4 social capital, confidence and loss

8/9/2019 4 Social Capital, Confidence and Loss

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4. Social Capital, Confidence and Loss

1. Economy and Public Square

2. Culture, Memory and Social Capital3. Remembering and Paying Debts

4. The Paradox of Liberalism5. Modernity meets a Rival6. Monism and the Closed Economy7. Faith, Freedom and the Open Economy

The economy is our social relationships considered from a particular angle. Theinteractions we identify as economic derive from, and depend on, otherinteractions that are social, cultural and political. Our readiness to transact withone another depends on our being at ease enough with one another to do so. This

requires a large enough reserve of social cohesion and trust, that makes uscontent to leave some services unstated and unacknowledged. The slippage of

relationships from the informal economy of household and community into the

market may be the result of a reduced appreciation of our inter-relatedness, andso be the result of a reductive and economical view of man, owed to moderneconomics.

Perhaps the economic developments of recent decades, chiefly the move fromproduction and industry, to services and consumption, and a move fromcitizenship to individual rights-holders, results from an assumption that there is

little we may offer one another and loss of confidence in ourselves as publicbeings. Nevertheless the economy depends on the freedom exercise and

expression of our full, high, view of our interrelatedness.

1. Economy and Public SquareWe may judge for ourselves. We are free to decide. Though habits and rules help

us arrive at it, no one may tell us what our decision is to be. We make ourjudgments here and now, in the particular circumstances we find ourselves. We

must judge in the light of everything we know, using all the gifts, virtues andexperience acquired through whatever processes of learning we have undergone.We may listen to all sides, take into account what everyone understands as

common sense, change our own mind perhaps, argue for our own view andeither convince others or not. But then we may reach our judgment and makeour decision. When others are involved, the agreement on this decision is likely

to represent a compromise, but one which everyone must be ready to stand by it.We make decisions and bear responsibility, together, so our decisions are our

joint responsibility; we bear the praise or blame that may result, even though asindividuals we may have foreseen the unfortunate consequences that the

majority did not. This requires that we act with a measure of self-control.

Every decision requires a decisiveness, even a boldness. Courage is what enablesus to insist on this particular decision, even against the consensus. Others maynot be able to see the wisdom of it. We have to justify it in terms of what is justand right, and so may point out how it seems to us to offer the best and most

just solution. The Christian gospel affirms that each individual person has thedignity of exercising their own judgment and making their own decisions. We may

decide for ourselves, and we may decide for other people and so for the commongood. This may require any number of personal qualities; the classical list names

the four virtues of wisdom, justice, self-control and courage. Each of these isrequired for the exercise of that personal responsibility on which our culture andeconomy rely. We may not finally delegate our decisions to others, for each of us

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finally has the dignity of standing alone before God. Our decision is not set out forus in any law or set of instructions. It is Christianity that describes and insists onthe autonomy and dignity of this sphere in which we take these decisions, and soit is the Christian faith which defines and defends the secular sphere. For each ofus there is such a sphere, an area when which no one can take our decision forus. This sphere of our own responsibility is what the Christian tradition means by

the secularsphere. We make our decisions not in any ideal realm, but in the hereand now, and so pragmatically. The gospel affirms this proper secularity.

We are able to make judgments because, as members of society, we share in a

culture. Each member of society decides from resources which we may describeas social, political and religious which belong to that society. We take particulardecisions in the light given by our long-term commitments, expressed in moraland religious terms, as these direct us towards what is right, just, true and good.We cannot decide not to bring our own background to bear on any issue; we canonly become aware of some aspects of our tradition that allows us to reach ourview. These political and religious resources allow us to decide. They enable us tocountenance and weigh and to come to some specific judgment. Our moral and

religious traditions enable us to live in the world, be pragmatic and to come toagreements with others, of the same or different traditions. Every short-term and

immediate decision is shaped by our long-term orientation, for none of us setsout to make decisions that take us where we do not want to go.

The economy takes place in this secular sphere, in which I take decisions, andthere is no one to second guess me. In the sphere described by this freedom ofmine, I alone get to decide what I purchase. With each purchasing decision Ialone decide which firm to give my custom to, and a million individuals like mewill make unseen the purchasing decisions which reward one firm and punish

another. I have only a limited duty to agonise over the hidden ramifications ofeach purchase. I did not send that garment factory into insolvency: I merely did

not buy the shirts made there. I cannot be accountable for the fact that manyothers made the same decision I did with the result that that firm had to call in

the receivers.

By its insistence on the dignity and inviolability of our judgment, and thus on theautonomy of the individual person, the gospel defends the independence onwhich every individual has a particular defined sphere of responsibility. I amresponsible for some consequences of my actions but only to a limited degree amI responsible for the actions of others. My purchasing decisions have a specific,limited, responsibility. There is a distinct sphere of freedom within which we are

not beholden for our decisions to any man. No one can tell me that I may notwear the shirt I love, plant in my own garden the flowers I love, or marry the

person I love.

Where the Christian faith has been a long presence within it, that society willhave acquired the culture in which that secularity is secured. This freedom for thedecision of the individual person will be reflected in the law, and in the practicesthat constitute the rule of law, which make this a society of more or less self-controlled people. Such a people abides by the law and accepts that it is the taskof representative authorities to enforce that law, even when its enforcement is

directed against themselves.1

Christianity secures the secular sphere, which itself secures that space of freeexchange that we term the economy. The economy is the sum of all our

individual choices, as these are reflected in prices. This Christian account of man

1 Oliver O'Donovan The Ways of Judgment

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as judge, of himself and of his peers, makes him a champion of the freedom ofevery person to take decisions for themselves and so of the public square. Thisautonomy of each person, to enter the relationship and make the transaction thatthey judge best, gives a degree of sovereignty to this sphere that we term the

economy. The civic and political realm is another aspect of the public square inwhich persons meet together to take the decisions that that will shape and

support their lives, and in which they must insist in taking for themselves. Theymust also enforce the decisions they have taken by the censure of public speech;

each can challenge the other and attribute blame as that other seems to flout thedecisions which that community has agreed on. You can buy and sell as you like,

and do so within the framework of law, and yet anyone may challenge thedecisions you make, however you describe them as economic or political, privateor for the public good.

But we may also ask ourselves whether there has been a retreat from thisChristian account of man as bearer of responsibility, as judge, and as someonewhom his peers may call to account, and who may debate the extent of ourresponsibilities. Have we seen an inclination to avoid challenging one another in

the public square? If there has been a decline of the public square, perhaps adecline in the economy follows from it? This that is both cause and consequence

of a movement away from the view of man as public being, robust enough to giveand take public challenge, to an account of man as merely private being, should

neither give nor have to take a challenge?

We have seen there is also a political force, or perhaps a political temptation, torule out public expression of public and long-term considerations, and especiallyto rule out those challenges which are identified as coming from the Christiantradition. This secularisation means precisely the opposite of secularity.

To suggest that religion should stay out of politics is to exclude long-termconsiderations from our decision-making. Yet even trivial decisions may carry

long as well as short term consequences. In each decision we can only do thebest we can. We cannot entirely foresee the outcome of our decisions, for

subsequent generations can take our decisions in directions which we neitherwished or foresaw but cannot guard against. So secularisation is the temptationto believe that judgment and the traditions of wisdom which make judgmentpossible, are no longer required. Secularisation suggests that there is a settledprogress of removing and converging from the deep assumptions about theintegrity and dignity of the human being, and which is articulated as gospel, andthus as religious tradition. Are we seeing a departure from the full account of manoffered by the Christian tradition to account a lesser account of the freedom and

dignity of the human being?

The confrontation of ideas

A healthy economy depends on a people motivated by the confidence that they

receive through their culture.

Civil society materializes most dramatically when even strangers can succeedroutinely in establishing such a relationship and such a mode of reliance, despitethe fact that there is no question of personal attachments or anticipatedconsequences affecting what people do.2

A healthy culture supports a healthy public square. In a healthy public squarepeople publicly express differences and so there is public testing of ways of lifeand public discussion of what is good and what is of value. A healthy culture isable to identify those traits which benefit that society long-term, and so give

them its public approval, and aim its disapproval at those traits which tend to its

2Geoffrey Brennan & Philip Pettit Economy of Esteem (OUP 2004) p. 256

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long-term disadvantage. In the public square we praise and pour scorn, attributehonour and ignominy.

