Danny Kruger, Covenant

 

Covenant: The New Politics of Home, Neighbourhood and Nation

Danny Kruger

Forum / Swift Press, 2023 (ISBN: 9781800752115 hb, 149pp)

 

Danny Kruger, a Conservative MP with an Oxford DPhil in history, seeks to set out a social and political vision oriented towards The Good Life and virtuous living. He claims our culture seems to be searching for something. “We want a life that is both embodied and enchanted: rooted, tactile, sweaty, but also lit by sacred fire. We want a life of function (to be useful and fully used) and of place (to identify with a piece of land and the people of it), and for these things to be food for the body and food for the soul.” (p82)

 

We need to value not only care and fairness but recapture a sense of authority, loyalty and sanctity (p60). Kruger wants to restore and further what he calls “The Order” which is social and other people oriented with a network of relationships, obligations and commitments fostered by institutions. He contrasts this with “The Idea”, the gnostic sense that my own autonomy is all, that I should discover or define my identity according to what I feel to be my inner self, regardless of physical or external realities. Kruger thinks the word “woke” is rather trivial. “Cultural Marxism” is preferable: revolutionary tribes war over identity, self-interest and ideology rather than merely over the means of production. He prefers the term “transgressive” to describe those who in a spirit of grievance want to overthrow all that might restrain “the dominant individual will” (p39).

 

Kruger thinks “we are born to worship: this is our essence, as primary as our existence.” (p40) He contends that “the culture war… is a religious conflict about the right gods to worship.” (p25) “You are what you worship. Your identity is a reflection of your god, the thing you venerate, which gives life meaning and explains good and evil. A culture is the act of common worship, and so a community or a civilisation might best be defined in terms of the gods the people serve.” (p29) In our post-Christian age, “we worship ourselves… more particularly the individual person, and even more particularly the person within: ‘the real me.’” (p30)

 

Kruger argues not just for contracts but for the covenant of marriage as the basis for a flourishing society, and for a covenant of place and nation. He even claims that “all politics might be said to come down to the regulation of sex and death.” (p62). The family and household are central to him. “We cannot carry on as if the purpose of life is the restless quest. The alteration we need is the one that a single person, hitherto alone and self-focused, undergoes on falling in love, getting married and starting a family. We need to move from a one-bed flat to a family home.” The general economy should make “it as easy as possible to form and sustain a household.” (p87) Though some may not choose or fit this pattern, the generalisation is for the good of the wider community, not only the oikos but the par-oikos or parish which would support others too. He wants to see parents central to education and more local socially responsible decision making with everyone politically engaged.

 

Kruger takes in not only civil society, but our relationship to the natural environment. Paganisms tended to see humanity as subject to nature but we should see ourselves as stewards of creation, intended to have dominion rather than domination, cultivation rather than exploitation.

 

As well as Edmund Burke, Roger Scruton, Jonathan Haidt, Jonathan Sumption and others, Kruger cites Carl Trueman, Colin Gunton, John Milbank, Andrew Rumsey, Alasdair MacIntyre and Tom Holland’s Dominion. He is influenced by David Godhart’s work on “Somewhere”s and argues that too many people uproot to go to university and join a precariat.  

 

We are certainly given a big vision with bold brushstrokes here. I sometimes wondered how this might be achieved. But Kruger does have specific policy proposals for example around planning and Community Land Trusts, law, education, social care and welfare insurance. He wants to see work which is local and meaningful, likely focused around creativity or care. We should value more the support families can give to their own children and their elderly relatives rather than depending entirely on the nursery or the care home. This involves a taxation system that supports the household with more people able to manage on one wage or two part-time wages. Well paid local jobs and technology would allow more time for involvement in civil society and volunteering.

 

Whilst recognising that “there is little to boast of in many aspects of modern England, and much to learn from others” (p142), Kruger hopes for a sense of Englishness that can recapture something of her discordant heroic, gentle, progressive, conservative spirit in “the great project of defence and restoration that is needed.” (p144)