Anyone got any better ideas?
Theodore Dalrymple, British ex-patriate and author of "Not With a Bang but a Whimper: The Politics and Culture of Decline" (a collection of essays), despairs of the 'social pathologies' emerging in Britain in recent decades. He considers a major cause to have been the direction of Britain's social welfare policies, which have left "many people in contemporary Britain with very little of importance to decide for themselves. … They are educated by the state (at least nominally) … the state provides for them in old age and has made savings unnecessary … they are treated and cured by the state when they are ill; they are housed by the state if they cannot otherwise afford decent housing. Their choices concern only sex and shopping.
"No wonder the British have changed in character, their sturdy independence replaced by passivity, querulousness, or even, at the lower reaches of society, a sullen resentment that not enough has been … done for them. For those at the bottom, such money as they receive is, in effect pocket money, … reserved for the satisfaction of whims. As a result they are infantilized. If they behave irresponsibly — for example by abandoning their own children … — it is because both the rewards for behaving responsibly and the penalties for behaving irresponsibly have vanished."
He also has plenty to say about the pitfalls of the contemporary approach to morality generally.
He makes a good case, but I can't really imagine what a solution might look like. I find myself wondering if perhaps our generation, having this kind of thinking so deeply ingrained in us, are just going to have to let the postmodern phase play out, until our kids get sick of it and look for a more positive direction. But maybe that's just laziness on my part. Because, like everyone else apparently, I'm full of inbuilt resistance to making hard decisions and choosing a direction - especially if it involves making impositions on anyone else.
"No wonder the British have changed in character, their sturdy independence replaced by passivity, querulousness, or even, at the lower reaches of society, a sullen resentment that not enough has been … done for them. For those at the bottom, such money as they receive is, in effect pocket money, … reserved for the satisfaction of whims. As a result they are infantilized. If they behave irresponsibly — for example by abandoning their own children … — it is because both the rewards for behaving responsibly and the penalties for behaving irresponsibly have vanished."
He also has plenty to say about the pitfalls of the contemporary approach to morality generally.
He makes a good case, but I can't really imagine what a solution might look like. I find myself wondering if perhaps our generation, having this kind of thinking so deeply ingrained in us, are just going to have to let the postmodern phase play out, until our kids get sick of it and look for a more positive direction. But maybe that's just laziness on my part. Because, like everyone else apparently, I'm full of inbuilt resistance to making hard decisions and choosing a direction - especially if it involves making impositions on anyone else.
posted by Kat | 2/12/2009 11:13:00 am
4 Comments:
There is something… appealing? right-seeming? about the brutal, unforgiving fend-for-yourself-and-your-kin of nature. I'm a little ambivalent about whether we should have subverted the 'survival of the fittest' as soundly as we have.
Also worth noting is that if family/tribe is all you have, it tends to be (obviously) more important, while if everything is provided by an external source (e.g. government) family/tribe becomes far less important to one's survival.
Still, I don't know that I want to be mandating a return to "no law but nature" or the like.
The opposite extreme – everyone fends for themselves – is just as much a problem. I've been thinking about it in terms of the current financial crisis, and it just doesn't quite work.
Some people in finance are saying "the govt should stay out of it, and just let the market sort itself out, and people should just deal with the consequences of fulfilling whatever contracts they had, and take responsibility for their own problems."
So, you *could* just watch and let everything sort itself out, but there are a lot of people unjustly caught in the middle of this crap who will have their lives destroyed if no-one intervenes. I don't think, in that case, intervention, or social welfare or whatever, are patronising and pacifying. I think they're absolutely necessary.
Maybe we need to make a distinction between emergency assistance and long-term babying?
The opposite extreme – everyone fends for themselves – is just as much a problem. I've been thinking about it in terms of the current financial crisis, and it just doesn't quite work.
It's only a problem for ignorant people like you who don't understand it:
http://myslu.stlawu.edu/~shorwitz/open_letter.htm
Okay Stan, sure, the government has fucked up too; I'm not arguing against that. What I *am* arguing is that the average guy on the street doesn't really deserve to have his life destroyed because of some bad institutional decisions far, far outside of his control.
That, to me, is exactly the injustice Jesus spent all his time condemning.
(Okay, sure, maybe people who have got mortgages on houses they couldn't afford should be foreclosed on, that's justifiable. But they're not the only people getting fucked over at the moment.)
Also, fuck you and your patronising little barbs.
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