Every society must be glad of the history that formed it. It must celebrate thathistory, give thanks for it, even direct its thanksgiving to God. Our publicdiscourse must be primarily self-affirming and only then self-critical. We may not

let the second-order discourse of self-criticism to drive out the discourse in whichexpress our own basic contentment. We may express our gladness about

marriages and children, our towns and communities. We may proclaim whateveris good about local industry, local produce, local teams and all other sources of

pride. We may decry whatever we believe is execrable about them. One way oranother, social enforcement is inevitable. Geoffrey Brennan and Philip Pettit referto the sanction of shame as the intangible hand.

We may be judged by those who say or do nothing as a result just being wellor badly thought of by others can be a significant sanction for people, so thatwithout doing anything in particular people may police one another into certainpatterns of behaviour.3

One way or another, we communicate our estimation of our own community. Wetalk ourselves down but we could equally talk ourselves up.

We must be able to say what is valuable and attempt to persuade one another

that it is so. Our values are tested in the public square, and we hope, theirtruthfulness is established there. It is established through public discussion and

the practices of peaceful public contest built up over generations. We maychallenge the value that others place on economic goods, and sometimes perhapsdeclare that they are worthless or destructive. We can say that a thing is notmade valuable by price, and that prices may therefore be wrong. We may saythat the market is mistaken, and that a particular market is pact of knaves andfools bound together by mistaken estimations of value.

Money abbreviates our valuations. These abbreviations depend on our ability to

persuade another that our description of what is valuable is true and ourcommitments to them good, and this depends on our willingness to contest

incompatible accounts. This public dialogue requires face-to-face encounter, time-consuming though it is. Public dialogue should not be eclipsed by those sub-personal relationships expressed by money. If we give up such contests we willnot find that the price mechanism takes our decision for us. Even though distinctsphere of culture and public discourse recede, money cannot perform the wholetask as sole medium of our encounter.

Though we have promoted the discourse of the private over that of the public

sphere, our society is as much an economy of honour and shame as any earlier

society.Our society has managed to stigmatize stigma so much so that we are reluctantto blame people for any act that does not appear to inflict an immediate andpalpable harm on someone else.4

But it is not only in order, but it is entirely necessary, that we publicly attributehonour and shame. What happened to honour?

3Geoffrey Brennan & Philip Pettit Economy of Esteem (OUP 2004) p. 277 (citing Adam Smith Theory

of Moral Sentiments p 116).4James Q. Wilson The Marriage Problem: How Culture has weakened Families (New York:HarperCollins 2002) pp??

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The story of that words virtual disappearance from the working vocabulary ofEnglish and other European languages belongs to the larger story of thediscrediting ultimate loss of cultural honor in the West.5

Culture and freedomFree speech is embedded in custom and tradition, made explicit by law. The rule

of law is more fundamental than democracy. Democracy functions when it isfirmly embedded in the attitudes and customs that evolved together with thenational body of law. When it has not grown organically with law, democracy canonly mean the views of the electorate at this moment, views which will shift week

by week. A democracy that acknowledges nothing but democracy, without thesecustoms, acknowledges no source of authority but itself. But since it own views

may change as often as they are polled, that authority cannot make itself felt,and there is a crisis of authority. Democracy is healthy when it is no hurry, and is

not directed to rooting out the attitudes and customs of previous generations.

Modern man, as modern, both flees and seeks out law. He flees the law that isgiven to him and seeks the law that he gives himself. He flees the law given tohim by nature by God or that he gave himself yesterday and that today weighson him like the law of another. He seeks the law he gives himself and withoutwhich he would be the plaything of nature, of God or of his own past. The law heseeks ceaselessly and continually become the law he flees.6

If democracy is defined without reference to law and custom, it means no morethan the most fleeting self-expression of the electorate. Without law, we haveonly the crowd that barracks in the television studio or takes to the street. Then

the people is a mob and tyrant, and politics would only be about placating it bybuying it off. Democracy cannot merelymean the will of the people, without

any other more long-term consideration. For our good government, we needleaders who do not cave in to the latest expression of our demands, and who are

not therefore just like ourselves. We need leaders who are good at self-

government because they have been formed by a traditionof self-government.

To set out the secular sphere, by distinguishing between State and Church, is theprivilege given to the Christian Church. When no other such institution does so,the Church may have to perform this role for the nation as a whole, in which caseChristians must have courage. But this task is given to the Church by Christ, notby the State through establishment. Establishment and an established Church

merely indicate that the State acknowledges that the Church has this role, andthat the State does not, which is simply to acknowledge that any State must, by

definition, be secular. If it is not willing to do this it may be because it is makingits own religious, ideological or totalitarian claims. Secularity is established

through continuing reference to the precedence, of national attitudes, customs,

law and the working of representative government. Secularity is threatened, notenhanced, by any state-led attempt to rule out those attitudes or traditions. Anynation needs to express in which those attitudes of honour and shame can betested.

Can the State truly be secular? Can it allow the open stage on which the realvariety of ways of life in one national community can appear? Can the State avoid

turning secularity into an ideological secularism that denies real pluralism? Whenit determines that all our motivations are merely private and that the traditions of

thought, religious and other, which give us our motivations should have no publicexpression or debate, the state forestalls real pluralism. It is the Churchsconfession of the gospel that secures the secularity of the public square. The

5 Bowman Honorp.106 Pierre Manent The City of Man (Princeton 1998) p. 204

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Christian faith is that form of politics that distinguishes between politics andreligion, and thus between our present circumstances, and our ongoing and long-term orientation, between now and not yet, the eschatological reserve which isessential to all politics. It determines that the most Christian society can be issimply civil society, under the rule of law, in which the Christian community andits tradition is partner.7 Long-term there cannot be any government or any

society when we abandon the discourse and practices of self-control and try to dopolitics solely in the discourse of individual will, rights and interests. The

discourse of good, truth, authority, service and love may not be dispensed with.As soon as we define man without consideration of his purposes, aspirations and

future, and thus without hope, we have taken away freedom and he is eclipsed.Then man, without means to direct and control himself, is turned into afundamentally a-social being who can only be controlled externally. When this isso, we have created a two-class society, of the controlled and of their controllers.

The Church says that that man may not be utterly known and controlled. He isfree, and is a mystery and a wonder, knowable yet never utterly known, who willalways surprise us, and about whom there is always more to learn. This

insistence on the depth of man and the world that makes the Church essential tothe public square. Without it, secularism becomes a fundamentalism, and thus no

longer secular.

Christians are witnesses of freedom. The best favour that can be done for thosewho are not free, is to be free and not to capitulate to their lack of freedom. The

freedom that acknowledges no responsibility and restraint is no true freedom butmerely libertinism and captivity to the passions. I am not free if I am only free tofollow my own whims moment by moment. I am truly free only when I havesome other source of authority by which I can decide between my whims so that

they become more reasoned and mature views. So freedom is not merely givenby democratic institutions and freedom of the press, but also requires a self-

critical independence of mind by the nation. When our freedom is only that ofconsumers, powerless to resist, or even notice the relentless encouragement to

buy, we are held captive by our own stunted moral development, our inability tojudge well for ourselves.

It's our duty to consume, we're told, because it keeps other people working. Forspare moments, when regime-threatening questions might come to mind, theoligarchs have authorized a modern form of bread and circuses, an array of newsexual freedoms to compensate for the loss of the most basic civil right of all the right of self-government. 8

Under political totalitarianism each of us at least has the smallest interior freedomin the heart. But in the soft, all-comprehending, all-providing comfort of the

market, we may loss our ability to judge well for ourselves without ever-realisingthat this is what we have given up the dignity of being unsatisfied, that can onlycome through the virtue of self-control and the desire to achieve a degree of self-

government.

