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- Politics and society

Postmodern Tories What does the Conservative party believe any more?

Prospect Magazine February 2013

The mid-term of a government is a time of reflection, in which the parties can revive their attachments and reformulate their message. Two recent volumes, Britannia Unchained,co-authored by a group of young Conservative MPs, and Tory Modernisation 2.0,issued by Bright Blue, an organisation that campaigns for reform within the Conservative party, give us some indication of the forces now at work in shaping Tory thinking. The volume by the MPsKwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, Chris Skidmore and Elizabeth Trussis a detailed analysis of the ways in which Britain has been failing, and the ways in which it could regain some, if not all, of its former stature. The volume by Bright Blue is a plea for the party to "modernise." The one calls on Conservatives to save the country, the other calls on them to update themselves in order to solve their image problem. These two messages correspond closely to David Cameron's policies over the last two years. So it is worth enquiring whether the messages are really compatible, and whether they stem from some long-term vision that will re-establish Conservatism at the centre of British politics. Britannia Unchainedis well written and well researched. It includes many telling comparisons between our country and others from which we can and ought to learn. The argument is remarkable not least for its unideological tone, attributing much of our current fiscal crisis to the mistakes, rather than the malice, of the Labour party, and showing a readiness to share some of the blame. If all politicians resembled Kwarteng and co in their willingness to address real issues with a similar seriousness and clarity, parliament would not be the disreputable place that so many people now think it to be.

Tory Modernisation 2.0contains contributions from two MPs, David Willetts and Francis Maude, but Bright Blue is not a parliamentary campaign, having been conceived in think tanks, including the "Progressive Conservatism Project" at Demos. The book opens with Matthew d'Ancona's lively discussion of the Tory party's image problem among postmodern people. What follows shows why progressive conservatism has an image problem among more traditional conservatives like me. There are intelligent thoughts from David Willetts but the chapters are for the most part thin on ideas and uninspiring. The suggestion that the party must reform in keeping with social change is not new: Burke already argued in the founding document of British conservatism that "we must reform in order to conserve." But that implies that we must have an idea of what we are hoping to conserve and why. On this point the contributors to Tory Modernisation 2.0are uncertain. What is it, in the end, that they wish to hold on to: the nation, the Union, the family, the free economy, the freedom of the individual? Their discussions veer constantly away from the places where this question can be asked. The tone is for the most part secular, utilitarian and disenchanted. Religion is off the agenda; so too is national sovereignty. The loss of our legal autonomy to Europe is barely mentioned. The family is there, sort ofbut gay marriage is above it on the agenda. The contributors are serious people, troubled by the obvious fact that the old sources of social sentiment, to which we might appeal in building a civil society that is not just another name for the state, are drying up. Butwith the exception of Willetts and d'Anconathey show little or no familiarity with the tradition of conservative thinking. Modernisation seems to mean looking at the world as though it began this morning. The result is interesting in its way: but it would be better described as the "postmodernisation" of the Tory party. And I doubt that the electorate would vote for a postmodern Tory party. The five authors of Britannia Unchainedturn to economics whenever they need a conclusive reason for their policies. They are acutely aware that our civil inheritance can no longer be taken for granted. But their first concern is to outline the economic cost of this. I sympathise with this emphasis. For how do you counter the

emotional impact of arguments from the leftarguments about social justice, equality and compassionif you don't refer to the cost of putting them into practice? And the cost is huge. The authors show, through comparison with Canada, just what it means to pay for your promises by borrowing, and just what you ought to do to break the habit. They give a devastating account of Britain's educational decline, and the economic effects of it. They tell persuasive stories, with both statistics and well-chosen examples, of the real price of our benefit system and of the welfare culture that has flowed from it. They do not shrink from addressing some of the deep social and spiritual problems that have emerged in postwar Britainnotably the collapse of the work ethic, and of the family structures that go with it. Necessarily, however, their arguments depend on the financial aspect of the things they deplore, and they retreat into the castle of economics whenever the big ideas loom on the horizon. If we are to confront these ideas, it seems to me, we must begin from Plato's famous distinction between philosophy, whose goal is truth, and rhetoric, whose goal is persuasion. In a media-dominated democracy truth counts for very little, while persuasion is everything. Looming over the battlefield of modern politics is the rhetoric of equality. It fights for any side that can capture it, defending traditional conservatism as equality of opportunity, and socialism as equality of outcome. Philosophically speaking the idea that all human beings are equal is questionable. Equal in what respect, for what end, and in what perspective? Are criminals to be treated equally with law-abiding citizens, for instance? Nevertheless, from the rhetorical point of view, the very same idea of equality is the premise of every winning argument. Equality demands equal treatment for disadvantaged and advantaged children, and therefore exams that make no real distinctions between them. It demands equal treatment for nationals and for migrants, and therefore the abolition of effective border controls. It demands equal treatment for gay and straight people, and therefore gay marriage.

