"I am overwhelmed by a sense of the unfitness for life of all the participants in these sordid dramas: their main problem was that they had not the faintest idea how to live and yet - this is the hallmark of modernity - they were plentifully supplied with ego.
They had received no guidance from religion, naturally enough, since God is dead for them, and never has been very much alive. As for social convention, it has not so much been destroyed as turned inside out. The poor who once prided themselves on such things as respectability, cleanliness, honesty, orderliness and thrift, often in the most difficult circumstances, now pride themselves on their bohemianism. Disorder and chaos are a metonym for freedom and authenticity. But they are bohemians without being artistic, and the result is a squalor scarcely credible in times of supposed prosperity."
My only problem with his writing is that, while he may be good at the diagnosis, I don't recall him suggesting solutions.
Tony Blair, being of the Left (well, for certain purposes anyway) does believe in the "nanny State" solution, but it's hard to imagine this working. Mind you, I am not sure what the solution is myself, except that it seems that those on the Left inadvertently aggravate the problem by their emphasis on government being the solution to every social problem, rather than individual accepting more personal responsibility.
By the way, this leads me to get off my chest something that has bugged me for years. I want to defend Margaret Thatcher's famous line "there is no society, only individuals". I took it to mean that to always talk about things being good for society overall is typically an idealist's line, which can (at least in extreme socialism) result in toleration of all sorts of evil against individuals provided it has a good intention of being for the benefit of society overall. I think Thatcher's comment was directed towards emphasising the need to look at the effect of policy not on the overall benefit of the group, which can often be difficult to clearly ascertain anyway, but on individuals, on the assumption that you have happy individuals, you will have a happy society.
Of course, the Left took it to mean that she was emphasising individual greed over a 'common good', and her wording probably nnecessarily left that attack open. But I think she was just emphasising individual happiness, which is quite a different thing. She also presumably did not share the assumption of some on the Left that an individual succeeding always means there is someone else who is a loser.
On the whole issue of the problem of idealism and socialism, some recent posts over at Catallaxy by Andrew Norton have been very good on this, and my comments on Thatcher were brought to mind by his post here. I liked the comment by Rob on 10 January, and hope he doesn't mind my extracting it as a whole:
"The natural place for an idealist is on the left: if you believe the world is wicked, unjust and unfair, and is there for the making better of it, where else - with the decline of conventional Christian beliefs in the social and personal efficacy of of good works - would you go? The task of governments, in the eyes of the left, is to right social wrongs, and make the world a better place. A subtle, unacknowledged sub-text is that it makes the world a better place of the believers - often the urban, affluent middle class, especially that part supported by public moneys (although they usually nod in the direction of the workers).
That’s why, as some have pointed out above in the thread, they tended to think in terms of intentions, not outcomes. If socialist governments meant well, were idealistic - or gave the world a reasonable excuse for believing them to be so - the downstream results could be (largely) forgiven, or written off as unfortunate. This is also what sits behind the exculpatory view that socialism was a good idea but one that was imperfectly executed. All intelligently articulated ideas look good on paper. It’s what happens when they are put into practice that counts.
The reality is that you can’t make society fair, equitable or just by executive fiat. You have to wait for deeper processes thtn those amenable to government coercion to do the job. Amazingly (and quite against idealist expectations), it’s worked pretty well in the capitalist west - though one cannot discount the role of the left in civilising what would otherwise have been probably a much more savage process. You can’t make people better than they want to be, but, fortunately, most people seem to have a predeliction for decency, honesty and fairness - possibly because, as some of the theorists for capitalism argue, it is actually in their own interests to be so.
Socialism ‘in theory’ was an ideal. No wonder it attracted idealists. There is no better Australian example than Manning Clark. No fool, and not unaware of what the Soviets had done in recent decades, he still managed to hoodwink himself (in ‘Meeting Soviet Man’) into believing that a totalitarian police state offered more hope for a better world, and a better ‘man’, than the liberal democracy that generously fed and watered him."
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