In the final episode of The Office, the Cornell-educated salesman Andy Bernard pensively observed, “I wish there was a way to know you were in the good old days before you actually left them.” Danny Kruger’s 2023 book Covenant: The New Politics of Home, Neighbourhood, and Nation, concisely explains Britain’s slow passage from the “good old days” to the chaos and disarray of the present. The stability and predictability of the past is that much clearer when contrasted with the wars, unrest, economic crises, and threats of terror that Britain—and the West—face today.
Kruger’s work is not an apologetic for the past—yes, the British Empire perpetrated many crimes and the past was far from perfect. Yet Kruger is not concerned with the finer details of history but rather the historiographical lens through which the relationship between past and present is understood. Until relatively recently, people were born into a world marked by “the arrangement of society around a common conception of the way to live, and around the common practices of worship,” which Kruger refers to as “The Order.” In other words, even through all the vicissitudes inevitably constitutive of being, a coherent telos could still imbue human life with meaning. The benefits of this received tradition were immense: a common sense of morality that informed personal and civic virtue; individuals oriented from birth as part of communities large and small; and a society indexed to “providing the support and the restraint that individuals need to live well with one another.”
The Enlightenment inflicted a slow-bleeding yet mortal wound on The Order. The slow death gave way to the emergence of “The Idea,” which eroded the foundations the social institutions—families, churches, and social networks—that made up The Order. The Idea in its most rudimentary form is “that there exist autonomous agents, called individuals, who both self-determine and self-moralise.” Persons infected with The Idea choose who they are, what is right, wrong, and even the nature of reality. This conception of the individual has had disastrous effects, resulting in an atomized society largely unprepared for and disinclined towards living productively as a part of communities that require some type of conformity to a broader sense of morality or duty.
Kruger rightly describes a chain reaction of institutional demise. For example, the decline of marriage has led to the decline of the family. The decline of the family, in turn, has led to the dissolution of home-life as the center of productivity; of intertwined social and economic networks; of the village; and of myriad other institutions dependent on persons whose self-understanding could be intelligible in light of something bigger than themselves.
As social institutions that once regulated (and ordered) human behavior began to decline, impersonal government intervention became necessary to replace the safeguards and safety nets once provided by local communities. Complex human relationships are defined by concepts like love, duty, and respect, all of which are unquantifiable and, therefore, impossible to bureaucratize. With these mediating institutions compromised or eradicated, the government “solutions” have only exacerbated the problems. The rise of radical personal autonomy and the resultant atomization of the individual have essentially knocked the legs out from the mediating institutions that were a part of “The Order” and eliminated the safety nets, social networks, and “little platoons,” in Edmund Burke’s words, that once held Western society together.
Kruger’s discussion of solutions understandably focuses on Britain, but is certainly applicable to other Western nations. A resurgence of The Order is dependent upon “the transfer of power from the state to local places.” He describes in general terms cooperation between local stakeholders and national and local governments to reach solutions regarding problems like housing shortages, for example. These proposals represent the application of the principle of subsidiarity, one of the classic tenants of Christian social teaching.
Kruger’s first chapter is one of the clearest and most compelling descriptions of what lies at the heart of the West’s radical shift towards individualism and resultant decline. The following chapters also contain well-crafted explanations of the havoc wrought by radical autonomy on marriage, family, and society more broadly. There are, however, two issues worth noting in this otherwise very helpful book.
First, in the chapter entitled “On Sex and Death,” Kruger describes marriage as a covenant forming the basis of family. A wife’s children, for example, are presumed to be the husband’s offspring and so the law obligates the husband to the care and provision of the children. However, there is one disjointed comment that seems to affirm same-sex marriage: “Same-sex marriage…does not invalidate this principle, nor does the principle invalidate same-sex marriage: all marriages, gay and straight, involve the union of difference.”
If this statement is to provide an interpretive lens for the chapter, it seems that Kruger does not clearly define the telos of marriage. Is it sex? Or is it children? At different times he seems to suggest different things. If the answer is sex, the question that logically follows is, “What is the telos of sex?” That answer is either children, whose telos is the propagation of society, or something else. It is well-documented—from time immemorial, in fact—that sex between two men or two women does not result in children. It could be that he is fully aware that same-sex marriage presents a challenge to defining the telos of marriage, but political realities preclude an argument that concedes this and he, like me in this article, is disinterested in relitigating whether same sex marriage should be legal in the context of writing something entirely unrelated to the issue.
Second, while Kruger’s policy recommendations are broad, the challenges involved in resurrecting The Order are significant. The fact is that, like it or not, we are moderns who have been conditioned by The Idea, no matter how much we long for The Order and recognize its benefits. Family life has been transformed and it is almost impossible to envision an industrialized or post-industrial world that somehow mirrors the pre-modern home-as-economic-center model Kruger describes. Certainly things like dishwashers and hot water heaters have made domestic life less burdensome for women, who were the initial beneficiaries of these innovations.
Covenant is a short book and certainly not intended as a policy manifesto, so I cannot criticize Kruger for his dearth of detail on how to translate “the good old days” into a contemporary context. He does admit that we cannot and should not turn back the clock on equality of the sexes or any number of positive social developments of the past 250 years. But, is there a solution rather than merely a diagnosis lurking in the ideas in this book? I hope so. Civilizational ideals are universal ideals, and we desperately need to revive them.
Since the book’s publication in 2023, though the Conservative party has endured an embarrassing electoral defeat, Danny Kruger has retained his seat in a dramatically smaller Tory parliamentary delegation. Hopefully, this will result in Kruger’s ideas gaining more purchase in a party reeling from electoral defeat and in search of a new approach. But, even so, with such a comparatively small number in Opposition, any influence would likely not translate into wider influence. The book, however, is well worth reading and considering even for those outside of the U.K. who are interested in cultural renewal.