Looming slightly less prominently over the battlefield is the rhetoric of freedom. Philosophically speaking it is again highly questionable whether human beings are or ought to be free: free from whom, to do what? In the name of freedom men abandon their families; schools abandon discipline; universities abandon the old and tried curriculum in order to offer students a wider choice of degrees. Freedom means opportunity, and opportunity means that the canny, the determined and the strong rise to the top, enjoy those phenomenal city salaries, and join the new class of global fat cats. Dressed up in this way, individual freedom cries out for top-down control. Yet freedom also opens the road to the rest of us; educational freedom creates opportunities for those at the bottom of society; economic freedom protects the volunteer and the entrepreneur against the smothering cloak of regulation; freedom of conscience protects us from the rule of priests and mullahs, while freedom of speech enables us to scorn bigots and bullies without fear of reprisal. Freedom, in this sense, is unquestionably a good thingunless it is abused. And there's the rub. What counts as abuse, who is to decide, and what should be the penalty? The philosophy here is deep and difficult but the rhetoric is easy. Matthew Arnold summarised the matter succinctly: "a very good horse to ride; but to ride somewhere." Reading these two books I came to the conclusion that the current difficulties for the conservative cause lie exactly in the tension that worried Plato. The philosophy of conservatism, launched two centuries ago by Adam Smith, Edmund Burke and David Hume, and on the continent by GWF Hegel and Joseph de Maistre, is, in my view, difficult, intricate and true. Today's winning political rhetoric, by contrast, is simple, persuasive, and false. The theory of knowledge and its social function that inspires Michael Gove cannot silence the loud cry of the teachers' unions for equality whatever the cost. The subtle arguments for the market economy developed by the Austrian school will never extinguish the zero-sum fallacy, which says that if some are rich it is because others aren't. Burke's defence of common law justice, like Hegel's defence of the family and the corporation, has little weight against the rhetoric of "compassion." Even those on

the right who believe that the long-term effect of this rhetoric is to make everyone dependent on the state, and the state dependent on borrowing from a purely imaginary future, will go on repeating it. For the ruling belief is that "in the long run we are all dead," as Keynes famously put itnone of us will have to pay for current policies and meanwhile it is best to look caring and nice. The philosophyof conservatism has nothing to say in response to this. For it is not about appearing nice. It is about conserving the foundations of civil society. Whatever rhetoric you choose for promoting that cause, the other side is going to describe you as "nasty." For rhetoric is about appearance, not truth. The five authors of Britannia Unchainedare aware of this. They tell alarming stories about the new generation of Britons, de-skilled and de-schooled in the name of equality. They describe a society in which household savings have dropped from 8 per cent to less than 2 per cent of available resources, and in which one fifth of adults have an unsecured debt of 10,000 or more. Twenty-five years ago the top wished-for careers of British children were in teaching, finance and medicinein other words, careers as useful members of society. Today the top wished-for careers are sports star, pop star and actor. Kwarteng and co do not blame anyone for this. Instead, they hunt for the inspiring exceptions and the ways in which we can all work together to put the country back on its feet. This leads me back to philosophy. What, in the end, does a conservative seek to conserve, and why? If you can answer those questions you can address the practical corollary: how? The answer is implicit in the arguments of the five MPs. They are seeking to conserve a country and its institutions, in the face of internal and external threats. They do not believe that Britain can flourish, either economically or morally, under the present weight of welfare dependency, or with an education system that puts equality ahead of knowledge as its goal. They believe that British business must be freed from excessive regulation if it is to function properly, and that the free economy is an asset that we should value as much as we value freedom generally. They point to all the areas, from policing to healthcare, in which regulation is defeating initiative, and tired old policies are holding us back. And I find nothing to disagree with in

