Apartheid in Perspective

There are many evils that can be charged to the account of the late twentieth- century phenomenon that is commonly called political correctness. One of these is the growing inability to perceive certain historical figures, events, and institutions with anything worthy of being called perspective. In the last century alone, movements and organizations committed to the political philosophy of Marxist-Leninism murdered the bodies of over one hundred million people and the spirits of millions more whom they forced into the dreary, hopeless, slave like existence that passed for life in the police states that flew the red flag. Yet to this day it is far safer for someone in academic or media circles to praise a Communist government, to dismiss the fear of Communism as irrational paranoia, and to say that the Americans were the aggressors in the Cold War, than it is for someone in those same circles to say anything that could be construed as a defense of General Franco of Spain or General Pinochet of Chile even though there was far more freedom and prosperity for the average citizen under either of their regimes than in any Communist country and the number of people tortured and killed by their regimes was far lower than that of any Communist country. Any attempt to put both Communism and the anti-Communist regimes of Franco and Pinochet in perspective is likely to be met with widespread denunciation and accusations that one is engaging in apologetics for “human rights” abuses.

Virtually anything having to do with Africa is similarly protected from perspective by political correctness.

Take the slave trade for example. We know all about it, don’t we? The bad guys, the white Europeans, in the age of exploration came to Africa, where they began to capture and enslave black people, who they shipped overseas to Europe and the European settlements in the Americas, where they were oppressed as drudge labourers.

Suppose, however, we were to broaden our perspective on African slavery by including within our picture of it the fact that slavery existed on the African continent long before European ships arrived on her west coast, that African slavery had begun with African tribes going to war with one another and enslaving each other, that the Arabs had conducted a trade in African slaves centuries prior to Europe’s getting involved, and that one of the consequences of modern European expansionism, colonialism, and imperialism was that the imperial powers ended and outlawed the slave trade in the nineteenth century, and abolished slavery in the territory under their control? Suppose we were to broaden our perspective even further by pointing out that since the end of World War II, which had accomplished a geopolitical realignment around the two new superpowers of the USA and USSR, who forced the old imperial powers to withdraw, slavery has begun anew in parts of Africa where it had been abolished by Britain, France, and the Dutch.? Suppose we were to point out, as Professor Bruce Charlton recently did (1), that due to liberal immigration and multiculturalism slavery has been reintroduced into the birthplace of abolitionism and is largely being ignored by the leftists who promote multiculturalism in contradiction to their professed opposition to slavery in all forms?

From that broader perspective it no longer appears to be a simple Manichean morality tale of evil whites and pure, innocent, oppressed blacks does it?

There is probably no element of African history that is more lacking in perspective than that of apartheid. Apartheid is the word in the Afrikaans language that refers, as its sound would suggest to English speakers, the state of being apart or separate. In 1948, when the Nationalist Party came to power in South Africa, it adopted this term to designate its policy of racial segregation.

The government of South Africa picked a particularly poor time to institute this policy. World War II was over, the revelations of the atrocities of Nazi Germany had given racialism a bad name, the anti-colonial, anti-imperial era was beginning under the supervision of the new progressive superpowers, the Communists were at work trying to fan the flames of anti-racist sentiment into the fire of revolution, and in the United States, now the leading power of the liberal, democratic, West, the Civil Rights movement would soon be underway, which would lead to the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, the model for subsequent anti-discrimination legislation such as the 1968 Race Relations Bill in the UK and the 1977 Canadian Human Rights Act. The way the tides of opinion were moving, it was inevitable that apartheid would receive widespread condemnation. Interestingly, the one country that understood perfectly well where the Afrikaners were coming from, itself achieved its independence as a country that same year. After the Six Days War in 1967, Israel and South Africa forged a close alliance, signing the Israel-South Africa Agreement in 1975. Today, enemies of the Jewish state liken the measures she has taken to preserve her existence in the face of the constant threat of Arab and Muslim terrorism to apartheid. Her defenders reject the comparison as a calumny, perhaps because they, unlike the country they are defending, lack perspective on apartheid.

It is fitting, therefore, that of those essays with which I am familiar, the one which in my opinion best put apartheid into perspective, appeared in an extremely pro-Israeli publication. The author of the essay was British writer and historian Paul Johnson. In an article that appeared in the September 1985 issue of the American neoconservative monthly journal Commentary, (2) Johnson took the United States to task for the economic boycott of South Africa then underway. It was a “cruel absurdity”, he declared, for the richest country in the world to “deliberately set about destroying the economy of what is in some respects still a developing nation.” (3) The United States had nothing to gain from doing so and much to lose. The only explanation for this absurdity, Johnson argued, was that “assumption that the South African regime is a unique moral evil, whose wickedness is so great that the necessity for its destruction transcends all the rules governing relations between states and, indeed, the dictates of elementary common sense.”

