Ideas@TheCentre
Society in pyjamas
Going for an early morning walk last Sunday morning in the English town where I now live, I encountered a middle-aged woman coming towards me wearing pyjamas and a dressing gown.
I’m pretty sure she wasn’t mentally ill. I think she’d just woken up, found she was out of cigarettes, and nipped down the local tobacconist shop for fresh supplies. UK newspapers report that going out in your pyjamas is no longer unusual in this sad, benighted island. It used to be that the underclass couldn’t be bothered to go out to work. Now they can’t be bothered to get dressed before going out for a packet of fags.
Going out in public wearing only your nightclothes indicates a total lack of self-respect. That woman, and thousands of others like her, was showing she just doesn’t care any more. She has withdrawn from civilised society, and she doesn’t give a damn who knows it.
But it’s her problem, right? We liberals believe individuals should be left alone to lead their own lives, provided they don’t harm others. John Stuart Mill called this the ‘harm principle.’ That this woman was almost certainly living on welfare benefits is of legitimate concern to me, because it directly affects me. I have to pay more tax to support her. But her decision to go to the tobacconists wearing her pyjamas does not harm me. So how is it any of my business?
On issues like this, I encounter the limits to my liberalism. Deep down, I think this is my business. This woman’s refusal to conform to one of the simplest, least demanding yet the most basic of shared social rules – putting clothes on before going out in public – is confronting. She’s not just removing herself from mainstream society with this sort of behaviour, she’s putting two fingers up to it.
When Mill formulated his ‘harm principle’ 150 years ago, the mass of the population in England was ignorant and ill-educated. Mill believed that education would bring enlightenment. Give people a decent education, and they will strive to improve themselves and realise their full potential. Free people, and they will blossom.
Most Victorians thought like this. Matthew Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby School, believed education would transform barbarism into ‘sweetness and light.’ Karl Marx thought human beings would spend their time reading books and philosophising once they were freed from a capitalist system that had stunted their true natures.
But we now know the Victorians were wrong. Everyone nowadays gets at least 10 years of schooling, essentially all of it free of charge. But the brutishness seems almost as bad as it was in Hogarth’s London. There is little sign of Mill’s enlightenment in the welfare ghettoes of England.
This poses a serious problem for classical liberals. What do we do if, having freed and educated people, they still send our society into a tailspin, trashing conventional standards of decency and dragging the public sphere into the gutter?
I suggested in my 2008 CIS essay, Declaring Dependency, Declaring Independence, that liberty should perhaps be seen as a privilege that has to be earned by demonstrating responsibility. Maybe some people need to be told how to live. Of one thing I’m sure. When Mill wrote On Liberty, he never intended to defend the right to shuffle down to the tobacconists on a Sunday morning wearing only your nightgown and slippers.
Peter Saunders is a Senior Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies.
