Society

In the church of St Lawrence Jewry, in London in March 1978, an invited guest set out the following analysis -

"Freedom will destroy itself if it is not exercised within some sort of moral framework, some body of shared beliefs.....It appears to me that there are two very general and seemingly conflicting ideas about society which come down to us from the New Testament. There is that great Christian doctrine that we are all members one of another, .....from this we learn our inter-dependence, and the great truth that we do not achieve happiness or salvation in isolation from each other but as members of society,   That is one of the great Christian truths which has influenced our political thinking; but there is also another, that we are all responsible moral beings with a choice between good and evil, .......You might almost  say that the whole of political wisdom consists in getting these two ideas in the right relationship to each other."

The speaker was Margaret Thatcher. Why then is this passage ignored, and why have  her critics  seized on another of her observations, when she wrote that  Society " is made up of individuals and communities. If individuals were discouraged and communities disorientated by the state stepping in to take decisions which should properly be made by people, families and neighbourhoods then society's problems would grow not diminish" - a passage which resulted in the accusation that  she  believed that there was no such thing as Society. And after all, only individuals can take decisions, even when the decisions are concerned with the interests of  Society

One reason for ignoring her other observations on society is that her critics have no knowledge of it. But more fundamentally they do not like the fact that she was moving the political balance away from the first of her two apparently conflicting ideas and towards the second, to release individual responsibility and encourage initiative.  There is no doubt that the post war consensus had cramped the freedom of the individual to create, and to act  freely, and that she was right to correct the balance.

 In the document "Who is my neighbour" issued by the House of Bishops for the General Election of 2015,  paragraph 59 remarks that " We are most human when we know ourselves to be dependent on others. That is something we first learn in families ....[and] they flourish best when there are networks of friendship, neighbourliness and mutual support around them."   Mrs Thatcher's views almost exactly. But the paragraph continues " Our society celebrates the autonomy of individuals but does too little to acknowledge that dependency on others is what makes human beings social creatures" -   This may be the case, but one sees here and in other paragraphs in the document that distrust of the second of Mrs Thatcher's ideas.  There is no distinction between  restoring individual responsibility  and selfishness. .  " Everything is what it is" said the philosopher Bishop Butler " and not another thing."

Note.  The lack of understanding in the House of Bishops is also demonstrated  by the statement in paragraph 36, that Mrs Thatcher believed in unregulated markets. In fact the regulation of the activities of financial institutions was vastly increased over her period as Prime Minister. It is this sort of  uninformed and simply incorrect superficiality that makes one despair of any kind of moral leadership  from the Church. Do the Bishops ever read anything to do with the subjects on which they so freely comment? 

A catastrophe, but a character and an event

"Sir, there is no awarding of a precedence as between a louse and a flea"   -  Dr Johnson

It is possible to discuss Stalin rationally, but not Hitler. This  restricts  the analysis of one of the most important men in history, and certainly the most important man of the 20th century, without whom there would have been no World War II in the West, no holocaust, and Stalin's empire would not have imposed itself on Central Europe for forty years. We can take refuge in the remark of Thomas Mann, that the man was  "a catastrophe, but that is no reason why we should not find him interesting, as a character and as an event"

The discussion of Hitler is indeed difficult. In a recent year a commentator remarked that Hitler was a master of public relations - of course he was, that is how he came to power - and of putting on tremendous spectacles ; and as our ambassador Neville Henderson commented, even the  staging of the Russian ballet in its great years before 1914 was surpassed by Hitler's shows at Nuremberg. Yet this comment caused outrage and a demand for its withdrawal

Another example of the way in which Hitler's activities cannot be rationally discussed was revealed when David Bowie commented on the film of the 1934 Nuremberg Rally, a film by Leni Riefenstahl which was a remarkable  achievement as a film as well as of propaganda. Having watched the film  it is said 15 times Bowie commented

"Hitler was one of the first great rock stars"   And "He was no politician, he was a great media artist...The world will never see anything  like that again. He made the entire country a stage show. "

An expert view of the greatest interest. But Bowie was attacked for calling Hitler a star.

