Modern funerals are not too heavenly, just too short.

 Funerals  No Responses »
May 172012
 

Early findings from a study of humanist funerals has found that nowadays there is a strong emphasis among mourners on celebrating the individuality and uniqueness of the deceased person, in contrast to the more traditional focus on the afterlife. It suggests that funeral directors need to take more account of the needs of the non-religious at funerals.

Now I am all for giving people what they need at a difficult time, especially when they are fumbling their way forward through a fog of grief. But I’m not sure that inclusion of the hope of an after-life is really what’s wrong with the traditional funeral. Nor am I convinced that a humanist alternative goes much of the way towards solving the ‘problem’ of the contemporary funeral.

In one sense it’s curious for the study to link the ‘after-life’ with the traditional funeral. Some religious traditions don’t believe in it at all; some Jews in Jesus’ day certainly didn’t. It’s a hazy notion that doesn’t appear much in the Old Testament, and it never really reached the colourful heaven and hell version until the Middle Ages. And in fact, mainstream Christianity doesn’t believe in its popular version either: nowhere in the New Testament does it ever say that when you die you go to heaven. Instead, we are told to expect a future resurrection of the body, but not until the whole of the created world is re-created at the same time. Go to an old village church in England, and look at the gravestones on the south side (the oldest ones): the graves will all be facing east, their occupants awaiting the bodily resurrection. One thing is sure, they have not yet achieved this version of the ‘after-life’.

What’s more, Anglican funeral services since the 1970s have shifted away from an emphasis on ‘meeting your Maker’ to a more pastoral concern for the mourners themselves. True, this is still a long way from the humanist ideal of celebrating the ‘individuality and uniqueness’ of the deceased person, but inexperienced clergy do quickly discover that mourners are not thinking primarily about themselves at a funeral – but about their loved one. I wonder if the humanist and religious services are so different after all.

So has the humanist funeral found the answer to a more inclusive, authentic ending? Or is it in danger of creating an ersatz version of a rite which, for all its failings, has been hammered into shape on the anvil of human grief for more than two millennia?

The problem with making the ‘individuality and uniqueness’ of the dead person the focus of the rite, is that it freights the poor dead person with the responsibility of having a life of sufficient meaning and depth to do justice to the great theme of death. And, let’s face it, most of us live lives that are simply too mundane to carry this freight. Endless playing of ‘My Way’ after every funeral has all the gravity and glory of a bald, fat man pretending to be David Beckham scoring for England – but his way. Many celebrants at funerals, I suspect, are scraping around to find much, beyond platitudes, that’s worth repeating. Some mourners fall back on internet searches to try to find apt words that will say something special about their loved one – but the torrent of lachrymose doggerel that so often pours from the lectern suggests they might have been better using their own words.

Funerals do have to deal with the question of where the loved one has gone – and of course there will be different answers to that. But they also have to deal with the body, and with the grief. In this sense, modern funerals, whether humanist or religious, are in some kind of a crisis.

The basic problem is that it all happens so quickly – indeed, so slickly. We don’t get to see the dead person nowadays, let alone fall upon the body, or kiss it. More often than not we enter a crematorium for just 25 minutes, and, amidst the wood veneer and tassled burgundy velour,  we say our good-byes. The ritual seems fake: a hymn is sung, a prayer said; unctious professionals bow in po-faced silence toward the coffin; the box is wheeled behind a curtain; the curtain closes and is sucked inward as the deceased descends to the furnace. The congregation depart.

The afterlife? Well, we just don’t know. The body? It has been dealt with after a fashion, swept under the curtain. And the grief?

In other societies mourning is given weeks or months to unfold; bodies are left above ground for years until the bones have whitened, and only then are buried. The process of saying good-bye is a long one. I think the main problem with contemporary funerals is not that they are too heavenly – or too mundane for that matter. It is simply that they are just too short.