He then proceeded to demolish that assumption by pointing out that South Africa, far from being unique, is “in many fundamental respects…a typical African country.” He gave six examples, the first four of which are 1) that like other African states it was undergoing a population explosion, 2) like other large African states its racial problems were particularly complex and not just a matter of black and white, 3) “population pressure on the land is driving people into the towns, and especially into the big cities”, and 4) like in other African states this creates problems for the government to which the response is typical:

So governments respond with what has become the curse of Africa—social engineering. People are treated not as individual human beings but as atomized units and shoveled around like concrete or gravel. Movement control is imposed. Every African has to have a grubby little pass-book or some other begrimed document which tells him where he is allowed to work or live. South Africa has had pass-laws of a kind since the 18th century. They have now spread all over the African continent, and where the pass-book comes the bulldozer is never far behind. Virtually all African governments use them to demolish unauthorized settlements. Hundreds of thousands of wretched people are made homeless without warning by governments terrified of being overwhelmed by lawless multitudes. In the black African countries bordering on the Sahara, the authorities fight desperately to repel nomadic desert dwellers driven south by drought. When the police fail, punitive columns of troops are sent in. (4)

The fifth example Johnson gave was that South Africa, like all African states, conducts its social engineering on a racial basis. He wrote:

All African states are racist. Almost without exception, and with varying degrees of animosity, they discriminate against someone: Jews, or whites, or Asians, or non-Muslim religious groups, or disfavored tribes. There is no such thing as a genuinely multiracial society in the whole of Africa…African countries vary in the extent to which their practice of discrimination is formalized or entrenched in law codes and official philosophies. Most have political theories of a sort, cooked up in the political-science or sociology departments of local universities. Tanzania has a sinister totalitarian doctrine called Ujaama. Ghana has Consciencism. There is Zambian Humanism, Négritude in Senegal, and, in Zaire, a social creed called Mobutuism, after the reigning dictator. All these government theories reflect the appetites of the ruling racial groups… Apartheid is not a concept which divides the Republic from the rest of Africa: on the contrary, it is the local expression of the African ideological personality. (5)

This, it should be noted, has changed since the change in power from the Afrikaner National Party to the African National Congress in 1994. Not only does the ANC, despite the false image of the “rainbow nation” generated by a deceitful media, practice discrimination against the white South Africans who are currently being eliminated in a Zimbabwesque manner, the ANC is not even representative of all South Africa blacks, being historically a primarily Xhosa organization, (6) although its current leader, Jacob Zuma, comes from the rival Zulu people.

The sixth way, in which Johnson said that South Africa was typical of Africa was in the way it had suffered “at the hands of its politically minded intellectuals”.

Having demonstrated that in all of these negative things Nationalist South Africa was a typical, rather than unique, African state, Johnson then identified four ways in which it stood out by differing from other African states. The first two of these were its wealth, “South Africa has by far the richest and most varied range of natural resources of any African country”, and the fact that it had used that wealth to build a modern economy, the only one of its kind in Africa. The third was that blacks were better off in white-governed South Africa than any other country in Africa. Here another extended quote from Johnson is in order:

Except for the Ivory Coast, Kenya, and Malawi, all the black African states have experienced falls in real incomes per capita since independence. But only in South Africa have the real incomes of blacks risen very substantially in the last quarter-century. In mining, black wages have tripled in real terms in the last decade and are still rising…This helps to account for the fact that there are more black-owned cars in South Africa than there are private cars in the whole of the Soviet Union. The Republic is the first and so far the only African country to produce a large black middle class. In South Africa the education available to blacks is poor compared to what the whites get, and that is one of the biggest grievances the black communities harbor; but it is good compared to what is available elsewhere on the continent…Thanks to mining, again, this modest but rising prosperity is not confined to blacks born in South Africa. About half of South Africa’s black miners come from abroad, chiefly from Mozambique, Malawi, Lesotho, Swaziland, and Botswana…The security fences South Africa is now rather anxiously erecting are designed to keep intended immigrants out, not—like the Berlin Wall—to keep people in. (7)

The fourth way in which Nationalist South Africa differed from other African countries is that was “in many respects a free country.” Johnson explained that:

Every other African country has become, or is in the process of becoming, a one-party state. None of them subscribes in practice, or in most cases even in theory, to the separation of powers. Both the rule of law and democracy are subject in South Africa to important qualifications. But it is the only African country where they exist at all. The emergency and security powers enjoyed by the South African government are so wide and draconian that they almost make us forget that the judiciary is independent—very much so—and that even non-whites can get justice against the state, something they are most unlikely to secure anywhere else on the continent. The courts are cluttered with black litigants suing the police, the prison authorities, or other government agencies, or appealing against sentences. (8)

To summarize, the things which the anti-apartheid movement most objected to in Nationalist South Africa – its official racial discrimination, its heavy handed government policing, etc., were all features that the South African government shared with all other African governments, that were not uniquely South African, per se, but rather were typically African. It made no sense, therefore, to single South Africa out for condemnation. The only difference was that in South Africa the governing group was white whereas in all other African countries – now that Ian Smith’s government had fallen and Rhodesia was being turned into Zimbabwe – it was black. Since the conditions for blacks were improving in Nationalist South Africa, to the point that they had an immigration problem from the rest of the continent, whereas they were rapidly declining in the rest of Africa, it made even less sense to condemn South Africa.

