Collective bankruptcy

Here is an interesting coda to my 'Water into Wine' post and the mention in it of a Guardian feature article outlining reasons why kindness has gone out of fashion in the age of the free market and the selfish gene.

This coda comes from the Introduction to Rowan Williams' Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction in which Williams sums up "the central question posed by the various moral crises to which Dostoevsky was seeking to respond as "What is it that human beings owe to each other?" He writes that:

"The incapacity to answer that question coherently - or indeed to recognise that it is a question at all - was for Dostoevsky more than just a regrettable lack of philosophical rigor; it was an opening to the demonic - that is, to the prospect of the end of history, imagination, and speech, the dissolution of human identity."

Williams writes that "the question does not seem any less pressing in the new century, and the incapacity or unwillingness to answer it is even more in evidence."

The Guardian article by Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor (and their book, On Kindness) seems evidence of what Williams is saying. In the article, they note that “for most of western history the dominant tradition of kindness has been Christianity” which “functioned as a cultural cement, binding individuals into society” until “the Christian rule ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’ came under increasing attack from competitive individualism”:

"Kindness was mankind's "greatest delight", the Roman philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius declared, and thinkers and writers have echoed him down the centuries. But today many people find these pleasures literally incredible, or at least highly suspect. An image of the self has been created that is utterly lacking in natural generosity. Most people appear to believe that deep down they (and other people) are mad, bad and dangerous to know; that as a species - apparently unlike other species of animal - we are deeply and fundamentally antagonistic to each other, that our motives are utterly self-seeking and that our sympathies are forms of self-protectiveness."

James Meek made some similar comments in yesterday's Guardian in writing about the credit crunch:

"It's not just that we see the economic crisis rearing up out of the sea in the distance, like a slow-motion tsunami from which, despite its creeping speed, we cannot escape. What makes the situation peculiar is that the crisis that threatens us also seems to be us; we are simultaneously menaced by the wave, and exist as elements of the wave. After all, that is what an economic crisis is: the sum of all the individual actions of billions of people around the world, deciding whether to lend or hoard, borrow or save, sell or buy, move or stay, hire or fire, study or look for work, be pessimistic or optimistic.

It's like those mysterious polls of "consumer confidence" in which pundits set so much store. How confident am I about the future? Well, I'm confident if everybody else is confident. I'll tell the survey how confident I am when I see what that confidence survey says.

Nobody likes to think they are a pinprick in a vast demographic, particularly one that seems to be engaged on its own destruction - The Consumer consumes the consumer - but that is where we find ourselves."

Where we find ourselves is, at:

"the realisation that, all in all, everything that was in the world just wasn't worth as much money as punters thought it was. Never in the field of human consumption, the banks realised, had so much been owed by so many to so few, and with so little collateral."

What we collectively valued has been shown to be bankrupt and, unless and until we collectively begin addressing the question that Dostoevsky and Williams raise, it and us will remain so.

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Peter Case - Walk In The Woods.