Book review: Kruger on the need for Conservatives once more to foster virtue

Aug 18, 2023 by Jill

by Andrew Gimson, Conservative Home:

Covenant: The New Politics of Home, Neighbourhood and Nation by Danny Kruger.

[…] Here is Kruger, leading from the front:

“I argue in this book that the purpose of politics is the cultivation of the conditions of virtue, of the moral impulses that make good conduct, and that these conditions are the normative dispositions of a conservative society.

“A normative is a belief about reality, and an action in response. We believe things fall through the air, and therefore we are careful near clifftops. I argue that in political terms we have a mistaken normative, and we need to change it. The political normative we have is the belief that people are infallible, moral creators, and that therefore the job of government is to facilitate their independence. The normative we need is the belief that people are dependent, fallible creatures, subject to a moral order, and yet capable of great goodness and achievement; therefore action is required to strengthen the institutions that mitigate our weakness and help us realise our potential.”

Chief among these institutions is marriage. This, he declares, is “the foundational social covenant”. Its goal is “to make sex safe”, reducing its capacity “to wreck relationships and produce unwanted babies”, and instead creating strong families.

Kruger wants to free us from the tyranny of ourselves:

“The true tyrant is our own caprice, the power of our appetites and our impulses to selfishness and self-harm.”

In this connection he quotes a passage by Edmund Burke:

“It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions form their fetters.”

What a magnificent counter-blast to the disordered liberalism according to which freedom is found by surrender to our appetites. That way lies unending selfishness, bringing deep unhappiness to all who depend on or care for the selfish person, who himself or herself becomes a miserable and isolated wreck of what a human being ought to be, grasping in vain at life’s pleasures, like an alcoholic seeking salvation in another bottle of whisky.

Read here