Since the ANCs rise to power in 1994, conditions in South Africa have deteriorated for blacks and whites alike. What was a first world country when governed by the Afrikaners is becoming a third world country, in which the white South Africans face genocide and the black South Africans face the deterioration of the rule and protection of law, a failing economy, and a decline into the conditions present everywhere else in Africa. Those South Africans who can, black and white alike, are now fleeing the country, while under Afrikaner rule they were struggling to get in.

What is apparent out of all of this is that South Africa was a better place to live, for blacks and whites alike, from 1948 to 1994, than either any other country in Africa was at the time or than South Africa itself has been ever since.

This does not mean, of course, either that the policy of apartheid made the difference between South Africa then and South Africa now, or that apartheid is somehow justified by all of this. What made the difference between South Africa then and South Africa now is that South Africa then, the prosperous, Western, country, was largely an expression of the Afrikaner people who built the country, established its institutions, and wrote its laws. As such an expression, the country of South Africa was a country that Afrikaners, other African whites, and African blacks all wished to participate in. Apartheid, of course, prevented the other people living in South Africa, other than non-Afrikaner whites, from full participation, and that is wherein its injustice lies. The difficulty is that apart from apartheid, that South Africa would probably have been impossible to create.

All of which must be taken into consideration if we are to even approach perspective, when it comes to apartheid and the whole South African situation.

(1) http://charltonteaching.blogspot.ca/2013/10/why-do-modern-leftists-pretend-to-be.html


(2) Commentary has been published since 1945 when it was founded by the American Jewish Committee as a replacement for the Contemporary Jewish Record. Its first editor was Eliot Cohen, who was succeeded by Norman Podhoretz in 1960. It was during Podhoretz’s editorship that the journal ostensibly moved to the right, when Podhoretz, initially a Cold War liberal Democrat, grew disgusted with the pro-Soviet, pro-Palestinian, New Left in the 1970s and realigned himself and his publication with the American conservative movement. Hence the label “neoconservative”, which in an American context generally refers to a member of the “New York Intellectuals” who moved from the left to the right in the 1970s and who is usually belligerently militaristic. Commentary gradually became independent of the American Jewish Committee. Its current editor is John Podhoretz, son of Norman Podhoretz, and it remains extremely, to the point of being obnoxiously so, pro-Israel.

(3) Paul Johnson, “The Race for South Africa”, Commentary, September, 1985. https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-race-for-south-africa/ (if you wish to view this, you will have to part with some shekels, I am afraid, either a subscription price or the purchase price of the article)

(4) Ibid.

(5) Ibid.

(6) See Ilana Mercer’s Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa (Seattle: Stairway Press, 2011) for more information about this.

(7) Johnson, op cit.

(8) Ibid.

The Iron Lady Had Class

Baroness Margaret Thatcher, who became leader of the Conservative Party in 1975, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in 1979, and held both positions until forced from office by an in-party coup in 1990, passed away on Monday, April 8th, 2013. In the days since her passing, leftist politicians and media commentators, progressive bloggers, union leaders, student activists and other leftist riff-raff have been celebrating, rejoicing, partying, and basically making a loud, crude, rude public spectacle of themselves. The song, “Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead”, from the 1939 MGM musical-movie version of The Wizard of Oz even made it onto the singles charts due to their efforts. By carrying on in this fashion, the Left has demonstrated the truth of what I have long said about such radical ilk – that those who believe in a classless society have no class.


Lady Thatcher herself, had class.  Sadly, the same cannot be said of all of her supporters.  It saddened me to hear one of her admirers, a media personality in my own country, speak of Britain’s traditional “class society” with the same sneer in his voice that one ordinarily associates with Marxists.   The man in question is no Marxist.  I often agree with what he says, and I agreed with most of what he had to say about the rudeness and ignorance of Lady Thatcher’s detractors and in defence of her ideas and policies.   Yet for some bizarre reason, he chose to turn the death of the great lady into an opportunity for class warfare.

Yes, class warfare.  That is exactly what the talking head in question would have called it, if a union representative, leftist academic, or Marxist politician were to attack the entrepreneurial, business, or middle classes in the name of the manual labour classes or the poor.   He would have been right, too.   Marxists, however, are not the only ones to engage in class warfare.

This man rightly praised Margaret Thatcher as a champion of liberty, economic freedom, and democracy.   She was all that.  He also was correct in saying that she attained the leadership of the Conservative Party and accomplished all that she did in her years in power against the opposition, not only of the Labour Party, but of many of the leaders of her own party.   He insisted, however, on making this into a matter of class differences.   Margaret Thatcher, nee Roberts, was of middle class origins, a grocer’s daughter, whereas traditionally, the leadership of the Conservative Party had been drawn from the upper classes.   The opposition she met from within the ranks of the Conservative leadership, he maintained, was due to snobbery on the part of Tory aristocrats, whereas her success as Primer Minister was due to virtues that arose out of her middle class background.   While there is some truth to both of these assertions, the contempt for the upper classes that was dripping from every word displayed a remarkable affinity with the spirit of socialism.  Lady Thatcher herself, on occasion, had said that sometimes members of the upper classes were susceptible to sympathy with socialism due to misguided guilt over wealth they had inherited rather than obtained through work and entrepreneurship.  Unlike a certain broadcaster, she remained classy in saying so, and did not try to make the upper classes into a scapegoat.   She believed socialism to be bad for all classes of society, and economic liberty to be good for all classes of society.

