Why we need a gentle radical revolution

Our social arrangement needs to prioritise human relationships, argues MP Danny Kruger.

Danny Kruger

Danny Kruger is the Conservative MP for Devizes. He is the author of Covenant: The New Politics of Home, Neighbourhood and Nation.

A group of people stand in a field by a fence and a railway footcrossing.

Danny Kruger with a campaign group in his Devizes constituency.

Democracy divides us. The political system best calculated to hold together a diverse society is also one that exacerbates differences and obscures our common opinions and interests. A two-party system - and all Western politics is largely binary, split between conservative and progressive parties or groups of parties - encourages vicious disagreement across the aisle, and polarises opinion in the country.

The paradox is that, despite our party disagreements, the most popular opinion with the public is that ‘they're as bad as each other’. The view held in common across the country is that ‘they’re all the same’; that ‘there’s nothing to choose between them’. And deep down, the public is right, but in a good way. Fundamentally the parties share a worldview, which derives from our common inheritance as the heirs of the Christian tradition.

That tradition taught us that individuals are intrinsically, personally, valuable, without reference to the identities of sex, household, tribe or race which, in pagan cultures, gave people their only worth (or for most people, their lack of it). It also taught us that, despite our individual personal value, our mission in life was other-facing. Our object of worship was outside the self. God’s will was made material and meaningful through the institutions of our common life, in what we came to call civil society. These institutions in turn, especially the institution of the law, worked to protect the individual and make diversity safe.

This tradition split into two parts in the modern age, as an old, anti-Christian idea, which Christianity had expunged, crept back in. In my book Covenant I call it ‘the Idea’, as opposed to what I call ‘the Order’. The ‘Idea’ is that I am god, with the creative power to order reality and decide for myself what is right and wrong. This ancient heresy has been refreshed in our times precisely by the principle of individual rights and freedoms that Christianity gave us. This is because we have steadily degraded the other side of the Christian bequest: the other-facing, institutional life that gave individuals a more textured sense of who they were, i.e. members of a community with something to live for outside themselves. The consequence is both the narcissism of self-worship and the rise of identity culture - a return to the pagan belief that your value is determined by your sex, race or tribe.

In the age of tech we can create a decentralised, responsive and personalised system that will give us both belonging and agency.

Individual value and dignity, made safe and meaningful by a social arrangement which emphasises solidarity, peace and care for the stranger - these are the elements of what I call the ‘Order’. They are not absolute principles: even individual rights to life and liberty must be constrained in certain circumstances, and other-facing generosity likewise needs to be limited in order to be sustained. To take a current example, ‘care for the stranger’ does not, in my view, mean offering a home in the UK to anyone who manages to arrive on our shores and claim asylum. It does mean treating every asylum seeker humanely, whether we admit them or remove them, and it means committing part of our wealth and power to preventing, or mitigating the effects of, war and natural disaster in other parts of the world.

How does such a covenantal politics approach other policy areas? The principles that Graham Tomlin set out in the report he compiled after the Grenfell Tower fire, after listening to local voices, are a helpful guide. We need to ‘humanise welfare’, dismantling the inefficient bureaucracies which see people as units to be managed, rather than as people to be helped and given responsibility and agency, and build instead relational systems of social support. We need to ‘provide homes’, which means so much more than the sterile term ‘housing’: it means attractive, affordable, safe buildings where people can live both with privacy and in community. As this suggests we need to help people ‘become neighbours’, with the means and the motivation to connect with others who belong to different identity groups. We should ‘notice faith’: as happened after Grenfell, it is local community faith groups which more than any official agency provide support, belonging, cohesion, and practical change at a local level.

And lastly, overall, we need to ‘renew democracy’. In Graham’s words, ‘we need to find ways to enable people, especially in more deprived areas, to have more of a say in issues that directly affect their lives, rather than politics happening at a distance by competing parties remote from local life.’ The sense of this is both deeply conservative (small-c) and deeply radical. Of course, we need power to be close to the people; this was the traditional way of things before the Durkheim and his followers decided that the centralised state, not local civil institutions, was the proper place for managing human services. In the Middle Ages, according to Robert Tombs’ history of England, fully a third of men, of all classes, played a responsible role of some kind in the management of their neighbourhood. Yet a return to this model would be radical, because it involves upending Durkheim’s assumptions - shared by his heirs in the school of New Public Management beloved of the Blairites - about the proper arrangement of society.

We need a gentle revolution: a return to some old ideas about social organisation that prioritise human relationships, the organic and the natural over utility, efficiency and equality of outcome; ideas which actually lead to a more useful, more efficient and genuinely more equal system. These are the ideas of what I call the Order, derived from theories of the social covenant that lie deep in our history but which are also best fitted to the modern world.

In the age of tech we can create a decentralised, responsive and personalised system that will give us both belonging and agency. We can recreate a more localised economy, but this time more fair, equal and capable of supporting a larger and more diverse population than the pre-modern world knew. And we can make a democracy that more closely reflects the principle that we all, whether progressive or conservative, share a common inheritance and belong to a single political community.

