All this talk about broken society that has been catalysed by Cameron's brilliant speech this week, and Graeme and Peter's depressing anecdotes in particular, remind me of this article by the Guardian's Madeleine Bunting in January. Starting off with an anecdote about anti-social behaviour of her own, it's an astute analysis of the "pathological individualism poisoning public life" (and the blogosphere).
Most of the many comments it attracted knock it for being a "Daily Mail-esque" hearkening back to a mythical golden age of morality and community. But such people who always reach for - as one CiF commenter beautifully put it - that cosy bromide "T'was ever thus", miss the point.
They invariably bring up that quote commonly attributed to Socrates about how the youth of the day are ill-mannered, contemptuous of authority and disrespectful to elders, as if that was evidence that nothing has changed since the 4th century before Christ. It's pretty simple logic: just because I'm in London now and was in London last Tuesday doesn't mean that I must have been in London over the weekend. I could have been lucky enough to be back home in God's country (known to mortals as Liverpool).
Things change! The very youths that Socrates allegedly decried will have ended up being the ancestors of well-mannered citizens respectful of their elders at some point down the line, if they didn't become such themselves in later life. Cameron and early years Bush have both talked about "the nation of the second chance" when it comes to helping people get on their feet, why can't we give society at large a second chance? We're only doomed to repeat the mistakes of their ancestors if we let ourselves be so by wallowing in complacency. Belittling the problem like Balls et al do is contemptible. What scale of degeneration would have to occur for these people to recognise that it wasn't always thus?
If a Conservative government manages to make some headway in the huge task of making the state and society more responsibility-oriented we won't be on some utopic path to milk and honey. A blow would have been struck for virtuous human nature but human nature will always be flawed and our own descendants will screw it up soon enough. My point is that rather than retreating into miserable, pessimistic cynicism we can at least choose which part of the cycle we want to live in. This choice is articulated well in a Solzhenitsyn quote that I've had in my email signature for a few years:
"Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart."
That line isn't fixed at the 50/50 point. In the same way that there isn't a pot containing a set volume of wealth that needs to be distributed, I don't believe there is a cap on a human kindness. Just as wealth begets wealth, social responsibility begets social responsibility. The crux of the debate is about how we represent human nature. Why should the Conservative view of human nature be pessimistic? It can be optimistic about the good people can do whilst being realistic about self-interest.
This is where the idea of "nudging" people towards socially beneficial choices comes in. Although it didn't play well politically, I believe Brown was right to point out that families waste eight quid's worth of food every week. Judgments, probably too many, are made all the time by politicians about what should be legal and what should be illegal, I don't have a problem with them exploring the realm in between those two points. Statism has failed on this and libertarianism on its own isn't enough. As far as I'm concerned, politicians can nudge away.