The media commentator that I am referring to wished to emphasize the differences between Margaret Thatcher and the traditional Tories that he dubbed “the far right” – differences in class, training, and ideas.   While these differences were there, they were perhaps not as large or as significant as some people might think.   In her memoirs Lady Thatcher wrote that “both by instinct and upbringing I was always a ‘true blue’ Conservative.” (1)   She seems to have been speaking both of her party affiliation and personal philosophy.  With regards to the latter, she was both a conservative and a liberal.  A conservative is someone who believes in and defends his community, society, and country, their social, political, and cultural institutions, and the traditions which uphold those institutions.   A liberal is someone who believes in the abstract ideals of individual rights and liberty, the free market, and democracy to the extent that it is consistent with liberty.    While the latter are the set of ideas with which she was most often identified, at least by her North American admirers, she was also a classical conservative.   Consider her treatment of the subject of human rights in the chapter entitled “Human Rights and Wrongs” in her book Statecraft.  She started out by pointing to the religious origin of the idea that “an individual human being has a moral value in his or her own right”, then briefly described how the English concept of rights and liberties had organically evolved over centuries, so that “the English-speaking peoples’ conception of human rights is one that has an institutional context and is the fruit of a living tradition”.  This she contrasts with the “tendency to generalize about natural or human rights which predate and are not contingent upon specific laws” which produces the paradox that “the more ambitious and far-reaching natural rights are taken to be, the more likely it is that in the end liberties are going to be lost”, as is evidenced by the French Revolution.   Therefore it is clear that “the guarantees offered to individuals by habit, accumulated tradition and the common law were a great deal sounder than ‘democratic’ principles applied by demagogues.”  This is a clear enunciation of classical conservative thought. (2)  

Was liberalism more predominant in Lady Thatcher’s philosophy than conservatism, or the other way around?   The quotations in the previous paragraph would suggest that conservatism was predominant, as would her statement elsewhere in the chapter quoted from, that for her “duties precede rights”.  Her oft-quoted remark that “there is no such thing as society” would suggest that liberalism was predominant. (3) 

Ultimately, the answer to the question is not important.  Margaret Thatcher was the right person to lead the United Kingdom because she was both a conservative and a liberal, for at the time Great Britain was threatened, both domestically and abroad, by socialism, the common enemy of both conservatism and liberalism.  Liberals are opposed to socialism because it is an inefficient economic model and because they see it as a threat to individual liberty that leads inevitably to tyranny.   Conservatives are opposed to socialism because of its revolutionary and utopian nature and its threat to things such as property, order, and social institutions.  

The socialism that was killing Great Britain in the 1970s, had its roots in the 1940s, in the Second World War.   Great Britain had emerged from that conflict a victor in the limited sense that the enemy she had set out to defeat, Nazi Germany, had thankfully been vanquished.   Her victory, however, was in many ways a Pyrrhic victory.   The price she paid, for her triumph over Hitler, was her empire, and her place as the leading power of the Western world.   This outcome had been orchestrated by the egomaniacal socialist who was then President of the United States of America, the wartime ally that was to succeed her as the primary power of the free world.   Meanwhile, the country whose liberty she had entered the war to protect, Poland, was swallowed up along with the rest of Eastern Europe, by the Soviet Union, with whom Britain and the United States had been forced to make a wartime alliance in order to bring down the Third Reich.   The territory controlled by the Soviet Union, arguably a greater evil than Nazi Germany, was greatly expanded as a result of the war, and shortly after the war Communism triumphed in China and began to spread throughout Asia as well.

 

If Communism had grown through World War II to become the international threat that it was during the Cold War, domestic socialism was an outcome of the war in the UK as well.  The Conservative Party had been in power, under the leadership of Neville Chamberlain at the beginning of the war.  Sir Winston Churchill took over as leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister from Chamberlain in 1940 and led Britain through to the end of the war, at the head of a coalition government.   In the general election in 1945, however, he was unceremoniously thrown out of office when the election returned a landslide victory to the Labour Party, and Clement Attlee became Prime Minister.   Margaret Thatcher, who would have been twenty years old at the time, recorded her thoughts on this outcome: “I simply could not understand how the electorate could do this to Churchill…At the time I felt that the British electorate’s treatment of the man who more than anyone else secured their liberty was shameful.” (4)

