The 3rd Adullam Annual Lecture, 19 September 1997

"The Virtuous Citizen"

David Alton

Two short paragraphs, 42 and 43, in the White Paper, "Excellence in schools", published in July, announced the Government's intention to educate for citizenship: "Schools can help to ensure that young people feel that they have a stake in our society and the community in which they live by teaching them the nature of democracy and the duties, responsibilities and rights of citizens."

How they will deliver this remains unclear - not least to the Government itself - which is perhaps why they then followed the time honoured course of setting up an advisory group "to discuss citizenship and the teaching of democracy in our schools". "When in doubt - set up a committee."

The membership of that Committee will wield enormous influence in shaping an agenda which cuts to the heart of how a person perceives their relationship with the wider community. We should be foolish to underestimate the high stakes involved as the politicians now seek to define citizenship.

The debate about 'educating for citizenship' will be a cipher for a more fundamental debate about philosophy and theology, relativism and absolutism, values and virtues, the individual and the community. Some will try to use it as a smokescreen to see off religious education and the daily act of worship - which in the light of the extraordinary outpouring of spontaneous, but frequently unstructured, religious feeling over the tragic death of Diana, Princess of Wales, would be a lamentable response to a nation trying to find spiritual meaning to questions of mortality and immortality.

If all that emerges is a view of citizenship which encourages another series of miserable little charters, linked to consumerism, choice, entitlements and rights, it will be another wasted opportunity.

Citizenship has also been a casualty of the sheer complexity and overpowering nature of modern life. So often this has incapacitated citizens. We have come a long way from Athens and on the road we have been robbed of our inheritance.

Ill-prepared for the ethical and moral dilemmas, robbed of the concepts of duty and service, utility and functionalism have turned us into slaves of everything from a genetically manipulated reproductive system to the servility of consumerism. Less like citizens, more like slaves.

The Educators have become what C S Lewis in "The Abolition of Man" memorably called 'the conditioners'. These 'conditioners' have made "men without chests" from whom we expect "virtue and enterprise". Lewis concluded that through modern formation "we castrate and then bid the geldings to be fruitful" (ibid). Aristotle said: educate for virtue, for duty, for the common life. The conditioners say it's all a matter of individual opinion; that individuals are not responsible for their actions.

And what have been the consequences? What is the dowry the conditioners can hand to their daughters? What is the legacy for the men without chests? In the nineteenth century Carlyle called it "the condition of England" questions. In what condition do we find our country today? How a nation treats its children is a pretty good test of its claims to be civilised. It also sets in a proper context the scale of the challenge in forming tomorrow's citizens.

750,000 British children now have no contact with their fathers; since 1961 marriage breakdown has increased by 600% with the number of divorces doubling since 1971. Many children have no experience of family life and no model on which to build loving and caring relationships.

Children are daily robbed of their innocence. Computer pornography, much involving children, paedophile rings - many operating with the connivance of people in authority at children's homes and in social services or special hospitals - compete with the standard daily fare of advertising targeted at children. Never-ending computer games, films, and TV programmes saturated with violence, complement the pimps and drug pushers who operate like urban cadres on our streets, recruiting children and young people at every opportunity.

Broadcasters have colossal power in forming citizens - who spend an average 27 hours a week in front of their TV sets. Bruce Gyngell, Managing Director of Tyne Tees Television asks: "What are we doing to our sensibilities and moral values and, more important, those of our children, when, day after day, we broadcast an unremitting diet of violence... television is in danger of becoming a mire of salaciousness and violence." Oliver Stone, who made "Natural Born Killers", by contrast boasts: "we poke fun at the idea of justice, at the idea of righteousness, at the concept that there is a right and a wrong way." These sentiments should be a central concern for all who care about the formation of citizens.

In a book by the psychologist Oliver James (November 1997) "Britain on the Couch" (Century), the author asks the question "Why are we unhappier than we were in the 1950s despite being richer?" Clinical depression, he says, is ten times higher among people born after 1945 than among those born before 1914. Women under the age of 35 are the most vulnerable. The paradox is that we are told that we have never been more materially affluent and yet, says James, modern life seems less and less able to meet our expectations. We feel like losers, "even if we are winners".

