Conjuring the world that fell apart in 1914, John Maynard Keynes zeroed in on a Londoner buying the "various products of the whole earth" via his bedside telephone. A liberal world order, under a Pax Britannica, had created convenience "beyond the compass of the richest and most powerful monarchs of other ages".
Our own age feels like another precarious peak for modernity. With a pocket-sized phone that most people can afford, the Briton of 2016 can publish to the world, choose a sexual partner, subcontract menial work, access the total sum of knowledge possessed by our species. A liberal order, under a Pax Americana, has given ordinary individuals monarchical caprice.
The mystery is not whether and when this empire of private choice will crumble, but why it has so little purchase on the public space. The free-marketeers have told us for what feels like decades that a monolithic state cannot survive an emerging consumer consciousness among voters.
In a world of Uber and Amazon, of entertainment that is mesmerising in its variety and nearing zero in its cost, people will not wear the rationing, bounded choice and de haut en bas style of service that characterise some public services. A more demanding citizenry is ventured as a reason for the left's electoral malaise around Europe.
These sanguine liberals should be right – their teleology is so elegant. But there is little evidence they are. If the revolution is coming, it is coming slowly.
The state fluctuates in size but, qualitatively, it is much the same beast it was a generation ago. Conservative and Labour ministers have tried to infuse the public sector with notions of choice and competition, to limited success and enervating controversy.
The privatisations of the 1980s still constitute the last strategic clear-up of governmental rigidities in Britain. We have only tinkered since.
Lacking confidence
There is a plurality of school providers now, and technocratic disruption in healthcare, but interacting with the state continues to feel like being done to and acted upon. This is especially for people without the confidence and education to navigate the labyrinth. Government strips them of agency even as they fund it.
Today, junior doctors may strike against the Tories’ proposed revisions to their contract, which ministers say will help make the National Health Service fully operational seven days a week. The fact that it is not already should be the political sensation – but doctors are strolling the race for public sympathy.
Last month an NHS staff choir achieved the Christmas No 1 single in the pop charts with A Bridge Over You, a song so syrupy it might be prescribed as cough relief. Any reform to any public service, however sincere and plausibly life-improving, smells of improvident meddling even to the citizens who stand to gain.
This riddle is hard to untie, but we can consider a theory. What if the liberal teleology is not just simplistic, but the opposite of the truth? That is, dizzying choice in our private lives could actually heighten our craving for static institutions where we can find them.
We fear structural reform of the state because of, not despite, the great lifestyle upheaval brought about by geniuses at the nexus of technology and commerce in recent times. We are creatures of balance, not masochists for endless change and ever- greater atomisation.
This does not mean patients want to receive variable care. Taxpayers do not enjoy being treated in an offhand way. It is just that points of fixity are precious in our world, and we will endure rather a lot to preserve them.
Certain institutions can, as the former footballer Gary Neville said of Manchester United, "stand against the immediacy of modern life". The state is good at this. In a sense, we like the NHS for the same reason we like the royals. It is a conservative impulse as much as a socialist one.
The point, not problem
If this is somewhere near the truth, then it demands magnanimity from those of us who really are mad about freedom. For a youngish urbanite with good health, well-paid work and no duties, modernity is a daily miracle. Transience – of products, relationships, ideas – is not a problem: it is the point.
But we are a minority, and not a substantial one. If history were a 24-hour clock, this lifestyle has existed for the past second or so. Humans are hard-wired with more plodding desires: security, continuity, a nest. If these desires intensify even as capitalism showers people with bespoke choice, this is not necessarily a glitch. It might just be society’s mysterious equilibrium.
Even if the medical rebellion is quelled, public sector reformers are up against more than producer interests. They are up against the oldest human yearnings.
– (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2016)