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Original Sin and Our Choice.

By Anthony O’Hear

WE IN BRITAIN ARE about to have a general election, and in some places local elections, too.

The other evening I was canvassed by three young people on behalf of David (Dave) Cameron’s ‘Conservatives’, asking me if I had any local ‘issues’. I tried to explain that I had an ‘issue’ with Dave and his party, in that they were not really conservative; they were clearly determined that the state should continue to run such matters as health and education, where in my (conservative) opinion that state should have no leading role. ‘Ah’, I was told, ‘we want to give power back to local people.’

The so-called Liberal Democrats say similar things. One is only too aware that in politico-speak giving power to ‘local people’ simply means transferring administration in the relevant field from central to local government. And I seem to remember that part of the reason for a previous ‘Conservative’ government’s (Mrs Thatcher’s) nationalisation of the school curriculum and exams was the absolutely dreadful job local authorities were making of running education, but my rather charming interlocutors were too young to remember that.

Even earlier than 1989, back in the 1930s, commentators like Frederick Voigt and Christopher Dawson were saying things like this (from Dawson’s Religion and the modern state,): ‘If we believe that the Kingdom of Heaven can be established by political or economic means – that it can be an earthly state – then we can hardly object to the claims of such a state to embrace the whole of life’;  or this (from Voigt’s Unto Caesar.): ‘[they] ‘have enthroned the modern Caesar, collective man, the implacable enemy of the individual soul’. Dawson and Voigt were talking primarily about the dictatorships of their era, but Dawson at least was fully aware that there could be what in Tocquevillian terms Michael Burleigh, in Earthly Powers, has referred to as ‘the benignly soft totalitarianism of the modern bureaucratic welfare state’, a state which has, of course, grown immeasurably and unforeseeably since the days of Dawson and Voigt.

We could and should object to the crushing of the individual soul wherever the state takes over in areas where the individual soul should be sovereign (and just let a parent in twenty-first century Britain see how far he or she gets in objecting to the decision of a local bureaucrat over the school his child should go to, let alone in complaining about what the child will be taught in a state school on topics which range from history and religion to sexual orientation and healthy eating). But we should also take note of a further point made by Dawson: ‘the fundamental error (in totalitarians hard or soft)… is the ignoring of Original Sin and its consequences’. That is to say, human beings and human institutions are irredeemably prone to failure and worse; and the bigger and more powerful the institution, the greater the chance of failure and the greater the temptation of those running it to grab more power and resources for themselves. (Americans may soon discover this as the consequences of ‘Obamacare’ become more clear to them.)

IN BRITAIN, THE STATE now takes around half of GDP, and with another 20,000 new apprenticeships announced last year in the public services, even in a recession is in no mood to haul back. Spending on health and education has more or less doubled since 1997 when New Labour took over, and we were told ‘things could only get better’. Except in terms of salaries in health and education, it would be hard to point to any improvements of a more than marginal or cosmetic nature. Indeed some, including anyone who cares for education in the liberal sense, would say that in education things have only got worse since 1997. Looking more generally across government as a whole, it easy to see one failure after another in areas as disparate as defence procurement, financial regulation, the asylum system, health service computerisation, the social services, the running of prisons, student loans, the administration of the exam system, and, of course, what goes to the heart of politics, the integrity and regulation of parliamentarians’ expenses.

The characteristic response of British politicians from all three of the main parties is to suggest that with a new system or better regulation or oversight, the problems – whatever they are – can be fixed. Characteristically this involves more and more costly bureaucracy, a trajectory which has reached its reductio ad absurdum, one might have thought, when it emerged that some new system to scrutinise MPs’ expenses is itself going to cost over £6 million to set up, presumably with annual running costs on top of that.

No politician, to my knowledge, has suggested that many of the failures and problems of government arise from the hubristic tendency of politicians and bureaucrats to run more and more, to take over more and more of our lives, to stifle and crush the individual soul. And the general public is so captive to the same mind-set that they too put failures in state administration and policy down to glitches in the system, which with more or better administration could be fixed.

It is very hard to know who to vote for in the forthcoming election, or indeed whether to vote at all. There is no voice offering an alternative to the soft totalitarianism we have become so used to, or proposing any dismantling of the great leviathan bearing down on individual souls. That leviathan gained ground because people believed that it could remedy weaknesses inherent in the human condition, which in another age might have been seen as the inevitable outcome of original sin. Few to-day – and no politicians, least of all Dave and the new model conservatives pitching to what they see as the centre ground – are prepared to see the leviathan itself as a symptom and agent of that sin.

Anthony O’Hear, the director of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, is the author of Philosophy in the New Century and an editor of this Fortnightly Review.

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