Know Your Enemy

We are all Grand Inquisitors now

‘[The modern State may be recognised as an] invention for making circumstantially unavoidable choices for those unable to make them for themselves.’

-Michael Oakeshott

The UK’s Conservative Party is widely thought to be facing electoral oblivion this year. Only a fool makes predictions, but it’s always interesting to look at what people with skin in the game - gamblers - collectively make of things. Labour are, at the time of writing, at 2-17 on average with the bookies to get the most seats whenever the next general election takes place. The Tories are on average at 7-1. In what is for all intents and purposes a two-party system, those are what you call long odds.

It is commonly said that the problem for the Tories is that they don’t know what they stand for. There is a certain element of truth in this: the Parliamentary party is an almost absurdly broad spectrum comprising at one extreme people who wouldn’t have looked out of place in one of Tony Blair’s cabinets, and on the other, traditional religious conservatives - with an awful lot of Thatcherites, One Nationers, old-fashioned ‘shire Tories’, ‘wets’ and libertarians in the middle. But the bigger problem, it seems to me, is that the Tories don’t really know what they stand against. This is a particular problem for the Tory party in particular, which since the early 20th century has had the main raison d’etre of keeping Labour out of power. In order to do this, it should go without saying, you have to know what Labour stand for, and provide a clearly discernible alternative. That is the Tory party’s main duty, but it is badly shirking it.

Some readers of this substack will raise their eyebrows at the idea that the Tory party’s existence is mainly justified on the basis of keeping Labour out, so let me explain. And let me make no bones about it: while I have plenty of time for Labour voters (I come after all from dyed-in-the-wool Labour-voting stock) and even some Labour politicians, I despise the Labour Party and more or less everything it stands for. I don’t think there is an institution in contemporary Britain which exerts a more baleful influence. And this is because it is imbued with - indeed, it is the very political manifestation of - what Dostoyevsky might have called the morality of the Grand Inquisitor: a morality that positions itself always against freedom and agency in the name of comfort and ignorance.

To explain what this means, we need to do a little spadework. And it is useful here to go back to the thought of English conservatism’s most important political philosopher, Michael Oakeshott. Oakeshott was unusual among modern political philosophers in being deeply interested in personality and the way in which it is shaped by background, upbringing, and social circumstances - and how that then manifests in political preference. Put very simply, he described modern man as being born as an individual, whether he likes it or not. Medieval man lacked material comforts but he was swathed in a dense fabric of social and legal rights and obligations simply by dint of being born within a certain strata of society. This at least meant that he did not have to think very much about his station in life - it simply was what it was and that was that. Modern man, however, does not have this luxury: he has to confront the fact that he is free, and that his life is his own responsibility to do with as he might.

This is liberating, of course, but also challenging - and sometimes overwhelming. And Oakeshott described modern people as tending to exhibit two different responses to the circumstances of modern life. On the one hand there are ‘individuals’ as such, who embrace autonomy, value it as a good in itself, and respond proactively to the ‘adventure’ of freedom (and are willing to accept failure as the corollary of the opportunity to succeed). And on the other are ‘individual manqués’ or failed individuals, who find autonomy fearful, do not like the risks associated with having to take responsibility for one’s own successes and failures, and look always to authority for protection against the harshness of modern life. These prefer not autonomy but ‘the composure of a conscript assured of his dinner’.

This is sometimes portrayed by superficial readers as a grotesque form of dandyish snobbery - the idea being that Oakeshott must have been contrasting self-governing aristocrats with the cowardly and contemptible masses, and implying the difference was innate. And he was indeed scathing about the figure of the individual manqué, who he described as ‘defeated’ and ‘out-manoeuvred’ by freedom, riddled with ‘self-distrust’ and ‘submissiveness’, and longing only for ‘warm, compensated servility’. But careful reading reveals that Oakeshott’s position cannot have been founded in old-fashioned classism. The cleavage between the individual proper and the individual manqué is in the end for him philosophical: it is a contrast between two different ideals, not between two different classes of person. And, indeed, it actually reflects a cleavage within each and every human heart. At the end of his great masterpiece, On Human Conduct (1975), Oakeshott makes this more or less explicit. While it is perhaps true to say that some people seem ‘naturally’ more risk-averse and others more independent-spirited, we all have within us both dispositions: to embrace freedom as an adventure, but also to eschew it in the name of security. What matters are the conditions which tend to bring these dispositions to the fore - in each person and in society in the round.

