I spent three days at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London earlier this week, and I wanted to share with you some of what the very eminent speakers talked about, as well as some of my own observations from interacting with other attendees.
Back in October, I riffed a bit about rights and responsibility.
The Domain of Manners
With freedom comes responsibility, a responsibility that can only be met by the individual.
— Ronald Reagan
The Culture Wars have made it much more difficult for the Public to accurately understand almost any fast-breaking event. Ideology snakes itself into almost everything. Take the news coverage of Hurricane Helene. During the scenes of devastation, we heard one side blaming it all on climate change. On the other, we heard that FEMA would be compounding the tragedies through its emphasis on DEI (All the while, so many of us were focused on the lives lost and devastation, especially in western North Carolina. Very personally, the destruction of our beloved Biltmore Village hit us hard. The Boss and I were there just two weeks before Helene arrived.).
These ideological snakes are so intertwined that they have become a Gordian knot strangling our access to accurate information. I try to cut through this by getting information from many sides and then using each to filter the others, to get the nuggets of reality. In doing this, I’ve found some unusual sources, particularly on Substack. One of these is a neat little space called “Jotting in Purple” by Celia M Paddock.
One day last week, she reprised the text of an impromptu address given over 100 years ago to the Authors Club of London. It was given by Lord Moulton (UK) who was Minister of Munitions at the beginning of World War I. Called Law and Manners, its relevance to Present problems is startling (or at least to me – but maybe I’m easily startled!).
Lord Moulton’s focus is on people’s behavior. He divides what controls our behavior into three domains:
Positive Law – laws and regulations codified by government at some level;
Free Choice – uncontrolled except by our own self-interest;
Obedience to the Unenforceable – controlled by our duty to our community and our society.
The main thrust of his talk (from the 19-teens!) was that the domains of Positive Law and Free Choice were expanding to the detriment of that third domain, which he shorthanded as the Domain of Manners. A key phrase from his talk: the Public has “not yet learned that power [the ability to act] has its duties as well as its rights.”
For him, these were somewhat wry observations about his own time. For me, they were like looking at the picture on a jigsaw puzzle’s box. Suddenly a lot of pieces fell into place.
The Domain of Positive Law is definitely expanding. We have governments throughout the Western World imposing laws and regulations limiting what we can say and do. One of the first – and arguably one of the worst – of these laws was the Patriot Act. Passed in response to 9/11, it gave the federal government unprecedented power to listen in on our conversations. Perhaps the worst of these laws, though, are the numerous “Hate Crime” laws at the state and federal levels. They have tipped the scales of justice far to the side of the Prosecutors, with few checks to protect defendants’ rights.
While the Domain of Positive Law is expanding, so is the Domain of Free Choice, or at least it seems to be. To me, it’s more like the multi-culturism – "anything goes" – spawned in the 60s has become an Un-culture, one without fixed stars to help us navigate our lives. A culture has norms which act as those fixed stars. A culture sets expectations of behavior and responsibility. A culture helps us “find a reason to believe.” Thus, our current Un-culture with its kaleidoscopically changing “do’s and don’t’s” creates a sort of vacuum that Free Choice fills.
But in the Domain of Free Choice there is little Responsibility. We see this in many things. Take “my body, my choice” for example. Women took the power to make their reproductive decisions. Too many forgot that that also meant they took the responsibility for those decisions. And as Tim Carney has pointed out:
“Before the sexual revolution, women had less freedom, but men were expected to assume responsibility for their welfare. Today women are more free to choose, but men have afforded themselves the comparable option. If she is not willing to have an abortion or use contraception, the man can reason, why should I sacrifice myself to get married?”
The intellectual rot that’s set in at many of our colleges and universities provides another example. At one time, academic freedom meant that one could espouse any view as long as others in the community of scholars could do the same. Over time, that responsibility to protect others' right to express themselves was lost. Just as Freedom without Responsibility descends into License, so too academic freedom without responsibility became licentious. We have the sad spectacle of climate scientists trying to silence those with contrary views. We have the sad spectacle of faculty and students in the so-called liberal arts preventing those with views contrary to theirs from even speaking. Even sadder is the spectacular anti-semitism of faculty and students.
Thus, Moulton’s Domain of Manners is actually the Domain of Responsibility. Its shrinking can drastically impact our communities. For a community’s success – whether civic or a community of scholars – ultimately depends on people who feel a responsibility to help make their community successful. They have an innate sense of duty that impels them to go beyond their personal interests for the greater good. Sadly, in too many communities, we’ve seen their number dwindling.
