Human Rights:

Nonsense On Stilts?
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Saudi Arabia, China and Vietnam have been

appointed to the United Nations Council on
Human Rights. All three countries forbid free
speech and harshly punish criticism of the regime.
None respects religious freedom or freedom of
conscience. None has a transparent system of law,
and to put it mildly none has an immigration
problem. So what does this tell us about the idea
of human rights?
During the 17th century England was torn apart by
civil war. This war came to an end in the Glorious
Revolution of 1688, when James II was expelled
from the country and William of Orange welcomed
in his stead. At one level this represented the
popular desire for a Protestant rather than a
Roman Catholic dynasty on the throne. At another
level it meant the final victory of a centuries-long
struggle for a form of government that would see
individual freedom rather than collective
submission as its goal.
Henceforth individuals were to enjoy freedoms
that protected them, their property and their way
of life from arbitrary invasion, be it from their
neighbours or from the officers of the crown. Such
was affirmed next year in the 1689 Bill of Rights,
which guaranteed freedom from arbitrary arrest
and imprisonment, the protection of free speech in
Parliament, and the abolition of the Royal
prerogative to appoint judges or to act as judge.

The overall effect was to make the monarch as

much subject to the law as the ordinary citizen.
The Bill of Rights was regarded, at the time, as
reaffirming the ancient liberties of the English
people, embodied in the centuries-long
jurisdiction of the common-law courts. It was a
weapon in the hand of the individual, against all
those who sought to control him, whatever their
power and whatever the interests that they
represented. The philosopher John Locke, in
his Second Treatise on Civil Government,
published in the following year, put the point
rather differently: human beings, he argued, have
natural rights, and these cannot legitimately be
taken away or qualified. The right to proceed
about ones business without threat to life, limb
and property was, he regarded, sanctified by the
English law because sanctified by Reason, and
therefore by God.
It was no easy matter to define what these natural
rights amount to, and when Lockes arguments
were taken up in the American Declaration of
Independence, and subsequently in the
Constitutional Bill of Rights, rather more
provisions were included than would have
occurred to a philosopher writing at the end of the
English civil war.
Nevertheless, the basic thought remained the
same, and was at the root of all those claims for
human rights that carried conviction in the wake
of theEnlightenment. There are rights that we do
not obtain from the government but which belong
to us as human beings, rather than as citizens.
These rights arefreedoms. They guarantee that we
can take charge of what most concerns us, express
our opinions freely, and proceed about our
business without threat from those in power.

There is another of putting this point: human

rights protect the sovereignty of
individuals against whoever might wish to
enslave, silence or confine them.
Subsequent philosophers justified human rights
by other arguments than those used by Locke
Kant argued one way, Hegel another, John Stuart
Mill another. But the shared assumption was that
rights are liberties. They are there to protect the
individual against oppression, and especially
oppression wielded by the clergy, the sovereign or
the state. Their existence is fundamental to
anything that we could call government by
consent, and they capture the essence of the
political process as we, in the West, have since
conceived it namely as a device for protecting
the individual against the group. True, Jeremy
Bentham dismissed the idea of natural rights as
nonsense upon stilts. But we can perhaps agree
with what he meant, which is that, however rights
are defined, it needs a government to enforce
them.

English: Eleanor Roosevelt and United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Spanish text.
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When Eleanor Roosevelt and her advisers framed

the United Nations Universal Declaration of
Human Rightsin 1945, they were seeking an
impartial standpoint from which the various
regimes and legal systems could be judged. The
UN Declaration was to lay down a universal
standard, which would be acceptable to everyone
since it was founded in human nature alone. And
the Declaration begins with a list of freedoms, in
the manner of its predecessors, emphasizing that
rights are limits to the power of the state and
guarantees offered to each of us that we can be
both governed and free.

By article 22, however, the emphasis has changed

from freedoms to claims, and among the rights
supposedly guaranteed by the Charter are radical
claims against the State claims that can be
satisfied only by positive action from government.
Here is article 22:
Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to
social security and is entitled to realization, through
national effort and international co-operation and in
accordance with the organization and resources of
each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights
indispensable for his dignity and the free
development of his personality.

Contained within this right is an unspecified list of

other rights called economic, social and cultural,
which are held to be indispensable not for freedom
but for dignity and the free development of
personality. Whatever this means in practice, it is
quite clear that such alleged rights can be
guaranteed not by limiting the power of the state
but by increasing it, and also by empowering the
state to take as much of the property of its citizens
as would be necessary to guarantee the dignity of
those who need a slice of it. The agenda has
shifted from liberalism to socialism, without any
indication of why or how.
Maybe this would not in itself be harmful. But
subsequent uses of the concept must surely lead us
to wonder where it is leading us. Take the
European Convention of Human Rights, which
was also adopted after the Second World War.
This too begins from the traditional freedoms. And
this too quickly wanders off into the realm of wish
fulfillment. It is now applied by an activist court
(the European Court of Human Rights) which
aims to upset any piece of legislation that might

have got up the nose of its far from impartial, and

in any case highly politicized, judges. For example,
the right to a family life declared by the European
Convention has been used to prevent the
deportation of a convicted (and dangerous)
criminals; the right to the traditional life style of
ones ethnic community, declared by the ECHR,
has been used to install a park of mobile homes in
defiance of planning law, so destroying property
values all around; the right to non-discrimination
on grounds of sexual orientation has been used to
force an old-fashioned Christian couple who live
by taking in lodgers to close down their business.
Bankers have even claimed their
outrageous bonuses as a human right.

All those claims can of course be argued. No doubt

there are reasons in favor as well as reasons
against. But they all suggest that the human rights
idea has been cast loose from its philosophical
moorings, and that it can be applied by lawyers
and legislators to turn any grievance into an
enforceable claim without reference to the wider
issues of public interest. (Rights, remember,
belong to individuals, and can therefore be
wielded against the state, regardless of the
interests that conflict with them.) The concept that
was introduced in order to guarantee individual
freedom is now being used to constrain it. In the
name of human rights activist courts are enforcing
orthodoxies that could never be imposed on us by
an elected legislature.
But that brings me back to the United Nations
Human Rights Council. The Saudis have already
complained that Norway violates the human rights
of Muslims by permitting hate speech against

them in other words by refraining from silencing

open criticism of the Koran. This from a country in
which Christians are forced to conceal their faith,
in which apostates are whipped or executed, in
which women are maintained in a state of
domestic subjection, and in which those brave
enough to criticize either the regime or its
fanatical clergy are either dead or in jail. The
Saudis are calling for all criticism of religion and
the Prophet Muhammad to be made illegal in
Norway. And to illustrate their impartiality they
accuse Norway of increasing cases of domestic
violence, rape crimes and inequality in riches
failing to mention that a disproportionate
numbers of those rape crimes have been
committed by immigrant Muslims.