 

 

 

 Posted by at 12:46 pm

Ending cheap alcohol: here comes the nanny state

 Alcohol, Ideology, Scottish Government  No Responses »
May 152012
 

So, the Scottish Government have expressed a willingness to set a minimum price of 50p per unit of alcohol. This, claim the Sheffield academics who advised the government, will result in 300 fewer deaths annually, and over the next ten years 6,500 fewer hospital admissions and a saving of £942 million. This, as they say, looks like a no-brainer.

Look closer, however, and the policy is not so clear cut as it seems. For one, any policy such as this is liable to ‘unintended consequences’. For example, how do we know that binge drinkers won’t simply pay more for their alcohol, and continue to die just as before? How do we know that this policy won’t simply strip more cash away from the poorest families, leaving the children of heavy drinkers the ones who suffer? And can we be sure that the impact of this policy won’t simply deprive modest drinkers on modest incomes of a luxury that they can no longer afford?

But let’s lay unintended consequences aside for the moment, and give the Government the benefit of the doubt. Let’s assume the predicted benefits will all come true, and there will be no adverse consequences. Argument over?

Not at all. Notice that this policy leads us into some very perplexing moral territory for which I can think of no exact parallel. What this policy is proposing is penalising every drinker for the behaviour of a minority of drinkers. This is not like imposing a tax on cigarettes, where the revenue can be used to treat lung cancer. Nor is it like vehicle excise duty, where the revenue may be used to tackle pollution from emissions. In both these latter cases, it is the participant who pays. With this new alcohol levy, both participants and those who do not  participate (i.e. moderate drinkers) are the ones who are made pay. How would we feel if there were a £10 per head tax imposed on dining out, in order to discourage obesity?

The complexity of the problem comes about because there are two competing moral imperatives here. The first appeals to a utilitarian notion of the ‘common good’ – a macro-perspective – which argues that as a nation we will be better off overall if we drink less. That may be true. The second moral imperative operates at the individual level, and states that it is unfair that the many should have to pay for the misguided behaviour of the few. These two perspectives – the social and the individual – lie at the heart of the philosophical differences between the ideologies of left and right in the UK.

I would usually find myself coming down more on the side of the left – and argue that I should forgo my own personal benefit for the sake of a better society. For this reason, I think higher income taxes for the better off a good thing. But on this issue, there is something that riles me (quite apart from the fact that the policy will cost me around £150 a year). Whereas the poor are typically not poor by choice, binge drinkers are making a deliberate choice about their behaviour. Trying to persuade them to drink sensibly via pricing policies really does smack of the ‘nanny state’, no different to my limiting the amount of money I give to my children when they visit the sweet shop.

I never thought I would find myself complaining about the nanny state: but there it is. If Scotland goes down this route next week, binge drinkers can rest assured that someone else will be taking care of their consumption for them.

 

 

 

 Posted by at 10:59 am

We’re all religious really, aren’t we?

 Religion, Secularization, Spirituality  3 Responses »
May 082012
 

Linda Woodhead’s piece in yesterday’s Guardian strikes an optimistic tone for religion in the UK. Yes, old-fashioned religious institutions have declined dramatically in recent decades, but, she asserts, other ways of measuring religion show some very strong trends.

For example, people with no formal religious background still reach out for quasi-religious rituals when the going gets tough. The flower show after Diana’s death in 1997 is the paragon of such rituals.

Likewise, says Woodhead, people have found new ways of  belonging: dynamic networks of religious believers have sprung up to supplant traditional churchgoing.

And furthermore, she points out, while more traditional beliefs about God have declined (the idea of a personal God) other notable religious beliefs are experiencing a revival. Take 10 mates to the pub, and, on average, four of them will believe that there is some ‘spirit or life-force’, five will believe in angels, and seven will think they have soul. And that’s before the first round of drinks have been bought.

Lastly, Woodhead points to religious identity – 71% said they were ‘Christian’ at the 2001 census (to be balanced by more recent polls suggesting just over half of us now claim ‘no religion’.)

Woodhead argues that what is going on is not the absolute decline of religion, but rather its recovery by the rest of us.

