The Humility of
Margaret Thatcher


Robert Royal


"...when all is said and done, a politician's role is a humble one."
-Margaret Thatcheri

Since classical times, there have been two main answers to the question of how we achieve human happiness. In one view, happiness consists in indulging our appetites and developing the ability to satisfy them free of external constraints. The character Callicles in Plato's Gorgias, for example, argues with Socrates that not only do the stronger have a natural right to do what they like; the stronger should actually extend their appetites and their capacity for fulfilling them.ii The contrary view, however, is the moral thrust of the two greatest Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle. They advocated controlling impulses in accord with virtue, order in the soul corresponding to order in a good society and in divinely created reality. Aristotle believed people who cannot control themselves in these ways are "slaves by nature," however much they may think of themselves as free of external or internalized restraints.iii Ignorance, impulse, and instability cripple untutored human beings. In the long history of the pursuit of happiness, most figures can be easily lined up with either Callicles or Aristotle.

For the purposes of our present discussion, Michel Foucault clearly belongs with the first group, Morton Kaplan with the second. The first group believes that the self is already capable of seeking its own happiness if it is not prevented by family or the larger society; it may need education to acquire means, but it already knows or will create its own ends. The second believes that without character formation-in a variety of institutions, but most importantly in the family-we will neither know the good nor have the internal capacities to pursue it. Aristotle famously declared that those who are not well brought-up will not even be able to see the starting point of ethics.iv One school says the good is whatever I want; the other says that what I want should be the good.

Yet a series of complications arise when we begin to apply these two basic theoretical stances in concrete circumstances. To understand these complexities, it may be of particular use to look at the life of Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher is clearly a woman who has never been merely subservient to prevailing opinion. At the same time, it would be impossible to place her among those who believe what is right is a mere expression of personal preferences. Since all societies are imperfect in various ways, the votary of virtue will always need to reject parts of the social order at times and seek to reform it. So what do we call a figure like Thatcher, who is neither self-indulgent nor conformist? The proper name for what Thatcher has stood for may seem surprising, but I believe it is humility: the kind of humility that is nurtured in the right kind of family, neither too strict, nor too lax. Such a family encourages children to submit to the service of the true and the good, but that said, is no mere servile respecter of persons or-without careful scrutiny-of societies.

To judge by most of what has been written about Margaret Thatcher in the last two decades, of course, her name rarely appears in a sentence along with the word humility, save to deplore her lack of it. Her opponents have produced a steady stream of invective about her alleged narrow-mindedness and authoritarianism. Even people who generally supported what she did see her as tough, bordering on arrogant. But to look at her qualities of character at this superficial level without going to the virtues or vices that may lie behind them, means tacitly accepting several contemporary assumptions about what constitutes, on the one hand, strength of character and, on the other hand, compassion and humility. To better understand a person like Margaret Thatcher, we need to begin from radically different categories than those we find in current public discourse.


Preliminary Prejudices

Partly, this is necessary because of political biases. In the academy and the mainstream press, a curious rhetorical double standard exists. When people of leftish or progressive views become prominent, they are often commended for independence of thought, courage, and refusal to compromise with the status quo. Yet Mrs. Thatcher was often taken to task for these very traits. Pas d'enemis à gauche was a slight exaggeration even during the ideologically fevered days of the Cold War. Today, it would be misleading. But as a clear and continuing bias in intellectual life, we need to be careful to make allowances for the distortions of judgment toward which progressivism inclines all of us. Thatcher showed independence of thought in ways that cannot simply be reduced to a stubborn and narrow traditionalism.

There is good reason to think, for instance, that much of Thatcher's alleged obstinacy was mere fidelity to truth. She has never been blindly deferential to so-called "experts." Experts are, at best, people with extensive knowledge of a given subject; they usually, in the natural course of things, do not have great experience of or insight into the passions that move people and nations. Thus, in 1981, just two years into Thatcher's first administration, 364 economists warned in a join letter to The Times of London that her policies would not work and would lead to recession and social disturbances. Subsequent events proved the exact opposite. Britain today has low unemployment, one of the best growth rates in Europe, and a more stable society than at any time in decades. Lord King, one of Thatcher's most effective operators in privatizing previously nationalized industries, has said of this outcome: "Our intellectuals have never forgiven her for that."v