What was the reason for the Labour victory?  Duff Cooper believed that it was a response to the policy of appeasement Chamberlain had practiced prior to the outbreak of war.   Evelyn Waugh believed it was due to the obsequious fawning over Stalin and the Soviet Union by the wartime government.  Anthony Burgess was of the opinion that the British soldier, tired of war, yearning for home and family,  voted en masse to turn out of office the man who wished to keep them deployed for years after the war, to defend against the Soviet threat. (5)

Perhaps it was a little of all of these.  Clement Attlee, however, believed that it was do to widespread popular approbation of his socialist ideas.   He did not hesitate to bring in a broad range of sweeping changes.  He nationalized the canals and railroads, the telecommunications services, the coal and steel industries, and the electricity and power companies.   He expanded the social safety net established by the Disraeli Conservatives in the 19^th Century into a massive and expensive Welfare State.  These policies predictably produced exactly that which they were designed to combat – misery.  At a time when Britain was staggering under the debt from the recent war, the Labour Party made things worse by vastly increasing the cost of government, placing a huge tax burden on an economy that was less able to bear that burden due to socialist inefficiency.   The ineffectiveness of the government at administering the industries it had taken over combined with the Attlee government’s maintaining of war rationing well into peacetime brought about shortages and a decrease in the quality of goods produced.  All of this was brilliantly satirized by Wyndham Lewis in a collection of short stories entitled Rotting Hill. (6)

Unfortunately, the belief that the Labour landslide was due to the popular appeal of socialism was shared by the leaders of the Conservative Party. In 1947, they put out a paper declaring their support for the Attlee innovations, and, against the accumulating evidence that these policies were doing more harm than good, maintained that support for most of the next three decades. Historians call this the Post-War Consensus, and Margaret Thatcher dubbed the Conservative leaders who maintained that consensus, “Wet Tories”. Individual Conservatives occasionally spoke out against the Party’s odious policy of providing an echo rather than a choice. The most noteworthy of these was Enoch Powell, the former professor of classical Greek who had become an officer during the war and had returned to take up a career in Conservative politics. Powell, a High Tory who defended the political, social, cultural, and religious institutions of Great Britain on the basis of prescriptive authority, used his eloquence to oppose leftist plans to democratize the House of Lords, to champion free market and monetarist reforms against socialism and the Post-War Consensus, to challenge liberal immigration policies, and to speak out, on the grounds of national independence and sovereignty, against Britain’s joining the European Common Market. The Conservative leadership refused to act on any of these ideas, however, and Powell’s uncompromising stand alienated him from his own Party.

Meanwhile, socialism continued to have a deleterious effect on Great Britain.  Government spending continued to grow, and, unsurprisingly, so did inflation.  Unemployment, which many of the Attlee programs had been intended to prevent, began to rise.   Realizing that Britain was facing an economic crisis, James Callaghan, who in 1976 had succeeded Harold Wilson as leader of the Labour Party, and Prime Minister, attempted to control inflation through caps on pay raises and found himself in conflict with the Trades Union Congress.   This conflict erupted into strikes in the winter of 1978-79.  Things got so bad, that commentators, borrowing a phrase from the opening monologue of Shakespeare’s Richard III, bestowed upon that winter the sobriquet “the Winter of Discontent”.  

That was the last winter of Labour government for almost two decades.  Margaret Thatcher had become leader of the Conservative Party in 1975, and had broken with the Post-War Consensus, calling for free market reforms.   In the general election of 1979, the Conservative Party won a majority and Margaret Thatcher was summoned to Buckingham Palace where Queen Elizabeth II invited her to form the next government.

The rest is history.   As Prime Minister, she introduced monetarist policies to combat inflation, set out to promote economic growth through deregulation and free market reforms, cut government expenditures, and privatized industries that should never have been nationalized in the first place.  She declared war on the unions, with the purpose of breaking their power, derived from the threat of nation-crippling strikes, to dictate terms to Parliament .  Furthermore, she stuck to her guns.  It took time for the benefits of her reforms to become apparent and in the meantime progressives sought to pin the blame on Thatcher and her economic liberalism for every slightest bit of human suffering they could dig up in Britain.   The reforms worked however.  Inflation went down, and eventually, as the economy grew, unemployment went down too.   She succeeded in breaking the power of the unions as well.

In the international theatre, she helped bring about an end to the forty-year Cold War, by standing with American President Ronald Reagan against the oppression and aggression of Communism.   Progressive intellectuals will, of course, deny that the policies of Thatcher and Reagan had anything to do with the Soviets suddenly becoming more reasonable and the collapse of Communism in Russia, preferring to give the credit, if to anyone, to Mikhail Gorbachev, but as these are the same bloody fool idiots who could not see the terror famines, show trials, Gulag concentration camps, the utter misery of the masses, the persecution of the faithful, and other countless Soviet atrocities going on in their precious workers Paradise through the Potemkin villages, until forced to by the testimony of men like Solzhenitsyn, their opinion is worthless.

