Equality & Servility

The Servile Mind

Queen Elizabeth, Tony and Cherie Blair at the Millennium Dome, 1999

Anwar Hussein

How Democracy Erodes
the Moral Life
by Kenneth Minogue
Encounter, 384 pp., $25.95

Sensible people worry today about the West’s direction. What recently seemed to be merely a slow decline now seems to be a steady and even headlong slide. A thousand hands push us downward into a prisoner’s cell where we must share every dollar, watch every word, and bless every bureaucrat. The cell is roomy and secure, with exotic vines creeping up the bars. But it is a cell nonetheless. Looming over it are the strangely chilling apparitions of Obama and Brown, and the oddly manic specters of Clinton and Blair. Or should we say Gordon, Barack, Bill, and Tony because, as Kenneth Minogue points out in this bracing new book, galloping informality is one aspect of our new egalitarian world. No wonder that Tony’s comic attempt to restore a “respect” society in Britain was bound to fail.

Why was it Tony’s business anyway to tell us how to live, or Jimmy’s to tell us to snap out of our malaise? As Minogue tells it, we are becoming rats for politicians’ experimental schemes, patients for their white-coated therapy, objects for their fantasies of perfection. The utopianism which, in the wake of the Marxists’ collapse and defeat dares not speak its name, has regrouped as the piecemeal perfectionism that believes it can harmlessly and step-by-step overcome all inequality, poverty, and war. The woebegone electorate sometimes seems, to its nominal political servants, to be unworthy of their inspirations. (One thinks of President Obama’s arrogant lectures about constitutional rights and racial profiling.) But this lingering public recalcitrance will soon enough disappear, as hitherto independent citizens learn to recognize the endless vulnerabilities they should feel and the endless injustices they have caused. Only the state can put things right.