particularly significant, because no group is perceived by the public as more of a threat.
In a free society there are limits to what government should seek to do to change people’s behaviour, particularly the behaviour of families. It is in considerable part because the state
What then is to be done? Aiming at improvement rather than Utopia, and without wishing to deny that there are other initiatives which the fertile minds of social scientists and policy-makers might usefully devise, I propose the following four-fold approach.
VIRTUES TO COMBAT VICES
The first, most important and most difficult area is the moral and cultural ethos. A functioning free society cannot be value-free. Down through the ages the most profound thinkers have recognized this. For me, Edmund Burke sums it up with a clarity and sweep no one else has managed:
Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and the good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.[96]
Similarly, although those who framed the American Constitution chose to rely on ambition countering ambition, rather than the virtues, to preserve liberty, the fathers of the early Republic were well aware that virtue could make a significant difference. As the great patriotic American hymn puts it:
The character of the citizen both reflects and is reflected by the character of the state. This is an encouraging fact, for it reassures us — as it reassured me in the late 1970s — that if a people is better than its government a change of administration can release undetected talents and open up undreamt-of possibilities. But it is also a warning. For even a well established system of free government is vulnerable to any profound changes in the outlook and mentality of the populace in general and the political class in particular. Character, both individual and collective, is of course formed in many ways: it develops within the family, school, church, at work and in our leisure hours. Traditionally, the good and useful habitual characteristics which are the outcome of this process have been called the ‘virtues’. Although these virtues are by definition always good, their usefulness depends on the requirements of the situation. So, for example, some of the virtues extolled by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, though they will help get us to Heaven, may be of less practical use in our business or civic lives. Consequently, when we urge a return to those traditional virtues — for example, thrift, self-discipline, responsibility, pride in and obligation to one’s community, what are sometimes called the ‘Victorian virtues’ — we are not necessarily suggesting that only mass re-evangelization will pull Western society together. After all, it was the ultra-humanistic ancient Greeks who originally identified the key or ‘cardinal’ virtues of temperance, fortitude, practical wisdom and justice in the first place.
That said, I find it difficult to imagine that anything other than Christianity is likely to resupply most people in the West with the virtues necessary to remoralize society in the very practical ways which the solution of many present problems requires. Although I have always resisted the argument that a Christian has to be a Conservative, I have never lost my conviction that there is a deep and providential harmony between the kind of political economy I favour and the insights of Christianity.
I tried to explain this connection in a speech at the church of St Lawrence Jewry in the City of London in March 1978.
Freedom will destroy itself if it is not exercised within some sort of moral framework, some body of shared beliefs, some spiritual heritage transmitted through the Church, the family and the school. It will also destroy itself if it has no purpose. There is a well-known prayer which refers to God’s service as ‘perfect freedom’. My wish for the people of this country is that we shall be ‘free to serve’…
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, expressed in the concept of the Church on Earth as the Body of Christ. 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, beings who are infinitely precious in the eyes of their Creator. You might almost say that the whole of political wisdom consists in getting these two ideas in the right relationship to each other.
I do not generally hold with politicians preaching sermons, though since so many clerics preach politics there seems no room in this regard for restrictive practices. So from time to time I did return to this theme. Ten years later in May 1988 I addressed the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in similar vein. To the disquiet of some of those present, I emphasized that Christianity provided no special blessing for collectivism.
[We] must not profess Christianity and go to Church simply because we want social reforms and benefits or a better standard of living — but because we accept the sanctity of life, the responsibility that comes with freedom and the supreme sacrifice of Christ…
Near the end of my time as Prime Minister, I became increasingly conscious of and interested in the relationship between Christianity and economic and social policy. In Michael Alison, my former PPS, and Brian Griffiths, the head of my Policy Unit, I found two committed Christians as fascinated by these matters as I was. The discussions I had and the papers produced for them formed the basis of the book of essays
Not long ago it might have seemed unrealistic, to say the least, to envisage the return of an intellectual and moral climate conducive to the practice of the traditional virtues. Now, however, such matters are at the forefront of much serious debate about social problems.[97] Furthermore, at least some Church leaders, the people on whom much of the task of reshaping attitudes must depend, are having second thoughts about the beneficent effects of state provision and intervention. For example, Pope John Paul II in his Encyclical
By intervening directly and depriving society of its responsibility, the Social Assistance State leads to a loss of human energies and an inordinate increase of public agencies, which are dominated more by bureaucratic ways of thinking than by concern for serving their clients, and which are accompanied by an enormous increase in spending. In fact, it would appear that needs are best understood and satisfied by people who are closest to them
