A further consequence of this degenerative cycle is one that most people will think trivial but which I suspect may be the most important of all. Professionals are particularly valuable in understanding the very strict limits to their professional knowledge. They used to be parsimonious with general opinions. Employees today, however, think of themselves as citizens with a duty to improve the world. The result is that lawyers now think that they have to do with justice, rather than the law, and doctors start advising people on lifestyle.

Teachers become social workers intent on repairing the damaged fabric of family life. Academic economists even think they ought to dictate the public finances, like the ill-fated 364 academic economists who derided the 1982 Budget, which rescued Britain from the disasters of the Winter of Discontent. Here we encounter not the vulnerabilities of the dim but the illusions of the more or less intelligent. Instead of a clear division of labour between specialists who understand their limits, we have a jostling between groups who all imagine themselves to be universally wise. The old and fairly strict division of labour between professionals gives way to a democratic world in which everyone equally has opinions on all the subjects of political contention. The crusty lawyer of earlier days might well think that the law was an ass, but that was the business of legislators, not his. Today's judge is a good deal more creative.

The decline of professionalism is thus one way of tracking the change in our moral sentiments over the last two or three generations. What is today recognised as a "bonus culture" is part of the enfeebling of inherited integrities and their replacement by the external inducements that governments and other powers use in the project of improving society. The problem is that the moral life includes not only doing the right thing (whatever we may take that to be) but also our duties to the character we believe ourselves to have. This is an inner responsibility for avoiding whatever we would despise ourselves for doing. It is a test that many people have failed in remarkably public ways today and there is a lot to learn from it. As with all forms of moral change, there is no easy way back to the sensibilities so many people have lost. We have become so accustomed to being administered and managed by official power that many in our society have no other principle of motion than oscillation between impulse on the one hand and external control on the other, without much of an inner core of self-direction in between. The classical Greeks called this condition "servility."