According to Gallup, in a survey of comparative attitudes in 1997 and 1968:

1968: 62% thought behaviour was getting worse; today it is 92%

1968: 28% thought they were happier; today the figure is 7% - with 53% believing that life is becoming unhappier.

Only 1% believed that standards of honesty in contemporary Britain were improving.

Consumerism, material gain, the high-tech, high-powered information-laden lives of the 1990s are mirrored by collapsed family life, broken communities, the instability and insecurity in employment which accompanies market forces, and a widespread sense of isolation, from which flows loneliness. Like the disappointed ancient Greeks who finally climbed Olympus to search out their gods, modern men and women have scaled the peaks of prosperity and found nothing. They realise that instead of truth, they have been peddled a gigantic lie. When they ask for bread, we fill them with broken glass.

So many of our modern contemporaries find a void on the mountain top and resort to the escapism of the drugs scene, the couches of shrinks, the embrace of astrologers and the clutches of the black arts.

This modern loneliness, which breeds despair, is fed by a diet of nihilism and materialism initiated from outside the home or the community. One German study states that between the age of 3 and 13 a child watches an average of 107 minutes of TV each day. The German child psychologist, Mrs Christa Meves, found that 44% of pre-school children preferred watching their television to being with their father. 49% of videos bought or rented in Germany contain violent material.

The poison is often in the dosage and this will intensify with digital TV - the ultimate amalgamation of the internet and TV as they become one, the proliferation of video material and games, the ethical and conceptual dilemmas posed by the use of virtual reality and subliminal techniques; these are the new environment for Britons, and everybody else, on the couch.

Virtue must be promoted; vice can make it on its own. Instead of virtuous citizens, we have been forming couch potatoes, rather than discerning men and women with civilised and civilising attitudes. We have learnt everything except the ability to become fully human. We are no longer Romans but we are nothing else either. And who is to blame?

Parents blame teachers and vice versa; both blame the state; the politicians blame the broadcasters. Fear induces panic and while latter-day Luddites would happily smash the internet and the TV sets or string up newspaper editors - liberals are frightened to concede that anything at all is wrong, fearful that an honest admission would bring down their whole edifice.

Rosalind Miles, in "The Children We Deserve" eloquently sums up the problem:

"Part of the experience of growing up is learning to negotiate and to have social skills that come from relating to other people. If a child comes home from school, raids the fridge, and disappears to their room to the TV or computer console, that child is alienated. He or she will become cut off from real life and will come to expect instant gratification attuned to their needs. This is the foundation of yobbishness and violence."

Academics, as ever, agonise over the empirical evidence. The evidence of our own eyes should be quite enough. However, there are studies which reveal that TV can trigger suppressed fears of children, or neurosis; that the lowest school achievers watch most TV, while the highest achievers watch the least. Some studies suggest that not only can obsessive TV watching lead to retardation in language and mental performance but it is blatantly obvious that programmes promote anti-parent feelings or ridicule institutions, as well as triggering solitude and inability to integrate. In day to day conversation people talk endlessly about TV figures and characters - not about reality.

The internet may permit me to kiss my wife goodnight over the internet from New York or Paris, but it isn't and never can be real. The danger is that we simply escape from reality. In the "Pensées", Pascal says we are always trying to flee reality to near-real worlds e.g. a love of the past can become an attempt to escape the harsh challenges of today. Modern media has encompassed a new ideology of virtual reality to emerge.

Truth is a casualty as simple slogans, repeated ad nauseam in the media, become true. Why should we care about reality when the virtual will suffice? In addition to nihilism, reflected in political negative campaigning, spin-doctors ensure that the image and virtual reality politics counts more than substance or truth.

In our homes, the ideology of virtual reality allows us, through computer software, to kill, maim, brutalise or abuse another, without any apparent consequences. We start to feel like gods, as creators of the world with all of life's chances at our fingertips. God and creation become nothing but human invention. For some this is confirmation of Nietzsche's philosophy that man creates the universe and it is a new extension of the serpent's promise in the Garden. In the Middle Ages Thomas à Kempis well understood this impulse when he wrote ("Imitation of Christ", in the 3rd book, the 13th chapter) that "because men wanted to become God, God wanted to become man" - to sanctify and redeem us from this conceit.