Covenant: The New Politics of Home, Neighbourhood and Nation is published by Forum Press.

Article

Comment

Death & life

29 October 2024

4 min read

There’s fear or fascination as cultures confront death

If Western society discussed death more openly, would Halloween’s appeal hold such sway?

Rahil Patel

Rahil is a former Hindu monk, and author of Found By Love. He is a Tutor and Speaker at the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics.

A bronze statue of a resting angel sits atop a low stone grave.

A grave in a Dresden cemetery.

Veit Hammer on Unsplash.

Watching Christians jump and sing “death is defeated” was a strange experience.

As a new believer in Christianity from a Hindu background, I was struck by how Christians approached death. While I had seen reincarnation as a path to heaven, I couldn’t understand why the church either hesitated to talk about death or celebrated it so intensely. Why were Christians sometimes dancing and other times, silent about death?

During my early years in Christ if ever the topic of death arose from the fun times I was having with Christian friends it was almost always met with a dead silence - excuse the pun. On one occasion, the husband of a close friend in our small church community had passed away due to cancer. I was one of the first to make a call to his widowed wife. When my friends heard that I had done this the response was unusual, “well done Rahil!” “That’s so good Rahil.” Strange. I was sensitive over the phone, but it wasn’t that hard. Then I asked the others if they were going to make a call and the response was equally peculiar, “erm, I can’t” or “I just can’t do that... ” Puzzling.

Recently, I came across the GodPod podcast, which shed some light for me on this hesitation. In an interview with Dr Lydia Dugdale about her book The Lost Art of Dying, a surprising statistic caught my attention: “In the 18th century, one-third of church sermons were about death and eternity.” I had to play that line back multiple times. In contrast, today’s sermons often focus on personal purpose, calling, or spiritual gifts. All important, but are we missing a vital balance—one eye on eternity, the other on our present lives?

Why didn’t the British or ‘international’ media film the funerals taking place in Britain? Why hesitate with death at home and yet have a somewhat fascination with it in the East?

This avoidance of death became even more apparent during the Covid pandemic. When the Delta strain hit India in 2021 it caused a massive widespread devastation and death. The funeral pyres were filling the sacred river banks up and down the country. At one point there was no more wood left to burn the bodies. It had run out! Urban crematoriums were overrun and so people left their deceased loved ones to simply float down the nearest river in the hope that the next life would be easier.

I followed the detailed footage of the funeral pyres and bodies choking various holy rivers. It was meticulously covered by the western media. Even PM Boris Johnson at the time cancelled his trip to India because the Covid death crisis was “out of control.” It’s Interesting how the western media flippantly assumed that death could be controlled. And then an eminent academic in India wrote a remarkable article for Project Syndicate. Brahma Chellaney’s opening paragraph was,

“When reporting on any mass tragedy, a basic rule of journalism is to be sensitive to the victims and those who are grieving. Western media, which double as the international media, usually observe this rule at home but discard it when reporting on disasters in non-Western societies.”

The author’s accurate observation demanded my attention. Why didn’t the British or ‘international’ media film the funerals taking place in Britain? Why hesitate with death at home and yet have a somewhat fascination with it in the East? Although Chellaney uses the concept of ‘grieving’ for his argument, there really isn’t such a spiritual concept across Indic faiths as Christianity knows of it. Of course, there is sadness and loss but grieving in the deep spiritual sense, not really. Is that why the Western media found it easier to cover death in the East? Because the secular (although Christian) West knows of the concept of grief so well at home? Or is it because the West do actually want to confront death without hiding and when they see other cultures do it so openly (and a tad bit casually) they are drawn to it? As morbid as it sounds (and I’ll do the British thing and apologise here) there might actually be a healthy interest with the way certain cultures embrace death that the west is seeking to find an expression for.

Brahmar Mukherji chaired the Department of Biostatistics at Michigan University. In an interview with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 2021 she stated that India as a society sees death differently which is why the death toll along with so many other complex and practical issues was so high in that nation during Covid. They embrace it more easily. I am not promoting reckless behaviour around rules. One can’t play with a rattlesnake and then call it faith. My hope is that the reader finds hope when confronting death with a Christian lens. Why have themes of Euthanasia and Assisted Dying become such a big thing in the West and not in the East?

Which brings me to Halloween. It’s a leap, I know, but think about it: if Western societies and churches discussed death and eternity more openly, would Halloween’s macabre appeal hold such sway? Dressing up as a ghoul or a skeleton seems to be a playful, yet safe way to confront our fear of death—something we’re eager to do from behind a mask. That lighthearted, but jarring moment in the Barbie film comes to mind: “Do you guys ever think about dying?” Maybe that’s the real question we should be asking ourselves. Not just on Halloween, but frequently. How do we truly confront death—with fear, with fascination, or with the hope of something beyond?