'Sometimes you have to be a little bit naughty'

The perils of pursuing virtue as the crow flies

‘The predicament of Western morals, as I read it, is first that our moral life has come to be dominated by the pursuit of ideals, a dominance ruinous to a settled habit of behaviour; and, secondly, that we have come to think of this dominance as a benefit for which we should be grateful or an achievement of which we should be proud.’ M. Oakeshott, ‘The Tower of Babel’ (1948)

Have you happened to watch the 2022 film version of Matilda: The Musical, available on Netflix? The story, as you probably know, is based on the 1988 Roald Dahl novel Matilda, in which a young girl - who happens to be both psychic and a genius - is variously repressed by ignorant parents and an overbearing headmistress, and finally manages to get her revenge (as well as a more stable future) through an act of what can best be described as telekinetic rebellion.

The film version (which is itself based on a 2010 musical adaptation), as is so often the case, significantly vulgarises and debases the novel. But it is nonetheless a rich text in its own right. It reveals the extent to which contemporary artistic mores remain dominated by a particular aesthetic, in which society is imagined to be subject to the the oppressive forces of malign tradition and unjustified hierarchy, conspiring between them to erect a framework of petty rules which limit human potential. This entire edifice is in urgent need of being torn down so that something better can emerge from its ruin, and achieving this is the duty of all those who believe in freedom and justice. Their job is to continually struggle against the evils of tradition and usher in a new, more optimistic world to replace the unjust one which we find ourselves inhabiting.

You will have noticed that many films, TV series, and books are rooted in this aesthetic, and particularly those made for children. And it is no surprise that it is written all over Matilda: The Musical and the fantasy vision of the past it depicts - a past in which school children are actually still subject to anything approaching harsh discipline, or even discipline at all; in which they have any experience of being punished for misbehaviour; and in which they are expected to look up to adults with respect and talk to them circumspectly and politely.

No child living today - certainly none brought up in England - has any experience of such a world. The entire framework of old fashioned, ‘old school’ discipline; of minding one’s Ps and Qs; of ‘Yes, please’ and ‘No, thank you’; was already growing somewhat ramshackle in 1988 (I was 7 years old at the time, so I speak with some authority on the matter); in the 2020s it is barely even a folk memory. And yet the creators of Matilda: The Musical seem to think it somehow retains relevance. They remain enraptured, as the cultural left has been enraptured since its birth in the French Revolution, with the aesthetic which I earlier described. Never mind that barely anybody living can recall an actual interaction with a strict headmaster or headmistress. The struggle against such odious figures continues unabated, and the children of today must be drafted into the fight. Matilda: The Musical is part of that imaginary struggle.

In the real world, meanwhile, we see things like this going on:

Last week a large number of ‘youths’ (as they are invariably described) gathered on Oxford Street, central London’s most famous shopping street, to engage in a semi-organised bout of looting and shop-lifting, organised through Tiktok; they were not alone, and similar disturbances took place in several other urban centres across the country. This led the Police and Crime Commissioner for Hampshire and the Isle of Wight to observe that we are in fact facing ‘social breakdown’.

And it is hard, looking around as one goes about one’s daily life in urban Britain, to disagree with her. It is not just the public urination and drug-taking that one encounters when visiting any given city centre high street, or the vaguely menacing vibes put out by groups of balaclava-wearing, BMX-riding teenagers who wander the streets at all times, or the ubiquitous music blaring out on mobile phones. It is the generalised decay of good manners, of decorum - even down to the clothes that people wear and the slovenliness of their appearance, which all too frequently communicate to the world the message: ‘I don’t care enough about anyone else to bother to try to look good.’

Does it, in other words, strike you that the problem facing society in general and childrearing in particular is, as the creators of Matilda: The Musical seem to implicitly suggest, that we still have too much discipline? Or do you perhaps agree with me that, while we don’t want to go too far, maybe a tiny pinch of Miss Trunchbull-ism would go rather a long way in contemporary life? I can imagine in fact a successful spin-off of Matilda called Miss Trunchbull: The Musical, a film in which the titular character transforms a band of teenaged Tiktok looters into olympian hammer-throwers and shot-putters by using nothing but a good old stiff upper-lip and perhaps some judicious deployment of ‘the chokey’ - in the process revealing herself to have a heart of gold after all and perhaps even learning a few valuable lessons along the way. I would pay good money to see that. Not coming soon to any cinemas, near anybody, though; instead just another dozen Disney films in which - guess what? - a misunderstood young person/fish/monkey/alien/robot, repressed by society, discovers who they ‘really are’.

What is so striking about our current moment, however, is that all of this social breakdown is happening in tandem with such a crystallisation of moral idealism. While the hollowed-out shell of what remains of civility collapses all around us, we seem to collectively be ever more painfully aware of what is supposed to be right and wrong in any given instance. Name an issue of contemporary importance, from achieving ‘Net Zero’ to debanking to the reintroduction of wolves into the countryside, and you will without even a millisecond’s thought be able to then identify the position on that issue that is held within society to be morally correct. In that sense, we have all been very thoroughly trained and, indeed, disciplined. What explains this strange juxtaposition between social chaos on the one hand, and hyper-organisation of thought on the other?

