Rite and ReasonIt is time to revise the stern indictment of our times which holds that we are dominated by an ethic of individualism and consumerism, fuelled by a competitive and acquisitive culture, writes Kevin Williams
A few short months ago the devastation in south-east Asia prompted a huge outpouring of concern and generosity from the Government and people of Ireland. This generosity does not reflect a nation full of narrowly selfish human beings concerned only to acquire material goods for themselves.
Yet I wonder if this example of altruism will give pause to moralists who are pleased to denigrate the moral and civic culture of our times. I am thinking of those who tell us that we are dominated by "an ethic of individual consumption that is fuelled by a competitive and acquisitive culture".
This kind of moralising claim has always seemed to me to be questionable. It is time to revise this stern indictment of contemporary mores along with the belief that most people today are less virtuous than those of previous generations.
It is not easy to provide evidence regarding the moral and civic propensities of human beings, and impossible to generate this retrospectively, but we should be wary of romanticising the past and assuming that things were different then.
"The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there," wrote LP Hartley, famously and wisely. I was educated a generation ago and I do not think that the people of my childhood and youth were any more generous or community-minded than are the much-maligned citizens of the so-called Celtic Tiger today.
Before moralising on the values of people today, it is illuminating to reflect on how writers from past centuries have represented human behaviour.
Take Jane Austen, for example. The characters of her imaginative universe are just as varied in their moral qualities as people have been since humankind came on earth. Greed, selfishness, acquisitiveness and concern with material goods did not coincide with the 1990s.
These qualities were prevalent at the time of Jane Austen and have been recorded by many authors before and after her time.
Indeed, these were qualities that incurred the wrath and denunciation of Jesus.
My own intuitions are that Irish people today are like people all over the world and that they are no more greedy, more acquisitive or more eager for material goods than they were in the past.
And their generosity has also been - and still is - a more prominent feature of their conduct than greed.
I have never been persuaded by theorists who disparage us and preach ideals of universal benevolence. Two things have always struck me about these self-righteous moralists.
The first is a tendency to see only one side of the story. Let us take, for example, the deprived social conditions of many people in the developing world and also of marginalised or non-mainstream social groups in the West.
Now I believe there is a strong argument that some of these conditions are due to the abuse of their economic power by entrenched interests. But, unlike radical social critics, I would not offer this conviction as representing an incontestable truth about the world.
An alternative case can be made, although I find it unpersuasive, that the results of colonialism and the free market have been largely beneficial to humankind. Neither conservatives nor their critics have access to the definitive truth about human affairs.
Arguments in the socio-economic sphere rarely admit of conclusive proof; they admit only of degrees of reasonableness.
This leads to my second reservation about radical social critics. This is a tendency to what might be called rationalism, that is, of proposing attitudes that have little purchase when it comes to the conduct of their own lives. It is easy to be generous with the money of other people.
To be credible, moral beliefs and actual behaviour must display consistency. This is a logical point, not an ad hominem argument; that is, it is not merely a psychological observation. Anecdotal evidence leads me to understand that it is not only in Ireland that some radical theorists can exhibit extraordinarily conventional propensities.
Here is an obvious example. When it comes to the education of their own children, it is not unknown for critics who espouse theories of dramatic social transformation to send their own children to expensive private schools.
Moreover (and I am aware that this comment is also based only on anecdotal evidence), social critics and ideological fellow travellers have never struck me as any less assiduous in promoting their self-interest than others. The power agendas of others can seem very transparent, yet we may be completely unaware of our own.
One important lesson of Jesus is that it is well to be circumspect in casting stones at others because it may well turn out that the others do not have the flaws attributed to them at all.
Dr Kevin Williams works in the Mater Dei Institute, Dublin City University