Society's driving agents are usually sclerotic doctrines incapable of self-correction, writes JOHN WATERS
THE MOST interesting thing about this week’s study of the changing structure and economic profiling of Irish families, by researchers at the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) and UCD, was not really in the detail, most of which had been signalled and anticipated already, but in the manner of its presentation and reception in the public square.
It hardly came as a surprise that one-third of Irish families no longer conform to the “traditional” model. We may not have reflected too deeply upon it, but most of us probably intuited that cohabitation was more favoured among couples from the lower socio-economic groupings.
The only slightly startling element was the news of a developing shift in the economic character of younger couples, with women tending to be better educated – and better paid – than their men. And it’s a little encouraging in this context to note that there has been some talk about the need to adjust our thinking to offset such emerging imbalances. This is a welcome departure from the unrestrained ideological triumphalism that greeted similar announcements of emerging female dominance in the quite recent past. Sometimes, we do make progress.
But it is in the nature of ideological interpretations of reality to enforce a generalised conviction as to their virtue, and so, certain categories of gloating tend to persist. Some commentators couldn’t resist the temptation to wonder what Dev would have made of it all.
The present looks condescendingly upon the past, just as the future, were it able to observe us, would look in such a way upon our own efforts.
Still, such data and the responses they provoke enable us to examine in laboratory conditions the operation of ideologically inculcated cultural blindness towards whatever curiosities and absurdities have arisen as a result of the thrusting towards what is called progress.
For example, there was no reference in the ESRI-UCD data, or the attendant discussion, to the fact that previously celebrated shifts in Irish family economics undoubtedly contributed to the onset of the financial crisis.
A generation ago, the price of an average house existed in a cast-iron relationship with the average single income. One of the key triggering factors in the recent housing boom was the undoing of this relationship, when banks altered their basic mortgage-lending formula to take account of the circumstances of double-income families arising from more and more women moving into the workplace.
The point is not to suggest that we might go back to the past, but to alert ourselves to the dangers that can accompany seductive notions of progress.
If we can remove ourselves from the moral influence of the ideology, it is possible to acknowledge that some shifts in culture come with intrinsic ambiguities.
There is, of course, a very good reason why most commentators avoid making such observations, however obvious: the workings of the driving ideology demand the denunciation as a “reactionary” or “counter-revolutionary” of anyone who questions any aspect of its logic.
This allows a minimal possibility for straightforwardly factual or potentially constructive observations being heard as such.
Wisdom tends to be retrospective. Various analyses this week have pointed to ways in which the failure to anticipate certain shifts in family patterns has been harmful. The absence of provision for paternity leave has been remarked upon here, as has the necessity to support fathers in becoming more active in child-rearing.
But Irish society can hardly claim that such drifts have not been flagged. Some of us, for example, have for some considerable time been talking about the need to overhaul societal understandings of parenting roles, and seeking in particular to draw attention to the anti-father ideology of our secret family courts. For our trouble, we have been shushed by the very people who demand transparency and accountability in all other matters.
A paradox of the way societies are propelled is that the driving agents are usually sclerotic ideologies intrinsically incapable of self-correction. Thus, collective human entities tend to “think” and act in fits and starts.
If the steering of my car begins pulling to one side, I compensate by intervening with an opposing pressure. Societies cannot do this, but must, it seems, allow the car to plough into the crowded bus-stop, burst into flames and explode spectacularly before anyone can begin a reassessment. Moreover, as with the mortgage example, there is a tendency to see all “progress” as ipso facto beneficial, and therefore to suppress analysis that might point up potential problems.
No change in public or private behaviour comes without cost. Each new shift creates new casualties, who fall off the back of the wagon because everyone is concentrating on pulling the visibly wounded up at the front.
The tendency towards sclerosis that accompanies ideological thinking, and the way this is policed in our cultures, means that short-term history tends not so much to correct the intrinsic shortcomings of particular ways of doing things as reactively to replace these with new shortcomings and imbalances in a continuing process of error.
This means that, far from approaching the utopia that ideology always promises, what is called “social progress” causes a society to lurch from one state of imbalance to another, leaving a trail of entirely avoidable disaster in its wake.