The Dissolving Society

By LORD RADCLIFFE

O English cannot help noticing how markedly the

have lost their self-confidence in recent years. This is, I think, a new phenomenon. It is not merely that, on the whole, things have gone against this country in international affairs, the balance has tilted adversely; but our failure to analyse our situation with intelligence, or at any rate to act as if we had, and to adjust our words and deeds accordingly, has made us from time to time look ridiculous when we need only have looked demure. After all, we were left in an appallingly difficult position in the post-1945 world, and we were hardly to be blamed if we were not in many cases exactly the masters of our fate. Apart from this, however, the British have increasingly given the impression that they do not know how to make even their own system work effectively and that they are coming to believe less and less in the validity of those old conventions, customs, principles that were supposed to give a peculiar sanctity to the British way of conducting their affairs. This is a loss of confidence indeed. There is not only an aban- donment of the old: there is a failure to project the new. It bespeaks a faintness, a low tempera- ture of the spirit, and it seems to be accom- panied by an inertia in discussing its root causes which, of all symptoms, is the most depressing.

Yet how paradoxical it is. You might think reasonably enough that we were going through a period of exhaustion, both physical and mental, after the racking strain of six years' war and the hard grind of reconstruction. But does any- one get the impression that this is a country of exhausted people? On the contrary, its young citizens at any rate (omitting the lunatic fringe) generate a sense of unbounded energy, uncon- fined by an inconvenient apparatus of limiting preconceptions. If lethargy or aimlessness super- venes as they take the long pull of adult respon- sibility, the fault lies, I believe, rather in the failure of society to provide a worthy framework for actioR than in any defect in the human material.

Let us try another suggested cause. How often I have heard it said that our troubles arise from the fact that Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a new place in the world as a humbler power. To my mind this shows a complete misunderstanding of the British men- tality. It is the sort of explanation that is dear to special correspondents from abroad, and I have known even America,4.;,deligjit in it, who ought to know better. Theladis that the British people are not grieving over their lost empire at all. When it existed the people as a whole had very little to do with it, and, except for one or two brief, Mafeking-like periods, they felt no more than a detached and tepid pride in its existence. Indeed, for a great deal of the nineteenth century, British statecraft was devoted either to hoping that we could persuade the colonies to 'cut loose' or to avoiding, generally unsuccessfully, the assumption of further colonial commitments. India, much the greatest experi- ment, was a special case: but then the whole British relationship with India, astonishing in its achievement, was conducted either by incurious military professionals or by a minute section of the people, little more than a handful of families from England, Ireland, and Scotland,

while the remainder of the population pursued its lives and affairs with a stolid indifference to what was going on.

The imperial has passed into the Common- wealth image, but I doubt very much whether the latter has sunk any deeper than the former into the general public consciousness. The Commonwealth offers so tenuous a form of asso- ciation that it is difficult to call it more than a sentiment: at best, a real and in some limited ways a fruitful one for the small circle of people who are actually brought into contact with its practical applications, at worst nothing more than a vehicle for making politicians appear more important than they really are. Either way, how can an association which prides itself on having no structure and which asserts common prin- ciples that its members depart from more con- spicuously each year ever lay a strong hold on the minds and hearts of men? There will remain, no doubt, ties of interest, goodwill, grati- tude, and family feeling between certain areas of the whole strange agglomeration, but let us say without hesitation to our foreign inter- preters that, whatever else is amiss with them, the English are not sighing over lost imperial possessions or failing hegemonies.

Well, we are told by critics inside the country, what we need for our salvation is a national faith or national purpose. And indeed it would be a most gratifying thing if we were supported by a national faith, in the sense of an accepted set of beliefs as to the meaning and purpose of indi- vidual life and the relation of society to that purpose. Underpinned by such beliefs creative ideas can be released. But in this world of ideas needs, alas, however conspicuously realised, do not generate remedies. You cannot prescribe for a faith as if there were something for it in the pharmacopoeia. The Spirit bloweth where it listeth, and it is highly unlikely to waft us a settled national faith in an age of scientific and sceptical thought, in which the whole pressure of society is for more science and more scepticism.

Our problem, however, remains a practical one. It does not serve`us so much to ask what faith we need as a nation as to ask what faith we are likely to sustain in the incurious and scepti- cal society that we know. What have we got that we can use or hold? We are told that we would all be better men if we had a conscious national purpose which we could subserVe,.but do- the people who exhort us in these terms have any clear idea of what they mean? This nation is not a tribe to be led through the wilderness to a longed-for Promised Land. Nor is it a community consecrated and organised to a stan- dard of production of material wealth to which end all other values must be subordinate. There may well be other peoples whose circumstances make production for the time being a spiritual end. But they are not our circumstances. This is an ancient, complex, and sophisticated society, rich in the very fact that it embraces many separate purposes, sometimes conflicting under their various pressures, but harmonised, if only we keep our heads, by a long-Cultivated senti- ment of neighbourly benevolence. What other national purpose can be the aim of such a society than progressively to develop the conditions in which each man and wonnan in it has the chance of realising the best of his individual powers? The difficulty does not lie in finding an accept- able phrase for the occasion, but in the fact that with our history and the very different social philosophies to which it has given rise we shall continue to disagree radically as to what are the right conditions to foster such a realisation.