But it is often forgotten by people who have noticed this ideological bias that, in addition to the intellectual opposition, Thatcher had to confront-and change-a much less palpable foe: distorted public opinion. De Tocqueville warned that a kind of "soft despotism" might be more threatening to democratic societies than the more direct kind of tyranny. In a famous passage in Democracy in America, he predicted the emergence of a new servitude from a network of "petty, complicated rules that are both minute and uniform, through which even men of the greatest originality and the most vigorous temperament cannot force their heads above the crowd.... I have always thought that this brand of orderly, gentle, peaceful slavery...could be combined, more easily than is generally supposed, with some of the external forms of freedom, and that there is a possibility of its getting itself established even under the shadow of the sovereignty of the people."vi

In a similar vein, Friedrich von Hayek lamented in the Foreword to a later edition of The Road to Serfdom that, among the many misreadings of that seminal work, many critics had overlooked one of its main points: "that the most important change which extensive government control produces is a psychological change, an alteration in the character of the people."vii Hayek had been writing in the original 1944 edition about the changes in Britain-the Britain in which Thatcher was born and spent her early years-owing to the general centralizing and socializing tendencies of this century. He was vilified for suggesting that the same forces that he had seen growing in the Austria and Germany of this youth were about to emerge after a brief lag in postwar England.viii At the time, it may have been excusable to feel anger at comparison with a hated foe then being defeated at the cost of heroic sacrifices. But Hayek proved right. Even the first Tory government in which Margaret Thatcher served, Edward Heath's benighted reign in the 1970s, accepted large-scale planning and a paternalistic attitude toward the people.

Thatcher's confidence that the British people still possessed a residual will to cast off the restraints Tocqueville described and shake itself out of the lethargy Hayek feared, struck most commentators as unrealistic. Yet she knew something about the people, probably owing to her relatively modest upbringing, that more sophisticated analysts did not. And her efforts to bring that dimension of society back into public prominence transformed the nation. So successful was she that in 1997, even as the Labour Party was headed for a landslide victory after seventeen years in opposition, one observer noted the profound shift toward conservative views among the Labour leaders: "The ultimate triumph in an ideological war is when you convert your opponent...." Both parties essentially presented Thatcherite visions for the future, of less government and more popular initiative with minor variations in detail, such that, "The winner was Margaret Thatcher. The loser was Margaret Thatcher. Everything else is just commentary."ix Herein lies the Thatcher secret: that she had a mind original enough and a character formed and energetic enough to reverse processes in motion for over a century in developed democracies. How she was able to do this is something we want to look at quite carefully, without falling into facile, and very likely, misleading assumptions.


The Family Factor

Much has been written, for example, about Thatcher's strict middle-class upbringing as the key to her character. In this view, a combination of Methodist piety, bourgeois self-reliance, and village patriotism in the Grantham of the 1920s and 1930s is the main explanation for "Thatcherism." All these things helped form her, but this way of explaining things is far too simple. Millions of women grew up in similar conditions in England during the 1930s without showing the originality, vision, or energy Thatcher would come to display. Though, as we shall see, this early experience was important, we should be wary of deterministic or crypto-Marxist explanations for character, as if a human being were simply the expression of class and economic conditions. While the social milieu in which we are formed exerts an incalculable influence on us, there are undeniable personal factors that determine how we make use of our environment. That is why children reared in the same household and social setting sometimes wind up as polar opposites.x

In fact, all attempts to explain human action by any such simple scheme fail miserably. One of the most interesting developments in recent studies of genetics and brain chemistry, for example, is the growing realization that even the old nature-nurture argument oversimplifies far too much. The relationship of genetic inheritance and environment present one set of complex issues, but the reaction of the brain itself in different individuals seems highly unpredictable. A noted neuroscientist has written recently of studies of the brains of identical twins raised in the same households: "those identical twins with their identical genes never have identical brains. Every measure differs."xi And if physical brain functions, which are a kind of internalized record of free choices and environmental influences acting upon inherited potentialities, can vary greatly by empirical measures, how much more so the total personality in the world at large?