their diagnoses. However, their argument raises a question that it does not answer: just what is this country, this Britain, that they wish to conserve? *** David Cameron has now made his first clear statement on the matter, promising a referendum on the greatest question that confronts this country, which is the question of whether it actually exists as an autonomous political entity. Smith, Burke and Hume were clear that they were defending an enduring political order, kept in being by custom, law and religion. They admired the inherited freedoms and rights upheld by parliament and acknowledged that freedom depends upon a moral consensus and a society-wide habit of trust. All three came from the Celtic fringes. But all three shared the belief in England, a settlement established by long-standing custom and civil institutions, whose parliament exists to resolve conflicts and not to change the way things fundamentally are. This idea, of a territory that is home to a settled people and an accepted legal order, was expressed by Hegel in terms of the nation state, while de Maistre endowed it with mystical and religious foundations. Throughout the early years, as the British Tory party moved towards democracy, sometimes following the liberals and sometimes leading them, it remained wedded to a vision of inherited social order, and believed that it was the duty of the politician to conserve that order. Defining this order, describing its virtues, diagnosing its ills and proposing remediesthis was the stuff of politics. This approach is one reason for the astonishing success of the Conservative party over nearly two centuries. It has defined the customs and institutions that it is seeking to conserve in terms that a large proportion of electorate broadly agree withit has been the party of monarchy, of the family, of the Church of England, of law and order, of the common law, of the armed forces and of all the little platoons which aspire to some share in the pomp and circumstance of old England. So understood England is not a "nation" exactly, in the way the emerging Germany of Hegel or the France of de Maistre were nations. It is a moral idea, and one to

which the Tories have always appealed when asked to define what they are for, rather than what they are against. The left has understood this, and therefore set out to deconstruct the idea of England, to show it to be a class-ridden and socially divisive shamwhat Plato would call a "noble lie." And it has leant heavily on the grievances of the Scots and the Welsh in pressing the point home. The Labour party has encouraged a school curriculum from which the "we" concept has been more or less excised, with pride in empire replaced by shame at our former belief in it. But perhaps no move that the party made during its recent 13 years of office has been more upsetting to the Tory interest than that of creating a Scottish parliament without removing the Scottish members from the parliament of Westminster. This move has finally marginalised the English idea, by giving to the Scottish electorate two votes, one to govern themselves, and another to control the English. Moreover it has given a reliable block vote to the Labour party in Westminster. Those are only some of the problems faced, now, by the Conservative party in its search for a defining philosophy. Demographic changes, highlighted by the recent census, further emphasise the difficulty in reformulating the philosophy of "us." Far easier, you might think, to replace "us" with everyone, to dissolve the country and its culture in the abstract idea of human rights, and to march with Nick Clegg into a transnational future, leaving England on the dust-heap of history. That, in effect, is what the "modernisation wing" of the Tory party is hoping fora new kind of conservatism which conserves nothing, changes everything, and is guided by the very same rhetoric of equality and human rights that shapes the left-liberal agenda. If that is where we are, then conservatism is dead. But I take heart, nevertheless, from the five MPs, note their understated and very English kind of patriotism, and am encouraged when I see that only two of their names could have occurred in Trollope or Dickens.

Articles

- Environment

Conservatism and the Environment Conservative Home

March 2013 There is no political cause more amenable to the conservative vision than that of the environment. For it touches on the three foundational ideas of our movement: trans-generational loyalty, the priority of the local and the search for home. Conservatives resonate to Burke's view of society, as a partnership between the living, the unborn and the dead; they believe in civil association between neighbours rather than intervention by the state; and they accept that the most important thing the living can do is to settle down, to make a home for themselves, and to pass that home to their children. Oikophilia, the love of home, lends itself - to the environmental cause, and it is astonishing that the Conservative Party has not seized hold of that cause as its own. The problem arises because the agenda has been set by the globalisers. Global problems, we are told, require global solutions, and global solutions are trans-national solutions, involving the loss of sovereignty and the surrender to treaties that tie our hands. There may be reason to fear what is happening. But much more important for the activists is the political use to which that fear can be put which is to destroy national sovereignty and to exert a top-down control by the self-appointed experts over the ordinary activities of mankind. Moreover, by concentrating on climate change the activists have managed to distract attention from the many other environmental problems that could be, and often have been, solved by people acting in the conservative spirit. Environmental problems arise when homeostatic systems break down in other words, when the feedback loop that establishes equilibrium is, for whatever reason, destroyed. The homeostatic system that has been most studied is the free market, which returns to equilibrium in changing conditions, provided the participants bear the costs of their actions. Left-wing thinkers refuse to accept this, and constantly invent bogeymen 'neo-liberalism', 'corporate greed', 'market failure' in order to justify the intervention of the state, and therefore control by socialists. But intervention by the state is the major cause of disequilibrium, and the environmental consequences can be seen all

