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Clearing the Beach
Nearly ten years ago I bought a house on the coast of South Wales. With its rugged, windswept Atlantic coastline, its rainsoaked golf courses, its remnants of industrial greatness and its green hills just visible through the drizzle, it reminded me a lot of where I grew up, in Ayrshire: only slightly warmer, nearer Heathrow airport and with a rugby team more likely to beat England.
I bought the house mainly to be beside the sea. But there was a catch. The lovely stretch of coastline in front of it was hideously strewn with rubbish. Thousands of plastic bottles littered the sands and rocks. Plastic bags fluttered in the wind, caught on the thorns of the wild Burnet roses. Beer and softdrink cans lay rusting in the dunes. Crisp packets floated in the waves like repulsive opaque jellyfish.
Where did it all come from? Some of it was clearly dropped by local youths, who seemed indifferent to the ruinous effect of their behaviour on the natural beauty of the land of their fathers. But much more seemed to come in from the sea. I began to read, with mounting horror, about the extent of off shore refuse dumping. It is a practice beyond the control of any government, regulator or law. Unlike a landfill site, the ocean is a free rubbish dump. Unlike the stuff earlier generations threw into it, plastic rubbish is neither biodegradable nor heavy enough to sink. Where it ends up is decided by the currents, tides and winds. Unfortunately for me, those of the Bristol Channel seemed intent on depositing a disproportionate share of all the trash in the North Atlantic in my backyard.
Dismayed, I asked the locals who was responsible for keeping the coastline clean. ‘The council is supposed to do it, down by here,’ one of them explained. ‘But they don’ t do nothing about it, do they?’ This was not so much Under Milk Wood as Under Milk Carton. Infuriated, and perhaps evincing the first symptoms of an obsessive – compulsive disorder, I took to carrying and filling black binliners whenever I went for a walk. But it was a task far beyond the capacity of one man.
And that was when it happened. I asked for volunteers. The proposition was simple: come and help make this place look as it should; lunch provided. The first beach clearup was a modest affair: no more than eight or nine people came, and not all of them stuck at the work, which involved backache and dirty fingers. The second was more of a success. The sun actually shone, as it sometimes – very occasionally – does.
It was when the local branch of the Lions Club got involved, however, that the breakthrough came. I had never heard of the Lions Club. I learned that it is originally an American association, not unlike the Rotary Club: both were founded by Chicago businessmen about a century ago, and both are secular networks whose members dedicate time to various good causes. The Lions brought a level of organization and motivation that far exceeded my earlier improvised efforts. As a result of their involvement, the shoreline was transformed. The plastic bottles were bagged and properly disposed of. The roses were freed from their ragged polythene wrappings. One measure of our success was a marked increase in the number of locals and visitors walking along the coastal path.
My Welsh experience taught me the power of the voluntary association as an institution. Together, spontaneously, without any public sector involvement, without any profit motive, without any legal obligation or power, we had turned a depressing dumping ground back into a beauty spot. And every time I wander down for a swim, I ask myself: how many other problems could be solved in this simple and yet satisfying way?
In the previous chapters, I have tried to prise open some tightly shut black boxes: the one labelled ‘democracy’, the one labelled ‘capitalism’ and the one labelled ‘the rule of law’. In this final chapter, I want to unlock the black box labelled ‘civil society’. I want to ask how far it is possible for a truly free nation to flourish in the absence of the kind of vibrant civil society we used to take for granted. I want to suggest that the opposite of civil society is uncivil society, where even the problem of antisocial behaviour becomes a problem for the state. And I want to cast doubt on the idea that the new social networks of the internet are in any sense a substitute for real networks of the sort that helped me clear my local beach.
The Rise and Fall of Social Capital
‘America is, among the countries of the world,’ declared Alexis de Tocqueville in the first book of his Democracy in America:
the one where they have taken most advantage of association and where they have applied that powerful mode of action to a greater diversity of objects.
Independent of the permanent associations created by law under the names of townships, cities and counties, there is a multitude of others that owe their birth and development only to individual will.