Facts like these must lead us to reflect that when we grapple with questions of identity and character, we come face-to-face with one of the deepest of mysteries: the nature of the human person. By mystery, I do not mean to suggest something mystical or magical. We encounter human nature-our own and others'-every day, and human personality or character is something we can all identify, even though it may escape our desire to define exhaustively. That is precisely the point, however, that I believe mystery should suggest to us in this context. Our great successes in the physical sciences unconsciously encourage us to think that everything we know can simply be broken down, analyzed (to use the technical term), and then reassembled with complete comprehension. But in dealing with questions of character, the social scientists have shown that genetics, environment, and individual dimensions are all in play.xii So we are confronted less with a problem to be solved in examining character than with an essential existential condition to be accepted and understood.xiii

Notions like character and identity derive from Greek terms with a very different meaning: in ancient Greek, both character and eidos had a more visual sense, denoting a form that told something about the nature of the things. For a long time, these terms were also associated with sharply marked signs, hence what we still call the characters in the alphabet. But gradually from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century the meaning of character took on a decidedly moral sense until in John Stuart Mill's On Liberty we read: "A person whose desires and impulses are his own-are the expression of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture-is said to have a character. One whose desires and impulses are not his own, has no character, no more than a steam-engine has character."xiv Mill is making a kind of Aristotelian point at a time when mechanism was ascendant. But what he asserts and denies here are both important: the uniquely human thing is self-command, which by its nature is predictable and unpredictable.

We can predict, let us say, that Margaret Thatcher will never turn into a Communist because everything about her character runs counter to communism. But we could never predict that she would be the first to see Gorbachev for what he was, because that discrimination involved the personal capacity to subordinate ideological commitment to hard fact. You may try to escape the merely mechanical by trying to escape character, stable identity, or social positions-as a Foucault would counsel-but at the cost of ever really achieving anything of substance since the inertia of life does not yield to momentary rebellions. Real character combines steadiness of general orientation with flexibility in detail.


The Dynamism of Social Rules

Similarly, the simplistic and deterministic accounts of Thatcher's upbringing do not allow for another actor, the potential for dynamism within the middle-class values that she had accepted as these were brought into contact with new challenges. For instance, Thatcher, like her father (who also got involved in politics and was to become mayor of Grantham), inclined toward pacifism in the 1930s, as did many people at the time. In addition, her pacifism stemmed in part from a kind of religious idealism typical of the Methodism her family practiced. But all her family-and, one supposes, more sober Englishmen at the time-were both intelligent and realistic enough to see that pacifism was not a good policy against the likes of Herr Hitler. Thatcher was and would remain committed to religious ideals and personal virtue, but in politics, as she would later observe, "personal virtue is no substitute for political hardheadedness."xv

If critics had not assumed that the values of a small village equal a small mind, it would have been less of a surprise to find this same adaptability to reality later in Thatcher's life in far different contexts. Some people, particularly on the left, pointing to the bourgeois virtues Thatcher celebrated, were quick to accuse Thatcher of being a rigid ideologue, blind to anything outside of her narrow convictions. There are times, it must be said, when a hint of provincialism, in the negative sense, crops up in her life. But compared with the rigidity and blindness of the left in all the modern democracies, which Hannah Arendt once described as "experiments against reality," Thatcher was the soul of realism itself. No less sharp an observer than Jeane Kirkpatrick said of her: "If she had been negatively rigid as compared to realistically pragmatic, she would never have perceived that Mikhail Gorbachev was a man with whom 'you can do business' when no other Western leader believed it."xvi Some of the good old bourgeois ability to size up the reliability of a customer may be peeping through here.


Bring Back the Bourgeoisie?

There is a long European tradition of denouncing the bourgeoisie, sometimes even before they existed. When Napoleon dismissed England as a "nation of shopkeepers," he was expressing the old aristocratic and military disdain for what seem quite vulgar and unheroic virtues. The Marxists and other modern intellectuals took a similar view, for different reasons. More recently, feminists and homosexual activists, such as Foucault, have denounced the traditional bourgeois family as organized oppression.xvii But as we near the end of the twentieth century and have seen some of the alternatives, so-called "bourgeois" virtues, despite the smugness and self-interest they sometimes suggest, are looking better and better as antidotes to some of the deepest social pathologies.