across the former communist world in the Soviet case in the form of total devastation. The market ceases to deliver solutions to environmental problems when participants can externalise their costs in other words, when they can escape the internal rules of the system. It is this that gives rise to 'the tragedy of the commons'. The solution is not automatically to call on the state to intervene but first to look for the social mechanisms that cause people to bear the costs of what they do. That is what the common law of tort has done in our country, acting often in conjunction with the law of trusts. It is what oikophilia naturally prompts us to do, as Elinor Ostrom has shown, when we are permitted to regard 'common pool resources' as shared by a defined and localised community. It is what the conservative instinct for trusteeship spontaneously urges upon us. If we look at the history of the environmental movement in Britain we see those conservative principles working successfully, not through the state, but through the civil initiatives that challenge the state, beginning with the protests on behalf of the forests in the 17th century, initiated by John Evelyn's Silva, and leading to the creation of the National Trust at the end of the 19th century. Vital to this conservative environmental movement has been the love of beauty. Through art, literature and local activism the British people have given voice to the idea of beauty as a shared resource, an irreplaceable fund of 'social capital'. Beauty, they have recognised, acts as a barrier to the top-down brutalities of the exploiters and the social engineers. But the environmental demagogues are determined to brush such obstacles aside. Littering the landscape with pylons and wind-farms appeals to them not because it has any scientific authority for the science, such as it was, has been exploded but because it refocuses the problem as a global one. To destroy the home that we have built over centuries is to afflict conservatives in the heart of their way of life. It is to deprive people of the primary source of oikophilia, and to make conservatism the only political outlook that has ever done anything for the environment irrelevant.

Moreover, it is through the pursuit of beauty that we could solve our most pressing environmental problem, which is the need for new homes. People resist large-scale development, because they know that it will produce an eyesore. Conservative-minded architects like Leon Krier at Poundbury and John Simpson at Swindon have shown that this need not be so, that we can learn from our traditional architecture how to build in ways that enhance the neighbourhood, and in ways that produce affordable housing too. People protest at the faceless estates that destroy the view from their window. But noone protests at Poundbury except the modernist architects who sense the threat that it poses to their monopoly game. The sad thing is that the Conservative Party has said so little to clarify what is at stake. Why do those old-fashioned words like trust, settlement, beauty and home so seldom pass the lips of those who are now, nominally at least, in charge? And why is the agenda still set by those for whom climate change, renewable energy and global warming define the problem, and for whom the favoured solution involves the total destruction of the things we love?

Articles

- Politics and society

Baroness Thatcher: piece from 1990, LA Times: LONDON When the Athenians sent Themistocles into exile in 470 BC, they conveniently forgot everything he had done for them. It was he who had created the Athenian navy, held the Persians at Artemisium and finally defeated them at Salamis. It was he who had fortified Athens and made it the most prosperous city of theAegean. His work was continued by Pericles, (without whose energy and public spirit the democratic traditions of Athens would certainly have been destroyed). But Pericles also was driven from office, tried on trumped-up charges and threatened with exile. Democracies have a natural tendency to turn against their saviors. It happened to Winston Churchill. It happened to Charles de Gaulle, and now it has happened to Margaret Thatcher. It was not the faults of those great leaders that caused their downfall but their virtues.

Thatcher, like Themistocles, has been overthrown by the resentment of her inferiors. For in a democracy, inferior people have power. When she took office in 1979, it looked as though Britain was in a state of terminal decline. The trade unions, with power to bring down the elected government, were busy accumulating privileges for their largely idle membership. The country had no foreign policy to speak of, had irresolutely entered the European Community without any conception of the political cost and could no longer be relied upon to defend itself. Socialist mandarins reigned in the civil service, in the schools and in the universities, while more than half the gross national product was absorbed in public expenditure. Industry was crippled by strikes, and whole sections of the economy, run by central government, were protected from competition and maintained in a state of bankruptcy. When it came to communism, our leaders either maintained an embarrassed silence or made craven offers of friendship. For the Labor Party, the Soviet Union was a "socialist" state that had slightly deviated from its good intentions while remaining a friend of the working class. The threat to peace came from our habit of defending ourselves, in the face of which the poor Soviets could only reply in kind. In short, Britain was ready to surrender all that it stood for: its pride, its enterprise, its ideals of freedom and citizenship, even its national defense. The country wallowed in collective guilt feelings, reinforced by the dependency culture of the welfare state. Thatcher changed all that. She compelled the British people to recognize that the individual's life is his own and the responsibility of living it cannot be borne by anyone else, still less by the state. She released the talent and enterprise that, notwithstanding decades of egalitarian claptrap, still exist in British society. She broke the power of the unions, exposing such men as Arthur Scargill, leader of the mine workers, for the Stalinists they are. She restored our national pride and sense of sovereignty, first by resisting the Argentine invasion of the Falklands, second by countering the Soviet threat and exposing the peace movement as a part of it, and third by defying the ambitions of the Eurocrats. She began to reform the