The inhabitant of the United States learns from birth that he must rely on himself to struggle against the evils and obstacles of life; he has only a defiant and restive regard for social authority and he appeals to its authority only when he cannot do without it … In the United States, they associate for the goals of public security, of commerce and industry, of morality and religion. There is nothing the human will despairs of attaining by the free action of the collective power of individuals.1
Tocqueville saw America’s political associations as an indispensable counterweight to the tyranny of the majority in modern democracy. But it was the nonpolitical associations that really fascinated him:
Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds constantly unite. Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small; Americans use associations to give fêtes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools. Finally, if it is a question of bringing to light a truth or developing a sentiment with the support of a great example, they associate.2
This is a justly famous passage, as is Tocqueville’s amusing contrast between the way American citizens banded together to campaign against alcohol abuse and the ap -proach to social problems in his native land: ‘if those hundred thousand [members of the American Temperance Society] had lived in France, each of them would have addressed himself individually to the government,’ begging it to oversee the nation’s wine bars.3
Tocqueville did not exaggerate nineteenthcentury America’s love of voluntary associations. To give just a single example, from the historian Marvin Olasky, the associations affiliated with 112 Protestant churches in Manhattan and the Bronx at the turn of the twentieth century were responsible for fortyeight industrial schools, forty- five libraries or reading rooms, fortyfour sewing schools, forty kindergartens, twentynine savings banks and loan associations, twentyone employment offices, twenty gymnasia and swimming pools, eight medical dispensaries, seven fullday nurseries and four lodging houses. And this list excludes the activities of Roman Catholic, Jewish and secular voluntary associations, of which there were also plenty.4 Continental Europe, as Tocqueville rightly noted, was never like this. In his book The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, Edward Banfield contrasted the ‘amoral familism’ of a southern Italian town he called ‘Montegrano’ with the rich associational life of St.George, Utah. Same terrain, same climate – different institutions. In Montegrano, there was just one association: a cardplaying club to which twenty-five upperclass men belonged. There was also an orphanage, run by an order of nuns in an ancient monastery, but the local townspeople did nothing to assist their efforts or help maintain the crumbling cloister.5
Yet, just as Tocqueville had feared, the associational vitality of the early United States has since significantly diminished. In his bestselling book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam detailed the drastic declines, between around 1960 or 1970 and the late 1990s, in a long list of indicators of ‘social capital’ :
• attendance at a public meeting on town or school affairs: down 35 per cent;
• service as an officer of a club or organization: down 42 per cent;
• service on a committee for a local organization: down 39 per cent;
• membership of parent – teacher associations: down 61 per cent;
• the average membership rate for thirtytwo national chapterbased associations: down by almost 50 per cent; and • membership rates for men’s bowling leagues: down 73 per cent.6
As Theda Skocpol argued in her 2003 study Diminished Democracy, organizations like the Elks, the Moose, the Rotarians and indeed my friends the Lions – which once did so much to bring together Americans of diff erent income groups and classes – are in decline in the United States.7 In a similar vein (though from a very diff erent ideological point of origin), Charles Murray’s superb 2012 book Coming Apart makes the argument that the breakdown of both religious and secular associational life in workingclass communities is one of the key drivers of social immobility and widening inequality in the United States today.8