“Real religion – which is to say everyday, lived religion – is thriving and evolving, while hierarchical, institutionalised, dogmatic forms of religion are marginalised. Religion has returned to the core business of sustaining everyday life, supporting relations with the living and the dead, and managing misfortune.”

She cites examples of “angels, cathedrals, pilgrimages and retreats” and the plethora of books in the ‘mind, body, spirit’ section, which are “are all doing well.”

So are we returning to a medieval world in which religion is simply so much a part of the air that we breathe, that we no longer have to commit to it – a religion that is simply a part of us? Have we reached the point that T S Eliot outlines in his ‘Idea of a Christian Society’ where spirituality is made easy for the masses, so that the masses can all belong – albeit today in a more new-age form?

Possibly. The difficulty for her thesis, however, is that a religion requires certain strategies in order to survive. There are three main strategies a religion can rely on, but if none of these are present, it is likely to fail. The first strategy is distinctiveness. A religion needs a strong social container (a plausibility structure) in order to maintain the reality of its ‘world’. The stronger the structure, the stronger the community and its beliefs. The second strategy is engagement. Religions that  are able to play their part in the public sphere, gain social significance from this role, and are strengthened by demonstrating their relevance. The third strategy is one of inculturation. A religion that can be so much part of the culture in which it sits gains significant momentum from simply being part of the unseen furniture of a society.

It is this last strategy on which Woodhead is pinning her hopes for the survival of spirituality. The first she has acknowledged is the very form of religion that is in decline; and the second would require this ‘lived religion’ to poke its head above the public parapet, to engage in society – which it hardly ever does.

Is Woodhead’s ‘lived religion’ of today’s British society simply a contemporary, well-inculturated form of religion that is set to thrive? Or is it more the perennial expression of psychological yearnings that look vaguely for some satisfaction in silence, religious gimmicks, or a consumerised spirituality? Yes, there is undoubtedly a growing middle-ground of soft spirituality, but whether it is anything more than the reflection we see of ourselves, as we gaze into the mirror of a consumer culture, is open to question.

 Posted by at 9:39 am

For peat’s sake

 Climate change, Environment, Peat  No Responses »
May 032012
 

It’s that time of year again when I start doing things in the garden.

On a recent visit to Homebase I picked up large bale of compost, feeling vaguely guilty that it might contain peat – but not looking too hard at the label. Back home, on closer inspection, I discovered it did. Thankfully, the label seemed similarly concerned: it was at pains to point out that the peat content was just 50% – the rest of the compost was made from sustainable wood fibre. Still, could do better, I thought.

But why does peat matter so much? As a child in the 1970s I remember being taken on a ‘dig’ in Sutherland by some local crofters. Huge black seams, tens of metres wide, had been gouged from the heathery slope. Men with long, narrow spades, took thin slices from the seam, working sideways and backwards into the bog, and tossing them onto a trailer. Later, back at the croft, the peats were carefully stacked for drying, to keep a fire burning in the hearth through the winter months. It is a harvest still enjoyed by Scotland’s crofters today. With a natural resource such as peat lying in such abundance, why should we be concerned about Scotland’s peat?

One reason for concern is that Scotland stewards around 60% of the UK’s entire peatlands. Peat is a vital carbon store: while only 3% of the world is covered by peat, this contains 30% of the world’s land-based carbon stores. And since peat is an important carbon store, it plays a crucial role in Scotland meeting her carbon reduction targets. 4% of the total carbon in Europe’s peat is stored in Scotland. If we were to release this carbon overnight, it would equal an entire century of Scotland’s carbon emissions at current levels.

But peat also plays a crucial role in preserving biodiversity and water retention. Key plant, bird, reptile and insect life rely on peatland for habitat. Three species of spider are only found on the rare blanket bog.  And while Caithness and Sutherland are rich in blanket bog, and Scotland boasts one-fifth of its land covered by such bog, it is sobering to realise that this resource represents  a staggering 15% of this habitat over the entire planet.