education system, opposing the socialist apparatchiks who control it and holding up their "progressive" curriculum to scorn. She even took on the welfare state itself, trying to persuade people that their lives could be better, freer and simpler without this great cancer on the national economy, which benefits nobody so much as those appointed to control it. Those achievements led to her downfall. Anyone who threatens the dependency culture in Britain threatens the Establishment: the media, the universities, the schools, the welfare services, the vast heap of redundant civil servants. The chattering classes rose up in alarm, recognizing that Thatcher's triumph would be their destruction. Nobody was more disturbed than my university colleagues: For decades they have enjoyed financial security with no real obligations. They are natural believers in the state that nourishes them, and natural socialists when it comes--as occasionally happens--to exercising their minds. Acting together with their friends in the media, such people have created the myth of Thatcher as an "uncaring" and bossy woman, armed with Victorian values and a handbag. In fact she threatens nobody but the parasites.

Roger Scruton: Border control must be at the heart of any EU renegotiations Thus the Treaty of Rome included, among its four freedoms, the freedom of the labour force to move across national borders. This freedom, itself backed up by long-since exploded economic theories concerning the role played by the factors of production, seemed harmless at the time, when there was near full employment and parity of income in the member states. Everything began to change, partly as a result of the Treaty. And when the decision was taken, from which the people of Europe were, as ever, excluded, to extend membership to the newly liberated countries of Eastern Europe, the result was a mass migration from places devastated by communism to places where the rule of law, private property and representative institutions had kept in being the old spirit of Europe. Nothing could be done to stop this, we were told: at best it could be delayed. For a few years our government was able to postpone the influx from

Romania and Bulgaria. Now, it seems this influx is to come, and our Parliament and our law can do nothing to prevent it. Those who know Bulgaria and Romania will have some awareness of what this will mean, although current forms of censorship will prevent them from saying it. However, in the current discussion the principal matter is never mentioned. The greatest single problem that this country faces is not economic decline. It is over-population. Look at the real tensions in our society and you will find this always at their heart. Rising unemployment among the young, as jobs are seized by incoming workers from Eastern Europe. Escalating demands on our health and welfare system from people who have never paid a contribution to it. Ever more painful shortage of housing, and the impossibility of finding a house that a young family can afford. Threats to both town planning and the countryside from the pressure to build, and the rapid crumbling of our infrastructure, which was in recent memory the most effective in Europe. The collapse of education in our cities, as schools strive to accommodate classes in which hardly a child is a native speaker of the language. The growth of criminal networks located beyond our borders, in places where our long-standing rule of law has never been known. And so on. All these things result from a global change that was not foreseen by the founders of the European Union, and which the EU institutions cannot possibly address which is the mass migration from places devastated by brutal forms of government to the anglosphere, and to Britain in particular. Unless controlled, this mass migration will quickly destroy our countrys remaining cultural and economic assets. But the treaties forbid us to take action, and meanwhile our government sits tinkering with irrelevant details. If there is to be a renegotiation of our EU membership, should it not have this matter as its primarily purpose namely, to restore to our Parliament the capacity to legislate, in those matters on which our national survival depends?

The Conservative Neglect Of Culture By Roger Scruton. Nobody knows what a cultural policy should aim at, what means it should use, or how it could lead to legislation or other political initiatives. Hence, in Conservative Party thinking, considerations of culture remain on the margins. Worse, as in so many areas of

political life, the Conservatives seem to have abandoned this fertile territory to the Left. Here is an instance of which I have some knowledge: the Arts Council has refused to provide funding to the English Music Festival, an initiative devoted to one of the greatest and least explored legacies of our national culture. The Council objects to the word English, and to all that it means by way of settled loyalties, old-fashioned decencies, and the love of our country and its past. For the arts establishment culture should be antinational, disruptive, part of the labour of the negative that I described in a previous contribution to this blog. My attempts to get conservative politicians, including the Minister for Culture and the Chairman of the House of Commons Cultural Committee, to take up this cause have been greeted with silence. Who cares about Granville Bantock, Arnold Bax or Ivor Gurney, and what have they got to do with GDP, RPI, VAT, or any other collection of letters that the government cites in the place of a philosophy? This neglect of culture is a mistake, and here are three reasons why: 1. Conservatives are, at their best, rounded human beings, who are attached to forms of life and practices which might reasonably be described as cultural: they tend to believe in family values and the rewards of family life, and to have a love of literature, art, music and natural beauty. Their tastes vary, but they gravitate towards the serious and the enduring, and indeed it is their sense of the seriousness of human life that turns them in a conservative direction. It disheartens them to think that there is nothing to conservatism except the bits that can be transcribed as economic policy, and they would be comforted by the spectacle of a party endorsing the cultural values that they share. 2. Policies towards culture may be futile; but policies influenced by culture issue all the time. And when the culture is trivial or ideological the policies can be very destructive as we have seen in education, multiculturalism, and the rise of the leftist thought police. To be confident in ones cultural base is therefore a prerequisite for making firm and durable political decisions. 3. It is good for the image of conservatism that it should not be caricatured as a business consortium or a neo-liberal conspiracy. It should be seen also to be tentatively exploring the deeper issues, and making reasonable but non-belligerent contributions to the debates that occupy intelligent people

