I suppose the year must have been 1984 when I read not Orwell but Milan Kundera’s masterpiece of conflicted love and lust, fidelity and possessiveness.  I had come across a wildly approving review in one of the nationals written by a Tory MP which, what with the naked mirror-walking and Tomas’s other rutting male adventures, seemed a bit strange.  Then again, considering all the sleaze stories that appeared in the press during John Major’s time as PM, perhaps not.  Anyway, this was actually a book less about nookie than those debilitations of the soul inflicted by an interfering state.

Now, I never needed my view of eastern European communism to be confirmed.  That didn’t really interest me.  No, it was just the title of the book that caught my imagination.  For some years I had been railing within, as blow-hard right-wingers tend to, at the declining morality of the nation.  Of course, it’s one thing to bemoan standards of public morality which are sinking into the morass.  It’s another to formulate a socio-political path to redemption.

It was pretty obvious that social conservatives saw themselves losing a tug-o’-war with all things “sixties”.  It was obvious, too, that there was a fatal disconnection between our heaving at the rope and the actual likelihood of social change.  Indeed, heaving at the rope was no more than a palliative, a reflexive wish to “do something” when nothing much could really be done.  Alas, the human personality is not merely adaptive to changing circumstance but sadly formative of the succeeding generation in much more concrete ways.  By the 1980’s the generation whom conservatives would willingly have saved from social and sexual irresponsibility was happy with its lot and had no such thoughts itself - however bilious our protestations.

It became apparent to me, therefore, that it was not social liberalism we were fighting, at least not directly.  We were fighting what our people were becoming, and there was no getting away from it.  No easy redemption, either.  Queue Kundera.

This morning these thoughts came flooding back across the years as I pondered the opening paragraph of this Telegraph article about the nanny state:-

“The government has the right to intervene in family life because there are social implications in the way parents bring up their children, one of Tony Blair’s closest allies said yesterday.”

The close ally is Margaret Hodge, the Egyptian-born, Jewish, married mother of four and Blair’s ever so nannying children’s minister.  Now, as I understand it she admitted what we all know, even though to do it she “broke with Labour tradition by saying that marriage was the best context for raising children.”  Her precise words were, “Stability really matters for kids and people are more likely to stay together if they are married.”

But Labour tradition was not much broken with.  In the next breath she “insisted the state should not criticise unmarried parents or single mothers.”  Furthermore, government involvement in child-rearing was justified because the state had to “pick up the pieces” when it went wrong.

Circularity warning!  She identifies a primary cause of instability but proposes to displace its costs from the responsible party to the taxpayer.  Hardly a disincentive, then, from creating further costs and, naturally, further interventionism.  Ok, in the real world responsibility and cost are not going to be united in a sudden burst of anarcho-libertarian sanity.  That would plunge us directly into the blame game which Hodge has explicitly ruled out.  It would also exercise the liberal conscience and the liberal media no end.  Echoes, of course, of Honest John’s ill-starred Back To Basics and Kitten Shoes’ Nasty Party!

But the greater reason for Hodge’s avowal of interventionism is surely that the state is the only available agent of her kind of social advancement.  It’s probably just that old Tikkun Olam thing, which has been so damned disastrous to the gentile world down the years.  Well, the link given above to what is one of several Kundera websites brings up a formidable review of TULOB by E.L.Doktorow in which we find this observation:-

One recurrent theme in the book is that the ideal of social perfection is what inevitably causes the troubles of mankind, that the desire for utopia is the basis of the world’s ills, there being no revolution and therefore no totalitarianism without it.

Ah yes!  Margaret eat your heart out.  Please eat your heart out, Margaret.

But wonderfully unambiguous though Doktorow’s statement is, I want to muddy the Kunderan waters a little by returning to the subject (object?) of human personality.

When I first read that Tory MP’s review and saw the book’s title I had been thinking for some time of the function of human society.  Liberalism and Marxism were wrong.  Society was not some conveyor belt to an illusory state of self-defined liberty.  Its function had to be to provide us, during our brief lives, with an enculturated medium in which to grow.  In this respect, the quality of the medium was key.  There are some soils in which the human seed prospers better than in others.  We as conservatives know what those soils are and so, in fact, does Margaret Hodge - though she won’t go with the thought and against her political nature.

“Good soil”, most particularly a good parental environment, is productive of much societal and generational good and protective against much evil.  People may grow therein to a deep and satisfying maturity, which I took to be our natural birthright … normality.  Out of normality may flow presence and out of presence, freedom.  In this respect I took social conservatism to be in tune with human potential.  Its opposite, social liberalism, I took to be a psychological prolapse, a thief of substance.

Well, I read Kundera and found that his basic concerns were quite different to mine.  His words and images were employed against Soviet totalitarianism in the Czechoslovakia of 1982.  Full stop.  The cotton wool totalitarianism we face today – the state which both creates self-harm in our society and ministers to it – is no less an enemy of freedom.  But that freedom is, if anything, more eternal and more real even than the one threatened by Kundera’s hated communism.