleepwalking” is not. We have been more alert to our actions and their consequences over the last half century than Marquand thinks. We simply haven’t cared enough to face the consequences fully. I have been sufficiently OK not to worry too much about the fact that we are not.
The great acts of collective responsibility that reshaped British society in the twentieth century were all, in some way, connected with war – Boer, Great, Second World, Cold. In other words, we act together only when we dislike or fear the consequences of not doing so worse. In the absence of any such threat – or at least any such threat of which we are conscious: climate change may yet step into the breach but at the moment we seem oblivious to its long–term potential – we may well simply go on as we are, enjoying the freedom that liberalism affords us as individuals whilst bemoaning the chaos it wreaks on our common life.
Nick Spencer is Research Director at Theos
Mammon’s Kingdom: An Essay on Britain, Now is published by Allen Lane, 2014
Image by xinbert墨 on Pixabay
