Continuing my thoughts from the previous post, I was struck by another phenomenon of present-day government and social-political thought, not parallel, not even tributary, but somewhere in the same river system.
There is considerable renewed debate about slums, now of course vaster and more intractable than anything in history. New ideas are developing as to how they should be dealt with. There are still old-fashioned slum clearance schemes, in the Philippines, for example, slums are being razed and their inhabitants relocated in neat rows of concrete boxes well away from water supplies or sources of work.
That might fit closer to the habits of forcible state intervention that I deplore and yet there is perhaps a closer relationship with the new modern ideas of the positive value of slums and slum communities. Slum dwellers are recognised for their resourcefulness and social cohesion, and also for their utility to the more privileged classes whose rubbish they recycle and lawns they water (with fresher and more bountiful supplies than they themselves have to drink). There is even a suggestion (only in part deliberately provocative) that what London needs for its better functioning is an inner-city slum.
We are approaching here an advocacy of a social equilibrium of conflict and dependence, a muted version of the state policies of Israel and apartheid South Africa. It is perhaps not a new phenomenon, but it signals the end of that active hope of state directed universal social amelioration that was born (in our country) of Victorian civic pride, responsibility and benevolence and found its last flowering in the post-war welfare state, now crumbling, unloved and vilified alike by those who pay for it and those who benefit from it.
That model may not have been totally different from the eighteenth-century idea of the lady from the big house going down to the farm labourers' cottages with a basket of bread and religious tracts, but it was often driven by individuals who themselves came from the poorer layers of society but had risen to be safely distanced from them (but still enmeshed) by commercial or political advancement. They may or may not have envisaged a radical transformation of society but their benevolence did reach to educational improvement (through mechanics' institutes, libraries, galleries and schools) as well as material relief.
It worked for a while, and perhaps only faltered as the beneficiaries increasingly became the 'middle classes' who exercised a finer personal cost-benefit calculus than their predecessors. And took to reading the Daily Mail.
