Covenant (eBook)

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The Idea and the Order

The conditions of virtue

You are what you worship. Your identity is a reflection of your god, the thing you venerate, which gives life meaning and explains good and evil. A culture is the act of common worship, and so a community or a civilisation might best be defined in terms of the gods the people serve.

To generalise crudely, pagan societies served the material world. They worshipped living creatures, wood and stone, the sea and stars, and imbued these physical things with spiritual properties. And they placed themselves in this world: human beings were subject to the mystical powers of animals, the land and the elements.

Judaism and Christianity restored the material world to itself, stripping out the hocus-pocus: animals and trees are just animals and trees. The object of worship was a great and singular god who made the universe. And this god, God, had a special place in his creation for human beings. We were not a subject of nature but its steward. We were given the Earth to look after, and were subject only to God himself.

Now, in our post-Christian age, what do we worship? We worship ourselves. We might think we worship nothing, just as we believe in nothing, or at least not in God. But as Bob Dylan knew, you gotta serve somebody. And we have decided to serve mankind, and more particularly the individual person, and even more particularly the person within: ‘the real me’. Meanwhile, nature is disregarded, neither spiritualised nor stewarded, but rather plundered and abused.

In the modern era, meaning the last two or three hundred years, but especially the last twenty or thirty, the authority of a whole social order – of institutions, traditions and habits of thought, of social relations and obligations, of principles, practices, interests and affections – has been gradually replaced by the authority of something else. ‘The Order’ persists in fragments, as the remnants of a social system that is our only inheritance, but its authority is gone, or nearly, and so its fragments are disappearing too.

The Order was the arrangement of society around a common conception of the way to live, and around the practices of common worship. A culture whose god was outside the self created related and ‘relational’ beings. A person, we felt and thought in the old days, is a social animal. And so the Order organised the life of the individual to be ‘other-facing’: it stipulated and ensured that you lived for other people. My sense of myself derived from people other than me, with whom I was linked by the ties of love, service and dependence.

Thus the ordinary affiliations of life – families, communities and nations – were charged with the quality of the sacred. The holy mystery was reified, made material, not in wood and stone but in other people, and in the establishments of society: in homes, businesses, civic institutions, in the organisations of leisure and education and care, and in the state. These institutions were (at least in theory and sometimes in reality) easy-going within, generous and peaceable without, and plural by default. The mix of ages, sexes and functions in a household, of trades and responsibilities in a place, and of ideas, ethnicities and religions in a country, created relationships of like and unlike. All the pied beauty of humanity was held together by a common belief that beneath all and above all was something more important than any of it.

In the Order, the memberships and gathering places of communities mediated our differences and facilitated collective action. Membership and gathering were thought necessary because human beings are vulnerable and need the support and safety of the group, but also because human beings are greedy, and need the restraint and accountability of the group. In the Order, the function of society was to mitigate our vulnerability and greed, providing the support and restraint that individuals need to live well with one another.

Politics, as the business of the management of our common life, supported this function through deliberate action to strengthen the associations of society and thereby to strengthen us. Membership of a community was the context for the habits and skills that are the highest expressions of human capability. And in community, through iteration and testing, individuals discovered (rather than created) the rules of right and wrong.

To a conservative, the source of trouble in the world is not exterior but interior to human beings. The real meaning of freedom, as the concept has been understood from Aristotle onwards, is not freedom from the tyranny of others but freedom from the tyranny of ourselves. The true tyrant is our own caprice, the power of our appetites and our impulses to selfishness and self-harm.1 Our passions forge our fetters.‡

To defeat the tyrant caprice, to attain true freedom, we need virtue. The word is not to be understood in a drily moral sense. To be virtuous is not to be pinched, diminished and joyless. The virtues are the habits by which we cultivate the good life for ourselves and those around us. As Edward Skidelsky puts it, they are ‘the excellences of the species’, the things humans are good at: ‘they are to us what speed is to the leopard or strength to the lion’.2 And as this suggests, the good life means more than a passive sense of well-being. It includes well-doing, the practice of ‘excellences’ like friendship, forbearance and overcoming – practices that make us our happiest and our best. And the practice of the virtues does not just make us personally happier, it makes life better for everyone else.

Virtue is a pre-Christian concept. To the ancients, the value of community was that it taught the individual loyalty, courage and self-sacrifice: the skills or habits that both protect the tribe and give a person the fullest expression of life. Into this tradition Christianity fitted like a hand in a glove. But first it turned the glove inside out. For the virtues of the ancients are the ingredients of success, the qualities of strength. Christianity supplemented them with the qualities of weakness, the ingredients of a society in which not everyone is strong.

To the martial virtues of the heroic tradition a new set was added: virtues like charity, temperance, continence, prudence, shrewdness, forgiveness, faith and humility. The words have a deadening Victorian ring to them now, yet they were and are radical. For they transformed the of society – the good life we aim towards – from one of attainment and success, with all that implied in terms of war and exploitation, to one of justice and peace.

The black hole

The proper purpose of politics is the cultivation of the conditions of virtue. These conditions are the Order: the arrangement of families, communities and nations which, at their best, make the best of us. They make more likely the production of good people.

Families, communities and nations persist, but they live on the diminishing legacy of principles we no longer uphold. The Order has given way to an idea, whose authority is the new power in our lives. ‘The Idea’ is simply this: that there exist autonomous agents, called individuals, who both self-determine and self-moralise. They decide for themselves who and what they are, and indeed what wider reality is, and they decide for themselves what is right and wrong. The Idea is that the individual, me myself, or more accurately the inner tyrant whom Aristotle warned us of, is the proper object of our worship.

The Idea is the oldest, the original mistake: that we can be like God, with our own creative power and the ability to decide for ourselves what is good and what is evil. The irony, of course, is that even this error takes succour from the Order it rejects. The great value of Christianity to Western culture, as Tom Holland has shown, is that it unpicked the total identification of the individual with the group.3 Because for all that community gives the individual identity, it also creates manifold opportunities for the abuse of power. Christianity gave the person a different status from that given by society: a new status of being totally valuable, wholly unique and loved, with a worth deriving not from your tribe or social standing but from your existence as a child of God.

Over time – the lengthening time called the in which the world waited for the second coming of Christ – this principle of individual human dignity seeped into law and government: the Church developed ‘secular’ rules for the arbitration of disputes, which were duly adopted by chiefs and kings. In England, this blended with the common law, the evolving body of rulings that gave coherence and force to the customs that already prevailed among the people. In this way, with the sanction of the Church, the state came to protect society from itself, and to ensure that the poor and weak had some vestige of security against power. And so developed the greatest achievement of the West: the free man and woman.

It is important to remember the Christian basis of political liberty, because the creature has disavowed its creator. Liberty has repudiated its own origins. The individual, his God-given value recognised and protected in law, has decided in his pride that his freedom is his own achievement, that his power is his own – even, most absurdly, that he fought Christianity to be free.

For this we can blame the eighteenth century. In Britain and Europe at this time, the late medieval distrust of abstract universal claims about knowledge or existence became a more hostile...