You don't have to be a Grumpy Old Man, or any variety of fogey, to find some aspects of contemporary life unpleasing. Intrusive governmental campaigns, telling us what to eat or drink; the attempt to alter the way we think by changing the words we use; the decay of discipline in schools, and of manners in daily life; the reduction of our publicly expressed moral values to a strident demand for "rights" and "respect" on the one hand and a sentimental display of "caring" on the other — these are just some of the aspects of modern life that can rub most of us, psychologically and morally, the wrong way.
But are they connected? Is there some underlying pattern here, or are things — not all things, but at least some quite important things — just getting worse in a random multiplicity of different ways? It's easy to spot some connections here and there, but very hard to construct a general theory that would make sense of the whole predicament. For that, we need more than just a cultural commentator. We need a social and political philosopher, who can take the argument to the level of abstraction where essential connections begin to emerge.
Kenneth Minogue, Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the LSE, is just the man for the job. His new book, The Servile Mind, is a bold and wide-ranging study of the ills of contemporary politics and society in the West. The argument is elaborated in fairly abstract terms, but the abstractions are always aimed at making sense of the concrete irritations and idiocies of modern life.
The tone, however, is never merely fogeyish: this eminent Antipodean has an engagingly wry sense of humour, with a more than occasional flash of sharp-edged intellectual steel just beneath the surface of his prose.
The subtitle, How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life, sounds as if it is putting forward the master-thesis of the book. It may also make it seem, therefore, that Minogue is a political arch-reactionary in the tradition of Joseph de Maistre. But this is quite misleading. Minogue distinguishes between two notions of democracy, and directs his accusations against only one of them. The first notion is procedural and legal: democracy as a method for creating and replacing governments. Against this, Minogue has no objection.
The second, however, is a notion of "democracy" as a set of values or ideals, a substantive programme that is to be gradually realised as our society becomes more and more "democratic". The watchwords of a truly democratic society, according to this notion, are "equality" and "inclusiveness". Inequalities and distinctions are signs of injustice and oppression, and it is the role of the state to liberate the people from oppressions of all kinds.
But in taking this transcendent moral role upon itself, the state drains away from ordinary life many of those moral responsibilities that used to characterise us as individuals. The result, sooner or later, is the development of what Minogue calls (with a nod to Hilaire Belloc) a "servile" mentality.
What brings about the shift from the first notion of democracy, which seems not just harmless but positively beneficial, to the second? I am not sure that Minogue has a direct answer to this question; but he does have a rich analysis of what goes wrong when people adopt the second version of the democratic idea. What happens, he says, is that they confuse politics and morality, creating a hybrid set of values which he labels the "politico-moral". The task of government becomes that of implementing a quasi-moral blueprint. And the notion of compassion (a moral feeling which has real value in relations between individuals) is incoherently invoked to justify projects of social engineering aimed at entire categories or blocks of people.