By the strength Lady Thatcher displayed in conflicts – whether with Communism abroad in the Cold War, with socialists and unions at home, or with Argentina in the 1982 war over the Falkland Islands, she well earned her nickname the Iron Lady.   Whatever else may be said for and against economic liberalism, her economic policies repaired much of the damage done by three decades of socialism.   She was a champion of democracy, but of democracy grounded in a living tradition, and she was also a supporter of Britain’s other traditional institutions, notably saying with regards to the continuing relevancy of the monarchy that “those who imagine that a politician would make a better figurehead than a hereditary monarch might perhaps make the acquaintance of more politicians.”   Her virtues were such that she won over the support of such hardnosed, traditional High Tory critics as Enoch Powell and Peregrine Worsthorne, who had been highly critical of her in her early years in office, but who wrote and spoke in defense of her in her unsuccessful struggle to retain her leadership of the Conservative Party in 1990.   She displayed the traditional virtues of loyalty, gratitude and honour, against a sea of progressive criticism and hatred, when she came to the assistance of General Pinochet, a man whose support had been invaluable to Great Britain during the Falklands War,  after his 1998 arrest during a visit to Britain. (7)

She was a classy lady and she will be missed. May she rest in peace.


(1) Margaret Thatcher, The Path To Power (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995) p. 28. This is her second volume of memoirs, although the events recorded within it take place prior to those in the first volume, The Downing Street Years, which was published in 1993.


(2) Margaret Thatcher, Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2002), pp. 250-254. In the sentence after the last one quoted, Lady Thatcher quotes from Edmund Burke, the “father of conservatism”.

(3) The conservative view of society and the individual was expressed by Enoch Powell in a 1992 interview with Naim Attallah thus “Society is in the end normative, and politics is about the management and governance of a society. Society is prior (in a logical sense) to the individual; the individual in the last resort is an abstraction. Nobody has ever met an individual, we didn’t start as individuals, we don’t live as individuals, we only know ourselves as members of a collectivity.” (http://quartetbooks.wordpress.com/2010/05/14/no-longer-with-us-enoch-powell/)

(4) The Path To Power, p. 46.

(5) For Cooper and Waugh’s views, see Christopher Sykes Evelyn Waugh: A Biography (London: Penguin, 1975, 1977), p. 446. For Anthony Burgess’ views see Little Wilson and Big God: The First Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess (London: Vintage, 1987)

(6) Wyndham Lewis, Rotting Hill (London: Methuen, 1951)

(7) For her own account of this action, see Statecraft, p. 267-274.

Society is an Organism

There are many things I admire about former British Prime Minister, Baroness Margaret Thatcher. I admire her Cold War anti-communism and the strong leadership she provided her country during the Falkland Islands War. I admire the honourable way in which she stood up for General Pinochet, who had been a consistent friend to the West in general and to Great Britain in particular, when he was dishonourably arrested by the Blair government during a visit to Britain.

Needless to say I also agree with many of her ideas. While I am not as doctrinaire a Hayekian as she is I am in general sympathy with her belief in economic freedom and private property and her opposition to welfarism and socialism. I can think of no better response to the silliness of anti-royalism than Lady Thatcher’s remark that “Those who imagine that a politician would make a better figurehead than a hereditary monarch might perhaps make the acquaintance of more politicians.”

There is, however, a well-known statement she made with which I strongly disagree. In an interview with Douglas Keay of Women’s Own magazine in 1987, she said “There is no such thing as society.” This was a rather bizarre statement for someone who was at the time serving as Prime Minister of a society to make. As we will see it was also a statement that was particularly inappropriate in the mouth of the leader of the Conservative Party, which Lady Thatcher was at the time. She made the remark in the context of arguing that people should take responsibility for their own lives and not expect the government to solve all their problems for them. That is a perfectly sound position which makes the absurdity of her remark stand out all the more against the background of such straightforward common sense.

As it happened, we do not have to ask ourselves what on earth she was thinking. The remark generated all sorts of comment and the Sunday Times, in its July 10, 1988 published a statement from the Prime Minister’s Office explaining what she meant. The statement reiterated the point about personal responsibility and includes these illuminating remarks about her earlier words:

But society as such does not exist except as a concept. Society is made up of people. It is people who have duties and beliefs and resolve. It is people who get things done.


This clarifies everything. She was expressing a basic concept of classical liberalism.

One of the ideas of classical liberalism is that individuals have concrete existence but societies do not. Society, according to liberalism, is an abstract idea constructed by individuals to help them better their own lives in cooperation with other individuals. Society is no more than the sum of the individuals who comprise it and to treat it as if it were something more than that, liberalism says, is to commit the fallacy of reification, the false attribution of concreteness to something that is only abstract.

Now there are some liberal ideas that a conservative can agree with. This, however, is not one of them. It is in fundamental contradiction to the conservative understanding of the nature of society. It is also a key element of the theoretical foundation for progressive social engineering. Liberalism and progressivism are both the offspring of the modern rationalist belief that human beings can create a better life and future for themselves by doing away with tradition all together and applying reason and the findings of empirical science to the planning of such a future. Progressives believe that governments should implement this planning over the objections of those who have an “irrational” preference for traditional ways of life. It is far easier to believe that a better society can be devised from scratch through rational planning and that opposition to such planning is irrational and should be overruled by the state in people’s own interests if you also believe that society itself is just an abstract concept.

