Daily Mail, December 31 2001

The new year is the time when we famously make resolutions and even more famously break them. Last year, our resolutions to lose weight, be more punctual and stop kicking the cat may not have lasted beyond January 5 but this year, we promise, we’re really, really going to keep them.

New year’s resolutions arise from a combination of guilt and expectancy. The Romans, who established January 1 as the date of the new year, named the month after the god Janus who was depicted as looking both backwards and forwards.

In a similar fashion, on this day we not only take stock of the twelve months that have just passed but we also feel a surge of hope at the new year that is being born.

And with this sense of the world’s rebirth comes the renewed desire to make ourselves into finer persons. We promise ourselves that we will do things better in future, and set ourselves new goals to be achieved.

We make lists of our good intentions - finally to get down to mending that broken fence, to be more tolerant and less impatient, to go the gym every day.

This is because striving for improvement is a characteristic of our civilisation. We feel we can and should make a difference for the better. At the root of this impulse is a sense of optimism about the future, even at a time like this when the world is menaced by the threat of violence.

It was not ever thus. As the philosopher Anthony O’Hear noted in his book After Progress, people in the ancient world viewed the future with foreboding. It was only when pagan notions of decline were replaced by the Judeo-Christian belief in an ideal beyond the self and an infinitely better life to come that the prospect of degeneration was replaced by images of hope.

This optimistic approach was embedded in the development of science from the seventeenth century onwards. The modern age ushered in by this great movement of thought has accordingly been founded on an unshakeable belief in progress, a certainty that the application of reason will remove all ills and that through our personal choices we can make a better world.

The Victorian era was the high point of this optimistic drive for improvement. For the Victorians, impelled mainly by evangelical Christianity, believed not only that making moral choices distinguished human beings from animals, but also that improving standards of behaviour was inextricably connected to increasing the prosperity of the nation.

So high-minded Victorians threw themselves into civil and political duties aimed at encouraging self-reliance, self-improvement and social reform. This created a vast network of mutual organisations, co-operatives, self-help and philanthropy.

The result was that a society which had been similar to our own in its very high levels of drunkenness, crime and illegitimacy experienced an astonishing transformation to become a by-word for lawfulness, order and self-restraint. Such an upholding of human dignity is surely the essence of progressive politics.

However, in modern times the belief in progress has taken some heavy knocks. Our scientific age has produced tyrannies such as fascism or communism which have tried to impose by force a man-made view of how the world should be re-ordered.

Our obsession with consumerism and freedom of choice has given us crime, family breakdown and drug dependency. Science has given us BSE, environmental destruction and genetic experimentation in which children are used increasingly as objects.

Far from using reason to gain control over our lives, we find that more and more seems to have become uncontrollable. Faced with the bewildering complexity of the modern world, we feel we cannot cope because we seem to have lost our bearings.

Of course, to some extent this is a matter of temperament. Some people will always think the glass is half full, while others see it as half empty. At one extreme is the reactionary who thinks human nature is innately bad and that any change is always for the worse.

Equally damaging is the complacent moderniser who thinks that all change must be for the better. Indeed, from genetic engineering to reform of the House of Lords, our society seems to have become hooked on the process of modernisation as desirable in itself, without thinking through what we actually want to achieve.

The result is that sometimes we find we have changed things not for the better but for the worse. Instead, we should direct change towards improving our society by encouraging individuals to behave well.

What’s crucial is that people must be enabled to make the kind of choices that improve their own lives and the lives of others. The problem we face, though, is that the language of public debate has become distorted by people who want to impose their view of the good life on everyone else.

These people invented the culture of discrimination and victimhood which has done so much to demoralise our society. They trumpet their concern about ‘intolerance’, ‘abuse’ or ‘poverty’ in order to prove their own progressive credentials.

But in fact, theirs is an utterly destructive and indeed de-humanising approach. For it robs individuals of the power to make and be answerable for their own moral decisions, a power which lies at the core of what it is to be human.

Of course we should not return to Victorian values; our social landscape is very different. But we should learn the central lesson from that remarkable era, that it is possible for individuals to change for the better and for a society to reform itself.

We are all capable of good and bad deeds. We are not born good or evil but we are made by our own choices. The resolutions we make are important because we can all make a difference, to our own lives and to the well-being of those around us.

Our collective resolution for the new year should surely be to find ways of releasing the powerful human drive to do good. As a society we have to recognise that the liberty to make personal choices unfettered by generally recognised codes of behaviour — which many now assume is the path to happiness — is actually a route to fragmentation, intolerance and misery.

Step by individual step we can create the good society by moving from ‘me’ to ‘we’. We need to rediscover our bearings through restoring moral habits and a framework of virtue through our families, schools and community institutions, transmitting ideals from one generation to the next. We have to learn again how to connect.

We can start by making a new year’s resolution to restrain our own desires and put others’ interests first, to restore loyalty, trust and commitment, and to show kindness and consideration to all around us. Out of this will come the better world for ourselves and our children, towards which we shall raise our glasses at midnight tonight. Happy new year.