What world shall emerge at the end of all this pain, worry and the upturning of our present world? We should not be deluded, there are strong forces that want to resume business as usual. But of course for a time they will have no choice, for there will just be chaos and consternation. There will be vast problems with unemployment, businesses that simply did not make it through and people who are milling around terrified at how they will pay the bills and so on. The most typical reactions of governments are likely to be pouring vast amounts of money into welfare and unemployment benefit.
All the old tabloid staple about undeserving wretches taking free money to sit around and play computer games may or may or not be present but if there ever was such vast numbers of wasters who deserved to be left in penury until such times as they were willing to accept a paltry wage for some spiritually evacuated, repetitious dead end for forty hours a week, now there will be many more of us until things can be brought back to some level of equilibrium . That was those papers function of course. They were there to help ensure that the large number of nothing jobs, vital to the economy were not left unfilled. They were there to bully those on the lowest rungs of the social ladder into taking them. It would be nice to think that as obnoxious as, say, Daily Mail reporters could be in their nasty reductionistic portraits of the more wretched end of our society, that at least they had some kind of moral purpose in calling out socially irresponsible leeching off the state, Sadly that was never really their main function.The state was never going to run into the ground because of any minority of people whose upbringing or mental instability left them without the moral resources to find work like most others. But it might have serious problems if the population didn’t have a regular supply of scapegoats or pour their secrete self hatred and guilt upon, and perhaps finally to fill up the jobs that no one who didn’t have to would touch with a long pole.
Business as usual was exploitative, grossly unequal and profoundly unjust. In some ways it was better than many of the ways in which as a society we made a living before. But don’t relax into some morally complacent bubble and think that just because you weren’t doing back to back shifts in some dog meat factory then everything was as good as it was going to be. This wasn’t just how the world is, it was how we, as a society, chose to make our world. There were many who had the power to change things that certainly would not because while present circumstances enriched them, a serious upturning of those circumstances in favour of something more just, in which the social product was used to benefit people more widely, might not enrich them quite so much.
The people who were the victims of what I was talking about above were possibly some of the worst treated and purposely left as the least understood people in the system, but there were many, many others who didn’t suffer quite so much but who the system still regularly belittled, defeated and just left plain badly off. Sometimes it might have been you. Those who just about never suffered the ‘fag end’ of its treatments were the very rich whose interests therefore always lay in the preservation of things just as they are. And this was a particular problem since these were some of the few people who were capable of changing things.
All societies are, to put it in religious terms, riddled with sin. This is the sort of sin that cannot be so easily focused in individual human beings. It lives in the structure of things, the very language we speak, the signs and symbols through which we see reality. There are notions of what is the right and proper thing to do, the things that are worthy of wanting, and the things that are worth living for, that because they are in the structure of things that we imbibe with our mothers milk, seem so obviously true and right that it is common sense. We would rarely think to challenge these, at least as long as we are not seriously mistreated and left bruised and in pain by them, and then their provisional, not so obvious status might be drawn a little more to our attention. But these structures are nearly always partly grounded in truth, partly in the propaganda of self justification of that group of people who are chiefly responsible for shaping all our cultural world views, ie, those with the time and money to release themselves or their children to be the artists, the poets, the philosophers and academics and, yes, the priests. It’s not an accident that a hugely disproportionate number of priests in the Church of England, particularly the senior clergy, the Cathedral clergy and the chaplains of the great universities, are overwhelmingly middle class.
No society avoids the self delusions that allow these fault lines in human culture to thrive, but there are societies who are more or less self critical and self reflective. The people in a society who do the reflecting are never more important than in a crisis, and perhaps especially when they work to envisage what may lie on the other side of a crisis. The things that business as usual before crisis broke out, always insisted were impossible, and the stuff of idealist daydreams, suddenly become possible because the old ways of doing things have been turned upside down anyway. It was said only a little while back that it was easier to envisage the end of the world than the end of capitalism and certainly it seemed like Hollywood had an easier time culturally preparing us for armageddon when it came, than with the upturning of the capitalism that the industry so benefited from. It has produced little of imaginative insight lately to give us a picture of what might follow in the aftermath. Well, now it is indeed possible to envisage very different and better ways of live. It will be a sin against God if we do not learn from what has happened and do not try to picture a better, more just and kind way of living together. It is the responsibility of every generation of Christians to do what they can to make their society a thing as close to the kingdom of God as it is possible to be. Well, here is our opportunity to reproduce our little world accordingly. It will be a missed opportunity of the most staggeringly immoral kind to return to business as usual.