Another delusive cry, which is likely to do us no good, is this cry for national leadership. That we need more leadership than we get is no doubt true enough in the sense that at all levels of society we need more persons of- experience and authority to speak and act boldly and sin- cerely, without deference to the subtleties of public relations or the imputed susceptibilities of youth or of egalitarian opinion. We need men who are longing not to have to be heroes, but who are ready to act heroically if occasion thrusts the role upon them. But we delude our- selves if we think that our political system can ever convert a party leader, who is by definition a chief sectarian, into a national leader or a true representative of national opinion. On occa- sions of acute external crisis, when the crisis itself simplifies all issues, perhaps: and by the necessity of the case in certain relations with other countries. But for all general purposes it is as true now as it was when Halifax the Trimmer first remarked in the seventeenth cen- tury, 'The best party is but a kind of conspiracy against the rest of the nation.' We shall forget this distinction at our peril, the more so because there are non-political forces present in modern society to which the distinction is distasteful, and poli- ticians are quick to respond to so convenient and flattering an illusion. The `national interest' tends to become a jargon word, like 'explosion' or 'breakthrough,' and we need a public that is vigilant to see that the word is not blandly equated with the policies or programme of what- ever may be for the time being a majority party. Otherwise, it is a short step to lowering accusa- tions of `sabotage' and `unpatriotic' action, and we are totalitarians by the back door.

So far we have been following false trails only to turn back from them. Nevertheless, there is one that could lead, I believe, to the heart of that faintness and indecision that seem cur- rently to obscure and falsify the true outline of the British Character. We have ,by now lived for too many generations in a revolutionary climate of opinion. That may_ seem an odd thing to say of a country which presents an air of sober institutions and has been used to pride itself on having successfully avoided any revo- lutionary outbreak since the close of the seven- teenth century. But appearances can be particularly deceptive when the maintenance of the parliamentary form conceals vast and con- tinual changes both in the practice of politics and in social and economic dispositions. One must distinguish between revolutions that ex- press themselves in new constitutional arrange- ments, which are often of little general impor- tance, and revolutions of social habit and ideas, which can take place without any constitutional displacement; just as great revolutions can take the form either of a single cataclysmic event, such as the French or Russian Revolutions, which then work out their logic in the terms of a

given set of ideas, or on the other hand of a continuous adjustment of social and political habits which spins on without a single founding date.

It is the latter that has been the peculiar nature of the real English revolution. Since it has had no identifiable beginning and it has never had any authoritative ideology or set of principles there seems no good reason why it should ever stop. What does seem to be un- deniable, however, is that for many generations now England has been 'revolving* in a flux of changing opinions, gradually eroding by criticism the rock of its institutions and its faiths but failing to form any comparable solid substance to take their place.

I am reminded of the theory shared by Mill, Arnold, and Bagehot that each human society oscillates between critical and formative periods --critical and organic periods, to use Mill's terminology. During 'the latter, he says, 'a firm and nearly universal adherence to some belief guides the thoughts and rules the lives of the people; when the belief stagnates and loses its authority the inevitable period of criticism and negation, during which men search in multifarious ways for a new creed, succeeds.' So be it: but then is it not our misfortune that we have lived too long without an organic period to nourish us, and in the result we have formed the habit of negation, gradually persuading ourselves to the belief that change or alteration is a good in itself and the 'dynamism' (oh, flatterers!) of change is all that is needed for the establishment of a healthy political society? It is this shallow and almost perverted idea of progress that con- stitutes the English sickness of the day: for it is one thing to change or adjust in response to changed conditions; it is quite another to obey the impulsion of change merely in order to have something new to which to adjust-This is a poor sort of morality with which to leave ourselves. One can see with amusement or despair how in course of time our political language has injected a smug moral implication into such neutral words as 'reform' or 'modernise.' It is,. in its way, no small achievement; but unless one makes the enormous assumption that evolution and progress are interchangeable terms, it is plain that society must return to some other and more stable test of the changes that it wishes to promote than the bare fact that changes they are. This obsession with change for its own sake, the belief that the statesman's art is no higher than the showman's skill, that it con- sists in 'giving the public what it wants;' these are the traditional vices that are laid to the charge of democracy. Are we so secure in our sense of history, in our long-descended political skill, in our general temperance and benevolence that we can afford to ignore those lessons that so many others have learnt by hard experience?

