Moral Decay: what might we do about it?

Hanif Kureishi recently wrote about moral decay in his blog The Kureishi Chronicles. It rang a bell for me. In the last month I watched a shoplifter in Tesco shovel a whole load of confectionary into their backpack.  Nobody batted an eyelid. I watched another openly count the chocolate bars they had obviously stolen, in front of us all on the tube – and then push their way through the barrier without paying. I have read this week that a journalist spotted 62 fare-dodgers at Stratford tube station in the space of 90 minutes, and that shoplifting has increased by 48% and pickpocketing by 38% in London in the last year.  A friend saw 3 mobile phones stolen on Oxford Street within the space of a shopping trip. The fare-dodgers alone are costing us around £240 million pounds a year across the UK. So, what do we do about it?

The question I found myself asking was do these people not feel guilty, just a tad at least? Watching a BBC interview with a fentanyl dealer on the US/Mexican border, he said yes but if it wasn’t him someone else would do it.  Is that really answering the question? He seems to imply that his guilt is meaningless. But guilt isn’t meaningless, is it? It eats away at us somewhere, I believe. When we tell a lie we know we have lied, and it undermines our sense of ourselves in subtle ways. I think it was Aristotle who said, “The man who acts unjustly does injustice to himself.”  The implication here is that an act against another harms the victim but also corrupts the perpetrator.  Kahlil Gibran wrote something similar in The Prophet –

“It is when your spirit goes wandering upon the wind, That you, alone and unguarded, commit a wrong unto others and therefore unto yourself.”

If the perpetrators don’t feel guilty, how can one encourage them to have some kind of empathy or sense of responsibility for those around them? We seem to be living in a world of everyone for themselves and yet we can’t live happily in this way.  A sense of community, of safety, a sense of belonging, is fundamental to human happiness and contentment.

Call me old-fashioned (I may well be) but I feel that a sense of responsibility to those around us is key to a healthy society.  Perhaps on a basic level we are talking about good manners.  I have lived in London since 1968, and in that time people would always wait for those to exit before trying to get on a tube. In the last few years people push onto the tube while others of us are trying to get off.  There’s no logic to it any more than there are good manners. As children we were taught to stand up for adults, to give older people our seats as a sign of respect and consideration.  Well, so much for that one!

Sadly, we don’t have great role models do we, these days, with statesmen who lie to us and behave badly, religious leaders abusive, with some celebrities who make their reputation by being disruptive, . So, in an increasingly secular environment where stabbings are becoming a tragic but weekly norm, how do we help our young work out that to treat others badly will take its toll on them too?

Of course, in previous times we had to placate the Gods.  We have just been reading Death in the Andes by Mario Vargas Llosa for our book club.  Here we read of sacrifices made, children killed in order to placate and appease the Gods and mountain spirits.  Well, we certainly don’t want to go back to those times.  We now understand what causes thunderstorms, bad harvest and sickness so we have no need to return to witch hunts but who holds the power to influence our worst judgements in a world where few are standing up for what is ethically right?

Surely philosophy could be an answer.  The unexamined life is not worth living, Socrates said.  Teaching philosophy can help us consider the balances and drives of good and evil, can help us identify our personal values and those that support a functioning society, can consider what systems of law and order best suit a community.  Alongside that, Socratic questions, as applied in Cognitive-Behavioural therapy, can also provide models for self-examination.

I personally still look to the Christian Church for spiritual sustenance and find choral evensong a particularly poignant moment for self-reflection. Yet my life changed when I read The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying about 30 years ago.  What I took from it was the practice of taking a moment at the end of each day to reflect on what one has done or said in that 24 hours and reflect whether one can answer to oneself, or to our God if we believe in one.  If we can, then we can sleep well and feel at ease with ourselves. If we cannot, and we are all fallible, then we can identify what adjustments we need to make in order to do so in future.

As I walk around London, I am aware that, much as I still love it, this City has changed almost beyond recognition to the one I moved to in 1968.  Lime bikes strewn everywhere, scary-looking masked men on electric bikes and a feeling that our leaders, of church and state, have lost their own moral compass.  I hope they spend a little more time in self-reflection in the future to give us the role models and ethical guidance that is needed to bring us back together, wherever we have come from, into a sense of belonging and pride in our City, pride in our country, and responsibility for how we behave towards others.

Yet ultimately, however many President Trumps or Putins there are in the world, we have to answer to ourselves. We alone can make sure that we act in a way that supports our values and helps us feel a sense of contentment with how we have acted each day.