If the decline of American civil society is so far advanced, what hope is there for Europeans? Britain has sometimes been represented as the exception to Putnam’s ‘law’ of declining social capital. Like the United States, the United Kingdom experienced a golden age of associational life in the nineteenth century, ‘the age [in the historian G. M. Trevelyan’s words] of Trade Unions, Cooperative and Bene-.t Societies, Leagues, Boards, Commissions, Committees for every conceivable purpose of philanthropy and culture’. As Trevelyan joked, ‘not even the dumb animals were left unorganized’.9 In 1911 the gross annual receipts of registered charities exceeded national public expenditure on the Poor Law.10 The absolute number of cases of hardship reviewed by charities was remarkably constant between 1871 and 1945.11 The implementation of William Beveridge’s recommendation for a centrally administered system of national insurance and healthcare radically altered the role of many British ‘friendly societies’, either turning them into agencies of government welfare or rendering them obsolete.12 But in other ways British associational life remained vital. In the 1950s sociologists were still impressed by the resilience of this network of voluntary societies. Indeed, according to Peter Hall, it largely survived even the 1980s, the sole exceptions being traditional women’s organizations, some youth organizations and service organizations like the Red Cross, which did suffer declines of membership.13
However, on closer inspection, this story of resilience looks questionable. The reports of the Registrar of Friendly Societies, which began in 1875 and continued until 2001, allow us to trace over the long run the number and membership of friendly societies (such as working men’s clubs), industrial and provident societies (such as cooperatives) and building societies (mutually owned saving and mortgagelending associations). In absolute terms, the peak in the number of such societies was in 1914 (36,010) and the peak in membership in 1908 (33.8 million) – at a time when the population of the United Kingdom was just over 44 million. By contrast, there were just over 12,000 societies in 2001 . Membership .gures for that year are available only for the 9,000 industrial and provident societies and amount to 10.5 million, compared with a total population of 59.7 million.14 The Manchester Unity of Oddfellows, an umbrella organization for friendly societies, had 713,000 members in 1899, compared with 230,000 today.15 Moreover, a comparative study based on the World Values Survey showed Britain slipping from ninth to twelfth place in the international league table for voluntarism, as the share of the population claiming to be members of one or more voluntary associations fell from 52 per cent in 1981 to 43 per cent in 1991.16 The most recent survey data indicates a further decline (see Figure 4.1) and indeed suggests that even more Britons than Americans are now ‘bowling alone’.
The decline of British ‘social capital’ has manifestly accelerated. Not only has membership of political parties and trade unions plummeted. Longestablished charities have seen ‘a marked drop in numbers’. Membership of any type of organization was also lower in 2007 than in 1997. Remarkably, according to the National Council of Voluntary Organizations, just ‘8 per cent of the population [accounts] for almost half of all volunteer hours’.17 Charitable donations show a similar trend. Although the average donation has gone up, the percentage of households giving to charity has fallen since 1978 and more than a third of donations now come from the oversixty- fives, compared with less than a quarter some thirty years ago. (In the same period, the elderly have gone from 14 per cent to 17 per cent of the population.) 18 The final publications of the Citizenship Survey for England made for truly dismal reading.19 In 2009~10 :
Figure 4.1 Membership of voluntary organizations in the UK and US,2005~2006
Source: Source: World Values Survey Association, World Value Survey, 1981~2008, official aggregate v.20090902 (2009): http://www.wvsevsdb.com/wvs/WVSIntegratedEVSWVSvariables.jsp?Idioma=I.
• Only one in ten people had any involvement in decisionmaking about local services or in the provision of these services (for example, being a school governor or a magistrate).
• Only a quarter of people participated in any kind of formal volunteering at least once a month (of which most either organized or helped to run an event – usually a sporting event – or participated in raising money for one).
• The share of people informally volunteering at least once a month (for example to help elderly neighbours) fell to 29 per cent, down from 35 per cent the previous year. The share giving informal help at least once a year fell from 62 to 54 per cent.
• Charitable giving continued its decline since 2005.
What is happening? For Putnam, it is primarily technology.– .rst television, then the internet – that has been the death of traditional associational life in America. But I.take a different view. Facebook and its ilk create social networks that are huge but weak. With 900 million active users – nine times the number in 2008 – Facebook’s network is a vast tool enabling likeminded people to exchange likeminded opinions about, well, what they like. Maybe, as Jared Cohen and Eric Schmidt argue, the consequences of such exchanges will indeed be revolutionary – though just how far Google or Facebook really played a decisive role in the Arab Spring is debatable.20 (After all, Libyans did more than just unfriend Colonel Gadda..) But I doubt very much that online communities are a substitute for traditional forms of association.