Oddly, I’m guardedly optimistic that the tide is starting to turn. Surely, the often-enforced isolation of the pandemic turned the attention of many inward and away from their communities. As memories of the pandemic are fading, many are rediscovering their own communities. We see so-called “classical schools” introducing a million students to those classics that were the basis for our own Culture of Responsibility. In the time of Hurricanes Helene and Milton we see so many working in their communities to clear the debris and restore normal living. So far to go, but small signs of hope.
I'm a big fan of Lord Moulton- we need his observations on the Domain of Obedience to the Unenforceable now more than ever. It's also worth noting that the Domain of Manners tends to be mediated and organic. In the modern context, free choice is heavily influenced by social construction- there seems to have been a deliberate and concerted effort to bifurcate free choice from its often negative consequences- hence populations which have a preponderance of semi-permanent self-induced medical conditions. Meanwhile the Domain of Positive Law is inherently mechanistic, and by nature dehumanising through its inability to recognise individual circumstances (especially when judicial discretion has either been curtailed or usurped by ideology).
Recent economic research has highlighted that the key to economic prosperity and uplift for developing nations is institutions. It's obviously an observation which thrills the Left because they automatically read this message as strong institutions. The evidence shows their initial assumptions are incorrect, it appears to be more a matter of self-limiting institutions. A prime example would be Botswana which kept almost all of its colonial institutions and even invited former colonials to stay within the administration until sufficient Botswanan's had been educated and trained to fill their roles.
What the Left misses is the key ingredient to successful institutions:
"That government is best which governs least, because its people discipline themselves."
While the names have changed, it still seemed to me that this group of eminent intellectuals " gathering in London to save culture from itself (whatever that means )is no more than another elite gathering ready to tell all the deplorables how lucky we are to have ARC challenging the WEF hegemony. and not to worry,Baris Weiss, DouglasMurray Jonathan Pageau etc and are all sane, clear-eyed competent adults. IS this serious? This is the self congratulatory language of the in crowd. I can hear the dinner conversation now- isn't it grand that we are all sane and clear-eyed. Plus, Amongst the working class people I hang with, I can't think of any who is not sane and competent or who does not embrace reponsibility. My 54 year old son was out of work for 8 months and he sent out 500 applicationns until he finally got a job. Is that responsible enough for the ARC crowd. Jenny is right- most of America has no idea what ARC is, Right now I have to look up the word Hegemony. Not a word I normally use.
Look, there is always an elite, and I spend about 70 percent of the space on this Substack complaining about them. This is one of the few essays in which I don't, because the entire point of the thing is that it's anti-woke, which I am in broad agreement with and is desperately needed, so while taking a macro view of it, I chose not to quibble over the details, in this particular essay. If you want to be ill-tempered and reflexively negative, that's your choice.
"Being informed as I was by a reader below that Mosley is the grandson of infamous British fascist Oswald Mosley is a remarkable twist"
One has to be careful with the word fascist, since historically it was a term used by Communists to shut down criticism and opposition to Communism – and still is, I believe.
"If there was a common thread uniting the speeches that I attended, it was that we need to rediscover the connection between material wellbeing and moral good." I love hearing this. Also, enjoyed your take on Theil, like Musk he's been worrisome to me if only for the fact that he represents the tech-bro elite that we've come to distrust. After almost 5 years I'm feeling hopeful again, the fog is lifting and the spell is breaking.
I am convinced that President Trump and his allies are in fact the new Thatcherites.
She changed the world back in the 80s, by killing off the old socialst consensus that had arisen during the War. Governments all around the world, both left and right adopted Thatcherite reforms.
Unfortunately, the old left morphed into a new crony-capitalist left that has perverted our culture.
Their respectability is in fact the praise of vice. As the work of Theodore Dayrymple shows, that love of vice has cause social chaos and the growth of the underclass. We need to bring back real respectabilty, based upon Christian morality.
'Ayan Hirsi Ali also gave full-throated support to the nation state. “Modern liberals blamed nationalism for Hitler and the Holocaust, failing to distinguish good and bad nationalism,”'
It's an interesting take, but not the only one to contradict those who wish to see nation states displaced by a supranational world order which keeps the plebs powerless and in their place.
Some would argue that Nazism only emerged because of the failed supranational order imposed on the Germans by the humiliating and impoverishing treaty of Versailles.