Thatcher's early life is almost a Hollywood casting-director's idea of English bourgeois virtue. Not only was her father a shopkeeper, but in her autobiography she tells how the family grew up "over the shop," literally living above the store. She goes on to explain how people who have actually lived such a life know its distinctive qualities: "for one thing, you are always on duty." People knocking in the middle of the night, urgent requests that have to be handled amidst the press of the regular business, all the attentiveness to customers that is so quickly passed over in the denunciations of capitalist "greed." And there was another lesson as well: "it was pointless to complain-so nobody did."xviii

All of this, combined with the Roberts family's stem Methodism, might be taken to portray a belated touching up of the early life to accord with nostalgic pictures. Thatcher, however, relates that though she remembers her early life as an "idyllic blur," life was still precarious, even for those, like her father, who had succeeded through work and thrift. Life "over the shop" could come to an abrupt end if the shop did, and that fear both spurred action and restrained self-indulgence. We can feel the bite of that economic realism in some of her later criticisms of the free-spending ways of political opponents, such as her remark about Labour at a Conservative Party Conference in 1975: "They have the usual socialist disease; they have run out of other people's money."

At a different historical moment, these sorts of home truths might have been little needed or produced little effect in England. During Thatcher's rise and years as Prime Minister, however, they were precisely the kind of return to basic truths and virtues that a country that had departed from its own best traditions desperately required. Far from expressing greed and selfishness, as many critics claimed, this perspective comes from the daughter of a man who, though a businessman, did not worship Mammon. One measure of the family's real commitments is that Alfred Roberts, Margaret's father, devoted a good portion of his time to study of the Bible and political issues. He traveled the region as a lay preacher on Sundays. Whatever energies he may have devoted to pure commerce and passing practical affairs, he spent a large amount of time on the eternal things.

The charge is often heard against praise of an upbringing like Thatcher's that, yes, it enabled her to succeed reasonably well, but has blinded her to the virtues of those different from her or the plight of those less fortunate. In a typical intellectual sleight-of-hand, this accusation is never addressed, however, to those others whose background may be blind to the virtues of middle-class experience. The double standard reveals that identity politics is usually intended as a means to advance certain political agendas, rarely as a principle of equality. Nor could it be; we democrats believe in a presumptive respect toward all members of society, whatever their backgrounds, but that is only a matter of basic political etiquette. That said, we come to the harder questions of judging what is good and bad, productive and not, in the claims made about groups and individuals.


The Secular Benefits of Religion

One of the things that we might first wish to retrieve from the general condemnation of bourgeois existence is the beneficial influence of religion. In recent years, social scientists, turning to different subjects than they have pursued in the past, have discovered that people who are regular churchgoers are happier and healthier on average than are their non-believing counterparts. This finding runs contrary to the Freudian dogma that religion is a neurotic illusion. Indeed, the preponderance of evidence today shows that far from being a psychological disorder, religious belief and practice strongly correlate with lessened susceptibility to suicide, drug abuse, alcoholism, depression, family breakdown, sexual problems, violence, and other physical and mental ills.xix These are strangely healthy effects for a neurotic complex. It is one of the ironies of the late twentieth century that science itself suggests that if you want to stay off the analyst's couch the best method may be the church pew.

When we look at Thatcher's childhood, the good effects of religion's sacred canopy are everywhere. The Methodism Thatcher experienced as a youth seems to have been strict without being puritanical. There was lots of music in such Methodist homes, and reading, and even movie-going. Thatcher retained a lifelong interest in poetry and song. But even if these aesthetic interests were not developed in directions some on the aesthetic left might have wished, they left her with a deep appreciation of sheer beauty and its connection with the sacred. The British writer Paul Johnson remarks how privileged he felt when John Paul II allowed for a small group, including himself and Margaret Thatcher, to see the restored frescoes in the Sistine Chapel in private, without the distractions of noisy crowds. And adds, "It was a still rarer experience to see Margaret Thatcher, this Queen of Politics, this outstanding exponent of the art of ruling, quite overcome-rendered speechless, in fact-by the splendour of beauty brought into being by a genius under ecclesiastical patronage."xx

Contrary to the horrors we are often told are associated with strong religious belief-terrors about Hell and damnation and pathological scrupulosity-the Roberts family seems marked by good humor and grace. Though all were expected to do honest work and avoid obvious vice, guilt seems to have been far less evident than a sincere enthusiasm to achieve something worthwhile for the family and others. All the family members appear confident that they will have the capacity to carry out their duties without needing to fret about achieving self-esteem. If they possess such a thing it is because they have been engaged in productive work at home or in the community all their lives. Unlike the usual tabloid stories, aided and abetted by the psychiatric establishment, no dark sexual displacements seem to have occurred. All of this runs so counter to the typical picture of a strongly "religious" family in the media today that it's hard to remember that it once would have been almost taken for granted.