Conservatives do not share the liberal and progressive faith in the ability of human reason to design a better way of living and a better society from scratch. Conservatism is the belief that a society that grows and develops, slowly and naturally, over a long period of time, will never be perfect, but will always be preferable to a society drawn up on paper by some committee of planners, no matter how intelligent they may be. A society that grows and develops naturally over time cannot be merely an abstract concept. It must exist in a more concrete sense.

The liberal idea that society is merely an abstract concept shows just how out of touch with reality liberalism is. This idea is closely connected to the liberal idea of the priority of the individual. Indeed, the two ideas are the reverse sides of one coin in that neither could be true if the other were false. The idea of the priority of the individual is that the individual is prior to all social groups and that human beings are autonomous individuals in their natural state. For this to be true society would have to be an abstract concept thought up by individuals and for society to be an abstract concept thought up by individuals the individual would have to be prior to all levels of social organization. Yet the idea that the individual is prior to society is demonstrably false. Every human being born into this world is born into a number of social groups of which he is already a member without his voluntary consent being given or even asked for. He is born into his family, both the nuclear family consisting of his parents, whatever siblings he might have, and himself, and his extended family of grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc. Except in the most unusual of circumstances he will have been born into a community as well. Each of these, his nuclear family, his extended family, and the community to which his family belongs, existed before he did.

The liberal theory of the priority of the individual is not only false it is the opposite of what is observably true in the real world. It follows from this that the idea that society exists only as an abstract concept and not as something concrete is false too.

If society has concrete existence it must also have a nature. The traditional society preferred by conservatives over the artificial planned society preferred by liberals, progressives, and other rationalists is organic in nature.

What exactly does it mean to say that traditional society is organic?

The first thing it means is that traditional society has the quality, already discussed, of having grown and developed naturally over time rather than having been deliberately thought up and drawn out by a group of social planners. This is why the expression “the organic model of society”, an expression I confess to being guilty of having used in the past, is a contradiction in terms. A model is a tool of the rational planner. An architect designing a large building, a civil engineer designing the traffic infrastructure of a city, and an inventor designing a piece of complex machinery, might each first build a model so as to test his design and fix the flaws he finds before the construction of the final product begins. There can be no organic model of society because an organic society cannot be designed and constructed in this manner.

The concept of an organic society is a metaphor rather than a model. It means that to understand the nature of such a society we should think of a living organism, like a human being, animal, or plant. The way in which persons and groups within a society, relate to each other and cooperate with each other to form the society, is analogous to the way cells, tissues, and organs come together to form an organism.

There are a number of different ways in which the metaphor of an organism sheds light upon the nature of society.

Take, for example, the way the body of a complex organism like a human being, is multilayered. The human body consists entirely of cells but these cells do not come together directly to form the unity which is the body. First, cells of a similar type and function form tissues. Organs, such as the heart, lungs, and brain, are then formed out of tissues, and come together themselves to form systems like the nervous, reproductive, and digestive systems. Finally these systems, cooperating together by each performing its distinct function, make up a human body.

A traditional society is like this too. A traditional society is made up of people but individuals do not come together directly to form the unity which is society. Individuals belong to families and families come together to form larger social groups of various sorts. Families with similar education, occupations, wealth, and social status come together to form classes. Families that live in proximity to one another and who tend to do business with each other, shop in the same stores, eat in the same restaurants, send their children to the same schools, and regularly meet each other in a variety of contexts of work and play, form communities. Families that regularly meet together to collectively worship their God form religions. All of these various groups together make up a society.

As with any other metaphor the details of the analogy should not be pressed too far. The correlation that is being drawn is between the relationship of the parts of the body to the whole and the relationship between the parts of society and the whole. This does not mean that every specific part of society corresponds to a specific part of the body or vice-versa. Sometimes such a correlation may exist. That the government performs the same function in society that the head performs in the body is an observation that has been around since at least the time of Plato’s Republic. (1) Other times there may be no such specific correlation.

Parallels can be drawn between the role of the individual in society and that of the cell in the body. One can also draw parallels between the family and the cell, however. If the family is the cell then the individual is the atom. Interestingly, the term social atomization is used to refer to the alienation of the individual from society that has been brought about by modern conditions.

There is another way in which the relationship between the whole of a society and its parts resembles that of the body of a living organism and that is in its longevity. The life of a complex organism is ordinarily much longer than the lifespan of most of its cells. Its cells are constantly multiplying and replacing themselves. Indeed the fact that is occurs is one of the most basic traits that distinguishes living from dead material. The lifespans of the various cells which make up the human body vary, most falling within a range that goes from a couple of days to a little over a year. Only the cells of the brain and nervous system live as long as the body itself (2) assuming that one does not kill them prematurely by consuming toxic substances or holding to progressive ideas.