The effort of public challengeThe intellectual tradition that we can trace back to Plato and Aristotle tells us thatsome persons, those formed by particular traditions that teach the skill of

7Roger Scruton The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat(London:

Continuum 2002) p. 7 Put very briefly, the difference between the West and the rest isthat Western societies are governed by politics; the rest are governed by power.8

Mary Ann Glendon, Contribution to The End of Democracy? discussion, First ThingsJanuary 1997

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judgment, make better judges than others. Christians suggest that, since life isalso a matter of striving, hoping and directing ourselves towards what is not yetpresent to us, the future, it requires such an apprenticeship. But the concept ofthe consumer enthrones all of us without discrimination and without anyapprenticeship: everybody is right, no view better than any other. This does notgive us the public discourse by which we can talk about what is good and hope to

make good judgments. The long and involved discourse of speech and ideas hasbeen left on one side and the lighter and easier discourse of settling on a price

been used in its place. Money is public discourse abbreviated; prices areabbreviated speeches. Making and hearing speeches requires effort, while making

and accepting bids, selling and buying, requires much less effort. We havedeclined to hear and talk, listen and argue, and so act as public beings who faceone another in the public square and articulate our differences. We have askedthe discourse of money to take away from us the need for public confrontation.Our economy is in trouble because we have asked the discourse of economics todo too much and not asked our culture to do enough.

Albert Hirschman pointed out that it is easier simply to leave the institution that

you have become dissatisfied by than it is to declare that dissatisfaction. But thatinstitution is at risk if it does not allow the culture in which members or

customers are confident enough to complain. The disgruntled can always taketheir custom elsewhere exit; citizens will emigrate, and the country that does

not take note of such silent departures is in trouble. To complain, protest andgive voice is to act for the sake of the long-term health of your country.9

Culture relates to the reproduction and sustaining of our communities. How weshall encourage and reward the good, motivate the behaviour that sustains oursociety, punish wrong-doers and defend ourselves against them? This is must beour first- order discourse.

Critical and Modern discourse is a corrective, and so occasional, discoursedependent on our first order discourse. But the second-order discourse of critiquehas come to replace that first order discourse. We denigrate the discourse bywhich we identify and praise the good and shame the evil. We criticise those whoregard our culture as good, and as worth promoting. We have promoted topositions those cultured despisers who denigrate our inherited culture.10 We havedenigrated the transcendentals of truth, goodness and beauty by which we cantalk to communicate with one another at all. But the first order discourse isinevitable. For all discourse is intrinsically about both truth and public respect, so

about identifying and defending a community which, for as long as it is willing toreceive judgment and correction, is worth defending.

The good of disagreement

What makes our society so unready to argue and debate is that it is convincedthat warrior society is bad and is over and past. It has determined to avoidconfrontation, considering it as conflict. It is convinced that peace has arrived,and is only threatened when people fail to understand that peace and silencetherefore should be upheld.

9Albert Hirschman Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations,and States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1970)10Roger Scruton The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat(London:

Continuum 2002) p.79 A single theme runs through the humanities as they are regularly

taught in American and European universities: the illegitimacy of Western civilization, andthe artificial nature of the distinctions on which it has been based. All distinctions are

culture, therefore constructed, therefore ideological.

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Yet one faith community has had an exclusive impact on this country. The nearexclusive presence of Christianity has made this culture and this country whatthey are now. No other faith community has had any influence on the culture ofthis country. Moreover the culture of this country has been exported around theworld, to create a sphere of public which, depending on which aspects of it wewish to consider, we could call variously civil society, the rule of law, liberal

democracy, the freedom of the individual, the free market, the global economy.

It is culture that explains the wealth and poverty of nations. It encourages peopleto abandon impatience and violence and adopting the long-term habits of hard

work, rationality and education. Only societies with long histories of securitydevelop these cultural characteristics, while these cultural characteristics promotelong-term security.11 These are aspects of the culture of this country, and theyderive from one faith community exclusively. Faith communities are not all thesame.

Warrior culture may be pushed underground but it is always inchoately presentfor it is basic. We see it in the confrontations in every playground, boardroom and

market. We can assess Christianity only by the extent to which its presenceameliorates that culture, through the at best partial conversion of the country.

Since it is a faith, Christianity is not the permanent possession of this, or anyother, country or culture. This faith does not hang on where it is not wanted. It

ebbs and re-grows in this people, and when the Christian tide goes out it revealsmore of the pagan beneath that Christian culture. But this country is certainlyfree to shed this faith, precisely because it is to be believed in, or not believed in,freely.

The Christian contribution

Christian discourse is the guarantee of public and secular discourse, the Church isthe sponsor of the public square. Freedom starts with the freedom of man to

believe what he wants, to have his own view, and so to be private. Freedom ofconscience and the freedom of religion is freedom to dissent and disbelieve

whatever the prevailing orthodoxies. Christianity offers no totalising worldview. Itoffers a series of questions to whatever culture it meets, thereby opening thatculture to examination through the processes and practices of public reason,thereby enabling it to be a plural and secular culture. Christians are able toidentify the threat to the freedom of speech. They identify the temptation tohomogenise and attempt to achieve a conformity by legislation. The Churchspeaks truth to the liberalism that is unwilling to hear it and turning illiberal as aresult.

The origin of the word reminds us that liberal once meant generous. Generosity

can only be free and spontaneous. But the secularising liberalism that alwaysresorts to legislation is unable to account for the love and unforced public service

that supports civil society. Modern liberalism is now just a faint memory of theliberalism of unforced public generosity that was exercised as expressions of

joyful gratitude at the grace of God.12 It cannot tell us how to be a man or how tobe a woman. We will not be able to surprise one another with spontaneous acts ofgraciousness. We may point out the pragmatic argument that Christianitysucceeds in constructing civil societies because it places forgiveness overretribution and so breaks the cycle of violence.13

11 Gregory Clark A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World12 Frederick Beiser The Sovereignty of Reason: The Defense of Rationality in the

Early English Enlightenment(Princeton 1996) on the origins of Liberalism in Shaftesbury

and Cambridge Platonists13Bowman Honorp. 47 We have only to think again of the custom of honor killing in the

honor cultures of Pakistan and India to get an idea of what a revolutionary force

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The secular square must primarily a place in which people speak express thewhole range of attitudes, and give recognition to and withhold it from oneanother, attributing alternatively honour and shame. They will do so of coursewith make reference to what is good and purposeful, and they will occasionallybut necessarily utter what some are offended by. They refer themselves to what

is good and purposeful and to what is true. The secular sphere cannot be entirelyfilled by the market, in which our speech is abbreviated to yes/no signals, and it

cannot be monitored and approved by the state. The secular square cannot bedominated by either the provision or the regulation that market and state want to

interpose. Market and state can account for only part of the public square. In asignificant portion of it the views of the whole nation must be expressed, andheard and weighed by the nation itself.

2. Culture, Memory and Social CapitalThe goodness of existing covenants

Each generation finds itself in existing covenants and may takes its empowerment

from them.

Our history make us what we are. We can decide to talk up certain aspects of ourhistory, and downplay and denigrate other aspects. We can emphasise either the

continuity or the contrast between other ages and our own. If we remainindifferent to history or ignorant of it, we are likely to become captive to oneundeclared conception of it. Modernity represents one conception of our historyand so offers a particular historical canon. Modernity declares that history is of nointerest to us, while intimating that the past exerts a dark force over us unless weenergetically free ourselves from it. But we cannot simply alter our history by

grafting ourselves onto a different tradition. We are who we are, and are faced byour own set of issues, because we are the heirs of Abraham and Moses, Socrates

and Plato, Augustine and Descartes, Hume and Kant. If we were the heirs ofBuddha, Confucius or Mohammed, we would ask the sort of questions that the

cultures of Asia ask. The public square of Asia and the Middle East is a muchmore smaller and more timid place than it is in Europe. The extra-large publicsquare of the West is the direct outcome of the long presence of the Christiancommunity that promotes self-examination, buttressed by those practices ofChristian discipleship that puts the question of truth over the question of who is inpossession of power. If they decline to receive the witness of the Church, Westernsocieties may find that their public squares shrink to similarly small dimensions.