Even the feminist claim that traditional families stunt female ambition seems falsified in bourgeois experience of this kind. It may have been slightly different for Margaret and her sister had there been brothers around. We can only speculate about that. It is a fact, however, that her father not only included them and their mother in discussions of things going on in the town and the world, he positively encouraged reading and study for everyone. Lest it be thought that this was merely a generational shift, it's worth noting that Margaret thought her mother, too, a virtuoso of combining many duties, praising her for all the good she had done as Mayoress of Grantham. The Roberts may have been slightly unusual in the degree of talent and energy they brought to their multiple activities, but their fair treatment of the girls is probably more common in the average bourgeois family than the nightmares of the feminists allow.

Margaret's relationship with her father warrants still further attention. From everything we know about the Roberts family, it was he, not the mother, who dominated. In the standard feminist reading, this should have led to women conditioned to play a subservient role to men. But if any woman in the twentieth century knew how to stand up to powerful men it was Margaret Thatcher. How can we account for that fact? Again, some of the poise is a personal trait. But no little credit must be given to the kind of father she had. Family studies seem to show that a good connection with a good father, such as Thatcher had, teach women competence in dealing with men. They learn how to give and take in intellectual exchange, and do not seek compensation for missing paternal affection in the wrong sort of relationships with men. If we want more such confident women leaders, we need more fathers like Alfred Roberts.xxi

Thatcher's deep connection to her father appears most fully in her account of the process that led up to her first appointment to the British Cabinet as Minister for Education in the Edward heath government in the early 1970s. Tellingly, that chapter of her book ends not with dealings of elation or a look toward future battles and successes, but with a moving turn to thoughts of her father, who died shortly before she was appointed. She knows, she says, that he would have wanted it "because politics was so much a part of his life and I was so much his daughter. But nor would he have considered that political power was the most important or even the most effective thing in life." In fact, she gives her father the last word, quoting from the notes for one of his sermons: "Men, nations, races or any particular generation cannot be saved by ordinances, power, legislation. We worry about all this, and our faith becomes weak and faltering. But all these things are as old as the human race-all these things confronted Jesus 2,000 years ago.... This is why Jesus had to come."xxii In this brief, Dr. Johnson-like passage, the whole greatness of both father and daughter may be glimpsed. They could both be confident and energetic in politics precisely because they did not think of it as the highest thing. Beliefs of this kind call forth service to the neighbor and at the same time effectively short-circuit all utopianisms. They keep even limited politics in the proper perspective.


Confidence and Clarity

It is almost impossible to overestimate the self-confidence and aspiration toward clarity that this background instilled in Thatcher. Like any intelligent person, she often came, after the fact, to recognize the blind spots or errors she and her colleagues had suffered from as they made decisions at one point or another. But never does she allow this to deflect her from the need to reflect as deeply as possible on the evidence and then act without regret. In a world nearly dominated by the belief that all politics must be tentative, hand-wringing, and pragmatic rather than principled, many may regard this as her worst sin. Certainly, it made her an unusual personality in political circles: as a not unsympathetic writer once summed up Thatcher's coolness and aplomb during a meeting with the press around a table, "In front of her a glass of ice water stood straight and sweated."xxiii

It is somewhat ironic that her most famous nickname, "The Iron Lady," was given to her not by some Labour Party opponent in the heat of domestic controversy, but by an anonymous writer in the Soviet Army newspaper, The Red Star, at the height of the Cold War. Then again, perhaps this is not so odd, since our worst enemies often see us more clearly, for good and bad, precisely because they need to make an accurate appraisal of our strengths and weaknesses. Thatcher later would describe the Soviet characterization of her as "one of the worst misjudgments." But one of her strengths is that she was able to take this epithet, clearly intended to disparage, and turn it into a badge of honor.xxiv