As is often the case, Michael Oakeshott long ago gave us a set of conceptual tools to understand the predicament which we are in. There are two ideal forms of ‘the moral life’, Oakeshott tells us in his 1948 essay ‘The Tower of Babel’¹ - and these are essentially in conflict with one another. In one of them, morality is understood to a custom or ‘habit’. To act morally is to unreflectingly follow a tradition of conduct into which one was born and raised, acquired like a language. One does the right thing by doing what is always done in one’s society as a matter of course, and one does not think about the reasons why or interrogate the underlying rationale.

In the other, morality is understood to be an exercise of reflectively applying a ‘moral criterion’: a system of moral ideals exists, and behaving morally is identifying which moral ideal applies in any given moment, and acting in light of it accordingly. Here, behaviour is subject to ‘continuous corrective analysis and criticism’, and morality is not something one is brought up with, but something about which one must be trained - so as to be able to detect and appreciate the ideals in question and to balance them against each other and apply them correctly. This ‘calls upon those who practice [this type of morality] to determine their behaviour by reference to a vision of perfection’.

Neither of these forms of the moral life are very desirable, to Oakeshott, at their purest. The first can readily tip into superstition and prejudice; the second into outright perfectionism. But he was much more concerned about the danger posed by there being too much emphasis on the latter. As he puts it, in a society dominated by the pursuit of moral ideals, the ‘[t]he constant analysis of behaviour tends to undermine, not only prejudice in moral habit, but moral habit itself, and moral reflection may come to inhibit moral sensibility.’ This is because, essentially, of what we might call analysis paralysis. Rather than unreflectively acting in accordance with custom, those who are subject to moral idealism must submit all of their conduct at all times to what Oakeshott elsewhere calls ‘the tribunal of the intellect’. They must forever be weighing different ideals against one another and figuring out how they apply in the given circumstances before determining how to act, with the result being continual uncertainty what to do in any given circumstance: ‘the unhappy society, with an ear for every call, certain always about what it ought to think…in action shies and plunges like a distracted animal’.

Our contemporary society sounds a lot like the one which Oakeshott predicted would emerge where the pursuit of moral ideals, or (to use his own evocative phrase) the seeking 'of ‘virtue as the crow flies’, becomes dominant:

When action is called for, speculation or criticism will supervene. Behaviour itself will tend to become problematical, seeking its self-confidence in the coherence of an ideology. The pursuit of perfection will get in the way of a stable and flexible moral tradition, the naive coherence of which will be prized less than the unity which springs from selfconscious analysis and synthesis. It will seem more important to have an intellectually defensible moral ideology than a ready habit of moral behaviour.

And there we have in a nutshell the problem. Our society has become dominated by the notion that what matters is an ‘intellectually defensible moral ideology’ rather than good moral habit. We obsess over the pursuit of perfection, and as a result in any given circumstance we are impeccably sure about what not to do. We have a critique for every traditional more, from marriage to the family to punctuality to prudence. We can all explain exactly what is wrong with these outmoded moral habits, and have been well and truly trained in identifying their flaws. But we have nothing to put in their stead: ‘lacking habits of moral behaviour, we have fallen back upon moral opinions as a substitute’, with the result that ‘we know less about how to behave in public and in private than ever before’.

There is no more central element in our ‘intellectually defensible moral ideology’ than the principle of equality, and we see in stark terms how Oakeshott’s schema plays out when we examine the way that the young are now raised in light of this ideal. Everybody is certain that everybody is equal, or should be, and everybody knows that our society pursues perfection in this regard to the exclusion of almost any other value. And from this we derive our critique of traditional discipline and manners; to a society dominated by the pursuit of equality, it is self-evident that there is no good reason why adults should boss children around merely because they are adults, nor any good reason why children should be deferential to their elders merely because of their age, and nor indeed any reason in particular why anybody should display good manners to anybody else without that person having revealed themselves to be somehow worthy beforehand. These are the irrational notions of the hierarchical past, and we all know that hierarchy is for the dustbin of history.

Yet we, plainly, have no idea what we should be doing instead. The evidence before our eyes is clear: we are struggling more and more to bring children up into functioning adults who can play a positive role in a stable society; who do not suffer from mental health problems of various kinds; who are not addicted to their phones, pornography, video games or medication of one type or another; and who are even able to tell right from wrong in the most basic sense. Blaming the youngsters rioting on Oxford Street is in this respect almost a category error; they have been raised to think that morality inheres in the self-conscious application of ideals, and not that there is simply good and bad and that is that. They all, doubtless, know exactly what to think about Net Zero and Brexit. But nobody has ever bothered to properly inculcate in them respect for the notion that it is never right to take that which belongs to somebody else - not because of some carefully developed moral ideology, but just because it is wrong to do so.

What is to be done about this sorry state of affairs? Habit, once lost, is hard to recover, and I am worried that soon we will be in the position of having to start again more or less from scratch. For the moment, we can at least, as Oakeshott advised us, rid ourselves of the ‘self-deception’ of congratulating ourselves that we have morality figured out. Far from it: our obsession with the pursuit of virtue is driving us to forget the most foundational of moral precepts - the elements, indeed, of civility, which are almost by definition unreflectingly and unconsciously followed, and inculcated into the young not because they make sense in view of what is ideal, but because that’s what adults do.

1. Not to be confused with an essay he wrote with the same title much later in life, and which was published in 1983 in On History and Other Essays.