All culture is an acknowledgement of our forebears. We regard some forebears asparticularly significant because they were publicly instrumental in shaping the

world we have inherited. We can name, and we can even in a soft way revere,those who we particularly identify with the political forms and freedoms we now

benefit from. The more a society is able to look with equanimity on its ancestors,the more it is able to look forward with the same equanimity. The broader itsview of its tradition, and more forebears and their differing ways of life it is ableto value, the greater the resources from which a society can judge how to livewell. The further back it looks, the better prepared it is to face future challenges.The society with a rich account of its own historical journey is better placed tosustain itself over the long term and thus live in hope of a good future.

Modern Europeans acknowledge no obligation to remember its debt, or pay itsour respects, to their ancestors. They prefer to name only those forebears who

Christianity was, especially in its prohibition of polygamy and its promotion of the idea ofthe full humanity for women.

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freed it from what it regards as the burden of its further past. They celebrate ashallow history, because it releases them from a deeper one. They celebrate theirmodern forebears, the founding fathers of European and American republicsbecause they tell us that we are already free and mature, and that we needundergo no course of discipleship or formation. No effort or labour is requiredfrom us, for they tell us, the economy of persons is a matter of the all-immanent,

all-demanding present.

The self-respect that extends into fellow-feeling and sense of belonging is theglue that holds a people together and makes them a nation. A nation perseveres

through time because it attracts a sense that it is worth dying to defend, apatriotism. Modernity has forgotten the warrior culture and pagan religion ofancient Europe. Christianity has preserved some memory of them. Warrior cultureis never simply a matter of history, but is always at least inchoately present andbasic. We see warrior culture in the confrontations in every playground,boardroom and market. Though almost nothing is now known of the paganismthat that preceded Christianity, throughout our long history, Europeanintellectuals have re-imported and re-packaged Roman and Greek accounts of

warrior culture, its gods and cosmologies. We can discuss the contemporaryphenomena of pagan culture through this Greek and Roman intellectual

inheritance that describes the fatalistic worldviews represented by ancientatomism, Epicureanism and Stoicism. These allow us to identify warrior culture

and fatalistic cosmologies in ourselves, and to identify them in the deviousbecause undeclared violence of modernity and modern economics.

Tradition as embodiment, history as debt

The concept of the embodied person is fundamental to the Christian account ofhumanity. A person is inseparable from his body. It is the means by which wemay come to know him. The body is not a nuisance. The Christian doctrine ofcreation affirms that the world, both material and social, is goodand it is given to

us. The body is no embarrassment or nuisance. We the form of our bodies fromour parents and all generations previous to them. We are located in an ethnicity

and a culture and inhabit our tradition as a body.14

On the Christian account, everything has that outward form by which it can berecognised for what it is. Everyone receives a body, first from their immediateparents and then a more extended body or presence that accrues by a processof enculturation from wider circles of cultural authorities. What have been given isfirstly our own families, comprised first of our parents and their generation, andthen through baptism the Church, then perhaps also children and a generation

subsequent to ourselves. Everyone is shaped and given the public form andbody made of what they have received from some combination of the

generations that preceded them. Every form is both new and it is a bricolage ofgiven and existing things. Our morality is not held by any coherent narrative

account of our communal identity. As Alasdair MacIntyre has pointed out,

What we possess are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of whichnow lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possessindeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions.But we have very largely, if not entirely lost our comprehension, both theoryand practical of morality.15

14James Q. Wilson Marriage Evolution and the Enlightenment (AEI Bradley Lecture Series,

May 3, 1999) Once reason has been separated from experience and thought has been

freed from tradition, people will increasingly challenge any arrangement that seems to begrounded in experience and tradition as opposed to cognition and ideals.15Alasdair MacIntyreAfter Virtue p. 2

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Christians acknowledge a debt to our predecessors. We owe thanks to the saintsof the Christian communion, sanctified for our sake in every generation of ourhistory. We do not offer excessive respect to, and thus are not captive to themindset or worldview of any particular generation. Christian baptism tears usfrom captivity to all such partial communities into the true communion.

But moderns are afraid of what they have been given. On the modern conception,not only is your own individual and culture embodiment thought to be of no

consequence, but it is thought that you should energetically repudiate it. Nothingyou are do in your body or with your body is thought to impact on who you are,

but you must distance yourself from the world and its materiality, and from ourhistory. Moderns imagine that they are able to dispense with every form ofcultural embodiment, and exist without any inherited form, entirely sourced fromtheir own imagination. Modernity is entirely unfamiliar with the thought that thepast is the matrix and body from which each present generation emerges, and isa new instantiation of. It concedes the past nothing. Economics is the idiom of themodern account in which it believes that we owe our predecessors nothing, andacknowledge no debt to them.

Modernity consists in turning from the past to the future, as from the dead to the

living, and turning from the patient hearing to many voices in public discourse tothe discourse in which we buy options on all our preferences and are obliged to

no particular judgment. This apparent promotion of future over past makes thepresent problematic. Our society is not happy with itself, so is adopting Gnosticand escapist mode. The present is under-valued, and the future is drawn forward;but over the long term this throws the future into doubt too. If the eschaton andreconciliation of all thing is already here, it is no longer to be hoped for and welose the dignity of crying for justice and waiting for true reconciliation.

European was once a continent of feud. Over centuries the practices of Christian

life broke the cycle of violent retribution and enabled a secular culture open tothe world. If over the long-term Europe ceases to be marked by the Christian

faith it will revert to this violence. Christians do not nurse their grievances butconfess their sins and receive forgiveness and so are reconciled. They do notconsider any situation without looking for God's judgment of it, and with that

judgment, release from the brute facts that bring only condemnation, and thusthey consider each situation along with the prospect of its redemption. Modernityexpects things to continue the same and thus assumes an equilibrium. We haveinherited classical and Christian civilisation because the Church survived thedemographic and economic catastrophe. The Christian form of life tamed the

extreme violence of warrior society; it taught obedience to the law, brought abouta corpus of law that allowed national law to emerge, and so turned the warring

clans of these tribal societies into unified nations. It was the Church that enablednations to emerge. How is that? Christian judgment and repentance keeps society

together. Men were glad to hold to a higher law than retribution and power. It isonly the Church that holds a nation together.

To imagine that we could simply swap one history for another, to drop our ownChristian-impacted history for say the history of some Asia, is to suffer a kind ofbreakdown. Then we may start to believe that whatever is good cannot derivefrom the culture we have inherited. No modern believes that we have receivedanything of value from the hands of our own parents, the fifth commandment

abrogated. But who makes the positive argument that we could swap our historyand tradition for that of, say, Saudi Arabia and still remain recognisably British or

American? Without this inherited culture of ours, that relies on an ongoing

relationship to the Christian tradition, would we have the culture of self-examination and public judgment that has produced the secular public square and

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market? Would we find the means to challenge the discourse of economics thatwould otherwise entirely dominate and substitute for the public square?Economics is the culture that abbreviates and throttles culture, but it is not theonly culture that does so.

All cultures are warrior cultures, for confrontation and examination of differences

is intrinsic to the human economy. Public admission of confrontation is necessaryso that we may develop the practices of self-government by which we may hold

confrontation in proper and useful bounds. The state in Britain and Europe mustallow and enable the public examination of cultures so that their various accounts

of man can be tested by public speech. We can assess Christianity only by theextent to which its presence ameliorates our own intrinsic warrior culture throughthe, at best partial, conversion of the country. Since it is a faith, the Christianfaith is not the permanent possession of any European country. This faith ebbsand re-grows in this people, and when the Christian tide goes out it reveals moreof the pagan beneath that Christian culture. Europe is free to shed this faith,precisely because it is a faith, and thus must be received or refused in freedom.But, no Christian faith: no practice or canon of public memory. No public canon of

memory: no public culture of reason.