A noted British thinker has observed, "Her will is seldom paralyzed nor her intellect clouded by irony and equivocation-possibly the thing that intellectuals find most infuriating about her style."xxv It was precisely this quality-the perfect expression of the old bourgeois earnestness and practicality-that protected Salman Rushdie, one of those very ironic and equivocating post-modern intellectuals, when the Iranians issued the fatwa condemning him to death for blasphemy in his novel, The Satanic Verses. If the Iron Lady, instead of coolly looking to the safety of all citizens on principle without irony and equivocation, had been a postmodern Ironist Lady, Rushdie would have come face to face with Allah, and learned whether he was a blasphemer or not long ago.

This coolness and lucidity have given rise to any number of rumors that Thatcher was an autocrat, unfeeling in her handling of her subordinates, and even more unfeeling toward the poor and unfortunate. While there is no question that Thatcher could be quite peremptory with colleagues who had not mastered the basic facts about the sectors for which they were responsible, one of the people who worked with her during the eighties has characterized this habit in conversation as her way of sifting advice she could trust from advice she could not. Nor is the hardness of heart argument quiet right: all large-scale political decisions involve disruption and sacrifice. The main question is whether the results will be worth the price. Comparing today's England with the rest of Europe, in which greater percentages of people are employed at better wages and with a brighter future than the more protectionist regimes on the Continent, it is at least arguable that Thatcher's toughness was in the long run kindness, even towards the poor. In fact, perhaps the kindness was there even in the short run. The same colleague mentioned above has written:

Anyone who has ever worked for her must feel an extraordinary tenderness as well as respect for her. She has many great qualities, but perhaps the one that I value above all is the way that when talking about some dry policy, in public or private, she could suddenly convey an extraordinary surge of emotion. She could speak about home ownership or the changes in Eastern Europe or improving our schools, and suddenly reach out and hit an emotional note that is quite beyond the reach of most politicians. That is what brought British Politics to life.xxvi

Ronald Reagan could similarly convey the grand vision, but was often dismissed as merely the Great Communicator. Yet it is probably the case that both figures were so effective at the big picture because they both were deeply moved by it themselves, and their people could tell. Effective communicators have arisen in both countries since; none are credited with anything like a real moral vision.


Learning from Mistakes

In light of everything her own family had done for her, one of the few grave errors Thatcher made in public life-an error many well intentioned people made in the years after World War II-was to assume too readily that family life would not be destabilized by various acts of government. As a member of Parliament in 1966, she voted for the decriminalization of private homosexual acts between consenting adults and abortion under limited circumstances. She opposed, but only partly, measures intended to make divorce easier around the same time. These were pragmatic decisions, intended merely to ease difficult circumstances seeming to involve merely personal choices. The breakdown in family life that subsequently occurred surprised her as well as others. She learned a lesson: "Laws have a symbolic significance...taking all of the 'liberal' reforms of the 1960s together they amount to more than their individual parts. They came to be seen as providing a radically new framework within which the younger generation would be expected to behave."xxvii

Like these decisions on family life, if we trace the evolution of her opinions during the course of her political career it becomes clear that Thatcher never abandoned the basic values and institutional frameworks with which she was familiar from youth. But she began to see how to apply them more effectively to the demoralized England of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, which had changed to something quite different than the little England she had known as a child. It was conviction born of sad experience of the consequences of prevailing political and moral values that is the true source of Thatcher's alleged hardness in later years.

It has almost become a principle of modern public life that strong views confidently held are thought to be almost by nature inimicable to political freedom. Pope John Paul II pointed to this phenomenon in a recent encyclical, saying that some people think a skeptical relativism is the only basis for democracy.xxviii Neither the pope nor Thatcher is an advocate of that kind of democracy and one sees why: relativistic democracy cannot tell the essential truths about the person and human society. It tends to produce Tocqueville's tamed democratic character that will almost certainly be an ally of the status quo, willingly or not, whatever that status quo happens to be at a given moment.