Human Rights Council Discusses Human Rights Situation in Syria June 27, 2012 (Photo credit: US
Mission Geneva)

The freedoms granted to the Muslim faith in

Norway are not granted to any faith other than
Sunni Islam in Saudi Arabia. Nevertheless, it
seems, Muslims have a human right to be
protected from the criticisms which their religion
naturally invites. Clearly, whatever human rights
are about, in the mind of the Saudi government, it
is not the freedom of the individual. The doctrine
of human rights, which was introduced to
guarantee our freedom, is now being used to

remove it. Religious fanatics and Leftist utopians

have combined to subvert the only weapon that
has until now been effective against them: the only
weapon that could be used by the dissenting
individual, but not by those who wished to silence
him.
What is the solution? More philosophy or less? An
attempt to return to the root idea of rights as
freedoms, or a rejection of the whole idea as a
costly mistake? Take your pick.

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We Depend On The Christians Of The Middle

East
On February 24th of this year, a group of Egyptian workers in
Libya was rounded up by an Islamist gang. It is normal for
Egyptian Copts to bear witness to their faith, with a cross
tattooed on their wrist. (Image of coptic cross on wrist) Those
workers who were tattooed with a cross were taken apart and
shot. Nobody has been brought to justice for this crime. The
Egyptian government has lodged no complaint, and the Libyan
government (if that is not too polite a description) has made no
comment. For many people living in the Middle East, crimes
against Christians are what we must now expect.
When, in the first flush of enthusiasm for the Arab Spring, our
politicians welcomed the move towards democracy, it became
rapidly clear that they had no understanding either of Islamic
law, or of the kinds of government that have been erected on the
back of it. The shariah the Holy Law that has been extracted
down the centuries from the Koran and the traditions of the
Prophet is a law for the government of Muslims. It offers
protection to people of the Book (i.e. Christians and Jews), but
not an equal status before the law. And it is based on a strictly

religious code of conduct, enforced by penalties that even its

staunchest defenders are on the whole embarrassed to advocate.
The first result of the Arab Spring was to encourage the Muslim
clergy to call for the imposition of the shariah, in place of the
various systems of secular law inherited from British and
French colonial administrations, and from the Ottoman
reformers in the 19thcentury. The Moslem Brotherhood,
founded by Hassan al-Banna in 1928, has made no bones about
this aim. And its most influential leader, Sayyid Qutb,
denounced the whole idea of the secular state as a kind of
blasphemy, an attempt to usurp the will of God by passing laws
that have a merely human authority. All valid law, for Qutb,
issues from the mind of God, through his principal messenger,
Muhammad.
Qutb was executed by President Nasser, who came to power in a
military coup. And ever since then the Moslem Brotherhood and
the Army have played against each other. Thus we should not be
surprised that the posters recently waved by Morsis supporters
do not advocate democracy or human rights. They say All of us
are with the shariah. The army says: no, only some of us are.
And the ten per cent of Egyptians who are Christians the
Copts agree with the army.
The original schools of Islamic jurisprudence, which arose in
the wake of the Prophets reign in Medina, permitted jurists to
adapt the law to the changing needs of society, by a process of
reflection known as ijtihd, or effort. But this seems to have
been brought to an end during the eighth century of our era,
when it was maintained by the then dominant theological
school that all important matters had been settled and that the
gate of ijtihd is closed. Hence today, when the clerics take
over, law is referred back to precepts designed for the
government of a long since vanished community.
Jurists have great difficulty in adapting such a law to the life of
modern people. Moreover, precisely because the shariah has
not adapted, nobody really knows what it says. Does it tell us to
stone adulterers to death? Some say yes, some say no. Does it

tell us that investing money at interest is in every case

forbidden? Some say yes, some say no. When God makes the
laws, the laws become as mysterious as God is. When we make
the laws, and make them for our purposes, we can be certain
what they mean. The only question then is who are we? What
way of defining ourselves reconciles democratic elections with
real opposition and individual rights? That, to my mind, is the
most important question facing the West today. And it is a
question to which the Islamists give the wrong answer the
answer that sets them in conflict with the modern world.
It is for this reason that the fate of the Middle Eastern
Christians is of such importance to us in the West. We have
learned that, when we legislate for the whole community, we
must put religion to one side. We do this because we are heirs to
the Christian idea of secular government, enshrined in Christs
commandment to render unto Caesar what is Caesars and to
God what is Gods, in other words to privatize religion and to
live by a man-made rule of law.
In the Middle East the Christian communities have remained
loyal to that ideal. When the states of Lebanon and Syria were
carved out of the ruined Ottoman Empire Empire at the end of
the First World War they contained large numbers of
Christians in Lebanon probably a majority. But in both cases
the Christians advocated national and secular government, with
a division of offices between the various sects. The shiites
accepted this at the time, since having been judged heretical
by the Ottomans and therefore outside the law they were
happy to live under a secular jurisdiction and to share it with
their Druze and Christian neighbours.
Since then the social equilibrium of the Levant has been
undermined, first by the totalitarian methods of the Baath
Party under the Assad family in Syria and Saddam Hussein in
Iraq, and secondly by Hezbollah, the Iranian backed shiite force
that has effectively destroyed the Lebanese constitution. When
law and order break down Christians, who have done most to
uphold the idea of secular government, are the first to pay the
price. Nowhere in the Middle East are they granted equal rights

or true protection by the Islamist factions and even in Egypt,

where the army, to its credit, is advocating equality before the
law, the Copts find themselves constantly under attack, their
churches torched, their children kidnapped, and their property
destroyed.
We in the West must not turn our back on these Christian
communities, since their fate, in the long run, is our fate. Only if
Islam is compelled to respect the rights and freedoms of the
Christians on its doorstep will it learn to respect the rights and
freedoms of the rest of us. If it does not acquire this habit of
respect it will continue to chafe against the modern world,
endorsing acts of terrorism like the bombing of the Boston
Marathon or the horrific murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby in a
London street.
How then should we respond to the persecution of the Middle
Eastern Christians? We must surely make a point of
withdrawing recognition from regimes that offer no protection
to their Christian minorities and that includes Saudi Arabia
and several of the Gulf States, as well as Libya. It is surely
unacceptable that Muslims settle in the West and demand the
right to practice their religion, to proselytise on behalf of it, to
build mosques and madrasahs, and in every way to take
advantage of the religious freedoms that our society upholds,
while forbidding Christians who live in their country to do the
same. Likewise we should be demanding of the Egyptian
government that it openly accept that a large number of
Egyptians are Christians, and that they are citizens of equal
standing to their Muslim neighbours.