Oakeshott has been excoriated for this - Perry Anderson, always to be relied upon to blithely misunderstand a subject despite having read fifty books about it - once said that it meant Oakeshott’s entire oeuvre was reduced to a ‘small parable’. But one only needs to reflect on one’s own experience to grasp the important truth which Oakeshott was hitting on. Think, for example, of any very consequential, momentous decision that you have made in your life - to buy a house, say, or switch jobs, or get married. Unless you are an unusually decisive person there will have been at least one episode in your life when you have agonised about such a choice. And though you probably didn’t think about it this way at the time, there would no doubt have been a small part (perhaps a big part) of you that actually would have quite liked to not have to make the decision at all - or, better yet, have some higher power make it on your behalf.

And we likewise also I think have all had moments in our lives when we have been stressed, depressed, bereaved, or just very tired, and have wanted to withdraw from the cold, hard world and retreat, literally or metaphorically, back under the bed covers. So we all, quite viscerally I think, know what Oakeshott was driving at. We, as moderns, have within us the capacity to embrace the liberation which modernity offers. But we also have within us the desire to avoid it and accept the assurance of having some authority or other tell us what to do and to take responsibility for our fate from our shoulders. Freedom is a great gift. But it can also be demanding.

The question then is what cultivates these different dispositions towards freedom and what causes one or the other to become dominant. Here, Oakeshott’s prognosis was bleak: modernity was one long, sad tale in which the propensity to adopt the perspective of the individual manqué was growing ever stronger among Western populations. The desire to engage with life as an autonomous, responsible, self-governing agent was diminishing; it was being replaced by an obsession with security and an acceptance of ‘servility’ as the price to pay for safety. We were in short coming to understand freedom as being at best a difficult chore: something best avoided in the name of an easy life. And this was chiefly (and this is where the Labour Party comes in) due to the growing prevalence of a particular class of person which Oakeshott describes as:

[Having] themselves just enough individuality to derive some satisfaction from the adventure of making choices but too little to seek it anywhere save in commanding others.

That is, there are in modern society certain people - politicians, yes, but also those in other walks of life such as teachers, civil servants, university lecturers, social workers, even businesspeople - who derive power and status (and the thrill of command) precisely from cultivating in others the propensity to approach life on the terms of the individual manque. Doing so - convincing other people that they are weak, vulnerable, incapable, and irredeemably needful of authority figures to tell them what to do - is the way that these people gain prestige and influence, and cement their careers. Because of course it gives them the justification they need to put themselves in charge and tell everybody else what to do.

The result is nothing less than a discursive method, using the word ‘discourse’ in its proper meaning as a body of knowledge that constructs its own subject. Modernity is characterised by a determination within government in particular to imagine government as a body of expertise founded upon the incapability of ordinary people to govern themselves. Within this mindset, it is necessary for government’s own self-justification, and its own sense of legitimacy, that the population should need it. And governing itself thereby becomes in large part a matter of convincing the entire population that they are incapable of managing their own affairs - to, in other words, make sure that the propensity of the individual manqué is as widely and deeply represented within the public as possible.

There are few political parties that operate on this basis as openly and fully as the British Labour Party. Whatever claim to govern the Labour Party has, it is always based on the notion that it is important that it governs, since ordinary people are quintessentially incapable of running their own lives. And central to this dynamic of course is the promise that one might never have to face the consequences of freedom; that one will be emancipated from having to make trade-offs; that one will be taken into the warm embrace of a benevolent authority which will make all the important decisions on one’s behalf, and ensure that one will never have to face the consequences of making a bad or imprudent choice again.

