“The great secret of morals is love,” wrote Percy Shelley, “or a going out of our own nature.”  Effusive and excessive as P.B. could sometimes be, I am firmly in his camp regarding humans’ need to strive against our innate self-containedness; in fact this is a political imperative too. 

Of course, in the loftiest, most existential sense and at the most grindingly practical level, each of us is alone in our head and can never really know what others are thinking.  But surely no-one can entertain this concept for long without entering into a Pirandellian spiral: intellectually intriguing, the thought process is also indulgent, inexpedient, leading to misery and mistrust, and taking us far away from Shelley’s “morals.” 

As Dr Alan Finlayson sagely observed at a recent Compass debate on the future of the Left, interdependence is not only a theory or wise precept (still less a “great secret”): it is just the truth.  At a practical level we are all dependent on each other; not just in a parent-child permutation, but on broader familial, local, communal and international stages. This is true, but it is an easy truth to retreat from, especially if you fear the fallibility of others.  Such a retreat was undoubtedly once part of the Conservative agenda and, the current government’s claim to progressivity notwithstanding, it remains to be seen whether that has changed.

Interdependence is why society works, and history has shown that when people distance themselves from the fact of each other’s humanity, bad things happen.  In this light it is not a coincidence that it was precisely during the heyday of literary Modernism, with all its faintly onanistic fretting about the boundaries of the self, that the far right was able to root itself in such hospitable soil. 

Emersonian self-reliance is insecurity cloaked as hardy realism – the homespun adage “If you want a job doing well, do it yourself” is only true if you are lucky enough to be able to do the job in the first place. I say this as a big fan of Pirandello and Emerson both, and no small worrier about the inaccessibility of another person’s consciousness, the impossibility of perfect communication – but I am aware, as I think one has to be, that these thoughts are luxuries. 

So I am concerned by the lack of self-awareness in some of what we have recently heard from Cameron, Osborne et al about the satisfaction of a good day’s work, the thrill of laying something by for the family, the privilege for parents of taking their children’s schooling into their own hands.  This strain of thought is partially true, but it is not very imaginative, and it is neglectful of the substantial swathes of our society which fall outside its purview.

In this way the Con-Dems do not seem to be, in Shelley’s phraseology, “going out of their own nature,” but, at least for now, unironically regressing right back into it. Osborne proudly espouses for an all-new generation his same old “hard-headed recognition that without enterprise… compassion comes with an empty wallet.” With policies that smack of deep, luxurious self-containment, and do not even know it, this coalition’s only innovation has been its fallacious realignment of semantic opposites “conservative” and “liberal.” 

If this is the New Politics, I’m Lord Byron.