Is it Innocents’ Day every day now? Do we learn nothing from experience? Michael Buerk was on Radio Four this morning advertising this evening’s edition of The Moral Maze and he asked what had happened to the idea of morality in politics: do we no longer have a commitment to the spread of democracy and instead consider only our own national interest?

But the notion that politics and policies should be based on abstract principles and systems is one which was born in Enlightenment Whiggery and greatly strengthened by the secular dogmas of socialism and Marxism. Eliot famously criticised this view of how we should conduct ourselves when he mocked “men dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.” For the truth is that not only should we avoid this intrusion of the notions of principle and abstract ideas into places where they don’t belong but, as matter of fact, such principles, ideas and theories never have guided the policies and politics of the nations. Nations and peoples tend to act in their interests – and a good thing too.

For there is a multitude of conflicting principles and these provoke conflicts which are avoidable and quite unnecessary. The idea of democracy has got too big for its boots and become our obsession, which is a wholly bad thing, not least because the word” democracy” is never clearly defined; and it is everywhere employed as a slogan, a shibboleth, as a secularised religious commandment. And the view of what constitutes democracy is excessively simplistic. In the realm of public discussion and media comment it always means nothing more than turning up at elections and meetings, counting heads and doing what the majority voted for. This is worse than simplistic: it is unjust. Even John Stuart Mill in his On Liberty understood that democracy concerns respect for the views of minorities. Suppose a controversial motion – say to ban hunting with hounds – is proposed and carried by a majority, what then becomes of respect for the views of those dissenting? In our system, they are ridden over, roughshod; they become, as it were, non-persons. This is not democracy, but tyranny. The issue becomes even more unjust in cases where the vote is a narrow one.

Democracy has thus become the dictatorship of superior numbers.

The organic, traditionally conservative view, the opposite of Whiggery and of this simplistic and unjust notion of democracy, is that our freedoms in society – what C.H. Sisson described as “a decent set of political liberties” – are preserved by a much more subtle interplay of forces. Public life is not formed and shaped by headcounts alone. We have national institutions: the law, the church, parliament, the university, the monarchy and we are what we are because we exist within them. The idea of the sovereign individual is not only divisive and malign: it is a delusion. For we are all shaped and formed by forces, events and conditions which are greater than the individual and beyond the individual’s control. Our parents. Our property. Our schooling. Our membership of all our voluntary institutions: the pub and the pie shop, the football match, the Lord’s Test, the Grand National, the Promenade Concerts. Before the comparatively recent demise of the Church of England, we should have mentioned the great Feasts and Fasts: Easter, Whitsunday, Ash Wednesday – and of course the correlative of the Church’s Year in the agricultural seasons, springtime and harvest. Now almost all we’re left with from the Church’s Year is the commercial Christmas and that, for good or ill, has become part of the democracy which shapes our lives. I am forgetting the revived pagan superstition of the vast – and expensive – communal celebration of the New Year. Among the lesser feasts and fasts, I’m afraid we now have to include such ersatz displays of public vulgarity as Valentine’s Day (the prefix “Saint” long since removed). Fathers’ Day and Halloween. It is worth pausing to note that our secularised society does not celebrate 1st November (All Saints) but 31st October (Halloween). Thus good is ignored and evil acknowledged. Other banalities float across from the USA and there is a growing observance of something called Groundhog Day – coincidentally 2nd February the ancient Feast of Candlemas.

It is not only a fact that politics and policies are about interests: it is right that they should be so. We are not abstractions, intellectual counters in a game whose rules are a sort of French Political Calculus. We are flesh and blood, bodies, parts and passions. We are embodied. The significant word is “incarnate.” We are creatures, and creatures have interests. A man eats when he’s hungry and a woman drinks when she’s dry. A nation goes to war either for the gains of conquest or for defence and self-preservation.

These are the tangible realities by the side of which modern notions of democracy are only so much hot air. 

All that we are as individuals and as a nation is summed up in one line: “God save the Queen!” He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.