Societies differ in their weaknesses. Some are fanatical about honour, and engage in blood feuds for generations, murder their daughters or daughters-in-law if they act dishonourably, or even pursue honour to the point of public human sacrifice such as widow-burning or the votive offering of children. Other societies become fanatically orthodox, persecuting the heterodox or, if the heterodox have sufficient numbers to constitute their own society, going to war over apparently very small matters. Other societies are self-indulgent in their rituals, spending large proportions of precious resources on grand superstitious/religious totems or vast buildings and astonishing festivals for their secular leaders.
Our own society lacks some of these weaknesses – if anything, we make too little of honour, orthodoxy or ritual. Instead, our specialties are self-indulgent and selfish pleasure-seeking. Ours are the vices of the flabby, the spoilt, the decadent. We sleep with the girl, then move on to the next one, for the first is fun no longer. We get married, then get bored, and give up. We have children, then find them a hassle, and leave our wives with them. We find we dislike our children’s fathers and find it troublesome to have them visit their kids, so deny them access.
We drink because we are too young to do so, then drink more because we are allowed to, then get drunk and throw up because that’s what everyone else does and what does it matter anyway? We drink because we like the taste, then we drink so we can forget for a moment that we don’t even enjoy drinking that much any more, let alone anything else. Then we look in the mirror and buy ourselves a gym membership (which we never use) so we can lose some weight.
We switch on the television to something mindless and we know it’s mindless, and we watch it anyway so that we can complain to our friends the next day how mindless it was.
We have no answers, and we despise as lunatics or hypocrites those who pretend that they do. We know we are wicked and we don’t care and we don’t aspire to be any better because no-one can *&$%-ing tell me how to live.
We live, cosseted and protected and indulged by our technology, our wealth, and the safety and power that came from the ingenuity and sacrifice and discipline of those that came before us. And we forget them and don’t bother to learn their history. We care only for the extremes, the cases that seem easy, where we can feel less doubt – Nazis, slaves, crusades. These give us a momentary fix, like our drugs and our booze and our one-night stands and our reality TV shows. And we don’t notice that in their intensity, like the passing extreme sensations of the flesh, these extreme cases deaden rather than revive us.
Likewise we focus our anger on the easy crimes to hate – the paedophile; the Moors murderess; the James Bulger killers. We find it hard to imagine doing these things ourselves, so we are not truly threatened by them. The more common crimes, the ones where we know that “there but for the grace of God go I”, we feel nervous of condemning. We have trapped ourselves in a picture in which it is assumed that those making a moral criticism do not believe themselves to share the same moral weakness (or, if they do so believe themselves, they are hypocrites).
For somehow we have gained the idea that to condemn is to hate, to attack. We think that if I criticise single parenthood then I am against single parents; that if I condemn theft then I am against thieves; that if I disapprove of abortion then I am against women who have had abortions (and similarly, in other context, that if I disapprove of Islam then I am anti-Muslim). But why should this be? Do we imagine that those criticising single parents really believe that the single parents benefit from the arrangement at the expense of the rest of us, so that somehow our criticism of single parenthood is motivated from within us, by some need to protect ourselves from the predations of the rampant single parents? That we criticise single parents because we dislike the individuals concerned? That our concern is extensional??
Of course not! Of course wickedness might cause harm to others, but the most fundamental harm done by the wicked man is to himself. It is not merely a matter of “hate the sin, but despite that love the sinner. No. It is “hate the sin because you love the sinner” or even “hate the sin, and by hating the sin love the sinner”.
To condemn debauchery, drunkenness, selfishness, sloth, envy, avarice, and the many other obvious and scarlet properties of our society is not to be against people. It is to be in favour of them!
This is an inadequacy in our critique of the Broken Society. We often talk as if the problem about divorce, drunkenness, drug addiction, the incredible proportions of children from care going on to be criminals, and so on were problems because they cause harm to the rest of us. I understand the reason IDS and others frame the matter that way. They want to be seen to have escaped from moralising and to appeal to people's self-interest because the moralising route seems to have failed.
But I cannot allow this to pass unchallenged. I believe that no-one’s conscience is entirely beyond appeal, that no-one and no society is truly beyond salvation. We must not think that the proper reason for addressing the needs of the Broken Society is only that, unaddressed, it might interfere, for a moment, with our decadent, empty and meaningless thrill-seeking. The wickedness of our Broken Society is only our own wickedness (yes, mine as well) drawn in vivid colours on a canvass large enough for all to see. It should not be that we address the needs of the Broken Society only because to do so suits our own selfish and nihilistic purposes. We must do so as part of trying to change ourselves. We must condemn the Broken Society because to do so is right and loving and good.
