Is there such a thing as society?
In Who is to choose which values?, we looked at the view that, because we may disagree on which values should be upheld, we had better leave the whole issue of values to the individual. Here, we look at the related issue of whether ‘society’ as a whole is something that, by its nature, needs to have collective values.
This is a crucial issue. Mrs Thatcher famously said (or is supposed to have said) “there is no such thing as society, only individuals”. If that is so, then a nation cannot be expected to have values, as a nation. The government, according to this view, ‘holds the ring’ and merely makes the rules that stop individuals hurting each another. Beyond that, it is up to individuals to decide how they will live; ‘society’ is morally neutral.
How we live
But we do not, in any regard, live that way. We say, for example, that it is wrong for anyone in our society to lack for medical attention merely because they cannot afford it. This is the principle behind the National Health Service. It is the application of a moral value – a statement about what kind of society we are and about the responsibility we say we have for one-another. It is a statement of communal morality. So is the Jobseeker’s Allowance – we believe we should be responsible for those unemployed through no fault of their own. But the principle that you have to be genuinely seeking a job in order to get it, is also an expression of our communal values. We don’t agree with ‘sponging’ or ‘free-loading’.
Now, crucially, these expressions of who we are as a nation came, not by accident, but by a process of debate and deliberation, out of which gradually emerged a consensus. The USA is only now coming to the view that health provision for the poor is a moral duty. Britain came to that view more than 60 years ago. In that 60-year period, these two nations have had different moral positions. But having a moral position of one kind or another has been unavoidable. Either we, as a community, are responsible for the poor or we are not. A value judgement is inescapable.
Are we obligated?
The same may apply to a nation’s foreign policy (was it right, even obligatory, for Britain to fight the Nazis, given what they were doing? Should we have intervened in the Rwanda genocide, or in the ethnic cleansing following the break-up of the old Yugoslavia – even though they could have precious little impact on our own ‘interests’? Should we have toppled Saddam? Were we right to help to topple Gadaffi? We cannot escape moral judgements, any more than prudential ones). Do we have an obligation to future generations, to save the environment from climate change now, while we can? Pure ‘enlightened self interest’ would be hard-pushed to justify that; and yet we seem to accept, as a nation, that there is an obligation to those not yet born.
Our contention, then, is that we cannot avoid having values as a nation. Indeed, the decision not to have them would be a value-laden decision. It would denote that we have chosen to be the kind of society that doesn’t care about the poor, or the vulnerable – which says ‘every man for himself’; and that is hardly value-neutral. It is a decision with vast moral implications.
A moral community
A nation is a sort of moral community (or an immoral one). We despised what the Nazis did (internal to their own country though much of it was) and we gave Pol Pot, and Mao and others the full weight of our moral censure. We did so because we have a sense of ‘justice’, which says that people should not be arrested or exterminated for political opposition, or on the basis of their race or religion. We would be less of a nation (much less) if we did not have such values; in precisely that way, we have become less of a nation as we have abandoned moral territory to the ‘anything goes’ culture that is enveloping us.
All for entertainment
Thus, we should have a view about horrendous violence shown on TV or in movies or video games, all for the sake of entertainment. We in fact have long held such a view about the ancient Romans, who entertained themselves with increasingly brutal spectacles. Is it merely that gladiators or slaves were being harmed that makes us critical of these spectacles – that has always made us regard the society that supported them as ‘sick’? Surely, it was not just what it did to the victims, but equally what it did to the observers – and what it represented in the observers – that we regard as depraved. Brutality is not good – it is bad; it should never be celebrated and the dark side within us that may respond to such orgies of nastiness should not be validated, let alone fanned into flame. That is the stuff of civilisation – that our nastier sides should be held within safe limits due to the tenor and character of our society, and that our better sides should be encouraged and developed.
And so it is that we can have one country, in which rape and murder and cruelty and dishonesty run riot (say, Rwanda during the troubles there, where law and order had broken down and all sorts of primeval instincts of cruelty and self-preservation had been released); or we can have a country which is orderly, kindly, considerate, ‘civilised’. And what is the difference between those two states? Is it human nature? Surely not. In our own society, at different times in our history, we have been typified by, say, brutality (think of the routine use of torture in Tudor times, or child labour in early Victorian times), but at other times not. It is the process of ‘civilisation’, versus the process of ‘disintegration’, which marks out a society that is becoming safer and nicer, from one that is becoming more threatening and darker. It is the gradual adoption of values that, as a nation, we come to apply to all – that certain forms of behaviour are not acceptable and others (such as kindness and consideration) are to be cherished – that makes a nation more and more civilised; it is the abdication of those values that makes our position increasingly unsafe.
Ducking out
We cannot afford to be ‘value-neutral’; we cannot afford to strip society of a character of moral responsiveness; we cannot afford ‘anything goes’, because the danger is that everything that we rely on will eventually go.
A nation is a moral personality. It cannot duck its obligation to have and express values in its communal life. But in many areas, we have been ducking exactly that obligation, because it has been easier to avoid the complexities and the disagreements than to face up to them and make some quality decisions.
On the way?
Of course, we have not disintegrated – yet. Why? We said in Can we go back? that imaging that values are a matter of personal choice is like saying that from now on the rules of football will be a matter for each individual player. We said that this would lead to a game that was both chaotic and unpleasant. But imagine now the process by which this actually happened. It would probably be gradual. A football club whose members had been playing together every week for years under the old rules would probably, the day the rules were made a matter of private judgment, play much the way they always had. Gradually, over weeks, fouls might get more blatant, more nasty. But the basic flow of play (passing, goal kicks, two halves of 45 minutes each, two teams of 11) would remain much the same – at first.
After a while, one team might try having 13 players. An argument would ensue! No rules? Have as many as you can get! Hand-balls would become more frequent. Finally, someone might even deny that the team with the most goals wins – why should your goal be more important than my beautiful dribbling of the ball in mid-field? And so on.
A fading tradition
The point is that the old values would apply for a long time after they were officially dropped. Only gradually would the tradition of the way the game had been played be upstaged by a growing assertiveness and willingness to ignore that tradition in the cause of success. It is somewhere on that path that we currently are as a nation, still held somewhat by a tradition of conduct, but increasingly becoming ‘free’ of it. That is why things are less disciplined, more fractious, more pointless even, but not entirely without shape or order. But the direction of change is clear.