In response to all this, families are patronisingly told to get a grip and use the off-button. Yet vast numbers of households no longer house families where there are parents to perform this task; others house tired, pressurised, stressed parents who use the TV to replace the hearth or the baby-sitter and simply fail to discern between different categories of programmes. One l6-year old girl told me, "I live as a stranger in my own family".

The destruction of family life lead inexorably to a dysfunctional society. Melanie Phillips in "All Must Have Prizes" perceptively analyses the consequences of this collapse. In the American context Allan Brown in "The Closing of the American Mind" spells out the implications for citizenship when personal commitments and bonds can be broken or sloughed off, when the concept of fault is abolished, and when children's interests are reduced to the deceit that they would be somehow better off:

"Of course many families are unhappy. But that is irrelevant. The important lesson that the family teaches is the existence of the only unbreakable bond, for better or for worse, between human beings."

It is within the family - the basic building block of society - that a love of civic life must first be cultivated. Young women, like the 16-year old girl I mentioned, must not be strangers to their parents, or in their own homes.

Ironically, those TV-resistant families who do shield their children may breed emotionally more stable and more mature children, but we will see another elite emerge: children unscathed by the ravages of uninhibited exposure to the electronic media.

There is plenty we can do in the three areas of technology, the law, and education to support the family, but political will would be required. These should be central questions for the politicians and media. They are certainly central questions about the formation of citizens.

The Archbishop at Canterbury, George Carey, perceived this when he said in a House of Lords debate in 1996, that the nation was being threatened by a tendency "to view what is good and right as a matter of private taste and individual opinion only."

What sort of values have the conditioners, the men without chests, left us with? They have replaced the Beatitudes with the Me-attitudes, and with individualism, relativism, syncretism, libertarianism and false liberalism. In fashioning a 'who-can-I-blame', 'who-can-I-sue', 'what·does-it-matter' , 'why-should-I-care' society, they have left us poor beyond belief. The human ecology is in tatters. Consider again our children:

In l996, 46,000 children were on child protection registers; 64,000 children are in Local Authority care; while a recent ICM poll found that 28% of British parents thought their children were running wild.

Crime is largely committed by young people - with 50% of all crimes committed by those under 21. Ten times as many crimes are committed as in 1955 and the crime rate is forty times that of 1901. In the United States, a baby born in 1990 and raised in a big city has a statistically greater chance of being murdered than an American soldier had of dying in battle in World War Two. What goes into the formation of these young people is far more important than the debate about curfews and custodial sentences.

In Britain hardly a family or community is untouched by crime, violence or drugs. More than 160 babies were born addicted to purified cocaine during one twelve month period alone; and a recent study by the University of Manchester found that in the North West, 71% of the region's adolescents had been offered drugs over a twelve month period.

Before we are born we are more likely than ever to be violently done away with. Only four out of every five pregnancies now goes full term. 600 babies are aborted daily. Since 1990, if you have a disability you may be aborted up to and even during your birth. 100,000 human embryos are now destroyed annually in British laboratories.

Euthanasia and eugenics are regularly practised - not just in Holland and Scandinavia - and the old mistakes - which have led to episodes of genocide, racial theories, corrupt medical ethics - are dressed up in the new guise of genetics.

Everything is reduced to a matter of personal choice. The word itself originates from the same Greek word as the word heresy. My right to choose - and never mind the consequences - is the modern heresy. Human life is reduced to a commodity: bought or bartered, experimented upon, tampered with, destroyed or disposed of altogether. 'If it's right for me, it's right per se.'

In "The City of History" (Pelican, 1961), Lewis Mumford perceptively and prophetically saw how the balance of civil society was threatened:

"Before modern man can gain control over the forces that now threaten his very existence, he must resume possession of himself. This sets the chief mission for the city of the future: that of creating a visible regional and civic structure, designed to make man at home with his deeper self and his larger world, attached to images of human nature and love."

Mumford foresaw the need to address the question of human development and personal expression. He appreciated the scale of de-industrialisation which would occur, the social problems which would flow from this and the need to invest heavily in education.

