The state of Goodness

The Children's Society publish 'A good Childhood' on Thursday: the results of their 2 year research into modern childhood. Listening to a representative on the radio yesterday was like listening to myself in many ways and it was uncanny to find myself agreeing so wholeheartedly with someone. The data seems to have supported the line of reasoning - but I was suspicious of this: can "data" really be such an ally in support of what we know is good by virtue of something quite separate from data: our Morality? The report concludes what is true across all of society not just children, that our happiness is nurtured best by a sense of care for our fellows rather than by a sense of personal achievement.

In passing he mentioned one thing, that I knew economists would criticise, that "there was only so much success to go around". This is the "protectionalism" of the Mercantile economists who viewed value in terms of gold of which there really is only so much to go around. However the Classical school diagreed and after Adam Smith argued that the amount of value is only limited by the amount of labour. I agree to some extend - "value" is not a fixed quantity so arguments of "there is only so much to go around" are falacious. But then often arguments proceed by believing that value can be measured e.g. in GNP. These suffer from the same criticism because value is not quantifiable. Anyway I digress...

Interesting not everything went the way of Morality and common sense. Apparently the data show that child suffering does not correlate with having both parents at work. What seems to cause suffering is poor relationship with the parents and poor relationship betwen the parents - which may be caused by both parents always being at work, but this is not the root. Does this then suggest that nanny's can replace parents? I've always thought that multi-parent creches is the most likely "natural" state.

But, the main thing I disagreed with was that the solution to these deeply felt moral arguments, with apparent data to support them, was education. Somehow if children were educated of the source of happiness and wellbeing then they would live better lives.

I used to argue like this as a child. The moment you perceive something that is wrong you seek for a power base to try and enforce that view on other people. This is self-defeating because you will come up with other people competing for those power bases, and who ever wins will end up enslaving the population to whatever ideology - standard political nonsense. I've argued at length the falasy of people who think like this, and who do jobs that follow this type of thinking.

It occurred to me this morning that the problem with these people is that they have a profound lack of faith in People and in particular Goodness. We don't have political departments to make the sun rise every morning because we have faith that it will. (Ironically we are more faithful than our "primative" ancestors who had exactly this!) Likewise why do we have moral shepherds of "the people"? Do we believe that they are prone to badness? And do we believe that the goodness in them is derived from external forces initiated by the "good shepherds" who by miraculous fortune have been born with a moral compass that "the people" somehow lack? Idiotic and absurd arguments, yet the root of the lives of many "do gooders" and politicians who self-appoint themselves as miraculously superior to "the people".

Buddha and Jesus by contrast, for example, are quite different from this. These great teachers cast the seed, some falls on good soil and some on bad. Where it falls on good the seed grows, where it falls on bad it perishes etc etc. Who keeps throwing seed upon the desert in the hope that it will germinate? If people don't have the moral compass already then they won't ever know goodness. It is not for us as people to bring goodness into the hearts of people: it is a gift if we ever find it in our own. It can only be that good people will recognise the lives, actions and words of good people and rejoice in these things: and bad people won't. There is no education, or enforcement of these things: they are gifts. And when we see a bad person (assuming we know goodness) then it is enough to realise that "there, but for the grace of God, go I".

But do we really believe that there are "bad people"? This is an element of faith that is central to Buddhism at least: that at root all people are good, we simply have differing levels of haziness obscuring that rich core. Christians may believe the same given that, God made Man in his image. And then Islam and Judeism must believe the same. So none of the major faiths East or West believe in Evil at the root, it is only an oscuration of Goodness - a turning from God in Christian words.

So the majority of us already belive in Goodness being at the root of us all. It is the thing that unites all people. And the evils we see are but clouds in this perfect sky. This is what we believe. So where is the need to teach people Goodness? All children know what is right and wrong - talk to them and you will be amazed, even the "hoodies" n "yobs". They just learn to turn away from it and ignore it because it represents weakness, and because Goodness, being their true core self, means that they must face themselves: and this they cannot do because they hate themselves, and everyone else hates them, and they have done bad things that concretes over the grave of themselves. They either commit suicide, or they kill other people because at the heart of childhood in this authoritarian uncaring society of bureaucrats whose job is to be morally superior to others, who take the blood money but offer no heart in return, who return correct paperwork on other peoples' suffering and take the money and run, who document and measure and budget for misery: this society makes enemies of the people who is governs and hates the very blood that flows in its veins. That is the problem, that sadly is the obscuration that hides the Goodness.

So clearly the very last thing we should do in society is to legislate for anything else ever. We have hundreds of years of rules: we need no more. L:ike a good computer program we should be able to recode the laws and make them more efficient, simpler and faster to process. There would be less people in government, and more people in "Life" flowing through the arteries of this society and making it live. But this is a futile last paragraph because am I going to legislate for a reduction in Law :-) No! let Goodness work all by itself.

While sitting doing nothing;
Spring comes!
And the grass grows all by itself.