We are present to one another in the present because we come together with ourvarious pasts, and come in hope of sharing a common future. That future is not

yet the possession of any one of us: it can only be jointly negotiated anddiscovered. We share a present in that we are present to one another, and thismeans bodily present, as embodied creatures in creation, the materiality of whichis the means of our sociality. We have to reveal ourselves, and let ourselves bediscovered, through our bodies. Bodies are the means of our sociality, but everyencounter requires not one body, but two and more.

3. Remembering and Paying Debts

Crisis of self-respectThe Western domestic programme is to root out whatever vestiges of its own

Christian inheritance it can identify.

The Christian gospel says that you may love your fellow as yourself. That is, thisfaith takes it for granted that you look after yourself and exhibit a basic self-preservation. When you are hungry you look for something to eat; when youhave an itch you scratch it. It assumes that it is not necessary to tell anyone toeat when they are hungry, scratch when they itch, and that they should look afterthemselves. It does tell us that you should love your own first, not expect others

to take care of your dependents for you. And then you are free to love others.You may love the stranger, take them in and treat them as though they were of

your own family or your own brother.

The gospel tells us that we may love our neighbour as ourselves. It takes forgranted that we love ourselves: we dress and feed ourselves and exhibit a basiccare for ourselves. Having done so, we may proceed to serve our neighbour inthe same way. We are loved, by God, and may not dishonour what God loves.Because they know that they are loved by God, Christian are freed to love: thereis no self-hatred here. We saw from Augustine that self-love is our

acknowledgement that God loves us and we must have respect for his creatures.But individual ethical principles extracted from this Christian faith and

community, and thus without experience of the love of God, do not result in self-love and self-respect, but flip over into self-hatred. Such cultural self-abjuration

has become a public policy directed against the faith that generated our inherited

culture. Secularism is prejudice is aimed at the community that insists on the

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integrity of that faith and opposes such dissolution into separate ethicalimperatives. Such self-reviling comes from a great ingratitude and unhappiness.16

Now we have no public account of how we arrived at our present freedoms, afailure to see the present freedom of the public square as good and a failure toidentify and defend ourselves against the threats to it.

Modernity is resistant to history. But the past is not only not the problem, but it

may be the place to look for the solutions. This countrys history has provided uswith civil society, the rule of law, the welfare state, a free market and prosperity

and stability. Nonetheless, our public political discourse is all about freeing usfrom the past, and starting again from a new and tighter legislative basis that willclose every loophole so that we are made entirely safe from the possibility ofdoing harm. But freedom is the freedom also to do harm. Society cannot beentirely managed and all possibility of anything going wrong made impossible bylegislation. If nothing we do makes any difference to anyone else what we havearrived at is not society. We cannot be made safe. There is always a risk to us.We must not box our leaders in by the expectation that they can make us safe

from one another or from ourselves. For this would mean only that nothing wedid would be of any consequence which would be the abolition of man.

Honour and self-respect

Our society is undergoing a crisis of self-belief. It does not honour its own originsand tradition and appears to despise displays of manliness and self-assertion. Ithas not listened to its own previous generations, so it does not have theirconfidence in the covenant of God with man, and so does not know how toexercise truthful self-judgment. As a result it swings between unsustainably highand low estimations of its own worth. The present financial crisis demonstrates

that this is a crisis for our economy. We should take recent financial instability aswarning us of a long-term failure. We are no longer be taken at our word, for we

ourselves have devalued it. Money is a series of promises, a proportion of whichhave to be kept: when that proportion is too low, and neither we nor anyone else

believes our promises, our money has no value, and neither does the economydenominated in that money.

An economy is a reflection of a society. The society that does not want to hearabout covenants suffers a crisis of morale that makes it unable to act for the longterm. If we devalue the covenants which constitute the community around us, wereduce its value, and weaken and reduce the value of every covenant of whichour community consists. So perhaps we should be shocked when marriages break

up. We should feel sex without marriage as shameful and feel hurt when amarriage ends, and ask one another how we could make it easier for marriages to

survive. We could even suggest that we have let this couple down, or they havelet us down, by breaking the word that they gave one another and those of uswho were in the congregation at their wedding. We should fear that when oneword can be broken, so can others, and suggest that all contracts and covenantsare weakened by the failure of this one. The apparent economic prosperity ofrecent years has been premised on the wasteful and destructive consumptionwithout replacement of our social capital. We have been on a fifty-year binge ofthe stock of our social capital.

It looks as though British regard it as dishonourable to express any respect for

themselves as a nation. Perhaps we are undergoing a collective loss of nerve and

16Pierre Manent The City of Man (Princeton 1998) p. 201 Modern man is the man who

does not know how to be either magnanimous or humble... he overlooks and rejects thesetwo virtues that correspond to the two principal directions of the human soul.

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breakdown. To recover from it we must diagnose it for what it is. The self-respect that extends into fellow-feeling and sense of belonging is the glue thatholds people together and makes them a nation. Each of us considers ourinterests in the light of those of our various communities and the nation as awhole. Yet we do not seem to care what others think of us. Our government hasnot considered whether other economies are really likely to carry for us the

burden of the national welfare that we have awarded ourselves. If we do notbelieve in our society it is not likely that anyone else will believe in our economy.

Social capital generates the economy but cannot be measured by it. Christian

social concern cannot be measuredby any economic indicators if it is Christian.Christian work cannot be paid and cannot show up on GDP. But Christian workmust receive its recognition within the Church. It must be acknowledged by thebenefactors, for those who give a year, or a life, to this work must be supportedin dedicated communities.

They are the ones who have created this definition of employment as that whichis explicitly recognised by corporations or government by being taken on their

payroll. They devalue all other sorts of unacknowledged work. Christians have tosay clearly that it is sometimes necessary to leave the formal economy. It is

essential that we recover our informal economy and voluntary sector, for this issimply neighbourliness, and neighbours give us our motivation. The decline in

neighbourliness means that our youth has become de-motivated and turned invarious forms of entertainment and self-harm so the decline in neighbourlinesshas resulted in the waste of our own best national resource.

Britains heritage of liberal democracy is under pressure from the new culture ofresentment and victimhood. David Green believes that we haveabout politically-

mandated victimhood and political authoritarianism. Sectarian collectivists arehostile to a constitutional system based on a shared political culture, and want to

replace it with a system based on loyalty to racial or sectarian identity. DavidGreen identifies group self-interest, misguided compassion and political

authoritarianism as three causes. This culture of rights is mistaken, he believes.

First, because it undermines the bedrock principle of liberalism, personalresponsibility grounded on the equal moral status of all. Second, because itencourages majoritarian rather than deliberative democracy. And third, becauseit infringes the ideal of equality before the law.17

Our society is undergoing a crisis of self-respect. We do not seem to beconcerned for our own reputation or what previous generations called honour or

glory. We have been given this social capital, this bundle of attitudes and thissystem of laws; this moral, social and constitutional capital is the silver spoon we

were born with. We have inherited the good will that came with the UK brand,which was created by all the Victorian, imperial and post-imperial twentiethcentury generations that shaped the society which we now see.

What is taking place is not merely the continuing decline of organisedChristianity but the death of a culture which formerly conferred Christian identityon the British people as a whole.18

The West has abandoned the discourse of honour and despise patriotism. Nosense that our civilisation is worth defending and even dying in the defence of.

European nations overcame the challenge of the Western European governmentsrefused to internalise the crisis and loss of confidence that earlier armed

17David Green We are (nearly) all Victims Now(Civitas).

18Callum Brown The Death of Christian Britain (Routledge) p. 193

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movements. In this Stockholm syndrome the healthy are so intent onsympathising with the sick that they deny that there is any difference betweenthem. Some believe that some in the West are ready to surrender themselves tothe strong arms of that alternative community and that Europe is internally in astate of submission.

Since we regard this countrys past as though it were all mistake we swingbetween excessively high and low estimations of ourselves. Where we are

uncertain about our value we see wild swings in the valuation the markets give toour economy and its currency. There are storms in the market because we have

let go of so much of our social capital that we are no longer sure what we areworth.