"Not industry, but education will be the centre of their (cities') activities."

In practice, over the 35 years which have elapsed since Mumford argued for the centrality of the personal formation of citizens, economic and industrial regeneration have taken priority.

Failure to appreciate the role of education in fostering a civilised society, where personal civic responsibility is cultivated in each person, has threatened the delicate balance which enables society to function.

Among the consequences have been:

the increasing isolation of the individual within the context of the modern urban environment.

the fracturing of community bonds and their corresponding effects on the relationship of individuals to the state.

the low levels of participation in the institutions and processes of local and national government.

the lack of understanding about civic responsibilities and duties in the democratic state.

the lack of a co-ordinatad approach towards corporate responsibility and involvement in the community; and

the failure of citizens to understand what responsible citizenship in modern society really means.

Civil society has become uncivil as modern citizenship has become perceived in terms of rights alone. This in turn breeds unrealisable demands and a cult of selfishness which is bound to flourish in a climate of materialism and consumerism. It is further entrenched in the isolation of individualism and the marginalisation of ethics. Is it any wonder that society becomes chronically disordered?

Rights and choice are the new civic dogma. Rights have replaced duties as propagandists demand the right to a job, the right to an education, the right to a child, the right to drugs, the right to pornography, the right to kill, the right to die. Displaced are the ancient duties to work, to acquire knowledge, to care for family, to cherish and to respect life. Choices are no longer conditioned by consequences. The delicate balance of civil society is thus broken. In his book "After virtue" Alisdair MacIntyre poses the central question of whether new communal and civic relationships can be snatched from the poisonous clutches of individualism.

These are not new concerns. In "Politics", Aristotle's koinonia, communal existence, was not about civic structures or forms of government but about the qualities in man which made civic co-existence a possibility. Civic virtue was exemplified by a concern for the rights of others, in the civilising of the polis and through a sense of justice. Aristotle said we are not like "solitary pieces in chequers" but need to cultivate a common life. Cicero, in his work, "On Duty" also saw the need for active participation: "the whole glory of virtue is activity." Aristotle believed that civic virtue could and should be taught.

Aristotle also held that there was something innate about a citizen's desire to participate in the public life. Zoon politikon, political animal, is a phrase which he coined in his "Politics" and which remains in regular contemporary usage. Today it has pejorative connotations; for Aristotle it was an honourable phrase denoting a citizen who strove for others. For Aristotle, communal existence - koinonia - was not about civic structures or forms of government but primarily about the qualities in man which made civic co-existence a possibilty. Man alone, he argued, had the logos - the ability to speak, but more than that: the ability to use reason and to act as a moral agent. "Man alone has the special distinction from the other animals that he also has perception of good and bad and of the just and the unjust." (Politics)

Aristotle described the polis as "an association of free men" which governed itself; where the citizen "takes turn to govern and be governed," familiar territory for the modern democrat always expectant of losing or winning public office.

The polis became the school of life. The polis, through its laws, religion, tradition, festivals, culture and participation in its common institutions, shaped each citizen. Its architecture, its theatre (the nearest equivalent in Athenian society to our concept of a free press; particularly plays which dared to satirise and to explore controversial questions), its orators, its laws: all were manifestations of the common life and all required the commitment of the citizens. It was a duty to engage in the polis sharing in the glories as well as the burdens. A man who withdrew from the life of the polis was not perceived as simply minding his own business, living a private life, but being a worthless good for nothing. The city's business was everyone's business and participation in the life of the city was crucial to a person's development. Taking part was not an optional extra.

Rewards and punishments help to mould a man's attributes and Aristotle held that a man would endure danger because of a combination of civic commitment to the common good and a fear of the shame and legal penalties, the punishments, which would attach to cowardice or civic indolence.

Aidof - fear or shame of how you would appear to other citizens - is for Aristotle the balancing scale in the civic question. It balances the cherished ideal that the citizen would want to act nobly and altruistically.

Closer to our own times, Gertrude Himmelfarb in her book, "The De-moralisation of Society, from Victorian Virtues to Modern Values", reminds us that the Victorians also focused on good character and personal responsibility. They spoke not so much about values but of virtues - a more demanding test.