Could I have cleared the beach by ‘poking’ my Facebook friends or creating a new Facebook group? I doubt it. A 2007 study revealed that most users in fact treat Facebook as a way to maintain contact with existing friends, often ones they no longer see regularly because they no longer live near by. The students surveyed were two and half times more likely to use Facebook this way than to initiate connections with strangers – which is what I had to do to clear the beach.21
It is not technology that has hollowed out civil society. It is something Tocqueville himself anticipated, in what is perhaps the most powerful passage in Democracy in America. Here, he vividly imagines a future society in which associational life has died:
I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they .ll their souls. Each of them, withdrawn and apart, is like a stranger to the destiny of all the others: his children and his particular friends form the whole human species for him; as for dwelling with his fellow citizens, he is beside them, but he does not see them; he touches them and does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone …
Above these an immense tutelary power is elevated, which alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyments and watching over their fate. It is absolute, detailed, regular, farseeing, and mild. It would resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood …
Thus, after taking each individual by turns in its powerful hands and kneading him as it likes, the sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromise, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and .nally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.22
Tocqueville was surely right. Not technology, but the state – with its seductive promise of ‘security from the cradle to the grave’ – was the real enemy of civil society. Even as he wrote, he recorded and condemned the first attempts to have ‘a government … take the place of some of the greatest American associations’.
But what political power would ever be in a state to suffice for the innumerable multitude of small undertakings that American citizens execute every day with the aid of an association?…The more it puts itself in place of associations, the more particular persons, losing the idea of associating with each other, will need it to come to their aid … The morality and intelligence of a democratic people would risk no fewer dangers than its business and its industry if the government came to take the place of associations everywhere.
Sentiments and ideas renew themselves, the heart is enlarged, and the human mind is developed only by the reciprocal action of men upon one another.23
Amen to that.
Privatizing Schools
To see just how right that wise old Frenchman was, ask yourself: how many clubs do you belong to? For my part, I count three London clubs, one in Oxford, one in New York and one in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I am a de -plorably inactive member, but I pay my dues and use the sports facilities, the dining facilities and the guest rooms several times a year. I give regularly, though not enough, to two charities. I belong to one gymnasium. I support a football club.
I am probably most active as an alumnus of the principal educational institutions I attended in my youth: the Glasgow Academy and Magdalen College, Oxford. I also regularly give time to the schools my children attend, as well as to the university where I teach. Let me explain why I am so partial to these independente educational institutions.
The view I am about to state is highly unfashionable. At a lunch held by the Guardian newspaper, I elicited gasps of horror when I uttered the following words: in my opinion, the best institutions in the British Isles today are the independent schools. (Needless to say, those who gasped loudest had all attended such schools.) If there is one educational policy I would like to see adopted throughout the United Kingdom, it would be a policy that aimed to increase significantly the number of private educational institutions – and, at the same time, to establish programmes of vouchers, bursaries and scholarships to allow a substantial number of children from lowerincome families to attend them.
Of course, this is the kind of thing that the left reflexively denounces as ‘elitist’. Even some Conservatives, like George Walden, regard private schools as a cause of inequality, institutions so pernicious that they should be abolished. Let me explain why such views are utterly wrong.
For about a hundred years, no doubt, the expansion of public education was a good thing. As Peter Lindert has pointed out, schools were the exception that proved Tocqueville’s rule, for it was the American states that led the way in setting up local taxes to fund universal and indeed compulsory schooling after 1852. With few exceptions, widening the franchise elsewhere in the world led swiftly to the adoption of similar systems. This was economically important, because the returns to universal education were high: literate and numerate people are much more productive workers.24 But we need to recognize the limits of public monopolies in education, especially for societies that have long ago achieved mass literacy. The problem is that public monopoly providers of education suffer from the same problems that afflict monopoly providers of anything: quality declines because of lack of competition and the creeping power of vested ‘producer’ interests. We also need to acknowledge, no matter what our ideological prejudices, that there is a good reason why private educational institutions play a crucial role in setting and raising educational standards all over the world.
I am not arguing for private schools against state schools. I am arguing for both, because ‘biodiversity’ is preferable to monopoly. A mix of public and private institutions with meaningful competition favours excellence. That is why American universities (which operate within an increasingly global competitive system) are the best in the world – twentyone out of the world’s top thirty – while American high schools (in a localized monopoly system) are generally rather bad – witness the 2009 results of the Programme for International Student Assessment for mathematical attainment at age .fteen. Would Harvard be Harvard if it had at some point been nationalized by either the State of Massachusetts or the federal government? You know the answer.
