Every society needs a kick up the butt every now and then. In historical terms my world and that of the previous generation has been relatively calm. Our society has not been subject to a major war, that has affected the mass of the civilian population, for nearly 80 years. We have been clouted by the occasional economic disaster and that has certainly brought misery to many people. But what our society has not had has been a crisis large enough to get us to change our behaviour; until now. Is this our ’kick up the butt?’
For nearly 40 years the United Kingdom, and all the liberal countries of what is called the Western world, have been encouraged toward a particular kind of self interestness. Since the 1980s the British have been told that there is no such thing as society; they have been encouraged through popular culture to believe that the way to prosperity is through individualistic self interested competition and they have had their public and private lives flooded with all manner of commercial, consumer enticements. Modern advertising has been responsible for an unparalleled peddling of propagandist and utopian pictures of happy lives that will be ours if we are to buy ’this product’. In an environment of religious decline heaven has been rebranded as something only obtainable through stocking up of large quantities of private property.
Certainly by comparison with even our grandparents lives, commercial advertising has saturated our environment: it is present on television and radio, cinema, computer, tablet and telephone. It surrounds us in the morning, on the billboards as we drive to work, on radio and television and tablet on the way home, in the evening watching TV or Youtube, and with phones by the side of the bed and with people on social media till the early hours, it is there in the night as well. We have got so used to it that we no longer wonder at what effect it might be having on us. The presentation of a myriad of images showing lives which are better than ours, causing us to – in the saying – ‘compare and despair’, continue to undermine our contentment with what we have and they ’write’ within us an apparent ‘need’ to have something else, something more, something newer and prettier.
Let’s be clear about this. Our world has come to depend on this sort of individualism. People are not wholly and solely selfish and self orientated, thanks be to a God given sense of humanity and moral sensitivity. And thankfully, the commercial messages are not the only ones in our society. There are still such things as churches, people are still taught good behaviour at home and school and there are enough people who are icons of upright, brave and honourable behaviour that we can follow. Nevertheless there are also, as is well known, plenty of celebrities who are not like that. And the propaganda of the sales executives are still some of the most dominant and ringing in our ears and hearts day and night.
The reason for this is that our world has come to depend upon people being reduced to a common denominator of adolescent disinhibition so that they will shop compulsively, for needed goods certainly, but also for recreation, therapy: to relieve discontent, depressive feelings and in hope of happiness. With money burning a hole in the pocket we are to have little self control, or rather whilst our moral self realises that we must have self control for all manner of reasons, yet the skill of the commercial advertiser lies in breaking that down.
The western way of life depends upon the cultivation of an attitude of needing more and to accumulate as much as possible regardless of what other people have. And so there is a notion of heaven that is bred into our society and which lies in the capacity for enormous levels of property accumulation. It is the picture of the individual that becomes so rich they are liberated from all the things and relationships they have with other people that are wearisome, annoying, depressing and tiresome: in work particularly. They are, in this fantasy, no longer having to contend with such things as people who descend like locusts onto shop shelves at times of crisis. When one is rich one can make one’s own arrangements.
This is a vision of being liberated from those neighbours from hell; bullying bosses; miserable, badly wallpapered and peeling walls, and the smell of factories; in fact all that seem thep most spiritually draining aspects of our life in the world of things and other human beings. It is realised from quite early on life that all this might be facilitated through the sudden accumulation of large amounts of money which give people the opportunity to buy a beautiful house in a beautiful place far away from everybody else. Once they’ve won the lottery, or whatever, their whole lifestyle can be dedicated to keeping the rest of the world out. All of this has to be an encouragement not to think too hard about the lot of your neighbour.
There is a type of person in our society that now makes up a huge, perhaps the majority of people. They are not bad or horrible people, they are the sort of people who ‘keep to themselves ‘. The sort of people who may be very sociable with regard to their own private circle of friends; they work hard, they keep the law and they bring up their children well. But they don’t have a great deal to do with the rest of the community in which they live, as though state of the community or the health of the way the community functions has nothing to do with them. Likewise the only time such people have had anything to do with the church and somebody like myself is when they have needed something and usually because there had been a funeral in the family.
When I have met such people they have been, in the main, perfectly nice. But they have never been encouraged, or habituated by anybody or anything, toward a sense of obligation to the rest of the community or society. They have grown up in a general societal atmosphere in which your only obligation is to yourself and your own prosperity, and eventually that of your family.