Ruins of the Great Basilica at Abu Mena (II) (Photo credit:

isawnyu)
We should remember that, on the whole, Christians and
Muslims have lived side-by-side in Syria and the neighbouring
Lebanon. The fragmentation of those countries along

confessional lines is not the least of the many tragic outcomes of

the successive civil wars, the latest precipitated by the Arab
Spring. In any final settlement we must insist on religious
freedom and secular law as the sine qua non of Western
support. If we give up on religious freedom we shall be sending
to the Islamists a message that is ultimately dangerous to
ourselves. We shall be telling them that our freedoms matter
less to us than peace, at whatever price they might one day be
able to dictate to us.
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The New Politics Of Climate Change: No

Space For Deniers
In a report published last week in London, Andrew Miller, the
Labour Member of Parliament who chairs the House of
Commons Science and Technology Committee,urged the BBC
and other media to stop giving time and space to climate
change deniers, and to accompany any appearance of them
with a health warning denouncing their views. What the deniers
are peddling, Miller argues, is not science but politics, and the
public should be informed that their views are rejected by 97%
of scientists. Just where the figure of 97% came from Miller
does not say; but he is adamant that all government ministers
should acquaint themselves with the science of climate change,
and be prepared to speak with one voice, accepting collective
responsibility for the official opinion, which will be his opinion
and the opinion of his committee.
The invocation of collective responsibility is revealing. For this
implies that the orthodoxy Miller adheres to is, after
all, not simply a matter of science, but a party line that must be
supported for the sake of policy. If it is the science that concerns
us, then dissenting voices must surely be part of the data, and
not dismissed out of hand on the authority of the 97%. No
doubt, at the time when Galileo stood before the Inquisition,

97% of scientists were prepared to assert that the sun goes

round the earth. Luckily for Galileo, his humiliations were not
crowned by an appearance on the BBC with a health warning
strung round his neck.
What most struck me in Andrew Millers words, quoted in The
Times was his insistence that all ministers should acquaint
themselves with the climate change science. As someone who, in
a modest way, has tried to do this, all I can say is that the
attempt will not leave much time for the business of
government. In the course of writing Green Philosophy: How to
Think Seriously about the Planet (Oxford University Press,
2011) I studied the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) reports and the literature that has grown around them,
much of it supportive, much of it also critical. I concluded that
climate change science is not one thing, but the amalgamation
of many disciplines and that its predictions, such as they are,
depend at every point on disputed models rather than
established theories. The greenhouse effect has been known for
over a century and a half, and implies that, other things being
equal, the accelerating production of carbon dioxide will cause
the earth to warm. But will other things be equal? That is where
the disagreements begin. There is geological and fossil evidence
of major and rapid fluctuations in temperature, prior to the
relatively stable Holocene period in which we are living, and the
causes remain uncertain. Greenhouse gas emissions are only
one factor in altering the balance of incoming and outgoing
radiation on which the earths temperature depends. And
among other relevant factors there are some for which the
science is incomplete or in its infancy such as the fluctuations
in solar energy, which probably had much to do with those brief
but devastating ice ages in the recorded history of Europe. In
these circumstances, for a politician to insist on collective
responsibility for a particular view of our planets future, and to
describe that orthodoxy as science, is an affront to human
intelligence. It is also a reminder of those previous attempts to
mask ideological censorship as scientific proof, inspired by the
scientific socialism of Marx.

The Inquisitors who threatened Galileo had a point. After all,

they were guardians of a volatile community of religious
believers, whose happiness depended on their faith. They could
not treat the prevailing orthodoxy lightly when (as they
thought) the moral order depended on it, and all would-be
challenges had to be scrutinized not only for their scientific
basis but also for their social impact. I dont think Mr Miller is
in the same position. For although there is an undeniable
religious streak to environmental activism, it is not shared by
the majority of people, most of whom live by other orthodoxies
than those that Miller wishes to protect from the heretics.
When it comes to the big issues of the day it is tempting to try to
silence those who disagree with you and who complicate a
question that you wanted to see as obvious and simple. And the
easiest way to silence someone is to portray him as some kind of
lunatic or extremist, a person outside the consensus of
reasonable opinion, and beyond the pale of rational argument.
But the true extremist is the one who argues in that way, and
who cannot entertain an opinion without wanting to protect it
at all costs from those who disagree with it.
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The Wrong Way To Treat President Putin

With characteristic blindness to its real situation the European
Union has responded to the seizure of Crimea by imposing
sanctions on the Russian hierarchy. The mafia bosses who
surround and depend upon President Putin are no longer to be
allowed to travel to their villas in Tuscany or to draw on their
extensive European bank accounts. Heart-broken mistresses in
luxury hotels will go unvisited for months on end, unless they
invite one of the Eurocrats from the restaurant downstairs.
Mansions in Mayfair will remain shuttered until the stucco
begins to crumble, and struggling football teams and racehorses will look in vain for a purchaser. That this will make the

faintest difference to Russias expansionist foreign policy is an

illusion of staggering naivety. More important, however, is the
deep ignorance of history that this measure reveals.
For let us look back to the collapse of the Soviet Union in the
time of the wily Mr Gorbachev. Why was it that, all of a sudden
and with no real forewarning, the Soviet elite relinquished the
reigns of power and quietly backed away from government? The
answer is simple: because it was in their interest to do so.
Thanks to President Reagans strategy and the North Atlantic
Alliance, it had become apparent that it would not be possible to
seize the assets that lay to the West of the
Soviet Empire Empire by force. But it had also become apparent
that force was no longer necessary. Over a period of seventy
years the Soviet Union had built up a system of espionage and
underground banking that essentially conferred on the KGB
elite more or less complete freedom of movement on the
continent of Europe and a secure system of private finance.
Already in 1989 the high ranking officers who took the leading
decisions owned property in the West and had transferred their
share of the assets stolen over decades from the Russian people
to their Swiss bank accounts.
They then perceived that the process could be completed at no
extra cost. By privatising the Soviet economy to themselves, and
adopting a mask of democratic government, the elite backed out
of communism into the world of the glitterati. They were now
free citizens of the world, able to travel, to own property, to
draw on their stolen billions and play with their own private
football teams. How stupid they had been all those years, to go
along with the legacy of communist paranoia, and to believe
that their role as alpha-males depended on threatening,
invading, subverting and tormenting, when the whole thing
could be achieved by being nice!
So what happened? With a few leads from Gorbachev the KGB
got the message. Privatise your own little bit of the Soviet
economy, and if necessary imprison your competitors for tax
evasion. Draw a life-long salary from your share of the stolen
assets. Secure your mansion in London, your account in
Switzerland and your yacht in the Mediterranean, and pose as a
businessman, with interests in gas and oil. Pursue a career of