In the United Kingdom, we have the opposite system: it is the universities that have essentially been reduced to agencies of a government- financed National Higher Education Service – despite the advent in England and Wales of topup fees that are still below what the best institutions should be charging – whereas there is a lively and financially unconstrained independent sector in secondary education. The results? Apart from the elite, which retain their own resources and/or reputations, most UK universities are in a state of crisis. Only seven made it into The Times Higher Education Supplement’s latest global top fifty. Yet we boast some of the .nest secondary schools on the planet.
The apologists of traditional state education need to grasp a simple point: by providing ‘free’state schooling that is generally of mediocre quality, you incentivize the emergence of a really good private system (since nobody is going to pay between ￡ 10,000 and ￡ 30,000 a year for an education that is just a wee bit better than the free option).25
It is rather ironic that, at the time of writing, the policies being introduced to address the problem of lowquality public education in England are the responsibility of a Scotsman. Michael Gove picked up the idea from an Old Fettesian named Tony Blair: turning failing schools into selfgoverning academies. Between 2010 and 2012, the number of academies went from just 200 to approaching half of all secondary schools. Schools like Mossbourne Academy in Hackney or Durand Academy, a primary in Stockwell, show what can be achieved even in impoverished neighbourhoods when the dead hand of local authority control is removed.26 Even more promising are the new ‘free schools’ being set up by parents, teachers and others, like Toby Young, who has finally worked out the real way to win friends and influence people.27 Notice that these schools are not selective. They remain state funded. But their increased autonomy has swiftly led to much higher standards of both discipline and learning.
There are many on the left who deplore these developments. (Many Labour MPs would happily disown the very idea of academies.) Yet they are part of a global trend. All over the world, smart countries are moving away from the outdated model of state education monopolies and allowing civil society back into education, where it belongs.
Many people erroneously believe that Scandinavia is a place where the oldfashioned welfare state is alive and well. In fact, only Finland has maintained a strict state monopoly on education, the success of which makes that country the exception that proves my rule. By contrast, Sweden and Denmark have been pioneers of educational reform. Thanks to a bold scheme of decentralization and vouchers, the number of independent schools has soared in Sweden. Denmark’s ‘free’schools are independently run and receive a government grant per pupil, but are able to charge fees and raise funds in other ways if they can justify doing so in terms of results. (Similar reforms have meant that around twothirds of Dutch students are now in independent schools.)28
Today in the United States, there are more than 2,000 charter schools – like English academies, publicly funded but independently run – bringing choice in education to around 2 million families in some of the country’s poorest urban areas. Organizations like Success Academy have to endure vilification and intimidation from the US teachers’ unions precisely because the higher standards at their charter schools pose such a threat to the status quo of underperformance and underachievement. In New York City’s public schools, 62 per cent of third, fourth and fifth graders passed their maths exams last year. The latest figure at Harlem Success Academy was 99 per cent. For science it was 100 per cent.29 And this was not because the charter schools cherrypick the best students or attract the most motivated parents.
Students are admitted to Harlem Success by lottery. They do better because the school is both accountable and autonomous.
There is, however, a further step that still needs to be taken – even by Michael Gove. That step is to increase the number of schools that are truly independent, in the sense of being privately funded; and truly free, in the sense of being free to select pupils. Significantly, six out of ten academy heads said in a March 2012 survey that the national agreement on pay and conditions prevents them from paying effective teachers more money, or extending the school day to give weaker pupils extra tuition.30 There are no such inhibitions about private education elsewhere. In Sweden companies like Kunskapsskolan (‘The Knowledge School’) are educating tens of thousands of pupils. In Brazil, private school chains like Objetivo, COC and Pitágoras are teaching literally hundreds of thousands of students. Perhaps the most remarkable case, however, is India. There, as James Tooley has shown, the best hope of a decent education in the slums of cities like Hyderabad comes from private schools like the imaginatively named Royal Grammar School, Little Nightingale’s High School or Firdaus Flowers Convent School.31 Tooley and his researchers have found similar private schools in parts of Africa too. Invariably, they are a response to atrociously bad public schools, where class sizes are absurdly large and teachers are frequently asleep or absent.