Add to this the value of wild peat bogs for walking, shooting, and the preservation of buried cultural artefacts, and we can begin to see why peatlands are so important.

Whence then the threat? Ironically, peatlands are put under pressure from activities that we might otherwise think are wholesome. Excessive wear from footpaths can lead to erosion, which exposes the peat to the atmosphere, and results in its decomposition. Planting trees also upsets the peat and accompanying drainage can lower the water table. Drying peat also decomposes, releasing its carbon store. And even land disruption from wind-farms can have a negative effect. Environmentally, there is a difficult balance to be struck.

Currently the blanket bog is protected from peat extraction, save for those crofters who can harvest it for personal use. Lowland ‘raised bogs’ however continue to be used for extraction, which degrades the remaining peat, and discourages wildlife.

We’ve grown used to demanding to know where our coffee or bananas have come from – and we rightly want to know whether anyone suffered in the process of production. Perhaps it’s time to ask some awkward questions of our garden centres – for peat’s sake.

(Information for this post came from the recent report of the Scottish Parliament, Peatlands and Climate Change.)

 

 

 

 

 Posted by at 4:26 pm

What I’d have said if I’d been Cardinal

 Equality, Marrriage  2 Responses »
Mar 062012
 

Cardinal Keith O’Brien’s showing on yesterday’s BBC Radio 4 Today programme was a PR disaster.

He was being questioned about his opposition to the proposed equal marriage legislation – that would allow same-sex couples to call their unions marriage.

Hearing him speak was like watching a drunk man drive down a narrow street lined with parked cars. Every few seconds there was a collision. Except that the crunch was not between two similar pieces of painted metal, but between two worlds made different by centuries: the medieval and the modern.

What did he do wrong?

Firstly, he made no attempt to explain where he was coming from. When most of us hear words like ‘Cardinal’, ‘church’s teaching’, ‘marriage’ – we think we have a pretty good idea what’s coming next. And our preformed judgement decides that we are about to hear some illiberal, outdated tosh from some old religious bigot. In short, we switch off, or get angry. What fewer people try to do is to understand why the man might be saying things that sound quite so outrageous. Why, for instance, would the Cardinal describe equal marriage as ‘grotesque’?

That was his first mistake – to assume that people would be able to leap the chasm and understand where he is coming from. And where was that? Well, the Cardinal’s thinking was born in a medieval world in which marriage came to be understood as a sacrament. Most people today think it’s merely a malleable social arrangement. But imagine if, like the Cardinal, you thought marriage was a fixed entity – a theological given – set for ever in the firmament, like the sun. moon and stars. A union of one man and one woman. Equal marriage proposals would then seem as ‘grotesque’ as a proposal to reshape the moon to look like the McDonald’s sign. We may not agree with him – but he could have helped us at least to see into the world he is coming from.

Which brings me on to his second blooper – metaphors. The Cardinal tried to say that being forced to accept equal marriage was like being forced to keep a slave. It was a human rights issue. Now, apart from the fact that invoking human rights is like a red rag to the liberal bull (don’t us lefties own all the ‘human rights’ type arguments?), the Cardinal was asking us to cope with a rather tortured metaphor before we had even finished our cereal.

And the problem with metaphors, is that our opponents can so easily misconstrue them – deliberately or not. The metaphor works by drawing a line of meaning between one aspect of thing A, and an illuminating aspect of thing B. The problem is that others can and will draw different lines. “Are you really saying that allowing same-sex marriage is akin to the reintroduction of slavery?” John Humphrys responded. Well, no. The Cardinal was using the metaphor differently; but most of us, I think, couldn’t hear that. So the Cardinal kept digging, reinforcing his dubious metaphor. Ouch. Elaine Storkey made the same mistake on The Moral Maze on Wednesday night – wheeling out the old Hitler analogy in an abortion discussion. Despite the analogy having potential, she immediately realised her mistake and withdrew the comment. Hitler analogies simply leave you too open to being deliberately misunderstood.