In this conversation/interview Isaiah Berlin makes a distinction between Nationalism and National Consciousness or National Feeling. It's his contention that nationalism mainly arises from a wounded sense of national consciousness or national feeling. By attempting to undermine national feeling across Europe, the internationalists are creating the circumstances which give rise to the very nationalism they seek to confine to the dustbin of history.
Thank you for this (sent to me just now via 'Substack Reads'. Like most on the right I am gob-smacked and in awe of the Trump regime's unapologetic, no-holds barred start. And I want to be heartened by ARC too. I really do. But..... As I wrote here: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-madness-of-intelligentsias
"I am pessimistic about there being effective political solutions to our Western malaise. I have never read Spengler’s Decline of the West but the idea that every civilisation will eventually – sooner or later - fall apart seems axiomatic... and borne out by history. The laws of entropy will apply...why would an exception be made of Western Liberalism? ....There are two fundamental ways of thinking about politics....a limited conception and a grandiose one. Due to the dominance of the grandiose conception in the modern era, we in the West have been schooled into an expectation that there is a political solution to every social problem. There isn’t... but the expectation can lead people - especially the most politically engaged kind - down some big rabbit holes.
The biggest problem - as I see it - is bureaucracy. Nobody really has any idea how to run an advanced urban society without it. What could realistically be done about the general Kafkaesqueness of the interface between us as individuals and any kind of system?
Because of the names we have all been called, the degradation we've all been exposed to, and the very public attempt to smear us all as conspiracy theorists, uneducated goblins, I have taken the time to do quite a bit of research on some of the "scary" words used. I won't go into it here, but there are words that have taken on meaning only because of relation to other movements. The problem is that the people using those words aren't decoupling half the definition. They are picking and choosing. So, not only do I agree with everything said here, I'm not sure that we can rid ourselves of these globalists without offending some sensibilities. The line has to be pushed and it can't be stopped on moderate because that leaves room for retrenchment.
Back in October, I riffed a bit about rights and responsibility.
The Domain of Manners
With freedom comes responsibility, a responsibility that can only be met by the individual.
— Ronald Reagan
The Culture Wars have made it much more difficult for the Public to accurately understand almost any fast-breaking event. Ideology snakes itself into almost everything. Take the news coverage of Hurricane Helene. During the scenes of devastation, we heard one side blaming it all on climate change. On the other, we heard that FEMA would be compounding the tragedies through its emphasis on DEI (All the while, so many of us were focused on the lives lost and devastation, especially in western North Carolina. Very personally, the destruction of our beloved Biltmore Village hit us hard. The Boss and I were there just two weeks before Helene arrived.).
These ideological snakes are so intertwined that they have become a Gordian knot strangling our access to accurate information. I try to cut through this by getting information from many sides and then using each to filter the others, to get the nuggets of reality. In doing this, I’ve found some unusual sources, particularly on Substack. One of these is a neat little space called “Jotting in Purple” by Celia M Paddock.
One day last week, she reprised the text of an impromptu address given over 100 years ago to the Authors Club of London. It was given by Lord Moulton (UK) who was Minister of Munitions at the beginning of World War I. Called Law and Manners, its relevance to Present problems is startling (or at least to me – but maybe I’m easily startled!).
Lord Moulton’s focus is on people’s behavior. He divides what controls our behavior into three domains:
Positive Law – laws and regulations codified by government at some level;
Free Choice – uncontrolled except by our own self-interest;
Obedience to the Unenforceable – controlled by our duty to our community and our society.
The main thrust of his talk (from the 19-teens!) was that the domains of Positive Law and Free Choice were expanding to the detriment of that third domain, which he shorthanded as the Domain of Manners. A key phrase from his talk: the Public has “not yet learned that power [the ability to act] has its duties as well as its rights.”
For him, these were somewhat wry observations about his own time. For me, they were like looking at the picture on a jigsaw puzzle’s box. Suddenly a lot of pieces fell into place.
The Domain of Positive Law is definitely expanding. We have governments throughout the Western World imposing laws and regulations limiting what we can say and do. One of the first – and arguably one of the worst – of these laws was the Patriot Act. Passed in response to 9/11, it gave the federal government unprecedented power to listen in on our conversations. Perhaps the worst of these laws, though, are the numerous “Hate Crime” laws at the state and federal levels. They have tipped the scales of justice far to the side of the Prosecutors, with few checks to protect defendants’ rights.
