The Decay of Contract
MORALS
By SIMON RAVEN
WHEN I was very young, a worldly don supplied me with certain basic rules of conduct. One must never, he said, give bad cheques to tarts, because they had no means of redress. Similarly, one must pay one's gambling debts, because these were not legally enforceable. Again, if one had agreed to play in a cricket match, one must turn up at the appointed time, even although it might have been raining all the morning and one might mean- while have received a more tempting offer. If one was invited to dinner and requested to wear a black tie, then either one put on a black tie or one declined the invitation: what one did not do was arrive in a sports coat and say that one's socialist principles forbade one to wear a dinner jacket.
All these rules (and several more of the same kind) had their ultimate sanction, he explained to me, not in morality, nor in honour, nor even in good manners (though elements of all three were included), but in sheer practical necessity. If a tart amiable enough to take a cheque were to be refused payment on it, then she would very soon cease both from being amiable and from taking cheques, which would spoil things for everybody. And so on. It was really very simple: all civilised life depended upon contract. 'If you do this, then I will do that.' Only if such agreements were clearly made and promptly met could any system, whether of prostitution or national government, be expected to work for an hour together.
'If you do this, then I will do that.' In so far as people still hold to such understandings, as on the Stock Exchange or the turf, their respec- tive systems still work, because they all know more or less where they are. There are always defaulters, of course, but these are immediately ejected lest they corrupt the system, and so things make pretty good shift to wag along. The trouble is that there are nowadays so many systems or circles in which default is regarded as for- givable and the defaulter allowed to remain. And worse than this: in some such circles default is regarded not only as forgivabbut even as meritorious, and that on the highest moral grounds. Let us start with a simple example from private life and see where it leads us.
Some ten years ago, when the decay of which I am writing was first beginning to take held, I attended a ladies' night at the depot of a famous regiment. After dinner there was roulette for moderate stakes. One lady, a regimental widow as I was told, sat avidly down, demanded ten pounds' worth of counters on credit, made a lavish game round the number 9, and looked surprised and even insulted when the ball fell into 26. And so it went on with her. She was out of luck, her ten pounds and yet another ten were soon exhausted, she rose from the table muttering peevishly, and she was heard of no more that evening. But she was heard of a few days later. A letter reached the PMC from the Colonel of the Regiment in London, who wrote that he had received complaint from Mrs X (the luckless widow) of the gambling which had taken place, contrary to all regula- tions, in the officers' mess, and that in no case whatever was such a thing to occur again. Later on, I heard, a bill for her twenty-pound loss was sent to the widow, who sent it back with
a note in v■hich she said that she understood the Colonel had condemned the game on dis- ciplinary grounds and that therefore any loss incurred in it was void. Her name was then deleted from the list of regular guests and herself informed of this; whereupon she made repre- sentations to the Colonel in London, who declared that she professed to have acted in the interests of the regiment and so must be rein- stated. Her contemptible behaviour was, in a sense, 'moral' and must not be called in question.
Here we have the essential clue to what is happening all around us. The point of contract is to ensure that peciple meet their obligations, not only when it happens to suit them, but also when it is tiresome or difficult. In this case and in order to evade paying out money, a mean old woman had acted as dilator in the name of morality, well knowing that in that name she would be upheld. Fier method is now universal. Let us consider a much broader and more im- portant issue, in which, once again, the agreed rules are being flouted, ostensibly in the name of 'right' but really in order to avoid em- barrassing action and to conceal certain unpopular truths.
It is a principle of democracy that educa- tional opportunity must be open to all; which is to say that the young must be given a fair chance to show their paces and then accorded the sub- sidies and training which their abilities deserve. But abilities are relative; and sooner or later, as has always been clearly understood, it is necessary to pronounce that some deserve better than others and must be provided for accord- ingly. At first, it was thought this could be decided at the age of eleven; then it was claimed (perhaps rightly) that this was too early; and now we are to have 'comprehensive' schools in which children are still 'streamed' according to ability but can be easily and immediately trans- ferred, should they turn out after all to deserve it, to a superior (or inferior) 'stream.' At least, this is what has been promised. If you accept the comprehensive system, its sup- porters have repeatedly urged, there will be no threat to standards, because these we guarantee to maintain by properly controlled streaming. On this understanding the new system is now to be proceeded with in many places.
But no sooner have the reformers got their way about comprehensive schools than they are busy finding excuses, on the strictest of moral principles, for reneguing their side of the agreement. Already, if I am to believe The Times Educational Supplement, canting voices are to be heard crying out that any form of streaming is immoral and unjust because it places a premium on personal ability, and this, of course, is unfair to those who haven't got any. In other words, there is a deliberate inten- tion to break the undertakings given, to destroy academic standards and to deny the relevance of merit—and this intention is justified and even flaunted in the name of democratic equality.
In fact, the real level of the morality invoked is that of the schoolboy who clings on to a copy of the Bible and insists that it would be blasphemy to attack him while he holds it. It is, most significantly of all, the level of morality that has lately come to characterise our poli-
ticians. For centuries they have been shame- lessly repudiating their agreements: but now we can observe a uniquely loathsome speciality, a truly modern refinement of hypocrisy, whereby, not content with mere repudiation, they start whining and squealing about how unfair the agreement always was anyway and how 'public morality' forces them to break it.
Another essential thing to notice is that, whereas until very recently political breach of faith was roundly condemned on all sides (see the work of George Orwell passim), these days it is condoned and even praised. For what makes the modern brand so welcome to the populace at large is that it is devised, among other things, to spare them the necessity of recognising dis- agreeable truths about themselves: if, for example, the progressive educators go back on their word and renounce streaming, then a lot of parents will avoid learning, at least for the time being, that they have stupid children. They will also, of course, be encouraged to start break- ing their own private agreements, not so much in direct imitation of politicians et al. as because of the new respectability, the moral righteousness, which, as they are now taught, attaches to the welsher (for welsher read 'rebel,' non-con- formist,"progressive,' etc. etc.). All they need to carry them through is a show of virtuous indignation; and then, like the old widow when she bilked her losses at roulette, they can see themselves as public benefactors. It is very pleasant to combine self-interest with the pro- fession of virtue, to refuse the nagging and awkward demands of practical equity on the blanket plea of 'social justice'; the only trouble is that on such conditions, as my worldly don warned me long ago, civilised life is no longer possible.
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