No doubt there was an element of romanticism implicit in the Victorian emphasis, calling up medieval codes of courtly chivalry: the virtues of mercy, religion, compassion and courtesy. But the caricature of Victorian virtue as largely hypocritical and enforced by Dickensian schoolmasters is just that: a caricature. The Victorian pursuit of virtue was as much about encouragement as it was about imposition. It was primarily aimed at creating a civic community of citizens who respected one another and were determined to advance and improve themselves. Perhaps it is best revealed in the civic municipalism of Chamberlain's Birmingham.

It is a pity that the word 'values' has become interchangeable with the word 'virtues'. Leo Strauss was right to muse on the mystery of: "how a word which used to mean the manliness of man has come to mean the chastity of women" (quoted by Himmelfarb, ibid). Friedrich Nietzsche was, in the 1880s, the first to stop talking about virtue and to use values in the modern sense of describing collective attitudes and beliefs. "Transvaluation of values," as he put it, disposed of virtue and vice, classical virtues, Judaeo-Christian virtues, good and evil and conveniently accompanied "the death of God".

Alongside virtue, value is a weak word. It can mean anything people want it to mean, which is why it works so well against a backdrop of syncretism and relativism. Everything becomes neutral and nonjudgemental, nothing is absolutely right or absolutely wrong. A return to the concept of civic virtue would prove to be the best defence against civic disaggregation and provide the basis for a new civic settlement: a settlement about more than a devolved Scottish Parliament or reformed House of Lords.

Virtue, is a word which is not simply about personal preference or personal views. It is about character and the fomation of the Citizen at the deepest level. Civic life and politics are conditioned by the culture in which they grow. If the character of the citizen has not been fullly formed - and is deficient in virtue - is it any wonder that social anarchy results? Can we avoid this? Can civic virtue be taught? Can we educate for Citizenship?

Since the virtual disappearance of civics courses, even that narrow preparation for citizenship has not been a priority in schools. When we recognise academic achievements and sporting prowess, we should recognise instances of good citizenship. In many American universities credits are given for community work. We need to practise and experience citizenship - as well as analyse it. Service learning, where those with advantages teach literacy to the disadvantaged, especially commends itself to me.

At school prizegiving and at degree day ceremonies, citizenship awards should be presented and form a recorded part of individual records of achievement.

For most young people civic education is generally acquired as an incidental, through contacts with voluntary projects and contacts with individual teachers or because of an event or political policy which directly impinges upon them. We must be far more systematic and in courses at every level ask the tough questions about the purpose of education, about what is expected of democratic citizens, and about the skills we each require to live peaceably. It is part of the mission of a school or university to educate for democracy, to develop Citizenship skills and to form men and women for others.

This should particularly appeal in the context of a Britain which commentators are claiming has been fundamentally changed and which, in an unfocused and often inarticulate way, has learnt compassion and a care for the disadvantaged from its dead princess.

How a citizen acts as a moral agent affects everything from how they treat their environment and their neighbours to the pursuit of ethical standards in commerce or the embrace of civic duties. It is not a spectator sport or the preserve of a few well-meaning specialists.

Before the collapse of the Soviet Union many of us saw first hand the consequences of the destruction of civil society. Loss of freedom is all too obvious when you have been run over by a tank. The corrosive effect of materialism and individualism is less obvious. Here the devil arrives in carpet-slippers.

If we are to avoid such disaster each of us must understand our duty to our country and to the community. The complete citizen will be a virtuous citizen; one who has been formed to consider and care for others. We will each still have our individual frailties, weaknesses and vices, but even from the worst of us some good can be extracted. In his "Fable of the Bees"- or "Private Vices, Publick Benefits", Bernard Manderville recognised how this might happen:

Thus every part was full of Vice

Yet the whole mass a Paradise...

And Vertue, who from Politicks

Had learn'd a Thousand cunning Tricks;

Was, by their happy influence,

Made Friends with Vice: And ever since

The worst of all the Multitude

Did something for the Common Good.

"The Virtuous Citizen" will be published in 1998 by Harper Collins.