Waiting for instalments of the charming saga of Limerick, I got to thinking that we have finally obliterated the melodrama of the 1950s and replaced it with a cartoon. In recent decades, much of the intellectual life of this society has been directed at deconstructing the mawkishness, piety, hypocrisy and small-mindedness we had come to associate with 1950s Ireland, writes John Waters.
Our neurosis did not allow us to care that we were removing also our collective moral tent-pole.
For all the rhetoric to the contrary, the ideology of this society is now broadly leftist, i.e. driven by the belief that everyone has an equal right to material prosperity, and that any deviation from this principle represents a moral failure for society. This view is held by many commentators and academics, the clergies of every religion, and has been the formal editorial policy of this and other newspapers for years.
Its power derives mainly from the indoctrinated guilt of those who, though materially comfortable, have become convinced that prosperity is less than wholly moral while others are comparatively less well-off. Criminality is the opening fault-line between "haves" and "have-nots". In the much-maligned 1950s, crime was a fraction of what it is now. We comforted ourselves until recently that crime levels here were much lower than elsewhere, but this becomes less true every year.
Twenty years ago it was fashionable to equate rising crime with poverty. This analysis was rebuttable on the basis that even when the poor were relatively poorer they were less inclined to plunder and steal. Some analytical refinement was necessary, hence the analysis that crime is the product of alienation, or anomie, arising from increased economic polarisation. This suggests it is insufficient to eliminate conventional poverty, because any degree of inequality can provide a rationale for those who decide to take what they are not given. Even successful, intelligent people now accept this.
Another word for anomie might be resentment. Motor-repair workshops now experience a windfall in January/February, fixing newly-registered cars which have been gratuitously defaced by passers-by who are, it seems, expressing some deep existential grievance at the unfairness of life. In mentioning this phenomenon in polite society one encounters an ambiguous response: even self-starters you'd expect to be outraged feel obliged to make pious remarks about our two-tier society.
Whatever the motivations for rationalising the criminality of allegedly disenfranchised elements of Irish society, the result has been the validation of that criminality by dint of the general acquiesence in the belief that such immorality is counter-balanced by the immorality inherent in society's failure to provide equally for all citizens.
It is well established that to succeed in life a human being needs both personal achievement and a high degree of self-motivation to pursue this, and everyday experience tells us that there is no absolute entitlement to benefit to any particular degree from the Earth's resources. Animal societies prosper only to the extent that they marshall collective energies. The human experience of socialism demonstrates that attempts to buck these natural laws are doomed.
When I was a boy, the greatest compliment you could pay a man was to call him "a good worker". This accolade disappeared during the 1980s, when high unemployment made it unacceptable to judge someone by criteria which appeared to place his moral status beyond his control.
We constructed a society which, while maintaining a core system of motivation for those deemed full members, sought to disperse its self-induced guilt by deviating from this logic in respect of elements considered ill-adjusted for communal wealth-creation. Hence, the welfare society and its inaccurately termed "working-class" ghettoes.
THERE are those who insist the problem is that we have not pushed the equality agenda far enough. But even by the logic of the polarisation argument, which suggests that the disenfranchised will not become enfranchised until they are driving State-provided top-of-the-range 03 cars, it seems clear there is no exit that way.
The nature of a welfare society, which involves effective imprisonment in second-class ghettoes by dint of means-tested benefits, which in effect prohibit legitimate self-advancement, ensures our developing cartoon society is self-consolidating.
This cartoon Ireland is largely the creation of our guilt and delusion. A cartoon has uniquely distinguishing characteristics - unreality, comedy, violence, but most fundamentally, a suspension of empathy. The denizens of these ghettoes are not, generally speaking, poor in any objective material sense - most of them have modern, warm houses, basic incomes and satellite TV.
Their poverty is mental, emotional and spiritual, and largely the consequence of what purported to be their salvation. Despite being victims of the general "compassion", they do not feel empathised with by society, and withhold empathy in return.
They live their cartoon lives in what appears to be an emotional vacuum, and the rest of us observe in a confusion of dissociated horror and bewildered amusement.
jwaters@irish-times.ie