Mortgage-holder support is well and good but why no sympathy for our nation in crisis?
IF THE economic crisis were a body in the library rather than a mountain of debt, the investigators would be searching for a serial killer.
Behold the line of corpses: Greece, Ireland, Portugal, with the ripper predicted to strike next in Spain and perhaps Italy after that.
Here, however, the “investigators”, rather than drawing attention to the general picture, insist that, in each instance, the common factor is the victims’ responsibility for what happened.
It seems these reckless parties took too literally the promises of their seducers and rashly downed several spiked cocktails before accompanying said seducers down the dark alleyways to their doom.
If this was indeed a murder, it is unlikely that we would succumb to such logic, since, in that context, the idea of blaming the injured party has long since been eliminated from the options available to defendants. The rapist is not permitted to plead that his victim wore provocative clothing or led him on with coquettish glances.
In the context of drug dependency, the idea of the near-absolute culpability of the pusher is understood and accepted. But in international finance, the victim or addict must take on the total burden of blame, while those who plied Greek, Irish and Portuguese consumers with cheap money are permitted to avail of whatever moral benefit is at play in the equation. And, since the “pusher” here is also the “investigator” who relentlessly explains the nature of the victim’s responsibility, we just nod, shrug and bow to what is clearly a selective and self-serving argument concerning causation.
One of the most restrictive factors in discussions about our current options is this unrelenting presumption that we “must pay our debts”. Interestingly, though, this is only in part because of some sense of a moral imperative and in part because we want to be able to borrow again.
The intervention this week of the Master of the High Court, Edmund Honohan, has thrown a relativist cat among the ethical pigeons, by suggesting that, in the relationship between bank and customer, there is no absolute obligation to repay debt.
If a debt has already been written off or cancelled, or if the debtor simply cannot pay, the bank should not be entitled to pursue the matter.
This intervention has attracted considerable public support, mainly because the potential beneficiaries of such logic are readily identifiable as put-upon victims – mainly people who are at risk of being rendered homeless by the aggressive policies of banks.
Honohan’s invocation of the spectre of suicide, which he claims to have encountered in several such cases in his court, renders his remarks difficult to challenge without a serious risk of incurring public odium.
Those who blandly tell us that we must “pay our debts” tend to lapse into silence when arguments are advanced in such terms.
It is strange, however, that while cheering Honohan to the rafters for his defence of beleaguered mortgage-holders, most of us hesitate to adapt his logic to the general situation of our national indebtedness.
He is, of course, correct. The idea that members of the public should be pursued by a banking industry which has itself been bailed out by the same public is absurd. But equally so is the idea that, in a global economy in which debt has long since exceeded sane or sustainable levels, human beings should have to continue bearing horrendous financial burdens just to keep the fictions going. It is unlikely that, in the foreseeable future, either of the Irish or Greek races will collectively kill thmselves, but is this the only reason indebted nations are not to be regarded as sympathetically as indebted individuals?
Of course, the idea of any simple morality pertaining here is humbug. The point of the moralising is to hold things together: the euro, the euro zone, the essential fictions of the capitalist system and its banking infrastructure.
In order to shore up the wider European economy, Ireland, Greece and Portugal must be placed in the economic stocks, their peoples humiliated and frisked for any loose cash, all to ensure that the truth about the underlying conditions pertaining to the euro and the European banking system is suppressed.
We all know that, eventually, the clock will have to be set at, in effect, zero.
While publicly tut-tutting about anyone proposing repudiation as a serious option, senior Government figures are already giving off-the-record press briefings calculated to direct reassuring winks at the public in case anyone has been disposed to take seriously the present rhetoric of eternal austerity.
In the long run, they imply, it’ll be fine: the bulk of the debt will be quietly forgotten.
The frustrating thing about all this is that so much of the public discussion is so obviously for effect: to reassure markets, to send signals, to communicate our supposedly virtuous intentions. “Moral” ideas are simply shorthand, designed to comfort those we’re anxious to please and appease.
But what will happen in time will be dictated by circumstances rather than principles, and we all know pretty much what that will mean.