Once a fortnight, the Oxfordshire vicar's wife and Telegraph agony aunt Anne Atkins presents the Today programme's "Thought for the Day." Almost invariably she helps her listeners to discover, if not their own moral deficiencies, then those of their neighbours and of the nation in general. The indices of decline are obesity, the target culture, abortion rates, consumerism and government interference. Learning used to be for the enjoyment of it; people used to be able to smack their children unhindered; sex was something sacred. The blame for our degenerating state, according to Atkins, rests with liberal relativism, secularism and the lost God. It's not an argument—or, rather, a pathology—that you can easily escape in these pessimistic times. I sometimes seem to hear about little else than the deficiencies of liberalism and the decline of the west since 11th September 2001.
On the evidence of his article in Prospect (September), Edward Skidelsky is the Anne Atkins of the senior common room. His summary of his own proposition was this Atkins-ish complaint: "The romantic ideal of self-development has collapsed into mere consumerism. Far from rising upwards, we are sinking slowly downwards."
So we are decadent, just as Atkins and Osama bin Laden say we are, and for Skidelsky too the culprits are liberalism and the loss of belief in something greater than ourselves. He reminds readers of John Stuart Mill's precept that people should be permitted to live as they choose providing they don't harm others, and observes that this principle is now dominant in the west, lying behind "the social legislation of the 1960s and the anti-discriminatory legislation of the past four decades." Then he asserts that, "In historical terms, it is an anomaly, a departure from the common sense of our species."
In historical terms, you could regard modern liberalism as a development, perhaps, out of an idea of individual conscience and individual communion with God, and thus having modern political roots in the Reformation. Such an analysis might only require a knowledge of western society in the last 500 years. But to claim to know what constitutes the common sense of homo sapiens throughout its 200 millennia of existence, is not so much to desire God, it seems to me, as to think one is God.
So what is Skidelsky's evidence for our slow sinking? The first is a degradation of "moral language." "The old idiom of the virtues ('honourable,' 'gentlemanly,' 'indecent') has been replaced by the neutralised jargon of the social services ('challenged,' 'vulnerable,' 'inappropriate,' 'disadvantaged')." Such moral words as do remain in use, says Skidelsky—he cites "evil," "perverted" and "racist"—are used so inexactly, or with such coercive intent, that they have lost their meaning. "We have become a nation of relativists on the one side and ranters on the other." And then Skidelsky continues, in what might be mistaken for a rant, about performance targets replacing moral behaviour, and how "their implacable logic denies hospital beds to the sick and swells academic journals with unreadable articles."
But Skidelsky's main example of liberal degeneracy concerns Big Brother, which, he argues, "illustrates the way in which the liberal focus on rights shuts off a whole dimension of moral thought and feeling. On some level we know that it is vile, yet we lack the authority and words to say so."
Skidelsky's point about targets, a commonplace prejudice among the professional classes, is untrue as a general proposition. Though not unproblematic, targets have helped many sick people get the operations that they needed. His other assertions reek of the post-port college discussion. Where, in common usage, have the words of moral approbation or approval been replaced by the language of social workers? The "neutralised jargon" Skidelsky so dislikes is commonly mocked, even in its more restricted application. Politicians know this, which is why you get them talking about "ordinary, decent, hard-working families." Think of the virtues enshrined in that phrase!
As to Big Brother, Skidelsky may be right to loathe it (I do too), but he seems to have no idea of its role in popular culture. As we saw in the Shilpa Shetty case, the programme becomes the focus for a million discussions about moral behaviour—about whether the way people treat each other and themselves is, in some way, "right." It sometimes seems to me that modern youngsters are in an unending, occasionally unendurable, discussion of how to behave and what we owe each other, as partners, spouses, friends and as a society. This has certainly replaced some of the advocacy of ideologies I remember, and seems to reflect a more morally aware society than the one I was born into half a century ago.
Of course, for many years such issues were—formally at any rate—decided by authority, and not subject to challenge. Today we do not wait upon the transcendent judgement of a clergyman, the party or even a philosophy don. Just as in consumer society, what has really changed is the ability of the masses to enjoy goods, travel and autonomy that were previously reserved to the philosophical classes. Isn't that what vulgarity really is? And isn't that really what Skidelsky objects to? The swinish multitude, the slaves who silently stoked the praefurnium while the nobility discussed virtue, are now in charge.