We take so much for granted in modern society and by so doing we impose such heavy strains on our good sense. We steam ahead, care- free navigators, as if the conduct of democratic society was an easy art. Look, no hands. It is, on the contrary, the most difficult thing in the world.

Laws and the constitutional process for making them may well not be the most important aspect of social activity, but they have a unique power af illuminating dramatically the structure which the individual can count upon for the building .id development of his own life. I believe a arm confidence in the stability of that structure is more than ever needed today for our be- wildered populations. And what have we done to secure this in a country where laws, even

on matters of critical importance, pop out, play around, and disappear again, like rabbits in a warren?

Let me enlarge upon this question of our con- stitutional arrangements, because they are so eccentric and yet so complacently accepted that they do serve to illustrate my general point. We pride ourselves, of course, on having a 'flexible constitution' by which, it is said, we have been saved from many ills. But then the Boneless Wonder too was a classic example of flexibility, and perhaps by now it would be better to admit, what foreigners have always suspected. that we have virtually no constitution at all. If you had to explain to a learned student, who happened to know nothing of our own affairs, how we make and unmake our laws and with them the citizen's rights and responsibilities, what amid your blushes could you tell him? There is nowadays no distinction of function between Government and Parliament, since the legisla- ture has become merely the law-making agent of the Executive. We have what is in effect a single-chamber legislative body; not because,

when in 1911 we disowned the untenable hereditary basis of the second chamber, we in- tended to set up a single chamber with plenary legislative power, but because since that date the political world has never generated the honesty of keeping faith with the nation by agreeing on the proper basis upon which an acceptable second chamber is to be constituted. There is no restriction, however, on the law- making powers of this single chamber, since there are no fundamental laws or constitutional restrictions on what it can do or undo. There used to be a few constitutional conventions, as they were called. which were thought to limit the absolute range of power, but he would be a bold man who predicted that any of them would be observed today. Lastly. the majority party in the House of Commons, from which the executive Government is formed, is elected every four or five years by voters in the con- stituencies, though the voters have very little chance of having anyone before them to select who is not already admitted as a nominee of one of the two major parties. Thus, to quote Bertrand Russell's summary, the electorate 'con- sole themselves for being in tutelage by the reflection that they have chosen their own guardians.' That may be unkind: but, all the same, what would the inquiring student. thus briefed, make of our account? I suppose that his first reac- tion would be to exclaim that it was an account of a tyranny, a demagogic tyranny of the classic order. After all, we are operating just the system that the great founders of modern democracy, the framers of the American Constitution, in- sisted that it must be scrupulous to guard itself against. It is a system dedicated to what Hamil- ton in The Federalist called 'legislative in- stability.' 'Readiness to change the laws,' says Madison, 'and excessive use of legislative power appear to me to be the most dangerous diseases to which our government can be exposed.' Hamilton and Madison were men of aristocratic temper prescribing for a democracy—perhaps the ideal arrangement. But on this even Jefferson, in many things a sentimental anarchist, was wholly with them. instability of the laws' was something that he dreaded.

Accepting that under any system a power capable of potential abuse min• be held satisfac- torily in check by the existence of restraining

social forces—religion. custom or • tradition, voluntary associations, a dominant philosophy --which are potent in fact without being legally

supreme, what I ask is whether we are develop- ing here a society in which such social forces are encouraged to grow and flourish or there is even recognition of the vital importance for

us that they should exist at all. Less and less can I see reason for thinking that we are. This is what I mean when I speak of the dissolving society, the slackness of tension in the ties that bind together the people who call themselves a nation, the thinness of the walls of the citadel into which we have withdrawn.

One looks around in vain for anything that can be called a public philosophy. At any rate I ask myself what it is. No doubt we must not look for or think in terms of a faith in these sceptical days, but surely we drift apart if we cannot consciously acknowledge some common philosophy that is to underpin our actions. It might entertain a historian to list the various philosophies that have governed the public life of this country in the past. In the eighteenth century, for instance. members of the governing class were trained to think of themselves as Romans—generals, senators, and proconsuls— and this country owes much of its rise to glory (that strange, echoing word; to their practice of the Roman virtues. Methodism, literally a way of life, drew its deep furrow in the politics and society of nineteenth-century England: and I suspect that what has now become the sterile controversy about Socialism and anti-Socialism would have been forgotten long ago if it were not for the religious soil in which Socialism has its roots.