today: for instance, religion and atheism, social media, pop culture, the fate of real music, architecture and the city. Those three reasons are circumstantial. Less circumstantial is the need to recognise that the heart of conservatism is not economic but poetic. From Burke to Oakeshott our conservative thinkers have been moved by the poetry of their stance, by its appeal to the imagination, and by the echo of ancestral voices in the life and art that surround us. Even today, in our mutilated country, it is the vision of a sacred landscape, settled in endearing ways, and of the texture of daily life and the beauty of simple manners, that win young people to the conservative cause. Our cause is the cause of belonging, founded in a sense of the beauty of given things and of the need to respond to them with gratitude. This is the real reason why conservatives wish to protect our institutions, culture and educational inheritance. It is the real reason why we oppose the leftist desire to sweep everything away for the sake of an equality that can be achieved only when everyone has nothing. Alas, however: what Oakeshott called the voice of poetry in the conversation of mankind is rarely heard by those whom we elect to Parliament. And we surely cannot blame this entirely on Nick Clegg.

Conservatism and Climate In How to Think Seriously About the Planet, I argue that environmental degradation has one cause above all others, which is the propensity of human beings to take the benefit, and to leave the costs to someone else, preferably someone far away in space or time, whose protests can be safely ignored. The solution is to give space to the rival tendency in human nature, which is to take charge of costs, when the costs affect one's home. So my book is an exploration of the motive that I call 'oikophilia,' the love of home. The propensity for settlement and stewardship is at the heart of conservative philosophy, I argue, and ought to be at the heart of conservative politics too. But what about climate change? This question is the first that I am asked by all those on the left to whom I try to explain my views, and it is a fair question. Here is a problem that cannot be solved by local

action. There is nothing that I and my neighbours, or even I and my nation, can do to rectify a problem that affects the entire earth, and which can never be cured in some local part of it. Surely, therefore, there is no solution, other than a radical change of lifestyle, imposed by international treaty and enforced across the globe? As soon as you put it that way, however, the doubts arise. Politicians in democracies don't sign treaties that will commit their voters to unacceptable changes in their way of life. What is the point of signing a treaty if you lose the election that would enable you to enforce it? Politicians in autocratic states sign treaties willy-nilly, but only because nobody is in a position to hold them to the deal. If the globe-trotting in search of a climate-change treaty is what environmental politics amounts to, then we can be forgiven for thinking that it is nothing more than conscience-washing by the political class. There is a tendency on the libertarian right to dismiss the entire environmental agenda, and to give credence to those scientists who argue either that global warming is a myth, or that it is not caused by human action and therefore not curable by human action. I don't go along with that, although, like most people who consider these questions, I am a mere amateur when it comes to the science. It stands to reason that the earth will get warmer, if the quantity of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is constantly rising. So how do we change? To penalize the use of fossil fuels when these are the principal, or the only, source of energy is impossible. People will not accept to use less energy than they need, and in any case large-scale political initiatives always need more energy, not less. There are two solutions: to find a source of clean energy that can be made freely available around the globe, or to embark on some work of geo-engineering that will counter the effect of carbon emissions. The second of those is so controversial that no politician will touch it. But the first has given rise to a spate of unreal and environmentally damaging solutions, such as the craze for wind farms, whose largely symbolic contribution to the grid is more than offset by the damage that they inflict on our shared sense of stewardship. Why care for the environment, if the price of doing so is the loss of an environment that you could care for? Besides, wind farms always need that other, more reliable, and more polluting source of energy, which comes, in the German case, by plugging in to the French nuclear-powered grid. The depths of hypocrisy here need no comment.