In similar fashion the lifespans of the people who make up a society vary but are usually much shorter than the lifespan of the society itself. Some people live out the threescore and ten years allotted to them by the psalmist, some live longer, and some die young for one reason or another. The lifespan of a society, however, is ordinarily measured in centuries not in years. As cells multiply, replace themselves, and die within an organism that lives much longer than they do, so generation succeeds generation as people are born, reproduce, and die, within the life of their society.

An implication of this is that the good of the whole society should be considered, not just in terms of its present living members, but of past and future generations as well. (3)

Further light on the nature of an organic society can be found by considering and answering a misconception about it.

The most common objection to the organic view of society is that it is a recipe for totalitarianism. An organic society, libertarians say, is a society in which the parts are completely subordinated to the whole and therefore the organic view of society serves the interests of despotic governments looking to justify their acts of tyranny.

In answer to this objection it should be pointed out that while specific despots may have used the organic theory in this manner the idea that government should have absolute control over the lives of its people by no means follows from the view that society is best understood as an organism. Earlier, I pointed out that the contractual model of society, which is part of the classical liberal worldview held by most libertarians, is itself an important element in the theoretical justification of progressive social engineering. Progressive social engineering is when the government, in order to achieve progressive goals like universal economic and social equality, interferes with the customs, traditions, mores, and folkways which people follow in their everyday lives. The idea that society is an abstract concept, a contract drawn up by individuals for the good of individuals, eliminates many of the objections people might have to this sort of heavy-handed government interference with the way of life they have learned and inherited from their parents and ancestors. Several objections to such social engineering arise, on the other hand, out of the idea that society is a living organism.

Indeed, the idea that the government should have absolute control over the lives of its people does not logically follow the idea that society is an organism at all. Think about it. Throughout your entire life, the cells, organs, and systems in your body perform various functions. How many of these do you consciously control? Do you ordinarily think about how your lungs inhale and exhale air and instruct them on how to do a better job? Do you regularly tell your heart when to beat? Do you find yourself bossing your kidneys and your liver around or passing laws in your brain regulating the way your skin absorbs sunlight or your white blood cells fight off infection? If you had to consciously control all the internal processes in your body you would be unable to function. Neither can a society function when its government tries to micromanage all the affairs of its members. If anything, the organic metaphor suggests that government should have less control over the affairs of a society’s members than you have over the involuntary processes and functions that take place in your body. This is because the people who make up a society possess something which the cells and organs which make up a human being do not possess and that is the ability to reflect, deliberate, and make choices.

The organic understanding of society, then, is not consistent with tyranny. The idea that the members of a society are parts of an organic whole is not an excuse for government oppression. It means that when people go about their everyday lives, voluntarily acting in ways influenced by the customs and traditions that have been passed on to them, which have developed throughout their society’s history to serve its needs, their actions contribute to the greater good of the whole society. When a man and a woman marry each other, have children, raise those children to both fend for themselves and cooperate with others in accordance with the customs and rules of their society, this serves the good of their society as a whole, which cannot survive unless a new generation follows the old generation.

A conservative is someone who prefers this kind of traditional, organic, society to one drawn up on paper by even the most competent of planners. For this reason “there is no such thing as society” is a phrase that does not belong in the mouth of the leader of a party which professes to be conservative.

(1) Ironically, of course, when Plato places this observation in the mouth of his mentor Socrates in The Republic, Socrates and his friends are engaged in thinking up a hypothetical, ideal model of a city-state.

(2) The claim that all of the cells in your body are completely replaced every seven years is a myth.

(3) Those who would question how the good of people now deceased could be affected in the present are invited to read the accounts of Solon’s interview with Croesus of Lydia found in Herodotus’ Histories and Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, and the discussion of this interview in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. When, according to Herodotus and Plutarch, the Athenian lawgiver Solon in his travels met Croesus, the king displayed his wealth to him and asked him if he had ever known a happier man. He was not pleased when Solon answered yes and proceeded to name Tellus, Cleobis, and Biton, all of whom were dead. Solon told him that because the fortunes of man rise and fall “and him only to whom the divinity has continued happiness unto the end we call happy; to salute as happy one that is still in the midst of life and hazard, we think as little safe and conclusive as to crown and proclaim as victorious the wrestler that is yet in the ring.” Croesus would learn what Solon meant when he lost his kingdom and life to the conquest of the Persians. Aristotle, in Book One of his Nicomachean Ethics asks “Must no one at all, then, be called happy while he lives; must we, as Solon says, see the end? Even if we are to lay down this doctrine, is it also the case that a man is happy when he is dead? Or is not this quite absurd, especially for us who say that happiness is an activity?” He then takes the question further than Solon himself had taken it by questioning how the fortunes of children and descendants affect the happiness of the dead. “It would be odd, then, if the dead man were to share in these changes and become at one time happy, at another wretched; while it would also be odd if the fortunes of the descendants did not for some time have some effect on the happiness of their ancestors.” The quotation from Solon is from Plutarch’s account of his life as translated by John Dryden. The quotations from Aristotle are from W. D. Ross’ translation of the Nicomachean Ethics.