Modern self-hatred and flight from public discourseThe question of culture arises with the rise and fall of national economies in theglobal marketplace. A national economy falls because other economic agents donot believe in the value of the product that arise within that national culture, andthey do this when they can see that those national economic agents do not

believe in their own redemption through work.

The question of culture, and the comparison of cultures, arises with themovement of peoples that has accompanied globalisation. It does not arrive with

immigration but with the arrival of Muslim culture in Western societies. Yet inthere is a determination to stifle the question by those European governmentswhich do not wish to believe that immigrants are culture-bearing in any public orpolitical sense. Each arrival from Pakistan is thought of as an individual withouthistory, a mere body, not a cultural or political integer able to resist the formsthat market and state want to press him into. The possibility that other cultures

arepoliticalcultures, and that they do not separate religious and political, privateand public, and can defy all attempts to impose such a separation this is the

thought which our policy-makers cannot countenance. Their conviction that Islamcan only be a religion and therefore cannot possibly also be a political system, let

alone more robust and long-lived political constitution than liberal secularistpolitics, has not yet been questioned in the public square.19 But the culture thatcannot allow such questions to be tested has already conceded too much groundto be able to last. It cannot tolerate the thought that the little population sorecently introduced, is not collection of individuals grateful to be admitted andindividually ready to take the place that market and state intend for them, butthat each brings with him a thick mesh of indivisible human relationality and anindissoluble political culture that may still be here when the host culture has

disappeared. The inability of modernity to tolerate the question of the formationof man and our the question of culture, a failure suddenly apparent with its

reaction to asking such question in this new Muslim presence, raises the questionof whether in modernity and Islam we are dealing with two forms of the samemonism and despair.

The concept of faith communities implies that one religion is very like another,and that none of them has had constitutive impact on us. But Christianity has haddecisive impact on Europe and America. It has made this culture and thesenations what they are now: no other faith community has generated the

19Paul Gottfried After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State p. 127 Administrators,

social workers and academics often romanticise the collective lifestyles of Third World immigrants.

Whether as victims of the West or as imagined avatars of nonsexist and nonracist culturesthese group are seen as.. entitled to their differences But it may be impossible for a

managerial state to socialize those who have such a privilege or to check the balkanisationwhich may result from its exercise. Proliferating alien cultures exercising a right to

difference can, after all, subvert a host society.

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freedom of the individual, property rights, the free market and welfare state, andconsequent prosperity and stability. Moreover this culture has been exportedaround the world, to create what we could call variously civil society, liberaldemocracy, individual freedom and the free market.20 These are aspects ofEuropean culture, and they derive from one faith community exclusively. Theequality agenda insists that the imported cultures that now appear on our high

street are as good as the culture that built those streets and markets in the firstplace. But the enforcers of this policy there this equality for any culture that is

notthe inherited culture, so we may denigrate no religion exceptthe religion thatgave rise to this freedom. Faith communities are apparently not all the same.

The demand that we cut ourselves off from the past is also an attack on thedisciplines that make possible public reason. Modernity is a flight from history intoa forgetfulness, punctuated with moments of rage at its own incoherence.Modernity is Manichean: the present must perpetually struggle against the darkpower of the past. Abjuration of history past has made the commonplaces oftwenty years ago controversial enough to bring the possibility of legal action, andsince legal action is costly, it is finance, rather than debate in open court, that

settles an issue. No issue is reasoned out in public debate, therefore, for themarket has always decided and discounted everything already.

Modernity canonises those thinkers and statesmen associated with the slow

separation of economy from politics and emergence of the economy as anautonomous sphere. Economics became detached from the other human sciencesand disciplines, and was re-conceived as the closed economy of nature, amechanism that goes on regardless of us. I have suggested that to talk aboutmarket and government as though they were systems and mechanisms is ameans of distancing ourselves from our responsibilities to one another and

avoiding the formation and labour such service involves. It is a way of refusing tobe accountable to one another and to generations past and future.

The moral philosophers from Bacon to Kant who championed of the autonomy of

the individual were succeeded by the Utilitarians who championed theautonomous economy. When neoclassical or utilitarian economics became thedominant idiom of public life, our various actions in the public square weredescribed in terms of individual market transactions in which each of us imaginesthat we act in private. No action of ours is understood to be visible to others orlikely to be emulated by them; every transaction is considered in isolation fromall previous and subsequent transactions. The inside world of the human heart isthe idiom in which we understand the public world, and the whole European

tradition of thought about being human in public is turned inside out, so we nowattempt to understand the public world only in terms of the preferences of the

individual, the man who is alone.

These champions of the autonomy of the individual rejected the existinghumanities tradition built up by Christian discipleship, and the Aristotelianinheritance with which the Christian tradition had been in long conversation, andso cut away the whole web of complex connections between the two ontologies ofnature (bodies) and culture (charisma). As a result much of the discourse thatheld together the doctrines of creation and redemption, and the two concepts of

nature and culture, disappeared in the West. We therefore have to considerourselves twice, or as two separate persons. We consider ourselves once as body

20Hernando de Soto The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism succeeds in the West andfails everywhere else p. 182 All property rights spring from social recognition of a claims

legitimacy. To be legitimate, a right does not necessarily have to be defined by formal law;that a group of people strongly supports a convention is enough for it to be upheld as a

right and defended against formal law.

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and set of needs, and once as the self that desires freedom from this body andenvironment. Each of us has two avatars, but no means of saying how theembodied and material avatar relates to the avatar with views and purposes.Should we give up hope of the reconciliation of the two worlds of nature(materiality) and culture (freedom)?

The champions of autonomy dismissed the great apprenticeship and hoped thatwe would forget its great representatives, Aristotle and Augustine. They denied

that this Christian history represented a moral and intellectual tradition that couldserve to form us into public persons. In doing so, they made it difficult for us to

compare their teaching to that of earlier generations and achieve any criticaldistance from them. These champions of the autonomy of the present havebecome the modern canon, and assumed an undeclared authority incontemporary Western societies. This early modern and modern period iscanonical for us because it withholds the names by which we can interrogate thecultural and economic forms that it elevates. The founding of the American andother republics, the explicit disengagement of political and religious sphere, andthe emergence of the disembedded economy, and the foundation of national

banks issuing a single legal tender, made a glorious new morning. Modernitygave us a narrative of progress, conceived through the nineteenth century in

material and political terms a rising standard of living and widening politicalparticipation. The Christian and Aristotelian narrative of the growth of the human

person through an apprenticeship, changed into a narrative of what we nowsimply call economic growth. We must pick up this story again in our nextchapter.

The shallow canonical past of modernityThis promotion of one past, the early modern period, to the status of canon

makes our society vulnerable. We cannot resolve our present problems only byreferring to the principles articulated by the fathers of the modern period. We are

unable to help ourselves as long as we obey their injunction not to enquire aboutthe great tradition that preceded them. When times are hard we need to take

advice from all members of the family, perhaps particularly those with the longestmemories. But this canonical early modern morning has become an article of faithin the cult of modernity. The autonomous and disembedded economy ofmodernity is not a matter only of beliefs, or of unarticulated deepestassumptions. It is actualised and given body in each economic transaction.

Because Western society is not confident of its long future, no one is willing toreceive their public recognition in the long-term and implicit currency of honour.

We demand that we are paid only in the explicit and immediate currency that ismoney. Money is a means of ordering and communicating preferences. It is not a

means of exchanging accounts of the truth, and testing our accounts, and so oftesting and improving ourselves. The economy has grown to fill the public square,driving explicit public examination and judgment into enclaves. We avoidconfrontation by tackling public issues in the idiom of economics, so thatdiscussion is not substantive, about ideas, but procedural, about budgets. To talkabout truth in the discourse of preferences is to take away the burden of judgingwhat is right in any case and, having reached judgment, to turn definitively awayfrom other options. To do politics in the idiom of economics is to deal with all

public issues by spread betting. Money is a kind of shorthand or pidgin that weoblige one another to employ for all public issues. Its infinite divisibility allows us

to avoid making any decision definitive. We never have to turn finally to or fromany decision, because we can keep all options open, by greater or smaller

budgetary allocations to all of them. But as we hedge our bets on all public policy,

it is we who are divided, and who therefore fail to develop and grow.

