From Democracy Digest:
While political scientists tend to focus on institutional reforms as a route to democratic renewal, there are also more old-fashioned ways to boost civic fabric, The FT’s Gillian Tett argues.
The historian Gertrude Himmelfarb – who died this week at the age of 97 – didn’t fear immorality so much as demoralization, the sense that our age has lost a moral vocabulary and with it the ability to think subtly about moral matters, David Brooks writes for The Atlantic. A great deal, she wrote, is lost when a society stops aiming for civic virtue and is content to aim merely for civility.
“In Edwardian and Georgian England,” Himmelfarb wrote, “the moral revolution was confined to a relatively small (although influential) group of ‘free spirits,’” Yuval Levin writes for National Review. It was only in her own time that she thought that revolution was finally becoming altogether democratized:
The idea of moral liberation is no longer the preserve of an elite but is rapidly becoming the common ground of an entire generation. Having finally used up the moral capital of the Victorians, we find ourselves more and more thrown back upon the one idea which appears to be of unquestionable validity, the idea of liberty.
Read this really interesting perspective here.
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