social climbing and erotic adventure in the West, and leave the
old monotowns of Russia to crumble to dust.
Of course it was an unseemly spectacle, though not so unseemly
that the German elite were repelled by it. On the contrary, by
inviting Gerhard Schroeder onto the board
ofGazprom Gazprom Putin made the German social democrats
part of the game. All across Europe the KGB elite has been able
to call upon favours received, and to buy its way into a society
already rotten with underhand dealing. And the result,
disgusting though it undeniably is, does not compare
unfavourably with the previous situation, in which the same
elite retained power by oppressing the Russian people,
imprisoning Eastern Europe and stirring violent conflict all
across the world.
So what will be the effect of the proposed sanctions? Note that
they target individuals, not the Russian state. They are expressly
designed to imprison the Russian oligarchs once again in the
country that they ruined, and from which they escaped with
flatulent sighs of relief a quarter of a century ago. That would be
a viable strategy if the European Union had the military means
to contain the oligarchs behind the Russian border. That was
the strategy of President Reagan, which was abandoned by
Obama when he decided not to proceed with the missile defence
system that had been proposed for Eastern Europe, and which
in any case has never had the whole-hearted endorsement of
either France or Germany.
So we are back where we started: a powerful menagerie of
snarling alpha-males, confined behind bars that will give way at
the first determined shake of them. And it is only a matter of
time before the shaking will begin. Peace between Russia and
the West was secured when the self-interest of the Russian
oligarchs required it. But it is no longer so clear that peace is in
their interest: and to assume that they will respect the interests
of anyone else is to show an amazing disregard for their recent
history.
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A Triumph For The Boston Bombers

The two bombers who killed and maimed innocent people at
the Boston marathon a year ago had come as refugees to
America, from conflicts that America and her people did
nothing to cause. They had been granted the privileges of a lawabiding democracy, including education, health care and the
precious freedoms for which Americans have fought in two
world wars. Their situation was incomparably better than it
would have been, had they stayed behind in Chechnya. Among
the many privileges that they enjoyed religious freedom was by
no means the least important. They were able to attend their
local mosque, to take part in its services and activities and to
absorb whatever lessons it had to impart, without fear of
persecution from their Christian, Jewish, Hindu or atheist
neighbours.
Of course, not everything in America is perfect, and even the
recipient of American hospitality might have cause to complain
of its more chilling side-effects. He might be repelled by aspects
of the consumer culture that offend the moral and religious
norms of his community. He might balk at the severity of a
social discipline which treats him merely as the equal of his
neighbour and which constantly challenges his high opinion of
himself. But he will know that at every point he can count on the
charitable instinct of the American people to offer help and
support that was seldom available in the place from which he
came. Why else, after all, did he come?
Something happened, however, to turn these two brothers
against the gentle society that surrounded them. We
dont know what it was; but we have a very good suspicion. And
the object of that suspicion is Islam. Because we live in a
tolerant society, which believes in equality before the law and
the right of each individual to a faith of his own, we dont allow
ourselves to criticise Islam, but only to take issue with what we
take to be the abuse of it. Our politicians and commentators
lean over backwards to distinguish the Islam of ordinary
Muslims from the extremism of the radicals, and no doubt they

are right to do so, for this too is part of hospitality. Moreover it

is inconceivable to me that my friends who practise the Muslim
faith should turn on their law-abiding neighbours and destroy
them in the name of Allah.
Nevertheless, we cannot simply disregard the evidence, that
there are Muslims among us who interpret their religion in
another way. The liberal mind-set, which blames their crimes
on Islamophobia, as though we, who threatened no one, were
to blame for the attacks on us, shows a wilful disregard of the
truth, and a crazy inversion of cause and effect. No doubt we
should be careful not to be provoked. And the peaceful
ceremonies with which the people of Boston have marked the
anniversary of the bombings show that they have not been
provoked, and that they continue to live in the open and
charitable way for which the bombers chose, for reasons of their
own, to punish them. But lets face it, planted in the heart of
Islam is the worm of contempt for the infidel, and this worm
can lodge in the brains of otherwise reasonable people and gnaw
away at their conscience until no conscience remains. If we do
not acknowledge this, then we do an injustice not only to
ourselves, but also to those Islamic thinkers, from Ibn Rushd in
medieval Andalusia to Muhammad Ali Jinnah in modern
Pakistan, who have worked to reconcile the absolutism of the
Koran with the demands of civil society.
It is in order to emphasize this that Ayaan Hirsi Ali has put her
life on the line. Coming to Holland as a refugee from Somalia
she set out to remind us of our incredible good luck. She told us
that we in the West are heirs to the Enlightenment, which
teaches that all people are equal, that women are not the
property of men, that we can resolve our conflicts without
violence and by means of a secular and man-made law, that we
can live without obeying the arbitrary commands of selfappointed men of God, and in obedience to the conscience that
all rational beings share. She herself was the victim of the
oppressive attitude to women that is still, today, the norm in so
many Islamic societies. She suffered genital mutilation as a
child and was forced to flee from an arranged marriage. But she
took it on herself to explain what that kind of oppression means,