One problem is linguistic. In words such as "genius" or "great" or "star" there is not only a description of the (high) level of achievement but also an implied approval. If one takes out the approval element by adding "-minus"  one can say that Hitler was in his public appearances  very definitely a star-minus, and he possessed  political skills at the level of  genius-minus. But what we experience  at present is  the lowering of the voice, as if one was entering on  a forbidden topic, or a room dedicated to evil. This is not sensible and a greater service would be done to those who suffered from the actions of this evil man if he were analysed objectively

And what about Stalin? Within his territories he murdered millions, including the peasants who were forcibly deprived  of their land and killed in the imposition of collective farming upon them. And Stalin set up a regime of terror  with torture and deportation to camps so cold that the dogs froze if they stopped moving  -  a terror which applied to everyone, not just one race,  with more people in the gulags at his death than at  the initial height of his terror in the 1930s.

And there is also Mao -

 And his red guards - 

And Pol Pot....... I met a lady in Cambodia whose deadly calm was the result of having her husband and little boy cut to pieces in front of her.
Look again at Dr Johnson's comment at the head of this entry, Do not attempt a ranking, but discuss all of them including Hitler in an objective and informed way.

With what little wisdom.........

" Do you not know, my son, with what little wisdom  the world is governed"  So said Oxenstierna, the great Swedish minister of the 17th century, of whom Cardinal Mazarin ( no mean statesman himself) said, that if the statesmen of Europe were in a ship together, they would not hesitate to hand the helm to Oxenstierna.

 So many of the confusions in modern life follow from the inability of  almost everyone to look at the roots of the problems They discuss the events as appear before their eyes,  and do not ask why the  events are as they have become., And this is true of  many intelligent people in the media.





Bloody Sunday

The administrative and moral fault of the British army and the British government was small  - and such fault as there was should have been addressed. The significant fault was rather with the IRA which,  by trying to establish no-go areas which the British were bound to resist, caused a confrontation at which some soldiers lost their nerve. This was just what the British wished to avoid and which the IRA was trying to engineer. Who went to bed that night full of happy satisfaction? And yet for years it is the British who have the blame.

MPs expenses

This "scandal" was the result of the views of the electorate over the years that MPs salaries should not be put up -  best  not at all, or anyway by very little. So over decades MPs were told to use their expense accounts  in a flexible way.  And when they did and it came out the media ( although they briefly mentioned that point) moved in with serious criticisms and everyone understood that the MPs were fiddling their expenses. There were a few claims based on falsehoods, but most followed the flexible approach and duck houses should have been perfectly acceptable. This fault lay with the population generally for taking the constraining view to start with,  and with the media for reporting the matter in a corrupt way

Coal and steel industries vanishing

During the UK/EU campaign it was reported, as an example of those areas of the country that  had lost out in economical development in recent years, that 50 or 60 years ago there was a vibrant social  and economic life in South Wales, with an integrated working class community and culture. And now it has collapsed, much of it  has disappeared,  with sad consequences.  But one has to ask why this social and economic community was there 50 or 60 years ago. The basis was the coal and steel industries which should have declined years before. These were industries nationalised by the Attlee government ( to the considerable benefit of the coal owners etc). They should have declined over time, which would have been far less destructive, far more likely to enable a transfer of employment to more modern industries, and far less of a drag on Britain as a whole. But  they were kept alive by the idea that they were good in themselves, and  that they should  be subsidised to keep them alive, Also in these old industries the trade unions resisted change - as exemplified in extreme form by Arthur Scargill and the miners strike which aimed to keep open pits however unprofitable and used violence to support their view.. If Mrs Thatcher had met a Labour Party and a trade union movement looking to work with government in winding down these out of date structures things would have been less traumatic and maybe rather positive,  even with the wrong starting point. But the post war consensus which was bankrupting the country was too strong for a mild approach

Remain/Leave

There were more voters committed to Remain  than there were voters committed to Leave. The Leave vote was pushed to a majority by the protest vote of those who had not benefited from the economic developments of recent years, and felt it and resented it. So they voted against the elite, who supported Remain, and we got a foolish and dangerous result to the referendum. This revolt against the elite is world wide - anyway in the Western world  ( look at Mr Trump)  -  but it is exacerbated in this country by the constant attacks by the media on anyone in the so called Establishment, and especially MPs. The Today programme commented some time ago, in the person of Mr Humphrys, that his job was to get politicians to say things that they did not mean to say. This was to assume as a given that MPs are corrupt, whereas it is the position of the questioners that is corrupt, even though they no doubt think that they are doing a good job  -   as this is  also no doubt true of those that write for Private Eye, which takes a violently negative view of anyone they comment on.  Thus it is not only the Leave press that caused the Leave vote to rise - it was also the fault of the Remain press ( and other parties) which by their constant nagging and unblalanced commentaries  reinforced the anti-elite view