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The West does not respect and admire what its previous generations have done.It is suffering from a loss of self-respect. This is a failure to honour its ownpredecessors, and to realise our obligations to past and future generations. Itdoes not keep the fifth commandment to honour your mother and father, torespect our elders and forebears. In part this is the result of such a hubristic viewof itself that it believes itself to be superior to all previous generations that it has

no need to grant them recognition, so it neglects to cultivate its own historyaltogether. Where the attitude of gratitude is not known, we see ourselves only

as critics and destroyers of what we have found.

We have put ourselves under the tutelage of the generation that said that allprevious discipleship should be wiped and systematically set aside. Those whofollowed them decided that we do not need any discipline, while their successorsasserted that all discipleships are forms of power exerted on us, and that wemust exert ourselves against all of them equally. The university has beenovertaken by those who are convinced that there is nothing to learn about man.He has been fully revealed to be a merely biological phenomenon without self-control, who needs to be controlled externally.21

We introduce ourselves as though we were without history. Only when we know

someones whole history can we argue with them, and suggest that the accountof their identity that they give us is not the only one. As long as we refuse to

name our sources and heads we hold out against each other. 22 We exert powerover one another when we attempt to withhold our identify from one another, byrefusing to say what our past is and so who our intellectual forebears are. Weattempt to withhold from them the means of showing how their identity and oursmay be different from what they say it is. We have to own up to our history andtradition and so even name our intellectual sources, in order to give one another

our identity. When we own up to our tradition we are being more generous andhospitable to others than when we do not. A society which is forgetful of its past

to the point that manages to conceal from itself its own history, is less generousto others, and over the long-term, will suffer for it. It is generous to give one

another an account not only of what we want, but why we have come to regardsuch things as valuable. We are better able to enter new relationships with otherswhen we offer them long-hand accounts of our identity, together with the longhistory of that identity. Once again, the short-hand account cannot entirelyreplace the long-hand account.

Christians know that we have to approach one another both in peace and withjudgment and questioning and readiness to challenge, so simultaneously in peace

and hold one another to judgment, even at the cost of confrontation. Christiansdo not think that peace obviates the need for confrontation and mutual

questioning and testing. Christians insist that our age must remain underexamination and judgment, for it is not yet the kingdom of God and this is not yetthe end time.

4. The Paradox of LiberalismModern self-hatred and the inversion of valuesThe first aim of any society must be to continue to be a single society. When itceases to make whatever effects are required to preserve its unity it will drift

apart into opposing groups, identified by income, class, ethnicity or age-group.Mutual attachment is the bond which holds these groups together as one nation.

In the form of love of glory, such attachment and affection is the motive for all

21MacIntyre22Jenson on Hegel

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public action.23 Though the modern tradition has left us with the impression thatlove is sentimental, unsophisticated and irrelevant to public life, we may properlycall this attachment as love. Love is end and goal of all sociality. Our hope forthe recognition and love of our contemporaries motivates us to act will for them.

In classical political philosophy, generosity is the most fundamental political

concept: either justice includes generosity, or is an aspect of it. Generosityresults in thankfulness and so is it own reward. You are able to take joy in the

people who have received your generosity, and to take joy in their joy in you. TheChristian view relates generosity to an insistence that each particular person is to

be loved for themselves, rather than as part of a class of persons. Christiangenerosity comes from the twin convictions that we are ourselves loved, and thatall human beings are loved, and are in the image of God. This emphasis on theparticularity of human beings, makes Christianity is the true source of that formgenerosity, that once termed liberality, then became gave rise to the politicalconcept of liberalism.

But there is another form of liberalism that I we may call ideological secularism.

It has turned the command to love our neighbour into a harder command, not tooffend or confront, and so not to identify anyone as neighbour. Since they have

decided that they cannot receive, however much at second-hand, the self-government that originates in the Gospel, our political leaders have lost touch

with generosity and its sources. The state that does not acknowledge the primacyof self-government is trying to push the service of the Church out of the publicsquare, telling Christians that they represent merely one faith community amongothers. But the Church replies that, though there be many faith communities,there is only one that threatens us. The government that is has lost sight of thesources of generosity, attempts to substitute for it, and becomes over-extended.

It looks for ideological justification for why it should become more so. Such astate is itself a faith community. Because they do not condescend to recognise

the covenant from which all our many distinct covenants come, everythinggovernments do substitutes for our own love and initiative and action. Their

equality agenda attempts to flatten every specific covenant, bringing eachindividual into direct relationship with the state, so that the relationship each ofus has with the state is more important than any other relationship that we haveinherited or entered freely. Their determination to solve our problems drives themto do things for us and insteadof us, so taking away our motivation to do thingsfor one another or for ourselves.

Liberalism, equivalence and compulsion

British society has routinized generosity, so fewer of us now want to experience itfirst-hand. The state that does not hear from the covenanted community of the

Church is drawn into a new gospel, which declares that all relationships are equal.The equivalence agenda takes the command of Christ to love your neighbour asyourself (Luke) away from the grace of Christ and the formation in the Churchwhich it enables. It is turned into an abstract principle, and so into a new law.

The first shall be last and the last first; the Lords warning that the last will befirst has become the principle that the previously marginalised must alwaysbecome our new norm. It promotes the marginal over the central, the exceptionover the rule. The promotion of the excluded is a Christian precept, taken from

the Christians and used as a lever against them.

The crisis of confidence felt by our contemporary society of individuals withoutcovenant expresses itself in many ways. The equivalence agenda is one of them.

When it is promoted to an agenda, equality represents a failure to admire and

23Augustine City of God

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wonder at the particularity of other people, though wonder is the basis of allenquiry and knowledge. without it, equality is likely to be pursuit of homogeneityand an effort to flatten whatever part appears to stand higher than the rest.

The public policy to disavow and eradicate our inherited differences has started tosilence the public sphere.24 No government that has taken on an ideology is able

to tolerate a rival. It wants to defend itself from challenge and so it wants toguard the public square from the risk of public speech. It considers confrontation

to be a form of conflict which it has to deter. It prefers to believe that peace hasarrived, and is only threatened when confrontational views are brought to the

public square.

The state has taken on the therapeutic task of modifying the behaviour andattitudes of the population, to root whichever of our beliefs are no longeracceptable. 25

(quote??) Affirmative action, mass immigration, and the exclusion of religionfrom public life illustrate the power of that elite to force fundamental changes

over strong and rooted opposition from virtually the entire people.....subordinates the institutions of civil society, and even popular opinions,

attitudes, and customs, to the state, which is responsible for their supervision,transformation, and reconstruction on inclusivist lines. It denies and indeed tries

to destroy the connection between government and any particular people withcommon habits, outlook and loyalties that make possible effective common

deliberation and participation in government.26

Anxious to avoid confrontation and upset, we regularly identify new categories ofperson who may be offended.27 We have to spread consensus by consulting with

ever-widening circles of people and demonstrating that we have done so bykeeping records, and keeping employ numbers of people on compliance.28 We

need a class of controllers to monitor us. All may be equal, as long as some, who

select themselves, are able to sustain their own superior status for our good.29

Confrontation avoidance and the loss of public speech

Our individual determination not to be judgmental has issued in the vastjudgment that all truths are partisan and temporary. We have decided that noone should declare anyone elses judgment is wrong, and that public expressionsof disagreement should not be pushed too far. The state wants us to regard us asthough we shared a single gender, and hints that it is coercive to suggestotherwise. But if response must be that if there were a single unisex no human

being would have no need or desire any other human being. If we are allundifferentiated beings, the state is prior to human existence, and must nominate

24

Paul Gottfried After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State p. 99Pluralism was intended to close off discussion with individuals and groups who were heldto be insufficiently progressive.25 Paul Gottfried After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State p.140 those

who rule have not abandoned the practice of restricting disagreeable speech but are

carrying it forward in the name of openness and combating discrimination.26James Kalb Tyranny of Liberalism27 David Green We are (nearly) all Victims Now(Civitas)28Paul Gottfried After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State p. 104

Pluralist proponents of social harmony aim at openness, inclusiveness and other idealsthat require the monitoring of groups by public administrators and behavioural scientists29Bowman Honorp.39 You could say that the most important survival of honour in the

West that by which we separate our intellectual, moral and social elites from the rest

lies in the sense of exclusivity on the part of the enlightened and progressive-mindedhonor group who regard themselves as being above the demands of honor. This anti-honor

honor

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and delegate our functions to us. We are then functions, and indeedinstantiations, of it. Society is then a single household, and the state is its head,our universal parent. Then the state is in truth the only person, the meta-humanbeing, and we are only persons to the degree that we receive our identity from it.The state is then a secular god, and we must be its worshippers. Such anunwillingness to concede that we have to give an account of ourselves and enter

debate should warn us not only of a loss of morale but of economic motivation.

