SOCIETY: Basic values
So why did that happen?
I feel sorry for John Major. He may have been a rotten Prime Minister but he was, and is, fundamentally a decent man. The recent revelations do not, in the end, alter that. His essential decency is, surely, demonstrated by his penitent expression of shame over the affair with Mrs Currie; and who can doubt his sincerity, for he evidently loves his wife and has repaired the damage to his marriage? Was it, perhaps, as much for her sake as anything else that he decided to ‘get off the stage’ when the curtain fell in 1997?
Human beings are fallible, and we are all sinners (even if we don’t all sin in the same way). How many good, upstanding and slightly boring middle-aged men are out there, after all, who have been thankfully spared from falling from grace in this particular manner simply because, luckily for them and their families, their paths were not crossed by the likes of Mrs. Currie?
We cannot hope for our politicians to be perfect, any more than the rest of us are. What we do, however, have every right to expect is that those who aspire to lead us should, like John Major, ultimately know the difference between right and wrong.
This is precisely what makes the snide and predictable charges of ‘hypocrisy’ from the Guardianistas so utterly nauseating. There is, of course, some question as to whether the ‘back-to-basics’ campaign was really about personal morality at all; but oh-how-convenient for liberals in the media to say that it was, and to use that as an excuse to grub around in the dirt for scandals about Conservative MPs’ private lives. How dare these Tories (so the argument goes) preach about moral standards when their own lives are so far from morally blameless? By contrast, it was quite OK for Robin Cook, for example, to dump his wife and run off with his secretary, because he never presumed to tell other people how to lead their lives. The message is clear: the real sin is not in falling short of an objective standard of behaviour, but in daring to suggest that such an standard might exist at all.
This line of thought is as distorted as it is insidious, and frequent repetition will not make it less so. It is an empirical fact that family breakdown has undesirable social consequences, spanning everything from desperate unhappiness and psychological damage in children, to poverty and dependence on the welfare state, to intolerable pressure on the housing market and the greenbelt. It is not unreasonable to conclude that we were better off with a society that recognised collective moral norms than we are with the current ethos of permissiveness. It must also be acknowledged that high standards of behaviour, in any area of life, are something to be aspired to, and not always attained. The higher our sights, the more likely we are to miss them from time to time; and the only way to ensure that we never fall short is to have no standards at all.
This kind of laissez-faire amoralism is, of course, precisely the dogma that the liberal establishment have been so adept in promoting over recent decades, and they are not about to let up now. The effectiveness with which this ideology has been promulgated is clearly evident when one considers the degree of support it commands these days even within certain sections of the Conservative Party. The proponents of this worldview despise anyone who challenges it, and the response is nothing short of intimidation, all the more dangerous for its subtlety. The implicit threat is always there: dare to proclaim any kind of belief in traditional morality, and you, or your colleagues, will have every detail of your private lives scrutinised for any sign of imperfection and be subjected to political and personal humiliation. It’s hardly surprising, then, that the chattering classes have lost so little time in resurrecting the old accusations, in a cynical pre-emptive strike against anyone (in the Conservative Party, especially) who might, rashly, be considering advocating social conservatism.
The only possible way to respond to these assaults is with an immense degree of moral courage. In an age when most Conservative politicians seem frightened of their own shadows, the signs are not good. Yet man is, essentially, a moral being; and the notion of objective morality must inevitably reassert itself. Whether then our present morally bankrupt culture will survive the process, however, remains to be seen.
Quinquagesima, a serving constituency chairman, suspects that of CCO’s many Christian virtues, one such lacked is forgiveness.
Quinquagesima, October 1, 2002 11:52 AM