The French are surely right to rely on nuclear power. There are risks, but the management of risk is what the environmental question is all about. Meanwhile we should face the facts: the problem of clean energy is first and foremost a scientific problem. It will be solved by well-funded scientists working in an atmosphere of free enquiry. In other words, it will emerge in a wealthy and democratic nation state, and can only be hampered by devoting our resources to futile treatymongering. Like every other viable environmental policy, the search for clean energy begins at home.

Facing Up to Darwin It is fair to say that Darwins dangerous idea, as Daniel Dennett has described it, has caused more trouble to the ordinary conscience than just about any other scientific hypothesis. We cannot easily reject the theory of evolution, which explains so much that we observe in the lives of plants and animals; and we cannot easily accept it either, when it comes to understanding human beings. It is not only the religious world-view that seems so precarious in the light of it. All kinds of moral aspirations, set against what we can know or surmise about our hunter-gatherer ancestors, seem to be so much wishful thinking. How can we entertain the liberal hope for equality between the sexes, for universal human rights, for a global community without wars, when we reflect on the harsh conditions in which our species is said to have evolved, and for the need, in those conditions, for belligerence, relations of domination, and an innate division of labor between woman and man? For a long time in the wake of Darwins Descent of Man, social scientists and anthropologists argued that human beings are not simply biological organisms, whose behavior is to be explained by their inherited constitution, but also social beings, whose most important traits are socially constructed. On this view culture is an independent influence, which works on the raw material of human biology and changes it into something finer, more malleable, and more responsive to moral and spiritual ideals. In this way, thinkers like Durkheim and Weber hoped to rescue human nature from Darwin by describing another input into our behavior than our biological inheritance. Not only did this give a new purchase to religion; it liberated morality from the constraints of evolutionary thinking. Morality was returned to its throne as a guide to life, by

which wisdom and reason override the demands of instinct and desire. But the respite from Darwin was only short-lived. Evolutionary psychologists have since turned their attention to culture itself, arguing that culture is not, after all, an independent input into human behavior. Culture too, they argue, is part of our biological inheritance. It is not simply that there are extraordinary constants among the many cultures that we observe: gender roles, incest taboos, rites of passage, festivals, warfare, mourning, religious beliefs, moral scruples, aesthetic interests. Culture is also a part of human nature: it is our way of being. We do not live in herds or packs; our hierarchies are not based on strength or sexual dominance. We relate to one another through language, morality, and law; we sing together, dance together, worship together, and spend as much time in festivals and story telling as in seeking our food. Our hierarchies involve offices, responsibilities, gift-giving, and ceremonial recognition. Our meals are shared, and food for us is not merely nourishment but the occasion for hospitality, affection, and dressing up. All these things are comprehended in the idea of culture and culture, so understood, is uniquely human. Why is this? The social scientists respond that culture is uniquely human because we created it. But the Darwinians reject that answer as a fudge: if we created culture, what explains our capacity to create it? The answer is that this capacity evolved. Culture is therefore an adaptation, which exists because it conferred a reproductive advantage on our hunter-gatherer ancestors. According to this view, many of our cultural traits are local variations of attributes acquired during the Pleistocene age and now hard-wired in the brain. But if this is so, cultural characteristics may not be as plastic as the social scientists suggest. There are features of the human condition, such as gender roles, that people have believed to be cultural and therefore changeable. But if culture is an aspect of nature, cultural does not mean changeable. Maybe these controversial features of human culture are part of the genetic endowment of mankind. This new way of thinking gains credibility from the evolutionary theory of morality. Many social scientists suppose morality to be an acquired characteristic, passed on by customs, laws and punishments in which a society asserts its rights over its members. However, with the development of genetics, a new perspective opens. Altruism begins to look like a genetic strategy, which confers a reproductive advantage on the genes that produce it. In the

