Covenant: The New Politics of Home, Neighbourhood and Nation by Danny Kruger
How gloomy should a conservative (or indeed a Conservative) be? It is hard to think of a period in our history when gloom was not warranted.
Within living memory so much has been lost. Before reading Danny Kruger’s book, I found myself delighting in Michael Bloch’s life (published in 2009) of James Lees-Milne (1908-97), who in 1964 gave a radio talk entitled “Who Cares for England?” in which he lamented the destruction of old towns by “giant commercial syndicates” which bought them up, demolished historic buildings and erected “hideous and shoddy substitutes”:
“Soon every town in Great Britain will lose its particular identity and look cheap, vulgar and commonplace. There will be nothing but a church or two to tell one whether one is in Worcester or Sheffield, Truro or Newcastle…”
Lees-Milne rescued many country houses during his distinguished service with the National Trust, but had ample grounds for pessimism, and would be dismayed by the banality of many of the buildings erected in our towns in the last ten years.
Kruger – MP since 2019 for Devizes, profiled in 2021 on ConHome, and writing about politics rather than architecture – observes that here too one finds ample cause for pessimism, with many people leading “lives of despair”:
“We have epidemics of mental ill-health, domestic abuse and loneliness. We are bored and anxious. We distract and medicate ourselves with a cocktail of passive entertainment, legal and illegal drugs, alcohol and bad food.
“As a nation, we are both obese and undernourished, a neat reflection of a society rich in some respects and not in others. The Government spends over £150 billion per year…on ‘social protection’, namely support for people who struggle. And it is not enough…”
Yet Kruger refuses to be downhearted. He instead leads a valiant counter-attack, has indeed been leading it for some time. I find this particularly admirable, because I have never done anything like this in my life.
Instead of writing a trenchant book making the conservative case, I adopt, even in this review, an oblique approach, for fear that plunging straight in and saying what I think might somehow be too much for the reader: a ludicrous inhibition when writing for ConHome.
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.
“Fading is the worldling’s pleasure,” as the hymn-writer put it. In an earlier age, Kruger would have written as a Christian conservative. In this book, he tries not to let his faith come between him and the reader.
This is perhaps prudent of him: how off-putting it can be to encounter an evangelical who plunges in and tries to convert one with indecent rapidity to the joys of commitment.
Kruger is a conservative-minded thinker who does not offer heaven on earth. He remarks that “we know things are awry at heart”, and that “even our experiences of joy or beauty have the quality of loss or yearning”.
But we also know “we want to belong, that we love most the people closest to us, that our deepest impulse is for human connection”, and that “the grim narrative of progress” – with its promise that when at last we are “free of all residual prejudice and superstition”, and able to become “the real me”, we shall be happy – is a fearful delusion.
Kruger finds the word “woke” too trivial for the “powerful and resourceful enemy” it describes, but fails to come up with a satisfactory alternative. Here is a problem for conservatives: in our anxiety not to look or sound out of date, we abandon various positions without a shot being fired.
A drawback of declining to use Christian language is that Kruger sometimes relies on dry terms like “normative”. He is nothing like as eloquent or memorable as Burke. Who is?
But like Burke, he knows we begin with local attachments, and from these proceed to love of country and of mankind.
What are the political implications of this? That in order to thrive, we should support marriage, families and living together rather than living apart.
And we should all make “sacrifices of time and effort” to support our neighbourhood: he suggests everyone should perform “council service – a year as a part-time local councillor – at least once in their lives”.
But this book has the virtue of brevity. Kruger does not offer anything as dreary or implausible as a worked out plan.
He instead defends a way of thinking which many of us still have, but which we might have difficulty in defending as anything more than an instinct, or a product of our upbringing.
Kruger points to the Christian origins of political liberty – here he is explicit – and how the thinkers of the Enlightenment and later periods took this too far when in their pride they decided man had actually attained freedom on his own.
It is our “submerged inheritance” from Christianity which gives us our ideas of justice, morality and freedom.
More recently, Kruger acknowledges his debt
“to my old friends – the first proper conservatives I met in the Conservative Party – the commentators Tim Montgomerie and Peter Franklin”
How infuriating rationalists will find Kruger’s work: that is one of its many virtues. Anyone who wants to understand modern conservatism should buy this book.
It is not, however, published until 7th September: this review is premature, behaviour so improper that it makes one wonder whether the reviewer can be altogether sound.