Culture and Anarchy Revisited 2: 'Doing as one likes'

Transcript of talk by Simon Heffer on The Westminster Hour, 22 June 2003.

Simon Heffer

When Matthew Arnold talked of the importance of culture as a civilising force in his book Culture and Anarchy, published in 1869, he specified the importance of culture as a developer of intelligence.

Culture was about the pursuit of perfection: and perfection required intelligence. A lack of intelligence then held similar dangers to a lack of intelligence now: notably a tendency to see the world in the wrong perspective, to place false values on things, and to come to misjudgements about oneself and others. So, when we have such a tendency in education as I described last week when education for its own sake, as opposed to for a vocational purpose, is regarded as wasteful and extravagant, we are clearly running a higher risk of encountering all of these difficulties.

Arnold feared that without education people would be subject to 'random and ill-regulated action'. Through lack of information, un-trained thinking, or limited experience they might perceive a state of affairs as being ideal and beneficial when, in fact, it was rotten and harmful. In the 1860s, less than a decade after the publication of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, there was a particular danger: the danger of people thinking that they could live as they liked within the law, and that they and society at large would be none the worse for it.

Arnold, in his chapter sardonically entitled 'Doing as one likes', takes issue with the great Manchester liberal John Bright on this very subject. He pillories Bright's proclamation that 'the central idea of English life and politics is the assertion of personal liberty'. Arnold wrote only a year or two after Walter Bagehot had institutionalised the cult of the English Constitution in his book of the same name; and Arnold lamented the now cliched praise of that constitution as 'a system which stops and paralyses any power in interfering with the free action of individuals'.

Unlike Mill, but like the formidable conservative jurist James Fitzjames Stephen, whom we shall meet properly next week, Arnold felt that the untrammelled free action of individuals, even within the law, could do extraordinary harm. Even lawful acts could have awful consequences: and if people aren't taught to see that, those consequences could be devastating to society. It was beyond doubt to him that there would need, at times, to be a restraint on the actions of individuals.

If the state had to impose a social order that would prevent anarchy, it was better it did it with the wholehearted consent of the people. Such consent, he knew, would be supplied only if the people's idea of perfection, and that of those who ruled them, happened to coincide. Both parties, the governors and the governed, would need greater, and matching, intelligence.

In Arnold's time the growing middle class was especially jealous of its prerogative of doing as it liked. Many were religious dissenters and didn't want the state to poke its nose into the chapel. Many were entrepreneurs and were against any greater regulation that might reduce their profits. Although Arnold had no great love for the middle classes, he recognised that their new wealth at least gave them a stake in the country, and an incentive to preserve the order that allowed capitalism to flourish.

His real worry was about what he called the 'raw and uncultivated' working class. There he saw the real tendency towards anarchy, for they'd been given almost all the same basic liberties as other Englishmen. Arnold thought they lacked the restraint and judgment about how to use them that could only come with education. With horror, he noted how the working man was 'beginning to assert and put in practice an Englishman's right to do what he likes - to march where he likes, meet where he likes, enter where he likes, hoot as he likes, threaten as he likes, and smash as he likes.'

Arnold ridiculed the assertions of his liberal friends, who said this kind of behaviour would soon blow itself out. He feared a situation akin to the French revolution of 1789. In that sense his fears were misplaced. A surprising proportion of the social order he observed is still intact today, with a Queen on the Throne, a Prime Minister in Downing Street, and a number of men still sitting in the House of Lords by merit of their birth. But Arnold was right to see liberty in a more conditional sense than the liberals of Mill1s generation saw it.

All the abuses of liberty he listed were abuses because the assertion of liberty by one individual could infringe the liberty of another. Someone's liberty to go about his or her daily business in peace and safety could be infringed by someone else's freedom to march, meet, enter, hoot, threaten or smash. Clearly, there had to be limits on the actions of individuals, to prevent them from damaging the lives of others. That could only come through education and the civilising process.

Perhaps, given the relatively tranquil nature of the last 135 years in this country, our people have been civilised as Arnold hoped. Or maybe 'doing as one likes' now means something that Arnold never imagined. Maybe 'doing as one likes' is not just tolerated by modern governments, but encouraged by them, to keep the people happy. Arnold did not imagine either the welfare state or the permissive society. His fear was of violence, riot and civil disorder.

What has happened instead is a peaceful, but far from passive, assault on the wealth and property of the affluent. Charity - in the sense of looking after the poor - has been taken out of private hands and placed in those of the State. Its basic Christian motivation, and its Christian effect on the giver and the receiver, have been lost. I believe this has led to a claimant mentality growing up - claiming not the right to participate in the political process, or to organise labour, but the right to live off the efforts of others whether the others like it or not.

The late Lord Jenkins of Hillhead was from 1965 to 1967 a model of a reforming home secretary. He was in direct line of intellectual succession from John Stuart Mill. Much of the legislation passed or introduced during his time at the Home Office - legalising abortion, making divorce easier, legalising homosexuality, abolishing capital punishment was geared to make people happy, or to enhance their rights. He established himself not so much as an apostle of Mill, but of Denry Machin, Arnold Bennett's magnificent fictional creation, the eponymous 'Card', whose mission in life was 'the great cause of cheering us all up'.

Yet this vicarious pursuit not of perfection, but of self-indulgence, has damaged the rights of other significant groups, many of them among the most vulnerable in our society - unborn children, born children, deserted women, young people unsure of their sexuality, and the potential victims of murderous people of both sexes. Religion might once have been the opium of the people: but from the 1960s onwards it was replaced by the drug of permissiveness.

'Doing as one likes' has a very different meaning now than it did in 1869. It is not mainly about political protest, for when we do that now it is usually well-behaved, and everyone has his, or her, 'rights'.

