This is the paradox which I am increasingly forced to consider. I started well – protesting at school against the massacre and exploitation of African workers in what was then a British colony; and campaigning against poor housing conditions. These were the late 1950s and 60s – when Penguin books were publishing their great series on “What’s Wrong with Britain?” lambasting British institutions as not fit for purpose.
But I then got stuck on what would, these days, be called class issues and was, for example, no great enthusiast for the campaign against “the glass ceiling” - which I saw as an issue for already privileged women….
Slowly,
however, a hitherto “deferential” society was changing and asserting itself.
The traditional authority of bodies such as the church, state, monarch and
elites was challenged – not least with the weapons of ridicule and satire. And, oddly,
one of the greatest challengers to that traditional respect and authority in
the 1980s was no less a figure than the Conservative Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher who launched an astonishing and sustained attack not only on the trade
unions but the legal and academic establishments…..Everything needed to change…to
be open to scrutiny – with the Freedom of Information (FoI) legislation being
enacted in the year 2000
What few of us saw at the time was the effects of this new critical spirit on social cohesion.
A new little industry has become that of plotting public trust in various profession and institutions. The results are worrying -
Since
the mid-1960s, public trust in government and political institutions has been
decreasing in all of the advanced industrialized democracies. Although the
pattern and the pace of the decrease are dissimilar across countries, the
downward trend is ubiquitous. Except for the Netherlands, which actually shows
increased trust in the government from the 1970s until the mid-1990s, all of
the other advanced industrialized democracies recorded a decline in the level
of trust their respective governments have enjoyed. Austrians pointed to the
collapse of collectivist consensus as the main culprit of declining trust in
government. Canadians blamed the continuing tensions on nationalism and
separatism in the country. Germans attributed their malaise to the strains of
unification, while the Japanese condemned the consecutive political scandals
and the long economic recession of the 1990s.
Even
the Swedes and the Norwegians, generally associated with high degree of trust
in politics, became distrustful of their political institutions in the 1990s….
Open and critical inquiry is the mark of a civilized nation…..is it not? Who can possibly gainsay that?
It’s
surely only old fuddy-duddies who could argue otherwise? People like David Brooks
– whose book “The Road to Character” I looked at not so long ago – just after
I had
been deeply impressed by another small book called On
Thinking Institutionally by Hugh Heclo (2008)
Pages 18-20 of Heclo’s book is a timeline which explains the development of political distrust in the USA
In the last 60 years our education system has
designated institutions as, at best, annoying encumbrances and, at worst,
oppressive tools of the past. Students are taught to believe what they like and
express themselves as they see fit.
Even people understood to be conservatives—at least in
the way we conceptualize political ideology today—assail institutions. Free
market economics places a premium on self-interest and assumes institutions stifle
innovation and entrepreneurship.
But institutions provide reference points in an uncertain world. They tie
us to the past and present; furnish personal assistance; and institutionalize
trust. They give our lives purpose and, therefore, the kind of self-satisfaction
that only the wholesale rejection of them is supposed to provide.
How, then, do we protect
and promote them? I must confess that, much as I wanted to understand his
arguments, I found it difficult to summarise them clearly. He clearly wants to
move our focus away from the self and towards a recognition of our debts and
obligations to others. To “think institutionally” is to do something
much more than provide individuals with incentives to be part of and promote
institutions - it rather calls on them to modify their behaviour. Heclo argues that acting
institutionally has three components.
- The first, "profession," involves
learning and respecting a body of knowledge and aspiring to a particular level
of conduct.
- The second, "office," is a sense of
duty that compels an individual to accomplish considerably more for the
institution than a minimal check-list of tasks enumerated within a kind of job
description.
- Finally, there is "stewardship." Here
Heclo is getting at the notion of fiduciary responsibility. The individual
essentially takes the decisions of past members on trust, acts in the interests
of present and future members, and stands accountable for his actions.
I have some sympathy for this line of argument – against “the quick buck”…. instant gratification….. tomorrow’s headlines…..we need cultures which respect partnership, timescales for investment and the idea of “stewardship” which Robert Greenleaf tried, unsuccessfully, to cultivate…..The quotation, indeed, which graces the first page of my Dispatches to the post-capitalist generation is from Dwight Eisenhower’s last address in 1960
We . . . must avoid the impulse to live only for
today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of
tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without
risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want
democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent
phantom of tomorrow.
Heclo’s book, I concede, is in the tradition of Edmund Burke and Michael Oakeshott and tended to attract the attention of clerics and university administrators – some of whom produced this interesting symposium
The trouble, however, is that “possessive individualism” has such a grip on us all that these arguments no longer seem to have any traction. Although I’ve just noticed that another conservative has just published a book which tries to build on Heclo’s much-neglected book - “A Time to Build” Yuval Levin (2020)
