Sick of the sick society

PERSONAL COLUMN JOHN ROWAN WILSON

In the fourteenth century, at the time of the Black Death, a strange phenomenon was seen in Europe. This was the cult of the Flagellants, who wandered about the countryside beating themselves and anyone else who would co- operate, as a form of atonement for some unspecified misdeeds committed by European civilisation.

These people were, of course, suffering from a collective mental aberration. They were moral hypochondriacs, obsessed by imaginary sins just as others are obsessed by imaginary symp- toms. Recently a similar form of mass hysteria seems to have taken hold of western intellec- tuals. There has never since the Middle Ages been quite so much moaning and breast-beating about the nature of our civilisation, or so much gloom about its future prospects. We are told that we inhabit a 'sick society,' that we are rotten with materialism and have no more religion than Oliver Cromwell's horse. Nobody is quite sure what is going to happen to us, but it is generally agreed that it will be some- thing pretty awful and that we shall deserve every bit of it.

I'm not quite sure what a 'sick society' means, and, what's more, I don't think any- body else has. Sickness and health are really very vague concepts. Even in the relatively simple case of the individual human being, health is a mirage. Nobody is perfectly healthy.

We try, and the doctor helps us, to keep as fit as we can, and if we are wise we put up as cheerfully as possible with those disabilities that we can't do very much about. The restless search for an unattainable state of perfection is only too likely to lead to a disease state of its own. It is an excellent way of developing an anxiety neurosis.

The same applies to our society. Like all living organisms, it exists in a state of dynamic equilibrium. Its structure is constantly threat- ened by outside forces and it has to cope with a multitude of inherent imperfections. This is true of all societies existing today and all that have existed in the past. Nor is there much likelihood that any kind of perfect _society will be developed in the future. To talk about a 'sick society' is a hypochondriac's way of de- scribing a perfectly normal situation.

What is the origin of this hypochondria? In the individual, as we all know, it is often a sign of a lack of genuine physical problems to worry about. Certainly the incidence of anxiety and depression has increased enormously in the last twenty years, at a time when we have achieved a spectacular control of the physical diseases. During the same period we have achieved equally dramatic advances against the social diseases of poverty, illiteracy and lack of opportunity. For the first time in the history of the world there has been sustained economic growth with practically no unemployment. At the same time democracy and freedom of speech have been preserved. Yet increasingly Western society feels its pulse, takes its tempera- ture and looks glumly at its tongue in the bathroom mirror. It has a distinct feeling that It is sickening for something.

The marxists, of course, are only too ready to make a diagnosis. The success of western Europe is, to them, a disease in itself. They were a little taken aback at first by the collapse of their fundamental assumption that capitalist society could only grow rich by exploiting the workers. However, they are nothing if not re- sourceful. The new doctrine is that the western populations as a whole are capitalist, and the exploited proletariat consists of the populations of Africa and Asia. According to this theory, the reason why Africa is poor is because Europe is rich and vice versa. And we should all feel very deeply ashamed of the fact.

If African independence hasn't led to the expected results, the explanation, we are told, is an infection spread by the Europeans. The reason for Africa's backwardness is its colonisation by the white man. (Without this, presumably, the whole continent would be as advanced economically and politically as Ethiopia.) It is true that things haven't im- proved as much as might have been expected with the removal of the imperial power, but the explanation for this lies in that infinitely corrupting condition, neo-colonialism.

The concept of neo-colonialism is a hypo- chondriac's dream. It is rather like that favourite obsession of melancholics, the Unforgiveable Sin. Nobody can be sure he is not committing it, since nobody knows what it is. Like the 'sick society,' it seeks to arouse the maximum of guilt feelings with the minimum of meaning. Once neo-colonialism had been invented, it became possible to develop a situation in which nothing any European nation did could pos- sibly be right. If it dominated the African nation politically, it was colonialist. If it lent money to the Africans on condition that it was used for certain purposes only, it was neo- colonialist. And if it lent money without strings and the borrower spent the money foolishly it was deliberately encouraging the Africans to drift into bankruptcy.

The fallacious argument is constantly ad- vanced that affluent nations have some kind of moral debt towards the so-called 'under- developed world' just as the rich have towards the poor within an individual nation. This is obviously absurd. Nobody can reasonably be asked to accept responsibility without power, and independence means the severing of both. If rich nations help poor ones, it may be for a variety of reasons—political, economic or just plain altruistic. It is obviously a very good thing that they should do so. But they should not be asked to assume an open-ended moral

indebtedness in areas over which they no longer exercise control.

This glum quest for guilt is not confined to the international scene. At home we are beset by flagellant sociologists, who accuse us of being collectively responsible for all varieties of crime or delinquency; and flagellant psy- chiatrists who assert that conditions such as schizophrenia are really responses to wicked and hostile treatment on the part of parents and society. Everywhere there is the same cry for the scapegoat. Everywhere the healthy, the rich, or the happy are to be made to feel guilty because they are not sick, or poor, or miserable.

Above all, we are accused of materialism. This, like neo-colonialism, is one of those vogue words which conveys a sense of moral disdain without meaning very much. Since the begin- ning of the world man has tried to achieve, for himself and his family, the maximum degree of comfort and warmth, the best possible food, the greatest degree of leisure. The only differ- ence between the West and the rest of the world is that the West has to a very large degree attained this object. One can imagine the paeans of praise that would have ascended to the sky if this remarkable success had been achieved by China or the Soviet Union. Socialism, we should have been told, as we sat gloomily in our crumbling two-roomed flats, really works—it delivers the goods. When it turns out that it is capitalism that delivers the goods, we are told that the goods are trash and that we are corrupted by false values.

You may ask : does all this nonsense matter? After all, it's every man to his own taste, and if people fancy a bit of flagellation why shouldn't they get on with it? The answer is that it does harm in two ways. The first is that a wrong diagnosis leads to bad treatment. When the Africans were told that all their troubles were due to colonialism, they assumed, naturally enough, that all they had to do was to get rid of the colonialists and everything would be fine. Their disillusion was all the , greater when they found this wasn't so. It is never a good thing to create methods of dodg- ing away from the real nature of a problem.

The other way in which harm is caused is in damaging the credibility of the so-called cultural elite. Ordinary people know in their hearts that flagellation isn't a normal healthy activity. They are tired of being told that they are materialistic if they want a washing- machine or racialist if they want to preserve the character of the neighbourhood in which they live. They don't feel the least bit of guilt about the Africans or the Indians or the Japanese. They know that Churchill didn't kill Sikorski and that Hammarskjold didn't kill Lumumba, and they regard people who take these allegations seriously as publicity-mad humbugs. They are fed up with being nagged and preached at.

There is a very real danger that this may lead to a resistance to any efforts to touch the public conscience, no matter how serious or important the issue. One of the reasons, for example, why it is so difficult to arouse interest in the Biafran situation is that the British have simply become bored to death with being blamed for everything that goes wrong in Africa, and have reached the stage where they find it hard to distinguish a real issue from a phoney one. Socially, as well as individually, the great danger of hypochondria is that it may mask the existence of a genuine, curable illness.