Let us all rebuild the respectable society
By Charles Moore
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 18/10/2008
After I got my first job, in 1979, it occurred to me that, one day, I should like to buy a house. To do so, I would need a mortgage. To get a mortgage in those days, you needed some savings. I opened an account with the Halifax Building Society and started to pay in small amounts.
Early in 1981, I got engaged, and so my property ambition crystallised. I had not yet saved enough, for long enough, to qualify for a Halifax mortgage, however. So I had to try to convince the building society that I was worth the risk.
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This process involved an assessment of my job prospects (it helped that I was working for The Daily Telegraph), a favourable consideration of the fact that I was about to marry, and a quiet word with a director of the Halifax who was a friend of my future wife's family.
After quite long discussions, we were granted a ?25,000 mortgage, on a joint income of about ?11,000. How dizzyingly, dangerously large that loan seemed! The cash arrived just in time for us to buy a house before our wedding.
My wife and I were almost the last to go through this process. Shortly afterwards, everything was liberalised, and everyone wanted to lend everyone money. By the end of the 20th century, a mortgage had become almost a basic human right.
Looking back today, through the smoking ruins of a political and financial culture which thought it had abolished the business cycle, I can see that we were co-opted into a form of social order which was dying. Job, saving, marriage, sucking up to potential lender: we were made to prove that we could be trusted in order to gain the privileges that trust brings. In a word, we were made respectable.
As hard times return, could respectability return, too? Should it? Ever since the Romantic movement began more than 200 years ago, no concept has taken harder knocks from great minds.
Respectability has been seen as life-denying, repressive, hypocritical, and very, very boring. It conjures up words like "Rotary", "doilies", "net curtains" and "Sunday best". (Indeed, that last phenomenon was so deeply respectable that it is now extinct.)
Harold Pinter once explained that his plays were about "the weasel under the cocktail cabinet" - the nasty truth behind the respectable bourgeois facade. Clever, iconoclastic Mr Pinter CH CBE. But I'm afraid my petty-bourgeois reaction is simply to get that horrid weasel out into the garden and hasten back to the cocktail cabinet for a stiff whisky.
Let me make the case for respectability. In our post-Romantic world, the most important entity is thought to be the individual, the ego. The child's cry "Look at me!" has become the slogan of adult life. That is what celebrity culture is.
Respectability opposes this. It asserts the enormous importance of other people. If you are to live harmoniously in society, you have to consider what other people want. For this you need shared conventions - of speech, manners, work habits, diet, dress, sexual relations, pastimes, and so on.
If you become respectable, the conventions operate in your favour. Your neighbours can see that you work hard, that your children are polite, that you turn up when you say you will, and so they trust and like and help you more. A virtuous circle is created.
Respectability also empowers those who wish to rise in the world. If you start with nothing, you cannot rise in a rigid class system, or in one controlled by the state.
But if society values certain human qualities, you can rise by exhibiting them. If you prove yourself diligent, honest, friendly, etc, people tend to give you your chance. "Smart boy wanted", job advertisements in shop windows used to say. The phrase comes from an era when respectability mattered. Now it would be illegal.
There is another wisdom in respectability: it recognises risk. It understands that what can be gained can also be lost, and that gain is often slow, while loss can be sudden. Stigma is the unpleasant flip-side of this. Terrible prices have sometimes been paid by people - for example, illegitimate children - who have found themselves on the wrong side of a social convention.
But this sense of the precariousness of social order is justified by experience. It has been a great spur to the creation of non-state institutions. Whether it is Methodist chapels, or sporting clubs, or friendly societies, or charity schools, or the Scout movement, or the WI, the self-protecting impetus is the same.
Even Alcoholics Anonymous, though by definition an organisation of people who have lost respectability, is a deeply respectable organisation. It arose as a way of restoring self-respect through truthfulness, mutual support and regaining responsibility.
Many financial institutions have similar roots. Scottish Widows, was invented for (well guessed!) Scottish widows, to protect them from penury when their husbands died in the Napoleonic wars. The TSB bit of what is now Lloyds TSB was established 200 years ago by a Scottish clergymen who found that his parishioners could not live respectably without a mutually supported system of credit.
Thousands of respectable institutions proved, long before the Tories thought of it, the truth of the slogan: "There is such a thing as society, but it's not the same as the state." In the Blair/Brown/Clinton/Bush/Alan Greenspan era, this most basic truth of social fragility was denied. The promise of growth was unqualified.
Therefore there was no incentive to be respectable. "Respect" became a word most often on the lips of those who least deserved it. Therefore people are now psychologically, socially, institutionally, politically unprepared for bad times.
And therefore respectability must return. But what form, in our age, would it take? A Liberal peer said this week that we need bank managers like Captain Mainwaring in Dad's Army once again.
There is some comic charm in the idea, but in fact it wouldn't work. I have met my bank manager only once in 35 years. I am very happy to keep it that way. Few of us want the sort of social control which existed in the era before the popular car, air travel, the television, the mobile and the computer.
But if we do not re-grow respectable social institutions and habits, with their necessary balance of carrot and stick, the state will attempt the equivalent, in its uniquely brutal, freedom-crushing way.
In the wake of Gordon Brown's banking rescue, this is what fools are calling for - banks giving out money on the orders of the Government, national "needs" worked out by ministers, the crazy notion that our problems can be solved by giving more power to the people who caused them.
I end with one specific thought - education. The way in which children are taught and examined has become based on the idea that education is therapy, the nurturing of that fragile post-Romantic ego. They are being brought up to believe in automatic entitlement, just when that illusion is collapsing.
In the respectable society we need to rebuild, every school would impart real knowledge. Then we could better understand the state we're in.
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