Modern self-hatred and the bodyModernity insists on an absolute disjuncture between the public and private

worlds. There is no intrinsic meaning of bodies and no long tail to any event ofencounter, however bodily that encounter is.

There is no difference between men and women, and such differences that wehave inherited are to be reduced by state intervention. Anyone who suggests thatthere are difference between men and women is shamed. For moderns, nothingyou do in your body or with your body has any intrinsic meaning, but only themeaning you put upon it. This is why the body is the area in which so many of

modernity most interesting contradictions appear.

Moderns feel that they should not be encumbered by shame, but theynonetheless feel guilt and shame in all issues that involve bodies, and they are

surprised. Modernity fights its campaign against shame. The female body is a fifthcolumn in the body politics. Individual women amongst us are periodicallyinvaded: they become pregnant. In doing so, their body has defied their will, andthey have no wish to acknowledge what their body has done. This pregnancy is afailure of the technology of birth prevention. Each conception is an incursion overan undefended border. They do not have the moral means to see this as anything

but a failure of technology, or even worse, to fear that this is a particularsusceptibility and even weakness of the female body. Men are not betrayed by

their bodies in this way. But a woman is the victim here, made so by her biology.Yet men have been persuaded to feel ashamed. In truth, every abortion tells a

man not that he should feel shame that, despite all that is asserted about theindependence of each woman from her biology, there is indeed a livingrelationship between this woman and her own procreative powers, but then addssimply that this woman did not believe that he was good enough for parenthood.

Those who opt for an abortion have decided that we as a society are not able orworthy to value them and support them in bringing up their child. Everytermination is a vote of no confidence in the rest of us. If the six million children

aborted in the United Kingdom since the 1967 Abortion Act were alive today wewould be likely to be dependent on workers from other countries, and perhaps

less exposed to the mindset that disparages our own products.

Abortion is war on the home front, indeed is the war of the present generationagainst its own best hopes, and therefore against itself. Perhaps in additional tomoral, we should tackle this issue in the terms of our societys long-term andthus of its economy. If we imagine that this embryo is indeed not a child, and sonot a bearer of rights, and confine our interest to the adults involved. Whateffect does a termination have on the readiness of the woman who has an

abortion to bear other children? Above the loss of a child, abortion compromisespersonal morale.

What is the effect on the confidence of the population of the absence of the six

million lives aborted in the UK since the legalisation of abortion in 1967? Does the

population that uses contraception, and abortion when contraception fails,recover the ability to have children? What is the effect of the undeclared grief of

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these acts on the morale of the individuals involved? What is the effect on thoseindividuals of being unable to talk publicly about this act? The emotionaldislocation that follows an emotion means that readiness to bear a child in thefuture disappears. Many relationships do not survive an abortion. What effectdoes the shame and silence generated by this event, have on the morale of thatage-group that might be starting families? Every birth causes a rise in the morale

of its parents. What effect does this lack of confidence have on the future growthof the population?30 What is the effect on the relationships lost and confidence of

men and women to embark on relationships that might eventually issue inchildren? But over these issues, is again the issue of our failure to talk about it,

and to lament the lack of moral resources by which this issue could be talkedabout. Discussion of the economy should consider whether by constantlypreventing the arrival of those children who are the agents of our own futures, wehave not been damaging our own economic future. Could it be that contraceptionand abortion are part of a wider fear of reproduction that reflect a wider flightfrom the future? Our failure to express such concerns in public life has direct anddeleterious effect on our economic prosperity.

We said that each generation owes the previous the gift of life, a gift that theycan only acknowledge with the return gift of a third generation, of grandchildren

for grandparents. We concluded that the economy is about the production ofpersons, and secondarily about the flows that enable one generation to bring

another into existence. Sex without the public social affirmation and the ritualchange of status marriage, the explicit covenant that welcomes children, resultsin the decline of a society, and generation that since it is without children of itsown, has a foreshortening horizon and one less reason to live responsibly.

Ideological liberalism is a partial borrowing from Christianity, that sets some

parts of the Christian inheritance against others without comprehension of whatwhole these parts belong to. Liberalism does not sustain itself. It seems unaware

of the long-term challenges it faces or of its need to renew itself from that samethe tradition which gave birth to it. A society needs to exercise its virtues in order

to maintain the stock of social capital it inherited. The gains represented byWestern culture may be lost.

Demographic collapse is one sign of an existential loss of hope and a turning ofthe self inward on the self, refusing to extend the self to a child and thusabandoning the task of civic formation on this most fundamental and privatelevel.31

I suggested that a healthy society depends on a mixed economy. In a mixedeconomy we have the demands of the body, family and tribe and inter-generational solidarity and continuity, on the one hand and, on the other, the

opportunity to grow through these biological and cultural givens into the freedomof encounter of the secular public square.

We have noticed the withdrawal from procreation, disappearance of the three-generation household, and the consequent question of how Western society willreproduce itself. Where once married with children was the norm, now it is

single, no children. The two-generation unit of the family household, combiningthe claims of present-and-future was norm. Now the household is a one-generation unit, that is unable to hear the claim of any time that is not the

30See Donald T. Critchlow Intended Consequences: Birth Control, Abortion, and the

Federal Government in Modern America (OUP); Phillip B. Levine Sex and Consequences:

Abortion, Public Policy, and the Economics of Fertility; Stephen W. Mosher PopulationControl: Real Costs, Illusory Benefits (Transaction, 2008).31Jean Bethke Elshtain While Europe Slept, First Things March 2009.

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present. The single are the norm, and the married and fecund are the marginal.The result is a lack of those new bodies which would as economic agents intwenty years time, would be our own support. We must contrast our society withthose other societies which are willing to produce a new generation. We cancompare the ideology that disdains bodies and procreation with the ideologywhich affirms them.

5. Modernity meets a RivalA society requires an element of self-respect. Do Western societies possess thisself-respect. Is their own reputations no longer reason enough for their public

actions? Are they undergoing a crisis of confidence? In order to recover from anyloss of self-respect we will have to identify it. We must find our self-respect andloyalty to our community for these are the basis on which we may be hospitableto other communities and cultures and so truly be an open economy.

In Chapter 2 we examined the family as source of virtues and the economicfunctions that grow out of them. We saw that the family is as constitutive of thefuture as of the past. Far from attempting to return in romantic fashion to an

earlier social form we saw that families produce the agents of our economy. Theeconomic future can only be generated by the unit that produces not merely

children, but children who receive enough emotional formation to become self-governingpersons. But there is a community that represents the strong claims ofthe family, right here before us. A vibrant non-modern community has come tothe West. Since it is not modern we may fairly call it primitive; since it isarticulate and well-defended I will call it ideological primitivism. Since thiscommunity is strong in all the virtues that make for inter-generational continuityit represents a rebuke to the anti-body, anti-family gnosticism of modernity andso to the modern refusal to acknowledge any debt to generations, past or future.

Faced by this self-consciously rival way of life, Modernity no longer appears asthe only form of life possible in the contemporary world. Modernity has a rival, so

cannot any longer insist on its own inevitability. It will h

4 social capital, confidence and loss

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