Sick of the sick society
Sir: It seems to me that society must be sicker than I thought if people like John Rowan Wil- son (14 March) can glibly cast aside all our problems as being 'phoney,' while making a brief final concession that perhaps there is something wrong with being indifferent to the genocide in Biafra.
There may be nothing worse than Biafra happening today, although Vietnam comes a close second. But I would hardly call ours a healthy society when around £50,000 million gets spent annually on arms while millions are deprived and populations soar. Should we be indifferent to the fact that even if we were to succour the majority of the present generation, unless we rapidly lower our sights on what human beings require for a good life, the non- renewable resources needed for an advanced civilisation will be gone forever, and we may well have polluted the biosphere beyond re- demption? Certainly Britain alone is not to blame; but we could be giving some better leads than, for example, the Concorde extravaganza.
All is not well, just because every scapegoat that is blamed for our troubles, such as neo- colonialism, can be shown to be false; the point is that we have yet to realise what is really the trouble, and those who pretend there is nothing the matter are hardly helping in the search. One can admit that we are not yet living in the 'worst of all possible worlds'—though any day we could now create just that—and we might once in a while count our blessings, such as the expansion of knowledge in so many fields, available for those who may have the wisdom to use it. But we should beware of glib optimism based on a blinkered vision, as we stroll along the brink.
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