Thatcher was no ideological revolutionary, but there is something untamed and rebellious about her nature that did not rest easy with the achievements of any given set of mere policies, however successful. She knew the nation needed a social revolution as well. Perhaps the most touching and revealing comment about Thatcher comes not from her admirers, but from her own pen as she praises one of her former colleagues. She says of him that he had "a passion to get Britain right." Many have had something like that passion, but have assumed that this entailed some sort of ongoing role for themselves or for an ideology or a party that would be forever meddling in the business of the nation. It is the final confirmation of Thatcher's humility that she knew getting Britain right meant providing ordinary English men and women the chance to use their own talents and initiative, rather than trying to run the country from No. 10 Downing Street. It is no accident that in speaking of religious values, she was led to remark that "any set of social and economic arrangements which is not founded on the acceptance of individual responsibility will do nothing but harm."


No Regrets

One of the consequences of Thatcher's view of studying problems thoroughly and making decisions in light of the best analysis available at the time, knowing full well that there is no final knowledge or certainty in complex political decisions, is that it accepts responsibility but leaves little room for regrets. Regret can only be over things you did not do, pains you did not take. Thatcher was rarely idle during her years in power. Around the time of handling over Hong Kong to Communist China, many commentators worried-and still worry-about the future consequences of such a move. Worry, of course, is warranted given the known human-rights violations of the Communist Chinese. But Thatcher believed in the early 1980s that Britain had no other real options, and so observing that, "I am not naturally given to raking over past events and decisions," contented herself with explaining the decision in 1997.xxix

She has also declared that she is not by nature given to introspection.xxx For many modern persons, especially intellectuals, this is a cardinal sin that reflects a character defect. The whole modern ethos, at least since Freud and perhaps going all the way back to Rousseau, has been to look into the self, not just to root out sin as in earlier Christian spiritual writers, but to uncover family conflicts and traumas thought to blight naturally good souls. The effect has been to produce an introspection bordering on narcissism. Thatcher has nothing in particular to teach us about this whole problematic area except, perhaps, to remind us that in certain realms-and politics is one of them-pragmatic approaches guided by realistic ideals are far more valuable than all the introspection and empty compassion in the modern world.

American leaders who knew her personally, such as James Baker and George Schultz, experienced the hard line she could take in public debate. Both also remarked on the sharp contrast with her private personality: "She was known for speaking bluntly and resolutely, but her warmth and grace in private contrasted sharply with the public image."xxxi This is, no doubt, an accurate representation of the two Margaret Thatchers. But those who see in this split personality something sinister or slightly incoherent may be making a major mistake. One need not be a Machiavellian to believe that the virtues that make us good persons in private may not be identical to the virtues that make good public leaders. Thatcher came up in a hard school when any display of weakness of "womanly" softness might have cost her and Britain dearly. She also seems to have added to this a personal bent toward making sure those around her knew their subjects and did not waste her time if they did not.

Furthermore, the harshness she often displayed even towards those in her own government must have something to do with the resistance she encountered everywhere during her years in power. After she left the Prime Minister's office, she was to write:

For years I had had to deal with and work through politicians and civil servants who, with a few remarkable exceptions, by and large did not agree with me and shared little of my fundamental approach. They had dutifully done their part-and some beyond duty. But the inevitable loneliness of power had been exacerbated in my case by the fact that I so often had to act as a lone opponent of the processes and attitudes of government itself-the Government I myself headed.xxxii

Under the circumstances, success could only come with constant hectoring and similar qualities. In the end, these qualities were to lead to her having to step down as Prime Minister. But they achieved what needed achieving in the England of her time at the relatively low cost of some justly bruised egos. To all who shirked responsibilities like these she said: "Freedom is not synonymous with an easy life.... There are many difficult things about freedom: It does not give you safety, it creates moral dilemmas for you, it requires self-discipline; it imposes great responsibilities; but such is the nature of Man and in such consists his glory and salvation."xxxiii

Can all this be said to amount to humility? It all depends what we mean by the word. G. K. Chesterton once remarked about the shift between an older version of humility and a newer one: "...the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether."xxxiv Margaret Thatcher was tireless in channeling her energies into her aims. For those not as energetic or brilliant, she was a virtual steamroller. But looked at from the old Aristotelian angle, what could be more humble than clearing out mounds of illogic, inertia, timidity, and hopelessness to arrive, not at self-aggrandizement, but at the simple truth that virtue, shaped by and shaping a good social order, is, under God, the motor of history, and that politics, indispensable though it is in many matters, is finally a humble affair?