The problem in Britain is not that there are too many private schools. The problem is that there are too few – and if their charitable status is ultimately revoked, there will be even fewer. Only around 7 per cent of British teenagers are in private schools, about the same proportion as in the United States. If you want to know one of the reasons why Asian teenagers do so much better than their British and American peers in standardized tests, it is this: private schools educate more than a quarter of pupils in Macao, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan. The average PISA maths score for those places is 10 per cent higher than for the UK and the US. The gap between them and us is as large as the gap between us and Turkey. It is no coincidence that the share of Turkish students in private schools is below 4 per cent.
Private education benefits more people than just the elite. In a 2010 article, Martin West and Ludwig Woessmann demonstrated that ‘a 10 per cent increase in enrolment in private schools improves a country’s mathematics test scores … by almost half a year’s worth of learning. A 10 per cent increase in private school enrolment also reduces the total educational spending per student by over 5 per cent of the OECD average.’32 In other words, more private education means higher-quality and more efficient education for everyone. A perfect illustration is the way Wellington College is now sponsoring a publicly funded academy. Another is the way schools like Rugby and Glasgow Academy are expanding their bursary schemes, aiming to increase the proportion of pupils whose fees are covered from the school’s own resources.
The education revolution of the twentieth century was that basic education became available for most people in democracies. The education revolution of the twenty- first century will be that good education will become available for an increasing proportion of children. If you are against that, then you are the true elitist: you are the one who wants to keep poor kids in lousy schools.
A Bigger Society
The bigger story I am telling, using education as the example, is that over the past fifty years governments encroached too far on the realm of civil society. That had its benefits where (as in the case of primary education) there was insufficient private provision. But there were real costs, too.
Like Tocqueville, I believe that spontaneous local activism by citizens is better than central state action not just in terms of its results, but more importantly in terms of its effect on us as citizens. For true citizenship is not just about voting, earning and staying on the right side of the law. It is also about participating in the ‘troop’ – the wider group beyond our families – which is precisely where we learn how to develop and enforce rules of conduct: in short, to govern ourselves. To educate our children. To care for the helpless. To fight crime. To keep the streets clean.
Since the phrase ‘big society’ entered the political lexicon, abuse has been heaped upon it. In the same month that I delivered the lectures on which this book is based (June 2012), the Archbishop of Canterbury called it ‘aspirational waffle designed to conceal a deeply damaging withdrawal of the state from its responsibilities to the most vulnerable’.33 Even Martin Sime, the chief executive of the Scottish Council of Voluntary Organizations – who claims to believe in ‘selfhelp’ – has described the big society as a ‘toxic brand … a Tory con trick and a cover for cuts’.34 It will be clear by now that I am much more sympathetic than these gentlemen to the idea that our society – and indeed most societies – would benefit from more private initiative and less dependence on the state. If that is now a conservative position, so be it. Once, it was considered the essence of true liberalism.
In the preceding pages, I have tried to argue that we are living through a profound crisis of the institutions that were the keys to our previous success – not only economic, but also political and cultural – as a civilization. I have represented the crisis of public debt, the single biggest problem facing Western politics, as a symptom of the betrayal of future generations: a breach of Edmund Burke’s social contract between the present and the future.
I have suggested that the attempt to use complex regulation to avert future financial crises is based on a profound misunderstanding of the way the market economy works: a misunderstanding into which Walter Bagehot never fell.
I have warned that the rule of law, so crucial to the operation of both democracy and capitalism, is in danger of degenerating into the rule of lawyers: a danger Charles Dickens well knew.
And, finally, I have proposed that our once vibrant civil society is in a state of decay, not so much because of technology, but because of the excessive pretensions of the state: a threat that Tocqueville presciently warned Europeans and Americans against.
We humans live in a complex matrix of institutions. There is government. There is the market. There is the law. And then there is civil society. Once.– I’ m tempted to date it from the time of the Scottish Enlightenment – this matrix worked astonishingly well, with each set of institutions complementing and reinforcing the rest. That, I believe, was the key to Western success in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But the institutions in our times are out of joint.
It is our challenge, in the years that lie ahead, to restore them – to reverse the Great Degeneration – and to return to those first principles of a truly free society which I have tried to affirm, with a little help from some of the great thinkers of the past.
It is time, in short, to clear up the beach.
e Strictly speaking, Magdalen is part of a state-funded university, the independence of which has intermittently been challenged by the government. But the college remains a self-governing entity with its own endowment.