and to appeal on behalf of the many women who are not

allowed to enjoy the freedoms in search of which she made the
long and difficult journey to the Netherlands.
She studied philosophy, and learned to tell her story in lucid
Dutch. And because she told her story she became the target of
people whose brains had been eaten away by the worm of
religious anger, and who have self-righteously condemned her
to death. Elected as a member of the Dutch Parliament, she
continued, at risk to her life, to speak out on behalf of Western
civilisation and its freedoms, against the tyranny from which
she had escaped. Deprived of her citizenship by a Dutch
government frightened of the truths that she put before it, she
came to America, here to continue her work, death-threats
notwithstanding, on behalf of our civilisation.
I am not in favour of the growing habit among universities of
awarding honorary degrees to politicians, CEOs and celebrities,
merely in order to gain status for themselves or to illustrate
their political correctness. An honorary degree ought to reflect
the recipients achievements in the intellectual sphere, when
these achievements are either great in themselves, or an
expression of a life informed by public spirit and lived on behalf
of the rest of us. It gave me great pleasure, therefore, when
Ayaan Hirsi Ali was awarded an honorary doctorate by Brandeis
University to be conferred precisely now, at the first
anniversary of the Boston bombings. What better way to show
that we stand for something, that we believe in ourselves and
the people who are prepared to make sacrifices on our behalf?
The intellectual life as we know it and as our universities are
obliged to endorse it, is a life in freedom, in which the dissenter
is protected against every orthodoxy that would seek to
suppress him. To honour Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose battle on
behalf of intellectual freedom has awoken so many of us to its
value, is to show, as all universities should show, a commitment
to the true life of the mind.
The award was all the more gratifying in
that Brandeis university, founded in 1948, and named in
honour of Louis Brandeis (1856-1941), the first Jewish Justice

of the US Supreme Court, has made a point of offering a nonsectarian education under the sponsorship of the local Jewish
community. It is a valued and civilising presence in the Boston
area and in the intellectual life of Massachusetts. The award of
this degree at this critical and anxious time made a clear
statement, on behalf of the values that Ayaan Hirsi Ali has
defended in her distinguished and beautifully written books.
What better way of expressing our solidarity with the victims of
the Boston bombing?
Inevitably, of course, the Council on American-Islamic
Relations (CAIR) protested. Hadnt a death sentence been
passed on this troublesome woman? Wasnt she guilty as an
apostate, and hadnt she spoken out against the society that
created her and to which her allegiance was owed? Wasnt all
this stuff about the rights of women really Islamophobia?
Knowing the sanctimonious clap-trap with which CAIR masks
its contempt for the American idea of freedom, I was not
surprised by this. But when I learned that 85 of the 350
members of the faculty at Brandeis had, in response, signed a
petition calling for the award to be rescinded, on the grounds
that Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a purveyor of hate speech, and that her
presence would make Muslim students uncomfortable, I
recognized the real problem that we now confront, which is not
Islam, but the liberal mind-set.
We are embroiled in an existential conflict, for which innocent
people in the West are paying with their lives. Liberals tell us
that we are to blame for this conflict and not those who attack
us. When someone flees to the West, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali did, in
order to say not so, it is they who are to blame, instead of
welcoming her many among us wish to turn her away. For her
message is a threat to our complacency. No one could possibly
want to attack us, the liberals insist, since we are so obviously
nice at least, the liberals among us. Our enemies are not those
who threaten Western civilisation, but those who defend it,
since their words are a provocation and their presence an
affront. Thus is blame redirected from the aggressor to the
victim, and the duty to defend our inheritance turned into a
duty to reject it.

To my chagrin Brandeis University caved in to this petition, and

the offer of an honorary degree has been rescinded. This great
university, created by American Jews in order to pass on the
values of Western civilisation, has chosen instead to betray
them.
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Is Europe Still Defensible From Invasion?

Events in Ukraine and the expansionist policies of President
Putin naturally raise questions about the defense of Europe.
Whatever Russian aims might be, there is no doubt that a
heavily armed country with dwindling economic assets poses a
threat, however theoretical, to an affluent neighbor with only
tenuous means of defense. In the days of the cold war, when
President Reagan took the North Atlantic Alliance (NATO)
seriously, an effort was made to counter the military might of
the Soviet Union, and to impress on the Soviet leaders that any
attempt to annexe the countries to the West of them would lead
to the destruction of their empire. The strategy worked, and
eventually it became clear to the KGB that it would be easier to
give up the struggle, transfer assets to Switzerland, buy a house
in London and create a fake democracy back home.
NATOs strategy worked because it was believable. It was clear
to the Soviet elite that President Reagan really did intend to
introduce defenses that would make the Soviet missiles
ineffective. It was clear that America was not only the backbone
of the Western alliance, but also entirely committed to its ruling
doctrine, that an attack on one member is an attack on all.
The Falklands war delivered a shock to the KGB, which had
planned on the assumption that the Western powers would
relinquish territory rather than embark on so costly a defense of
it. Nor was this assumption absurd. Officer Putin and his fellow
spies were well connected with the Western European left, and
knew how hostile the European socialist parties were to the

strategy of deterrence. The British Labour Party was committed

at the time to nuclear disarmament(CND), the German Social
Democrats were half-hearted members of NATO at best, the
Scandinavian socialists were more or less neutral and the
French, whether right or left, pursued an independent strategy
whose only clear meaning was that they didnt take orders from
America.
Since that time the Atlantic Alliance has become radically less
credible. Three factors are principally responsible for this. The
first is the growth of the European Union, and its policy of
dissolving national borders. The EU has set out to delegitimize
the nation state, to make it irrelevant to the citizens of the
Union whether they be French, British, Polish or Italian, and to
abolish the national customs and beliefs that make long-term
patriotic loyalty seriously believable. The EUs attempt to
replace national with European identity has, however failed,
and is widely regarded with ridicule. Moreover the EUs
inability to think coherently about defense, and its policy of soft
power which makes defense in any case more or less
inconceivable, means that the motive which leads ordinary
people to defend their country in its time of need has been
substantially weakened. Patriotism is seen as a heresy, second
only to fascism on the list of political sins, and the idea that the
people of Europe might be called upon to defend their borders
looks increasingly absurd in the light of the official doctrine that
there are no borders anyway.
The second reason for European weakness is connected. I refer
to the guarantee, under the European Treaties, of the right to
work and settle in any part of the Union. This has led to a
massive migration from the former communist countries to the
West. The people who migrate are the skilled, the
entrepreneurial, the educated in short, the elite on whom the
resolution and identity of a country most directly depends. Very
soon countries like Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Romania, all
of which are directly threatened by a militant Russia, will be
without a committed and resident class of leaders. No doubt,
should the tanks start to roll, the migr populations of those
countries will protest. But will they return home to fight a

