WRITTEN ON March 19th, 2009 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Foundation of Trust, What do we want?

Ruthie advises me that the best among many excellent talks at the convention on modern liberty (which I missed because I was in India) was Philip Pullman’s. The state, he says, needs courage, intellectual curiosity, virtue, modesty and honour:

A nation whose laws express fear and suspicion cannot sustain delight for very long; joy does not flourish in the garden of anxiety. The society these laws seem to be designed to bring about is one of institutionalised paranoia, of surly hatred and low-level panic. Every scrap of delight and gladness we can find is a blow against that fear; every instance of civility and kindness we come across is a clean wind dispersing a foul vapour. Every example we cherish of imaginative play, of the energy of creation, of the enchantment of art and the wonder of science is a weapon in the arsenal of moral and civic and, yes, political virtue. I say weapon, and I say arsenal, advisedly: we have a fight on our hands. “I will not cease from mental fight,” said William Blake, and this is the fight he meant: the fight to defend, to restore, and to sustain the virtue which is not now, but could so easily be, the natural behaviour of the state.

We are a better people than our government believes we are; we are a better nation.

Right on, brother! It’s a prescription for Ideal Government!