Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
O’Neill posed questions of such fundamental central importance that haven’t been answered seven years later, and it’s because they haven’t been answered that we have then had the credit crunch, we’ve had the decline of trust in politicians, and, the year after the lectures, we had the Iraq war which is the biggest single cause of loss of trust in government.
I’m interested that you put these mystical and religious texts in there with a philosopher like O’Neill.
O’Neill is an atheist, I think, and she is very Kantian, and she’s a hero because she raised the whole question of trust in a very public way in the Reith lectures in 2002, the year after 9/11. And she posed questions of such fundamental central importance that haven’t been answered seven years later, and it’s because they haven’t been answered that we have then had the credit crunch, we’ve had the decline of trust in politicians, and the year after the lectures we had the Iraq war which is the biggest single cause of loss of trust in government.
So she was putting her head above the parapet.
She is an intellectual pioneer and a hero: by asking fundamental questions and saying that we can’t batter trust into people, we can’t make them trusting by having laws, that trust is related to inner virtue. You are not going to build trust by installing more surveillance cameras or setting more targets, you are just going to make people more subtle and devious about finding ways around those cameras or around those targets. And I think she also has another fundamental truth, which is that the asking of the questions is more important than the answers. You can’t have a checklist of things that one never does as a trusting or trustworthy individual or organisation. It has to be an experiential change within oneself.
But you have written recently that there is a need now to be socially authoritarian to rebuild a cohesive society where trust is possible. How does that fit and how do you make people want to live in, as you put it, a ‘village’ society or within, for example, a traditional family structure?
The free market is not enough for people. Adam Smith himself said that there has to be a moral dimension. Climate change is one of the biggest single examples of the failures of the market, which always operates short-term. Your child, all being well, will now live to the age of 120 or 110 and the market doesn’t provide the answers. There has to be an element of higher values coming in, with structure and respect.
The way that you describe this goal, talking about a village … even those who may share your wish to re-evaluate what we want from society don’t want to go back to living in a village in a married couple with one of us chained to the oven.
The village is a parable for a community where you are known rather than ‘bowling alone’ as Bob Putnam put it [Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital, 1995]. The village could be a cyber village, it could be a very high-tech inner-city community, it could be anywhere where a number of people know and help and support each other.
This is controversial stuff: on marriage and the family we’ve got a major pre-election political row between the parties already.
But it is generating more heat than light. Are they talking about it because of their perception of where that extra one per cent of votes lie or do they really believe it? Well, the truth is that marriage is difficult but it is a much better way of bringing up young people – to have a formalised bond and to make vows. Vows are authoritarian. We no longer have vows when we are 13, we have lost the initiation rites into adult life when we symbolically leave the bosom of the family. We need this because we no longer make that vow to humanity as a whole, which is what once happened.
Read full interview
Anthony Seldon is a contemporary historian, political biographer and educationalist. He has written books on Churchill, Thatcher, Major and Blair and has recently argued for the need to tackle the collapse of trust in British public life. As Master of Wellington College, a major co-educational public school, he has pioneered lessons in happiness and well-being for teenagers.