pointless war, leaving their newly-won security and prosperity

behind? I doubt it.
The third factor tending to the indefensibility of Europe is the
dwindling American commitment to the Western alliance.
President G.W. Bush was prescient enough to revive the idea
of anti-missile defenses in Eastern Europe, and the military in
both Poland and the Czech Republic were prepared to go along
with it. Putin displayed his KGB training immediately, by
declaring that these purely defensive installations would be an
act of aggression. All the old Newspeak was trotted out in the
effort to influence the incoming administration of President
Obama against his predecessors policy. And the effort was
successful. Obama weakly conceded the point, and the antimissile defenses were not installed. Since then the Obama
administration has continued to divert resources and attention
elsewhere, creating the distinct impression in Europe that
America is no longer wholeheartedly committed to its defense.
Nor can the Americans be blamed for this. Is it not somewhat
absurd that the USA should still be maintaining troops in
Germany, at great expense to the American taxpayer, 70 years
after the end of the Second World War? Is it really acceptable, at
a time when America has 60,000 troops stationed in Europe,
that the Netherlands has committed only 17,000 people to its
own defense? Writing on this page back in November
2012 Doug Bandow pointed out that today the U.S. is effectively
bankrupt, but continues to write security checks which it cannot
cover. America accounts for almost half of the worlds military
expenditures and provides defense guarantees to prosperous,
populous allies throughout Asia and Europe. Moreover, U.S.
forces wander the globe attempting to create democracy and
stability ex nihilo. At the same time Washington props up
unpopular dictatorships throughout the Persian Gulf and
Central Asia. This strategy is unsustainable.
He was surely right, and President Putin is aware of the point.
The American people cannot go on defending a country like
Germany a country that enjoys a standard of living calculated
to arouse envy in its impoverished Eastern neighbor, while self-

righteously preaching soft power and non belligerence to its

pampered people. At some point Americans are going to wake
up to the fact that they are being unscrupulously exploited.
Their armed forces are trained to fight and die in Europe, on
behalf of people who would not dream of doing the same for
America, and who are not prepared to die even for their
homeland.
For those reasons, it seems to me, Europe is rapidly becoming
indefensible. Even if Putin would prefer a soft to a hard way of
acquiring the continents assets, the availability of the hard
way will surely strengthen his hand. And what is Europe doing
about it? It is perhaps worth pointing out that the European
Commissioner for Foreign affairs in effect the EUs foreign
minister is Baroness Ashton, a Labour Party appointee to the
House of Lords. Ashton began her political career in the
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a KGB-funded special
operation which almost achieved its goal of making Britain
indefensible. Advancing through leftist NGOs and Labour Party
affiliates, and never standing for an election in her life, this
woman is now my representative in the world of international
affairs. Do I think she is going to risk her career to defend me,
when all her privileged networks are at risk from doing so? Ask
that of President Putin.
More information: My Dictionary of Political Thought has
relevant entries.
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The Good Of Government By Roger Scruton |

Articles
In his first inaugural address, President Reagan announced that
government is not the solution to our problem; government is
the problem, and his remark struck a chord in the hearts of his
conservative supporters. American conservatives, called upon to

define their position, reiterate the message that there is too

much government. The seemingly unstoppable expansion of
regulations; the increasing control over what happens in the
workplace, in the public square, and even in the family; the
constant manufacturing of new crimes and misdemeanors,
aimed at controlling how we associate and with whom; the
attempts to limit First and Second Amendment rightsthese
developments are viewed by many conservatives with alarm.
They seem to be taking America in a new direction, away from
the free association of self-governing individuals envisaged by
the founders, toward a society of obedient dependents, who
exchange their freedom and their responsibilities for a
perpetual lien on the public purse. And you only have to look at
Europe to see the result.
The European countries are governed by a political class that
can escape from accountability behind the closed doors of the
European institutions. Those institutions deliver an unending
flow of laws and regulations covering all aspects of life, from the
hours of work to the rights of sexual minorities. Everywhere in
the European Union a regime of political correctness makes it
difficult either to maintain, or to live by, precepts that violate
the state-imposed orthodoxies. Non-discrimination laws force
many religious people to go against the teachings of their faith
in the matters of homosexuality, public preaching, and the
display of religious symbols. Activists in the European
Parliament seek to impose on all states of the Union, regardless
of culture, faith, or sovereignty, an unqualified right to abortion,
together with forms of sex education calculated to prepare
young people as commodities in the sexual market, rather than
as responsible adults seeking commitment and love.
A kind of hysteria of repudiation rages in European opinionforming circles, picking one by one on the old and settled
customs of a two-thousand-year-old civilization, and forbidding
them or distorting them into some barely recognizable
caricature. And all this goes with a gradual transfer of economic
life from private enterprise to central government, so that in
France and Italy more than half of citizens are net recipients of
income from the state while small businesses struggle to comply

with a regime of regulations that seems designed on purpose to

suppress them.
Many of those developments are being replicated in America.
The welfare state has expanded beyond the limits envisaged in
the New Deal, and the Supreme Court is now increasingly used
to impose the morality of a liberal elite on the American people,
whether they like it or not. These developments add to the sense
among conservatives that government is taking over. America,
they fear, is rapidly surrendering the rights and freedoms of its
citizens in exchange for the false security of an all-controlling
state. Those tasks that only governments can performdefense
of the realm, the maintenance of law and order, the repair of
infrastructure, and the coordination of relief in emergencies
are forced to compete for their budgets with activities that free
citizens, left to themselves, might have managed far more
efficiently through the associations of volunteers, backed up
where necessary by private insurance. Wasnt it those
associations of volunteers that redeemed, for Alexis de
Tocqueville, the American experiment, by showing that
democracy is not a form of disorder but another kind of order,
and one that could reconcile the freedom of the individual with
obedience to an overarching law?
The emasculated society of Europe serves, then, as a warning to
conservatives, and reinforces their belief that America must
reverse the trend of modern politics, which has involved the
increasing assumption by the state of powers and
responsibilities that belong to civil society. Such has been the
call of the Tea Party movement, and it is this same call that
animated the Republican caucus in Congress as it prolonged the
fight against Obamacare, to the point where, by jeopardizing the
fiscal probity of the nation, it antagonized the American people.
It is therefore pertinent to consider not only the bad side of
governmentwhich Americans can easily recognizebut also
the good. For American conservatives are in danger of
appearing as though they had no positive idea of government at
all, and were in the business simply of opposing all new federal
programs, however necessary they may be to the future and
security of the nation. Most of all, they seem to be losing sight of

