Values Judgments

David Henderson from the June 1995 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

Himmelfarb notes that modern "moral education" courses explicitly avoid educating people about morality. Instead, the values clarification technique has students "discover" their own values by "exploring their likes and dislikes, preferences and feelings"--as if likes and dislikes have anything to do with morality. The Victorians would have little tolerance for this ethical relativism that surrounds us today.

Instead, the Victorians believed in the bourgeois virtues--being honest, industrious, punctual, sober, and law-abiding, to name a few. Living by these virtues almost guarantees that dependency will not become a problem. Those virtues also resulted in a very civil, and very safe, society. Hippolyte Taine wrote: "I have seen whole families of the common people picnicking on the grass in Hyde Park; they neither pulled up nor damaged anything." And, notes Himmelfarb, Britain's crime rate during the Victorian era was very low. By 1901, near the end of the Victorian era, the crime rate bottomed out at 250 indictable offenses per 100,000 population. Compare that to Britain's 1991 rate of 10,000, a staggering 40 times that 1901 rate. Taine commented, "The aim of every society must be a state of affairs in which every man is his own constable, until at last none other is required." The modern emphasis on values over virtue has done little to help us achieve this noble aim.

But Himmelfarb believes that abandoning failed welfare policies and releasing the resources of the free market wouldn't be enough to achieve that aim either. Faith in free markets, writes Himmelfarb, "underestimates the moral and cultural dimensions of the problem." Traditional values, she argues, must be legitimated, and this is difficult when the state and the dominant culture are legitimating their opposite.

Those who want to resist the dominant culture, asserts Himmelfarb, "may be obliged, however reluctantly, to invoke the power of the law and the state, if only to protect those private institutions and associations that are the best repositories of traditional values." She does not say clearly which powers of the state she would invoke and for what, but her further discussion hints that she would have no trouble with anti-pornography laws, for example.

Himmelfarb is right that a cultural change is needed. But she is wrong to believe that "invoking the power of the state" is the way to get there. Though she seems to understand the strong connection between government welfare policies and the decline in culture, she doesn't take the obvious next step: calling for a radical downsizing of government.

But only a large cut in government welfare programs, with abolition of most, can set the cultural forces in motion that would lead to declines in illegitimacy, crime, and other social pathologies. Trying to change the culture without changing its underlying incentives is, well, silly.

David Frum said this well in his 1994 book, Dead Right. In discussing the major strands of 1990s American conservatism, Frum wrote: "Conservatives who throw in the towel on issues like Social Security and Medicare and welfare in order to direct their full attention to 'the culture' are attempting to preserve bourgeois values in a world arranged in such a way as to render those virtues at best unnecessary and at worst active nuisances. The project is not one that is very likely to succeed."

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