Now it's about abdicating social responsibilities and leaving the state to pick up the pieces. But 'state' itself is a misnomer, for as Arnold knew the 'state' is simply the sum of the individuals who comprise it. It is not an abstraction called the state that pays for the consequences of behaviour that creates welfare dependency: It is the taxpayer who is compelled by law to fund them. Strong social pressure to conform has been swept aside by the emancipatory spirit of the permissive society. This is a clear example of how one set of individuals doing as they like imposes a cost on others.

Arnold felt that when it came to doing as one liked, all the main classes would do differently, and inevitably¿. clash. If so, there would be no place for poor old culture, as it set about its business of 'simply trying to see things as they are, in order to seize on the best and make it prevail'. He knew that England was in 'an epoch of expansion'. The one salvation of such an epoch, he argued, was 'harmony of ideas'. He hoped culture could be the unifier, appreciated as it might eventually be by all classes as representing the best, and the pursuit of perfection.

The trouble is, of course, that the Arnoldian way of making reason and the will of God prevail - which he held to be the whole point of culture - is seen in different ways by different groups in society. Benefit claimants, no doubt , think reason and the will of God have prevailed when they collect their cash. Top rate taxpayers may not. The clash of cultures, which in Arnold's day was best phrased in religious terms as being between the orthodox and the dissenting, is now political and ideological. Every political group now claims to believe in liberty - the right to do as one likes - but everyone, inevitably, defines it in his own way.

Arnold countered that argument by saying that certain elements of 'doing as one likes' resulted so obviously in strife that they could not, and should not, be tolerated. He cited as an example a dissenting minister from Walsall, who went around stirring up anti-Catholic feelings with an excess of zeal: doing as he liked, undoubtedly, but also creating tensions and conflict that he had no clue how to put right.

I think we should consider whether this has been the problem with those who have sought to extend the boundaries of freedom by developing a welfare state: they not only had no clue about the corrosive abuses they would be enabling, but would have no idea of how to put them right either. Arnold castigated the Victorian middle classes for their refusal to confront agitators, a refusal to deal with 'social anarchy' for the good of the whole of that society. He saw the middle classes pretend to authority, but then refuse to exert it. Are there clear parallels today?

Despairing of finding any authority in the middle class, admitting to the stupidity of the aristocracy and the untrained excesses of the workers, Arnold groped for a solution. 'What if we tried to rise above the idea of class to the idea of the whole community, the State, and to find our centre of light and authority there?' That, though would not work.

It would mean simply surrendering to a ruling elite - drawn from whatever class happened to become elected - and having them impose their perhaps uncultured and uncouth wills on the rest of us. 'We are,' he wrote, 'only safe from one another's tyranny when no-one has any power; and this safety, in its turn, cannot save us from anarchy. And when anarchy presents itself as a danger to us, we know not where to turn.'

But if a society could be united by culture, by the pursuit of perfection, then that would spare us from the fear of being ruled by one group or another, for all would have the same experience of 'light', and all would have the same values. That, though, was an ideal too far: and what has happened instead in the last 135 years has been the rule, at different times, of all three classes: Liberal and Tory aristocrats, Labour working men, and the middle classes of all three parties.

We have been ruled by the personal vision of the rulers, and their mandate for imposing that vision on us has only ever been from a minority of those consulted. Disraeli, Gladstone, Salisbury, Asquith, Attlee, Mrs Thatcher or Mr Blair all ruled Britain in a sectarian fashion (whatever their claims to have achieved national unity), and never created a society unified by a common exposure to sweetness and light. Each leader sought in different ways to placate those who by their unrest or threat of unrest have the potential for anarchy. The quiet life has replaced the unified life.

People are allowed to do as they like: which is why, for most of the 20th century, organised labour was allowed sporadically to hold democratically elected governments to ransom, and why now industrious men and women of all classes work and pay high taxes so that those, also of all classes, who make a lifestyle choice to live at the state's expense can do so without stigma.

Arnold knew society was changing, and not merely because of the Reform Acts that extended political power down through society. He quoted with approval a maxim of the Duke of Wellington a generation earlier, that Britain was on her way to a 'revolution by due course of law'. He knew the survival of the country as a serious power depended upon these changes, for Britain could not exist in a vacuum outside the rest of the industrially and socially developing world. He knew, equally, that such changes had to be managed in a framework of order if anarchy were to be prevented. He hoped reason, sweetness and light would be implicit in that orderliness.

What in fact happened was that order was maintained by concession - as it always had to be - and by appeasement. Two world wars did not help. After the horror of the trenches, 'homes fit for heroes' was the least a Government could do: but it failed, for various reasons, to do it. The welfare state was the delayed reward, or bribe, paid after the second conflagration. In its half-century or so it has been successively a tool to alleviate unavoidable poverty, then a means of keeping under some sort of control what Arnold's generation called 'the submerged tenth'. The word has gone out: do as you like, and someone else will pay for it. Thus are - for instance - drug abusers allowed to go about their business, because they harm no-one but themselves - don't they?

Politicians have often said 'trust the people', with varying degrees of hypocrisy. In allowing not merely liberty, but licence, we see the people are indeed being trusted. The costs of this trust are enormous, both in financial and social terms. The productive sectors of our economy pay for the unproductive ones, whereas that money could better be used for investment, innovation and the expansion of prosperity.

More to the point, this is possible only because of the connivance in the process by institutions. It is they, more than individuals, who have furthered the cult of what the Americans christened 'political correctness', designed to prevent anyone from speaking out about the consequences of doing as one likes. At the risk of perpetrating a breach of this new etiquette, I shall be examining the activities of our liberal practitioners next week.