National values & political values
The state should not seek to define or inflence what constitutes national culture and values. These lie rightly outside the political sphere. Individual politicians may legitimately express their own views on the subject, but should not aim to legislate, regulate or otherwise intervene to constrain the perception and evolution of these values.
The protection of freedom and enforcement of personal responsibility are not a part of national values. They are political and economic values, available for adoption or rejection by any individual in any nation, tangentially related to national values. The same should apply to other, more authoritarian, political values. No politician should be taken seriously who implies that his political values are those of the nation (or a “silent majority”). People who argue that those whose political values they do not share are unpatriotic should be held in contempt.
What sort of values are national rather than political?
- Constitutional: the structure and role (rather than policies) of the legislature, executive, judiciary and head of state;
- Legal: how laws are made and applied, not the nature of the laws themselves;
- Historical: focus on and celebration of the achievements and awareness of the mistakes in the nation's history;
- Linguistic: the ability to communicate in a shared language with commonly-accepted definitions of terms, evolved (and evolving) over the course of the history of the nation;
- Cultural: a shared awareness and appreciation of those aspects of the national heritage (such as art, literature, sport, humour, gastronomy, manners, way-of-life, etc.) that are a common source of pleasure (and conversely, those unpopular, usually-foreign traits that are commonly disapproved of); and
- Moral: not the detailed moral strictures that are the subject-matter of theology, but the broad moral principles and norms that have evolved from the political and religious history of the nation, which are the context for our laws and personal interactions.