It is no accident then that the Labour Party should often present itself as the solution to all of the problems associated with the making of tough decisions - indeed, to the ending of genuine decision-making entirely. Want to work at home but don’t want to have to suffer the obvious career-damaging consequences? We’ll normalise flexible working and WFH and remove the ‘damaging divide between home and office workers’. Want to have a family but don’t want to have it impact on one’s career in any way? We’ll usher in ‘universally accessible, affordable childcare from the end of parental leave to the end of primary school’. Want to eat junk food but can’t exercise self-discipline? We’ll make sure you can only afford small amounts anyway. Can’t afford to take time off work but fancy a duvet day? We’ll introduce a statutory sick pay entitlement from the first day of illness. Want your kids to be healthy but don’t want to have to be confrontational or authoritarian? We'll introduce supervised toothbrushing in schools so you don’t have to be mean to little Jimmy. Care about the environment but are worried about the economic impact of abandoning fossil fuels? We’ll have a just transition that will turn the UK into a clean energy superpower. Want to be looked after when you get sick but don’t want to have to pay for it? We’ll socialise healthcare and make it free at the point of use. And so on and so forth: we’ve got it covered; you don’t have to make trade-offs; you can have your cake and eat it. The real world, with its consequences for bad-decision making and its risks and dangers, is out there, but we’ll protect you from all of that. You can go back under the duvet where it’s warm and cuddly. We’ll take care of everything.

The pitch that Labour makes is not, then, really about alleviating poverty - and as anybody who pays attention will have noticed, Labour politicians have largely ceased to talk about trying to make poor people richer (if they ever did). Making poor people richer isn’t the point. The point is to make everybody feel as vulnerable and as incapable as everybody else: an equality of mediocrity, vapidity, and indolence. None of us more competent than anybody else; all of us desperate for government to take away, as Tocqueville put it, ‘all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living’. Not emancipation from poverty and the self-reliance that comes from wealth and prosperity; emancipation rather from freedom itself - nasty, cold, harsh, unforgiving, uncompromising freedom, which presumptively none of us is equipped to handle.

This is, of course, as Dostoyevsky long ago showed us, the essence of socialism, so it is no surprise that the Labour Party should instantiate it. In The Brothers Karamazov Ivan recites for his brother Alexei a tale in which Christ returns to Earth and is more or less immediately sentenced to be burned to death. Before the sentence is due to be carried out, the Grand Inquisitor comes to see Jesus and castigates him for interfering with the mission of the church. Jesus, in refusing to rule over the world when offered it by Satan, and in thereby giving human beings free will, had made a critical misjudgment. In fact, human beings cannot be trusted with freedom, and indeed hate and fear it. It would have been better for Jesus to simply have deprived them of it and ruled over everyone, so that all could be redeemed and none would have to suffer. The tale ends on an ambivalent note, but the inference is clear: the essence of socialism is the perspective of the Grand Inquisitor, who sees freedom and agency as fundamentally undesirable because they get in the way of salvation. It is best that those things be sacrificed, so that humanity can be redeemed.

All that needs to be added to Dostoyevsky’s account, of course, is that this means that socialism incentivises, and relentlessly pursues, the advancement of weakness. For it to function, it must convince the public that its account is true - and it must therefore constantly find new ways in which to present freedom as bad, to present the individual as incapable and weak, and to present government as benevolent and necessary. Almost all of modern left-wing politics can be explained by this basic dynamic: salvation comes through the total government of the State, and most certainly not through individual choice or the exercising of agency, which are hindrances at best, and actively seditious at worst.

This is at the heart of the matter; it is what Labour stands for. And, knowing and understanding this, the role of the Conservative Party becomes much more clear. It must distinguish itself by concerning itself with the question of how the conditions within which freedom can be cultivated are made secure. It must in short interest itself in providing the framework within which agency can be - to use a hideous word - actualised. This does not mean it must produce a non-existent State: collective action problems are real. But it does mean emphasising that freedom itself is a good, and that, in particular, since wealth brings freedom, creating and sustaining the conditions for the maximalisation of wealth across the population ought to be one of the primary tasks of government.

If Labour’s interest is in advancing an equality of vulnerability that reduces us all to an undifferentiated mass, in other words, the Tory party’s should be in turning us all into aristocrats. But in failing to provide that crucial point of differentiation, it is consigning itself to the graveyard; if there is anything worse and more despicable to the electorate than the rule of a Grand Inquisitor, it is the rule of his second-rate lieutenant. That’s the position in which we, and the Tory party, find ourselves, however; a choice between the real deal, and its pale imitation - at best, a least-bad option, which only half-heartedly apes the authentic contempt for freedom displayed by the other. If you ask me the odds of Labour majority are if anything significantly undervalued.