There was a third problem with the dear Cardinal’s argument: to my ears, it was incoherent. For goodness sake, I thought, get someone up there who can think straight. And stop careering down narrow streets lined with smart cars.

 

 Posted by at 7:00 am

Settling the wild east.

 Architecture, Population  No Responses »
Mar 022012
 

Scotland’s population is predicted to grow in the east, and decline in large parts of the west, over the next 25 years. Figures just out from the National records of Scotland predict that some areas, including East Lothian, and Perth & Kinross will grow in population by around a third, while Inverclyde is set to lose around a sixth of its population. Edinburgh and Aberdeen are set to grow by 25% in as many years.

Of the western council areas, only Glasgow (11.3%) and South Lanarkshire (6.2%) are predicted to see any significant growth –  but undermined by the forecast that, overall, Scotland will see population growth of 10%.

So it seems that Scotland’s population, like a raft of marbles on tray, are set to roll eastwards; at least, that is the illusion the figures present. It’s as if Scotland is to experience America’s wagon trains in reverse – a great settling of the east.

But the statistics don’t tell why: they are based on projections of existing trends. Nor do they ask, ‘what if?’ For example, what if Scotland’s eastern population continues to rise at the rate predicted? What if the natural beauty of Perth, Kinross, East Lothian, Aberdeen, and Edinburgh becomes gnawed away by the blind, incremental decisions of short-sighted planning departments? What if green belt becomes negotiable, as it has already become on Edinburgh’s western corridor? What if Edinburgh and Dunfermline become one conurbation – which might, one day, come to be more accurately named ‘Dunedin.’

I have vivid memories of Edinburgh before the bypass, when you could walk from Colinton to Bonaly Tower over green fields quiet with cows. Today you have to cross a four-lane bypass forty feet below. You could drive out Ratho through unspoilt farmland: today you are stopped at traffic lights by RBS’ grandiose temple to banking, and its hideous bridge. Back then, the long sweeping road out to the Forth Road Bridge was fringed with wooded green slopes: now the approach to this iconic structure has been uglified by an abominable brown shoe-box-shaped American hotel, clearly designed by someone who hates daylight. The adjacent retail part is populated by American fast food outlets. Across the bridge, Dunfermline greets you with a gigantic Amazon warehouse.

Where will it end? Population growth needn’t mean the end of the countryside, or the end of vernacular architecture that was centuries in the making.

But it seems we’re heading that way.

 

 

 Posted by at 9:35 am

Mid-life is most unsatisfying

 Mid-life, Statistics, Well-being  No Responses »
Feb 292012
 

Figures published yesterday by the Office for National Statistics reveal that mid-life is likely to be the time when we feel least satisfied with our lives.

The study is the second part of a project aimed at measuring well-being in the UK. It uses data from a sample of 80,000 people within the Annual Population Survey carried out between April and September last year. While studies have often sought to measure well-being using ‘objective’ indicators, such as economic and social progress, these measures aim to capture ‘subjective’ wellbeing on the basis of four questions:

  • Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?
  • Overall, to what extent do you feel the things you do in your life are worthwhile?
  • Overall, how happy did you feel yesterday?
  • Overall, how anxious did you feel yesterday?

So, how satisfied are we with our lives? Overall, three quarters of adults in the UK gave themselves a score of seven or more out of ten. We’re a fairly contented bunch, it seems.

But there are some interesting wrinkles in the findings.

Women report slightly higher average levels of well-being across all four indicators than men, and particularly in relation to feeling things they do in life are worthwhile.

Mixed ethnic (6.9) and black groups (6.6) reported significantly lower levels of life satisfaction than the UK average of 7.4 out of ten. And London and the West Midlands seems to have the least satisfied people in the UK, with an average rating of 7.2. London also reported the highest levels of anxiety.

Perhaps the most interesting finding is that our levels of well-being also vary with age. The study observes a ‘U-shape’ relationship between the three positive indicators (satisfaction, worthwhileness, happiness) and age. In other words, well-being is perceived to be highest in youth (16-19 years) and old age (65-79).