While the Domain of Positive Law is expanding, so is the Domain of Free Choice, or at least it seems to be. To me, it’s more like the multi-culturism – "anything goes" – spawned in the 60s has become an Un-culture, one without fixed stars to help us navigate our lives. A culture has norms which act as those fixed stars. A culture sets expectations of behavior and responsibility. A culture helps us “find a reason to believe.” Thus, our current Un-culture with its kaleidoscopically changing “do’s and don’t’s” creates a sort of vacuum that Free Choice fills.
But in the Domain of Free Choice there is little Responsibility. We see this in many things. Take “my body, my choice” for example. Women took the power to make their reproductive decisions. Too many forgot that that also meant they took the responsibility for those decisions. And as Tim Carney has pointed out:
“Before the sexual revolution, women had less freedom, but men were expected to assume responsibility for their welfare. Today women are more free to choose, but men have afforded themselves the comparable option. If she is not willing to have an abortion or use contraception, the man can reason, why should I sacrifice myself to get married?”
The intellectual rot that’s set in at many of our colleges and universities provides another example. At one time, academic freedom meant that one could espouse any view as long as others in the community of scholars could do the same. Over time, that responsibility to protect others' right to express themselves was lost. Just as Freedom without Responsibility descends into License, so too academic freedom without responsibility became licentious. We have the sad spectacle of climate scientists trying to silence those with contrary views. We have the sad spectacle of faculty and students in the so-called liberal arts preventing those with views contrary to theirs from even speaking. Even sadder is the spectacular anti-semitism of faculty and students.
Thus, Moulton’s Domain of Manners is actually the Domain of Responsibility. Its shrinking can drastically impact our communities. For a community’s success – whether civic or a community of scholars – ultimately depends on people who feel a responsibility to help make their community successful. They have an innate sense of duty that impels them to go beyond their personal interests for the greater good. Sadly, in too many communities, we’ve seen their number dwindling.
Oddly, I’m guardedly optimistic that the tide is starting to turn. Surely, the often-enforced isolation of the pandemic turned the attention of many inward and away from their communities. As memories of the pandemic are fading, many are rediscovering their own communities. We see so-called “classical schools” introducing a million students to those classics that were the basis for our own Culture of Responsibility. In the time of Hurricanes Helene and Milton we see so many working in their communities to clear the debris and restore normal living. So far to go, but small signs of hope.
I'm a big fan of Lord Moulton- we need his observations on the Domain of Obedience to the Unenforceable now more than ever. It's also worth noting that the Domain of Manners tends to be mediated and organic. In the modern context, free choice is heavily influenced by social construction- there seems to have been a deliberate and concerted effort to bifurcate free choice from its often negative consequences- hence populations which have a preponderance of semi-permanent self-induced medical conditions. Meanwhile the Domain of Positive Law is inherently mechanistic, and by nature dehumanising through its inability to recognise individual circumstances (especially when judicial discretion has either been curtailed or usurped by ideology).
Recent economic research has highlighted that the key to economic prosperity and uplift for developing nations is institutions. It's obviously an observation which thrills the Left because they automatically read this message as strong institutions. The evidence shows their initial assumptions are incorrect, it appears to be more a matter of self-limiting institutions. A prime example would be Botswana which kept almost all of its colonial institutions and even invited former colonials to stay within the administration until sufficient Botswanan's had been educated and trained to fill their roles.
What the Left misses is the key ingredient to successful institutions:
"That government is best which governs least, because its people discipline themselves."
I am glad you are bringing back news from the conference. It is interesting but I am not quite sure why I don’t have a good feeling about any of it.
I know what you mean actually.
Excellent-thank you for the report. It's nice to know there are some things to be optimistic about.
It looks like it was a worthwhile conference. Thank you for the link to their U-tube channel. One more thing on my list of things to watch.
Love this insight into ARC and the leadership. So glad to hear it’s gaining momentum too.
A superb article ... !!!
While the names have changed, it still seemed to me that this group of eminent intellectuals " gathering in London to save culture from itself (whatever that means )is no more than another elite gathering ready to tell all the deplorables how lucky we are to have ARC challenging the WEF hegemony. and not to worry,Baris Weiss, DouglasMurray Jonathan Pageau etc and are all sane, clear-eyed competent adults. IS this serious? This is the self congratulatory language of the in crowd. I can hear the dinner conversation now- isn't it grand that we are all sane and clear-eyed. Plus, Amongst the working class people I hang with, I can't think of any who is not sane and competent or who does not embrace reponsibility. My 54 year old son was out of work for 8 months and he sent out 500 applicationns until he finally got a job. Is that responsible enough for the ARC crowd. Jenny is right- most of America has no idea what ARC is, Right now I have to look up the word Hegemony. Not a word I normally use.
