Practical Government In The Post-Liberal Era

Harriet broke in: “As for employing a governor or prison officers to enforce order, where will you find these people? Have you come here to volunteer? And if you won’t, who will? People have had enough of criminals and criminality. They aren’t prepared today to live their lives in fear. You were born in 1971, weren’t you? You must remember the 1990s, women afraid to walk the streets of their own cities, the rise in sexual and violent crime, old people self-imprisoned in their flats some burned to death behind their bars—drunken hooligans ruining the peace of country towns, children as dangerous as their elders, no property safe if it wasn’t protected with expensive burglar alarms and grilles. Everything has been tried to cure man’s criminality, every type of so-called treatment, every regime in our prisons. Cruelty and severity didn’t work, but neither did kindness and leniency. Now, since Omega, the people have said to us: ‘Enough is enough.’ The priests, the psychiatrists, the psychologists, the criminologists—none has found the answer. What we guarantee is freedom from fear, freedom from want, freedom from boredom. The other freedoms are pointless without freedom from fear.”

Xan said: “The old system wasn’t entirely without profit, though, was it? The police got well paid. And the middle classes did very well out of it, probation officers, social workers, magistrates, judges, court officials, quite a profitable little industry all depending on the offender. Your profession, Felicia, did particularly well, exercising their expensive legal skills in getting people convicted so that their colleagues could have the satisfaction of getting the verdicts overturned on appeal. Today the encouragement of criminals is an indulgence we cannot afford, even to provide comfortable living for middle-class liberals. But I suspect Man Penal Colony isn’t the last of your concerns.

Theo said: “There’s disquiet about the treatment of Sojourners. We import them as helots and treat them as slaves. And why the quota? If they want to come, let them in. If they want to leave, let them go.”

Xan looked up and said: “You’re not suggesting we should have unrestricted immigration? Remember what happened in Europe in the 1990s? People became tired of invading hordes, from countries with just as many natural advantages as this, who had allowed themselves to be misgoverned for decades through their own cowardice, indolence and stupidity and who expected to take over and exploit the benefits which had been won over centuries by intelligence, industry and courage, while incidentally perverting and destroying the civilization of which they were so anxious to become part.”

Theo thought: They even speak alike now. But, whoever speaks, the voice is the voice of Xan. He said: “We’re not talking about history. We’ve no shortage of resources, no shortage of jobs, no shortage of houses. Restricting immigration in a dying and underpopulated world isn’t a particularly generous policy.”

Xan said: “It never was. Generosity is a virtue for individuals, not governments. When governments are generous it is with other people’s money, other people’s safety, other people’s future.”

“You are a historian. You know what evils have been perpetrated through the ages to ensure the survival of nations, sects, religions, even of individual families. Whatever man has done for good or ill has been done in the knowledge that he has been formed by history, that his life-span is brief, uncertain, insubstantial, but that there will be a future, for the nation, for the race, for the tribe. That hope has finally gone except in the minds of fools and fanatics. Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past; without hope of a future he becomes a beast. We see in every country in the world the loss of that hope, the end of science and invention, except for discoveries which may extend life or add to its comfort and pleasure, the end of our care for the physical world and our planet. What does it matter what turds we leave behind as legacies of our brief disruptive tenancy? The mass emigrations, the great internal tumults, the religious and tribal wars of the 1990s have given way to a universal anomie which leaves crops unsown and unharvested, animals neglected, starvation, civil war, the grabbing from the weak by the strong. We see reversions to old myths, old superstitions, even to human sacrifice, sometimes on a massive scale. That this country has been largely spared this universal catastrophe is due to the five people round this table. In particular it is due to the Warden of England. We have a system extending from this Council, down to the Local Councils, which retains a vestige of democracy for those few who still care. We have a humane direction of labour which pays some regard to individual wishes and talents, and which ensures that people continue to work even though they have no posterity to inherit the rewards of their labour. Despite the inevitable desire to spend, to acquire, to satisfy immediate wants, we have sound money and low inflation. We have plans that will ensure that the last generation fortunate enough to live in the multiracial boarding house we call Britain will have stored food, necessary medicines, light, water and power. Beside these achievements, does the country greatly care that some Sojourners are discontented, that some of the aged choose to die in company, that the Man Penal Colony isn’t pacified?”

Harriet said: “You distanced yourself from those decisions, didn’t you? It’s hardly dignified to opt out from responsibility and then complain when you don’t like the result of other people’s efforts. You were the one who decided to resign, remember? You historians are happier living in the past anyway, so why not stay there?”

-excerpted from “Children of Men” (1992) by PD James