Perhaps those of us in grumpy middle-age can take comfort: given time, things will only get better.

 Posted by at 9:57 am

Fred’s shredding makes no sense, because we never understood the honours culture in the first place.

 Equality  No Responses »
Feb 012012
 

So Fred has himself finally been shredded – or at least his knighthood has.

But if many are secretly rejoicing that Fred has now been properly ‘rewarded’, still we are left with a lingering wonderment about quite why this decision has been made. Retribution, yes; but justice in this matter … we’re left feeling uneasy.

The problem with weighing this vogue for public shredding – Goodwin’s knighthood, Hester’s bonus –  is that we don’t understand what they did to receive these bonuses and honours in the first place.

Listen carefully to the debate around bonuses, in particular, and it’s clear that even the supporters of the bonus culture are not in agreement about what they are for. It’s something to do with shifting large sums of cash to people at the top of the organization – that’s agreed – but the rationale for doing so remains hazy.

What gives the game away is the sheer number of euphemisms used to make this rationalization. Listen to the language. One day, the bonus is described as a ‘reward’. The next it is part of the ‘compensation’ on offer. Then it becomes ‘remuneration’, and then ‘incentive’.

Which is it? Is it a reward for success? (In which case, why not share it more equally with every employee?) Or compensation for some exertion beyond the call of duty? (If it were within the call of duty, we would simply call it ‘pay’.) Or is the bonus some form of remuneration, literally the idea of ‘giving back’. Like the word ‘compensation’, it implies a kind of balancing. (If so, why then do bonuses appear so utterly imbalanced?) Or is it an incentive? Here’s a word of which to be especially suspicious, because it has only been used in this sense since WW2, emerging within the jargon of the US war economy. When my grandfather started work, there were no incentives – the word hadn’t been coined; because back then you did your best out of a sense of duty and loyalty, without requiring a gold-plated carrot to be dangling at the end of the year. Even the word ‘bonus’ is a disingenuous euphemism: it comes from the Latin word ‘good’. Whose good, we might wonder?

The truth is, we don’t know why anyone should receive a seven-figure bonus, and we weep little when a person is forced by public opprobrium to turn it down. So too with a knighthood for ‘services to banking’.

No wonder we can’t quite fathom the reasons for these public shreddings – we never knew why the honours were given in the first place.

 Posted by at 9:30 am  Tagged with: , ,

The commitment of cohabiting: stranger, stronger?

 Cohabitation, Commitment, Families, Marrriage  No Responses »
Jan 212012
 

New figures published this week show that the number of cohabiting couples in the UK has risen by nearly 40 percent in a decade. In 2001 there were 2.1 million such couples; today the figure stands at 2.9 million. By contrast, the number of married/civil partner couples fell from 12.3 to 12.1 million.

This is a remarkable figure when set against the current debate over equal marriage for same-sex couples. Society seems to be pulling in two different ways; one group clamouring for the right to be married; another voting with their feet against it.

This tension reflects a deeper ambivalence towards institutional commitment. We retain a romantic attachment to the idea of life-long commitment under law, and even under God – and will fight for the right to enter into the marriage contract. But we also want to feel free. Joni Mitchell captured this tension well in her song ‘Help Me’: “We love our lovin’/ But not like we love our freedom.”

So how do we manage this tension between freedom and commitment? Do couples typically live together for a while until they decide they would like to settle down, and start a family? No doubt some do, finding that the container of marriage offers a safer context in which to have children. But the idea that most do is a myth.

The reality is that the same proportion of cohabiting couples have children as married couples: 38 percent. This seems to undermine the view that cohabitees are simply ‘married couples in waiting’. Rather, it suggests that there is a significant proportion of couples who start families with no intention of getting married. They have made a deliberate choice to take commitment out of an institutional setting, and domesticate it.