In a real sense it could 13C said that a belief in 'freedom' did represent the public philosophy of this country in the nineteenth century. It was the unifying theme of our literature, of our popular songs. of our political life. and our foreign and colonial policies cannot fairly be interpreted unless it is accepted that we did genuinely believe that in promoting our concep- tion of freedom we had something of supreme value to impart to others less fortunately situated. That conviction has faded and indeed has proved too often a delusive guide among the com- plexities of the present world order. In that we have been unlucky. To our ancestors the word had a plain enough working. meaning: there were certain great forms of oppression. slavery, politi- cal tyranny, censorship, which were obvious and identifiable evils to be defeated in the name of liberty. But experience has refined upon the word, and when its emphasis shifts to-include not only political forms but also social and economic realities, the analysis is no doubt more profound, but the simple faith, I am afraid. loses for ever its clear image. The modern w orld too is funda- mentally an insecure world. which bedevils us with its paradox that. while to most men a state of insecurity is the antithesis of the enjoyment of liberty or freedom. security itself may only be Maintainable at the cost of just that enjoyment.

In our history the single great public philo- sophy has been a belief in the truths of the Christian religion, and it is with a singular com- placency that we set out in this century without the general support of that belief. Can one question that it is to its long-pervading influence that we owe the great part of these elevated senti- ments and principles of decent conduct that qualify us to claim that ours is a civilisation that is truly worth preserving? I am ready to imagine with the humanists that such sentiments and principles could have been inculcated by the un- revealed powers of man's natural reason, but I do not think that this diminishes the importance of the fact that in our society something much more potent than natural reason was needed to win the day. Now, it seems, we have to make do for the future with a tradition of decent conduct that has been cut off from its source, with the prompting of right reason in an age which finds in unreason its only poetry. and with a wide- diffused sentiment of sympathy and neighbour- liness that is perhaps the outstanding new feature in the make-up of advanced societies. 1 hope that the equipment is going to prove adequate for its enormous task. No one can yet tell how great is going to be the influence of this new sentiment of world sympathy, which is fed all the time by the advance of systems of communi- cation. It may well be the most hopeful factor of our present dangerous condition. If it is to prove so, it will be well to remember two things: goodwill. however amiable as a sentiment, is ineffective in itself unless it is continuously har- nessed to means of practical expression, and the media of mass communication, so smoothly in- formative about so much, have shown themselves to be just as capable of generating facile indig- nation and hatred as sincere sympathy and love. It may be that understanding must still come by the hard way.

What matters for our future is that we should still have a philosophy of living to sustain us in pride and dignity. *L'humanite ne se passe pas longtempN de grandeur: It will not come easily to people whose opinions have flowed so uncer- tainly for so long. It will not come by political action, as the great part of the population, who do not want to have to think for themselves, dimly hope that it may. Politics can be the ex- pression of a sound public philosophy, but they cannot create it: least of all in this country which in political terms is so organised. as Voltaire pointed out, that one half of the nation is always the enemy of the other, and in which the general public increasingly regards the two parties as two football teams which it expects to play for 'its entertainment. It will not come through the deplorable and lazy modern cult of majority wishes and majority opinion. We shall never begin to approach the ideal of a just and defensible society unless we shake our- selves free of the notion that there is any moral sanction whatsoever behind the votes or wishes of a majority. To respect majority opinion is the duty of a civilised man in all matters in which such deference may properly be required. A democracy cannot conduct its affairs on any

other working principle. But the art of political theory is hardly begun with the rules for ascer- taining and enforcing the wishes of a majority: the real art lies in analysing and expounding the circumstances and occasions upon which, what- ever the wishes of a majority, they ought not to be given effect to at the expense of a minority. large or small, and of that art, so far as I can see, our public life is almost totally de- ficient. We do not attend to it in our constitution, we do not discuss it on any intellectual level that commands respect, and yet there is no question more crucially important for the health of demo- cratic society.

We must, I think, get back quickly to the active realisation of our identity as a nation, the sig- nificance of which has been blurred by false educational policies and the mistaken belief that internationalism can be a substitute for national- ism. instead of a limited development of it. A nation can live without its history, yet the current ignorance and cheap rejection of our past is appalling. 'Without any stipulation on our part.' said Burke, 'we are bound to that relation called our country, which comprehends (as it has been well said) all the charities of all.' National feeling is the strongest bond of union that exists in the world today, and an old and experienced people, as we may call ourselves, can be trusted not to abuse it. Nothing else offers an associa- tion so satisfying in breadth and depth. sharing as it does tongue, culture, history, a political home, and a political order. It offers kinship, where others have no more than membership as an inducement. I have never forgotten an ex- change in Shaw's play Heartbreak House where Captain Shotover, on the sinking ship, asks Hector, 'Do you think the laws of God will be suspended in favour of England because you were born in it?' Hector says no, he doesn't want to be drowned like a rat in a trap. He has the will to live. But what is he to do? 'Nothing simpler,' says Captain Shotover, 'learn your busi- ness as an Englishman.' It turns out that his business is navigation. 'Learn it and live.' Navi- gation may sound rather a minor art by which a people is to survive. But is it? It is after all that which guides us when all exploration puts to sea, and it is that which in the end will bring us home.