______________________

i Margaret Thatcher, "We Can't Make It Without Religious Values," The Saturday Evening Post, July/August 1989, 61.
ii Plato, Gorgias, 491e-492a.
iii Aristotle, Politics, 1327b.
iv Ethics, 1095b6.
v The Economist, 29 April 1989, 59.
vi Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, part II, Chapter 6, "What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear," edited by J. P. Mayer and Max Lerner, translated by George Lawrence (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 667.
vii Friedrich von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944), xi.
viii Presciently, Hayek also predicted that the collectivist mentality would come to America later than it did to Europe, since, by a process of slow filtering down, the principles that drove the New Deal would take several decades to capture the popular imagination.
ix Thomas L. Friedman, "All About Maggie," The New York Times, 5 May 1997, A25 (oped page).
x This is hardly a new phenomenon. Plato's Meno examines whether virtue can be taught and, though passionate in encouraging people to pursue knowledge of what is right, points out that even men of consummate virtue, like Pericles, tried, but failed to form their sons properly.
xi Robert Sapolsky, "A Gene for Nothing," Discover, October 1997, 42.
xii See in particular, David C. Rowe's, The Limits of Family Influence: genes, experience, and behavior (New York: Guilford Press, 1994). Most psychologists today speak of "temperament" as primarily determined by genetic endowment, which studies of identical twins reared apart suggest accounts for 40 to 50 per cent of our behavior. The rest of our personality, the stable "character" that we develop, is an interplay of environmental factors and individual choice.
xiii See Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being (New York: AMS Press, 1981).
xiv J. S. Mill, On Liberty (New York: Penguin, 1981), 12.
xv Margaret Thatcher, The Path to Power (New York: Harper Collins, 1995), 11.
xvi In Susan Crabtree and Tiffany Danitz, "The Legacy of Margaret Thatcher," Insight, 18 November 1996, 15.
xvii Quite often such claims mask strange agendas. In Foucault's case, it ought to be mentioned, his documented engagement in homosexual sado-masochism, including dangerous engagements with partners even after he knew he was infected with HIV, casts a revealing light on the passion behind the critiques. On this point see James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993).
xviii Margaret Thatcher, The Path to Power, 4-5.
xix For a critical review of these studies see David B. Larson and Susan B. Larson, "The Forgotten Factor in Physical and Mental Health: What Does the Research Show?", National Institute of Healthcare Research, Rockville, Maryland, 1994.
xx Paul Johnson, The Quest for God (New York: Harper Colling, 1996), 74.
xxi One of the few anomalies in Thatcher's life was her study of Chemistry as an undergraduate in Oxford. This woman who had been so engaged in politics with her father at home and who continued to participate in debates, lectures, and campaigns as vigorously as anyone actually studying politics, actually also found time to prepare for what her father thought a "useful" career. Many students before and since, coming from backgrounds where hardly anyone had ever seen the inside of a university, have been encouraged to think science a kind of higher form of respectable labor. Thatcher seems to have been no exception. Fortunately for her, she not only was able to combine this work with what would become her real contribution to British life, but she encountered a formidable woman in her own right to study under: Dorothy Hodgkin, who in the 1960s would receive a Nobel Prize for work related to the development of penicillin.
xxii The Path to Power, 163-4.
xxiii Peggy Noonan, "The Gift of the Maggie," The New York Times Magazine, 16 December 1990, 9.
xxiv The Path to Power, 362.
xxv Kenneth Minogue, "The Moral Passion of Mrs. Thatcher," National Review, 19 May 1989, 25.
xxvi David Willets, "Working with Mrs. Thatcher," The Spectator (London), 1 December 1990, 14-15.
xxvii The Path to Power, 151-3.
xxviii See Veritatis Splendor.
xxix Margaret Thatcher, "No Regrets," The Wall Street Journal, 27 June 1997, A 14.
xxx The Path to Power, 466.
xxxi James A. Baker, III, The Politics of Diplomacy (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1995), 86.
xxxii The Path to Power, 467.
xxxiii "Right Thinking," quoted in Policy Review, Fall 1993, 18.
xxxiv G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1954), 56.

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