Commitment is no longer as clear-cut as it used to be; but it would be a mistake to say that it is no longer there. Clearly, a couple who have chosen one another, chosen to live under the same roof, and chosen to start a family together, are displaying a symbol of their commitment every bit as visible as a wedding ring.

The danger for such couples, however, is that the law has been slow to catch up with the solidity of their commitment. In England and Wales, cohabiting couples who break up have very few of the legal safeguards enjoyed by married couples. In Scotland, the situation is better: the Family Law (Scotland) Act 2006 ensures some legal protection – for example, over property rights – for cohabitees who break up.

But the irony of the Act is that it abolished a form of marriage that had held its ground since Roman times. Roman Law acknowledged that a couple who had been cohabiting for a year, by consent, could be regarded as married under Common Law. It is astonishing that this was abolished as late as 2006, in Scotland. Perhaps this is the very law we need, across the UK, to ensure that the real commitment of cohabiting couples is recognized, valued and safeguarded.

 Posted by at 10:24 am

‘Moral capitalism’ – a contradiction in terms?

 Adam Smith, Cameron, Capitalism, Economics, Equality, Kant  No Responses »
Jan 192012
 

David Cameron’s call for ‘moral capitalism’ is a brave attempt to marry chalk with cheese.

Capitalism is not a moral system – it’s simply a logic that we allow to unfold (or not).

‘Moral capitalism’ is as much an oxymoron as ‘moral Darwinism’. We can no more expect capitalism to be moral, than we can expect a hungry lion to eat toast.

The comparison with Darwinism is instructive. Darwin’s theory of natural selection, of the survival of the best-adapted, provides a direct biological analogy to the economy. The economy mirrors nature ‘red in tooth and claw’ – those with the best brains, those most socially skilled, those who are most beautiful, or ruthless, or privileged, will tend to emerge as winners in the economic race. The stupid, the slow, the awkward, the ugly, the meek, the weak, and the disadvantaged, will tend to emerge as losers.

This is fact of economics: it is not a moral system. It’s a cruel, but robust, logic, which anyone who has ever competed to win a job, or buy a house, will know only too well.

Of course, winners in the economic race don’t like to think that their position in the world is entirely down to their own sharp-elbowed ruthlessness or past privilege. So they will tend to champion the one moral claim that capitalism does have on its side – that capitalism benefits the good of the whole. Adam Smith claimed that many acts of self-interest – by the guiding action of some ‘invisible hand’ – amount to an outcome that favours the common good, such as society getting richer as a whole. In the Thatcher era, this was expressed as the belief that cutting taxes for the rich would result in a ‘trickle-down’ of their wealth to the rest of society.

Today, this same defence can be heard on the lips of bankers and CEOs; namely, that it is good that they are paid unspeakable sums, since this keeps their talent in the UK, and this benefits the economy for all of us. Is that a moral argument, or a form of blackmail?

So capitalism is the economic embodiment of Darwinism. It is not a moral system, but simply a very efficient, very ruthless, mechanism which ensures that the species we call the economy will survive. But it is entirely indifferent to the fate of individuals within that society.

So what could Cameron mean by ‘moral capitalism’?  He can only mean a form of capitalism whose inner logic is restricted in some way – like asking the big cats to stop chasing the gazelle, and eat toast instead. On what basis could such restrictions be imposed? Not on the basis of capitalism itself, since capitalism is a logic based on self-interest; and raw self-interest, as Kant explained, can never be the basis of a moral system. Some other system of ethics would need to be invoked, which would make society fairer, kinder, more humane, more just – by limiting the raw energies of capitalism.

We are not short of these. Catholic social teaching, socialism in its various forms, communitarian models of living, co-operatives, social enterprises, and the welfare state, all offer resources for a new economics. So do other European economies (Scandinavia in particular) which have achieved far more equal societies than we in the UK. What Cameron should be calling for is not a ‘moral capitalism’, but a moral economy.

‘Moral capitalism’ is a marriage of chalk and cheese. It will end – no doubt – in dust, sweat and tears.

 

 Posted by at 10:54 am
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