Look, there is always an elite, and I spend about 70 percent of the space on this Substack complaining about them. This is one of the few essays in which I don't, because the entire point of the thing is that it's anti-woke, which I am in broad agreement with and is desperately needed, so while taking a macro view of it, I chose not to quibble over the details, in this particular essay. If you want to be ill-tempered and reflexively negative, that's your choice.
"Being informed as I was by a reader below that Mosley is the grandson of infamous British fascist Oswald Mosley is a remarkable twist"
One has to be careful with the word fascist, since historically it was a term used by Communists to shut down criticism and opposition to Communism – and still is, I believe.
"If there was a common thread uniting the speeches that I attended, it was that we need to rediscover the connection between material wellbeing and moral good." I love hearing this. Also, enjoyed your take on Theil, like Musk he's been worrisome to me if only for the fact that he represents the tech-bro elite that we've come to distrust. After almost 5 years I'm feeling hopeful again, the fog is lifting and the spell is breaking.
I am convinced that President Trump and his allies are in fact the new Thatcherites.
She changed the world back in the 80s, by killing off the old socialst consensus that had arisen during the War. Governments all around the world, both left and right adopted Thatcherite reforms.
Unfortunately, the old left morphed into a new crony-capitalist left that has perverted our culture.
Their respectability is in fact the praise of vice. As the work of Theodore Dayrymple shows, that love of vice has cause social chaos and the growth of the underclass. We need to bring back real respectabilty, based upon Christian morality.
'Ayan Hirsi Ali also gave full-throated support to the nation state. “Modern liberals blamed nationalism for Hitler and the Holocaust, failing to distinguish good and bad nationalism,”'
It's an interesting take, but not the only one to contradict those who wish to see nation states displaced by a supranational world order which keeps the plebs powerless and in their place.
Some would argue that Nazism only emerged because of the failed supranational order imposed on the Germans by the humiliating and impoverishing treaty of Versailles.
In this conversation/interview Isaiah Berlin makes a distinction between Nationalism and National Consciousness or National Feeling. It's his contention that nationalism mainly arises from a wounded sense of national consciousness or national feeling. By attempting to undermine national feeling across Europe, the internationalists are creating the circumstances which give rise to the very nationalism they seek to confine to the dustbin of history.
https://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/lists/nachlass/probnati.pdf
Thank you for this (sent to me just now via 'Substack Reads'. Like most on the right I am gob-smacked and in awe of the Trump regime's unapologetic, no-holds barred start. And I want to be heartened by ARC too. I really do. But..... As I wrote here: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-madness-of-intelligentsias
"I am pessimistic about there being effective political solutions to our Western malaise. I have never read Spengler’s Decline of the West but the idea that every civilisation will eventually – sooner or later - fall apart seems axiomatic... and borne out by history. The laws of entropy will apply...why would an exception be made of Western Liberalism? ....There are two fundamental ways of thinking about politics....a limited conception and a grandiose one. Due to the dominance of the grandiose conception in the modern era, we in the West have been schooled into an expectation that there is a political solution to every social problem. There isn’t... but the expectation can lead people - especially the most politically engaged kind - down some big rabbit holes.
The biggest problem - as I see it - is bureaucracy. Nobody really has any idea how to run an advanced urban society without it. What could realistically be done about the general Kafkaesqueness of the interface between us as individuals and any kind of system?
"it requires a Judeo-Christian moral foundation. She, of all people, has earned the right to say this."
Absolutely she did!
Because of the names we have all been called, the degradation we've all been exposed to, and the very public attempt to smear us all as conspiracy theorists, uneducated goblins, I have taken the time to do quite a bit of research on some of the "scary" words used. I won't go into it here, but there are words that have taken on meaning only because of relation to other movements. The problem is that the people using those words aren't decoupling half the definition. They are picking and choosing. So, not only do I agree with everything said here, I'm not sure that we can rid ourselves of these globalists without offending some sensibilities. The line has to be pushed and it can't be stopped on moderate because that leaves room for retrenchment.
A member of the Mosely family threatening insurrection. What could possibly go wrong?
Surely it’s not the same Mosely’s?
Grandson of Sir Oswald, I believe.
I’m quite gobsmacked by that. Will take under consideration.
https://www.pressreader.com/uk/the-london-standard/20110524/283141425349195
What do you think of the younger M?
I don't know him personally. Invoking the English Civil War was not a shrewd rhetorical move.