the truth that government is not only natural to the human

condition, but an expression of those extended loyalties over
time, which bind generation to generation in a relation of
mutual commitment.
The truth is that government, of one kind or another, is
manifest in all our attempts to live in peace with our fellows. We
have rights that shield us from those who are appointed to rule
usmany of them ancient common-law rights, like that defined
by habeas corpus. But those rights are real personal possessions
only because government is there to enforce themand if
necessary to enforce them against itself. Government is not
what so many conservatives believe it to be, and what people on
the left always believe it to be when it is in hands other than
their ownnamely a system of power and domination.
Government is a search for order, and for power only insofar as
power is required by order. It is present in the family, in the
village, in the free associations of neighbors, and in the little
platoons extolled by Burke and Tocqueville. It is there in the
first movement of affection and good will, from which the bonds
of society grow. For it is simply the other side of freedom, and
the thing that makes freedom possible.
Rousseau told us that we are born free, arguing that we have
only to remove the chains imposed by the social order in order
to enjoy our full natural potential. Although American
conservatives have been skeptical of that idea, and indeed stood
against its destructive influence during the time of the 60s
radicals, they nevertheless also have a sneaking tendency to
adhere to it. They are heirs to the pioneer culture. They idolize
the solitary entrepreneur, who takes the burden of his projects
on his own shoulders and makes space for the rest of us as we
timidly advance in his wake. This figure, blown up to mythic
proportions in the novels of Ayn Rand, has, in less fraught
varieties, a rightful place in the American story. But the story
misleads people into imagining that the free individual exists in
the state of nature, and that we become free by removing the
shackles of government. That is the opposite of the truth.

We are not, in the state of nature, free; still less are we

individuals, endowed with rights and duties, and able to take
charge of our lives. We are free by nature because we
canbecome free, in the course of our development. And this
development depends at every point upon the networks and
relations that bind us to the larger social world. Only certain
kinds of social networks encourage people to see themselves as
individuals, shielded by their rights and bound together by their
duties. Only in certain conditions are people united in society
not by organic necessity but by free consent. To put it simply,
the human individual is a social construct. And the emergence
of the individual in the course of history is part of what
distinguishes our civilization from so many of the other social
ventures of mankind.
Hence we individuals, who have a deep and in many particular
cases justified suspicion of government, have a yet deeper need
for it. Government is wrapped into the very fibers of our social
being. We emerge as individuals because our social life is
shaped that way. When, in the first impulse of affection, one
person joins in friendship with another, there arises
immediately between them a relation of accountability. They
promise things to each other. They become bound in a web of
mutual obligations. If one harms the other, there is a calling to
account, and the relation is jeopardized until an apology is
offered. They plan things, sharing their reasons, their hopes,
their praise, and their blame. In everything they do they make
themselves accountable. If this relation of accountability fails to
emerge, then what might have been friendship becomes,
instead, a form of exploitation.
Our world displays many political systems in which the basic
relation of accountability has either not emerged or been
distorted in the interests of family, party, ideology, or tribe. If
there is a lesson to be learned from the so-called Arab Spring it
is surely this: that the governments then overthrown were not
accountable to the people on whom they depended for their
resources. The Middle Eastern tyrannies have left a void in their
wake, since there were no offices, no legal procedures, no
customs or traditions that enshrined the crucial relation of

accountability on which the true art of government depends

the art of government as we individuals understand it. In the
Arab tyrannies there was only power, exercised through family,
tribe, and confession, and without regard to the individual
citizen or to the nation as a whole. In such a form of
government there was no possibility of enduring civic
friendship.
In everyday life, too, there are people who relate to others
without making themselves accountable. Such people are locked
into the game of domination. If they are building a relationship,
it is not a free relationship. A free relationship is one that grants
rights and duties to either party, and which raises their conduct
to the higher level in which mere power gives way to a true
mutuality of interests. That is what is implied by the second
formulation of Kants categorical imperative, which commands
us to treat rational beings as ends and not as means onlyin
other words, to base all our relations on the web of rights and
duties. Such free relations are not just forms of affection: They
are forms of obedience, in which the other person has a right to
be heard. This, as I read him, is Kants message: Sovereign
individuals are also obedient subjects, who face each other I to
I.
There are other ways of expressing those truths about our
condition. But we see them illustrated throughout human life:
in the family, the team, the community, the school, and the
workplace. People become free individuals by learning to take
responsibility for their actions. And they do this through
relating to others, subject to subject. The free individuals to
whom the founders appealed were free only because they had
grown through the bonds of society, to the point of taking full
responsibility for their actions and granting to each other the
rights and privileges that established a kind of moral equality
between them.
In other words, in our tradition, government and freedom have
a single source, which is the human disposition to hold each
other to account for what we do. No free society can come into
being without the exercise of this disposition, and the freedom

that Americans rightly cherish in their heritage is simply the

other side of the American habit of recognizing their
accountability toward others. Americans, faced with a local
emergency, combine with their neighbors to address it, while
Europeans sit around helplessly until the servants of the state
arrive. That is the kind of thing we have in mind when we
describe this country as the land of the free. We dont mean a
land without government; we mean a land with this kind of
governmentthe kind that springs up spontaneously between
individuals who feel accountable to each other.
Such a government is not imposed from outside: It grows from
within the community as an expression of the affections and
interests that unite it. It does not necessarily put every matter to
the vote; but it respects the individual participant and
acknowledges that, in the last analysis, the authority of the
leader derives from the peoples consent to be led by him. Thus
it was that the pioneering communities of this country very
quickly made laws for themselves, formed clubs, schools, rescue
squads, and committees in order to deal with the needs that
they could not address alone, but for which they depended on
the cooperation of their neighbors. The associative habit that so
impressed Tocqueville was not merely an expression of
freedom: It was an instinctive move toward government, in
which a shared order would contain and amplify the
responsibilities of the citizens.
When conservatives grumble against government it is against
government that seems to them to be imposed from outside,
like the government of an occupying power. That was the kind
of government that grew in Europe under communism, and
which is growing again under the European Unionsofter,
gentler, perhaps, but also unaccountable. And it is easy to think
that a similarly alien form of government is growing in America,
as a result of the liberal policy of regimenting the American
people according to moral beliefs that are to a certain measure
alien, leading them to denounce government tout court. But this
would be a mistake, not just about the fundamental human
need for government, but also about the American situation as

compared with Europe. And because it is a mistake that so

many conservatives make, it is time to warn against it.
Government emerges in small communities as the solution to a
problem of coordination. Rules occur, not necessarily as
commands delivered by some central authority, but as
conventions spontaneously adhered to by everyonelike the
conventions of good manners. Nobody objects to the local judge
or lawmaker who is accountable to the people because he is one
of them, or to the local planning committee that invites
everyone to have an equal say in its decisions. Hayek and others
have studied these forms of spontaneous order, of which the
common lawthe great gift that we English-speakers shareis
perhaps the most vivid instance. And their arguments suggest
that, as societies get bigger and incorporate more and more
territory, more and more distinct forms of life and occupations,
so do the problems of coordination increase. There comes a
point at which coordination cannot be achieved from below, by
the natural willingness of citizens to accommodate the desires
and plans of their neighbors. At this point coordination begins
to require government from above, by which rules and
regulations are laid down for the community as a whole, and
enforced by what Weber called a monopoly on violencea
law-enforcing system that tolerates no rival.
That describes our condition. Of course, to say as much is not to
undermine the complaint against modern government, which
has become too intrusive, too determined to impose habits,
opinions, and values that are alien to many citizens, and too
eager to place obstacles in the way of free enterprise and free
association. But those effects are not the result of government.
They are the result of the liberal mind-set, which is the mind-set
of a substantial and powerful elite within the nation. The
business of conservatives is to criticize the ones who are
misusing government, and who seek to extend its remit beyond
the limits that the rest of us spontaneously recognize.
Conservatism should be adefense of government against its
abuse by liberals.