competition for scarce resources, the genetically altruistic are able to call others to their aid, through networks of cooperation that are withheld from the genetically selfish, who are thereby eliminated from the game. If this is so, it is argued, then morality is not an acquired but an inherited characteristic. Any competitor species that failed to develop innate moral feelings would by now have died out. And what is true of morality might be true of many other human characteristics that have previously been attributed to nurture: language, art, music, religion, warfare, the local variants of which are far less significant than their common structure. If we accept the argument of the evolutionary biologists, therefore, we may find ourselves pushed toward accepting that traits often attributed to culture may be part of our genetic inheritance, and therefore not as changeable as many might have hoped: gender differences, intelligence, belligerence, and so on through all the human characteristics that people have wished, for whatever reason, to rescue from destiny and refashion as choice. But to speculate freely about such matters is dangerous. The once respectable subject of eugenics was so discredited by Nazism that dont enter is now written across its door. The distinguished biologist James Watson, co-discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA, was recently run out of the academy for having publicly suggested that sub-Saharan Africans are genetically disposed to have lower IQs than the Westerners who strive to help them, while the economist Larry Summers suffered a similar fate for claiming that the brains of women are at the top end less suited than those of men to the study of the hard sciences. In America it is widely assumed that socially significant differences between ethnic groups and sexes are the result of social factors, and in particular of discrimination directed against the group that does badly. This assumption is not the conclusion of a reasoned social science but the foundation of an optimistic world-view, to disturb which is to threaten the whole community that has been built on it. On the other hand, as Galileo in comparable circumstances didnt quite say, it aint necessarily so. SOME CONSERVATIVES take comfort from this, arguing that liberal egalitarian values are, after all, no more than wishful thinking, and that the attempt to impose them through the school and university curriculum goes against human nature and is therefore doomed to failure. To take this line, however, is to announce the defeat of liberalism by conceding the defeat of

conservatism too. Conservatism is founded, like liberalism, on the assumption that human beings are free, that they can to a certain measure shift the boundaries that constrain them, and that there is a right and wrong in human affairs which are not simply dictated by biology. It is imperative, therefore, to find another response to the evolutionary picture. The real question raised by evolutionary biology and neuroscience is not whether those sciences can be refuted, but whether we can accept what they have to say while still holding on to the beliefs and attitudes that morality demands of us. From Kant and Hegel to Wittgenstein and Husserl, there have been attempts to give a philosophy of the human condition that stands apart from biological science without opposing it. Those great thinkers told us in their several ways that we are both human beings and persons. Human beings form a biological kind, and it is for science to describe that kind. Probably it will do so in the way that the evolutionary psychologists propose. But persons do not form a biological kind, or any other sort of natural kind. The concept of the person is shaped in another way, not by our attempt to explain things but by our attempt to understand, to interact, to hold to account, to relate. The why? of personal understanding is not the why? of scientific inference. And it is answered by conceptualizing the world under the aspect of freedom and choice. Our world is a palimpsest, and over the book of nature, written in the language of cause and effect, there is another and incommensurable text, written in the language of freedom. We cannot rewrite the book of nature so that it accords with our hopes and ideals, for these have no place in that book. But we can rewrite the book of freedom, and that is where the contests lie. Consider, then, the dispute over gender and gender equality. Liberals do not deny that there are two biologically fixed kinds of human beingthe male and the female; but they deny that there are two culturally fixed kinds of personthe masculine and the feminine. For the liberal, the division of roles, rights, and duties that conservatives defend is neither decreed by nature nor endorsed by the moral law. The response of conservatives should be to defend this division of roles, rights, and duties for what it isthe foundation of the most important personal relation that we have, which is the relation that binds a man and a woman in marriage. I dont think I have ever written a sentence more politically incorrect than that one. Nevertheless, as Galileo was wise enough not to say, if you dont like it, thats yourproblem.

Roger Scruton: When will the Conservative Party fight for England?

Roger Scruton is a writer and philospher. We know that electoral boundaries are currently drawn in ways that disadvantage the Conservative party. There is a pressing need for reform, if the Members elected to Parliament are effectively to represent the people who vote for them. But neither the Labour Party nor the Liberal Democrats will cooperate, since both of them, in their heart of hearts, wish to marginalise the Conservative Party, and to deprive the Party of its electoral base. In the current dispute within the coalition, there is one boundary change that is not discussed. Our government is a coalition; so too is our country. And the boundaries between our component nations are drawn in such a way as to disadvantage the people of England in other words, the people who reliably vote for Conservative Members of Parliament. In a hundred ways the Labour Party used its spell in office to secure a long term balance of forces in its favour and this fact has already been much commented upon in ConservativeHome. But no move that the Labour Party made was more damaging than that of creating a Scottish Parliament without removing the Scottish Members from the Parliament of Westminster. This move has had two disastrous effects, from the Conservative point of view. First, it has given to the Scottish electorate two votes, one to govern themselves, and another to control the English. Secondly it has given a reliable block vote to the Labour Party in Westminster. The two effects are connected. For although the Scots dont wish, on the whole, to be governed by the Labour Party as we

see from elections to the Scottish Parliament they do want the English to be governed by the Labour Party. Hence they vote to place Labour politicians, whom they dont want at home, in Westminster, where they can reliably pursue the interests of Scotland without imposing their censorious opinions on the Scots.

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