This cause has been damaged by the failure of many

conservatives to understand the true meaning of the welfare
state. During the twentieth century it became clear that many
matters not previously considered by the political process had
arrived on the public agenda. Politicians began to recognize that
if government is to enjoy the consent of those who gain no
comparative advantage from their social membership, it must
offer some kind of quid pro quo. This became apparent in the
two world wars, when people from all classes of society were
required to fight and if necessary to die. Why should they do
this, if membership in the society for which they risked their
lives had brought them no evident advantages? The
fundamental principle was therefore widely accepted that the
state has a responsibility for the welfare of its more needy
citizens. This principle is merely the full-scale version of the
belief adhered to by all small societies, that people should be
cared for by the community when they are unable to care for
themselves.
The emergence of the welfare state was therefore a more or less
inevitable result of popular democracy under the impact of total
war. If the welfare state has become controversial in recent
times it is not because it is a departure from some natural idea
of government. It is rather because it has expanded in a way
that undermines its own legitimacy. As we know from both the
American and the European examples, welfare policies may lead
to the creation of a socially dysfunctional underclass. Sustained
without work or responsibilities from generation to generation,
people lose the habit of accounting to others, turn their backs on
freedom, and become locked in social pathologies that
undermine the cohesion of society.
That result is the opposite of the one intended, and came about
in part because of the liberal mind-set, which believes that only
the wealthy are accountable, since only they are truly free. The
poor, the indigent, and the vulnerable are, on the liberal view,
inherently blameless, and nothing bad that arises from their
conduct can really be laid at their door. They are not responsible
for their lives, since they have not been empowered to be
responsible. Responsibility for their condition lies with the

state. The only question is what more the state should do for
them, in order to remedy the defects of which state benevolence
is in part the cause.
But that way of seeing things expresses a false conception of
government. The responsibilities exercised by government are
rooted in the accountability of citizens. When government
creates an unaccountable class it exceeds its remit, by
undermining the relation on which its own legitimacy depends.
The liberal mind-set has therefore led to a conception of
government that conservatives view with deep suspicion. In the
liberal worldviewand you see this magisterially embodied in
the philosophy of John Rawlsthe state exists in order to
allocate the social product. The rich are not really rich, because
they dont own that stuff. All goods, in liberal eyes, are unowned
until distributed. And the state distributes the goods according
to a principle of fairness that takes no account of the moral
legacy of our free agreements or of the moral effects of a statesubsidized underclass.
On the liberal view, therefore, government is the art of seizing
and then redistributing the good things to which all citizens
have a claim. (This may seem hard on the rich, but in fact it is
psychologically convenient for them, since it removes the
obligation to account for their wealth.) On this view government
is not the expression of a preexisting social order shaped by our
free agreements and our natural disposition to hold our
neighbor to account. It is the creator and manager of a social
order framed according to its ruling doctrine of fairness and
imposed on the people by a series of top-down decrees.
Wherever this liberal conception prevails, government increases
its power, while losing its inner authority. It becomes the
market-state of Philip Bobbitt, which offers a deal to its
citizens in return for their taxes, and demands no loyalty or
obedience beyond a respect for the agreed terms of the deal.
But such a state no longer embodies the ethos of a nation, and
no longer commands any loyalty beyond the loyalty sought by
the average chain store. As in the social democracies of Europe,

public displays of patriotism, of shared allegiance and pride in

the country and its history, dwindle to a few desultory spasms,
and the political class as a whole begins to be looked upon with
sarcasm and contempt. Government ceases to be ours and
becomestheirsthe property of the anonymous bureaucracy on
which we all nevertheless depend for our creature comforts.
This change in the phenomenology of government is striking.
But it has not yet been completed in America. Ordinary
Americans are still able to see their government as an
expression of their national unity. They take pride in their flag,
in their military, in their national ceremonies and icons. They
look for ways to join in the American venture, by giving time,
money, and energy to local clubs of their own. They want to
claim ownership of their country, and to share it with their
neighbors. They take time off from their conflicts to reaffirm a
shared social and political heritage, and still regard the high
offices of state with respect. In crucial matters, they believe, the
president does not represent a political party or an ideology but
the nationand that means all of us, united in the spontaneous
order that brought us together in this land.
In other words, ordinary Americans have a conception of
government that is not only natural, but at variance with the
liberal idea of the state as a redistributive machine. In attacking
the liberal idea, conservatives should make clear that they are
reaffirming a real and natural alternative. They are defending
government as an expression in symbolic and authoritative
forms of our deep accountability to each other.
This does not mean that conservatives are wedded to some
libertarian conception of the minimal state. The growth of
modern societies has created social needs that the old patterns
of free association are no longer able to satisfy. But the correct
response is not to forbid the state from intruding into the areas
of welfare, health care, education, and the rest, but to limit its
contribution to the point where citizens initiatives can once
again take the lead. Conservatives want a society guided by
public spirit. But public spirit grows only among people who are
free to act on it, and to take pleasure in the result. Public spirit

is a form of private enterprise, and it is killed when the state

takes over. That is why private charity has disappeared almost
completely from continental Europe, and is thriving today only
in the Anglosphere, where common-law justice reminds the
citizen that he is accountable to others for the freedom that he
enjoys.
Conservatives therefore have an obligation to map out the true
domain of government, and the limits beyond which action by
the government is a trespass on the freedom of the citizen. But
it seems to me that they have failed to offer the electorate a
believable blueprint for this, precisely because they have failed
to see that what they are advocating is not
freedom from government, but another and better kind of
governmenta government that embodies all that we surrender
to our neighbors, when we join with them as a nation.
Roger Scruton is the author of Notes from
Underground and The Soul of the World.
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