Our progressive generation stumbling on same sorry mistakes

The illusion of progress. Nothing like it.

This illusion sustains each generation in the belief that it has evolved past the previous generation which, if not precisely knocking its finger knuckles off the floor as it walked, was pretty Neanderthal.

Not their fault, of course. They didn’t live in a global village criss-crossed with information highways. They were comforted and confined by old beliefs, hampered and hounded by churchmen telling them what to do and what not to do. Aren’t we blessed not to have lived back then?

The illusion of progress affirms each generation to itself as the best, the cleverest, the most sensitive, the most sexually sophisticated and as the most put-upon of any strand of humanity at any point in time. It’s possible to accept that grandparents did productive bonking, because otherwise the present generation wouldn’t exist, but each generation prefers to believe their ancestors had sex rarely, and even then, did it with most of their clothes on and always had babies as a result.

Today’s generation, while accepting all that oul’ guff about taking a sod of turf to school and getting to eat an orange once a year, also believe that dealing with home helps and respite care and Alzheimer’s clinics is far worse than anything earlier generations had to cope with. But because we are so EVOLVED, see, we do it and we don’t complain about it. Well, we don’t complain that much...

The illusion of progress has been greatly bolstered by nearly two decades full of exposés, tribunals and enquiries which have sluiced out our augean stables to the extent that you now could eat your dinner off the floor. Those enquiries flushed out (and down the tubes) ministers and would-be ministers and counsellors and one lobbyist. They ensured we have transparent procedures and that corruption cannot happen any more (and if you believe that, you’ll believe anything, but we’ll come back to it). Not if we accept for a minute that progress IS an illusion. Of course it’s not. Let’s go evidence-based, here. Look at our education systems, churning out all these third-level graduates, polished, prepped and ready for employment in knowledge-based industries. Not only are they highly educated, but they’ve even been trained in how to dress for success and taught how to answer the questions in the job interviews. We have even developed this system, called transition year, to give them a run at the Dilbert world while they’re still in school and inoculate them against becoming loathsome exceptions ready to be caught out by later psychometric testing. They know how to establish how acceptable they are, how they merit inclusion. Hell, their very pedicures are identical. And that’s just the lads. Back in the last century, a couple of books like the Man in the Grey Flannel Suit portrayed US corporations of the time as recruiting only well-dressed automatons, educated to just the right level, who could fit into their big systems. Greatly exaggerated, of course, even back then and doesn’t apply at all to the Ireland of the 21st century. We have made such progress, damn it to hell, we’re all electronics engineers crossed with renaissance scholars in Jimmy Choo shoes, clutching cardboard beakers of cappuchino on the way to work. We are the ultimate proof that evolution works.

Knowing it works makes us calmly condemnatory of what went before our time. We wisely condemn, not just those who did the horrors, but those who knew but chose not to know. In Europe, it was the Nazis who did the deeds and the majority populations who colluded by making like the three wise monkeys. In Ireland, we had a variation on the theme of dehumanisation and torture. The state selected the victims and handed them over to the Church for processing, while the majority population clapped its little paws over its eyes, ears and mouth.

Now, it was easy enough for our less sophisticated parents and grandparents to ignore what was going on in the industrial schools and the orphanages. It was difficult to see behind those had high walls, difficult to check up on what was happening in the big grey buildings at the end of long driveways. Even the tall exterior walls frequently had broken glass embedded at the top. Broken glass to keep the inmates in and the outsiders out. Not that the outsiders were exactly dying to cut the posteriors off themselves going in to investigate.

Why not? Ah, lads, sure they didn’t have the sense of social justice we have. How do we know we have a sense of social justice? Well, Ray Burke went to jail, didn’t he? Plus, we’ve taken a lot of ill-gotten gains from people, thanks to the Criminal Assets Bureau, and, thanks be to God for Fergus Finlay, because without him we’d never have known about that poor man who died in Leas Cross. What’s that? It took Finlay years of boring relentlessness to reveal all of it? We didn’t do anything as a result? Well, all right, but we felt really awful about the whole thing and rang the phone-in programmes to demand that Government put procedures in place to prevent it ever happening again. That’s how you can spot our evolved social conscience.

You can also tell we have it because of the “no excuses” attitude we take to the sins of our predecessors. They got themselves off the hook by dehumanising the victims. They didn’t look into the industrial schools because the kids there were delinquents, couldn’t get along with anybody, peculiar. Not reasonable human beings.

We don’t do that any more. We know better. Just because, let’s say, a woman is argumentative and unreasonable and maybe even weird, we would not ever countenance her being allowed to silently, stinkingly die, starved to a skeleton like those piled dead in the concentration camps.

We would get past the obstructions posed by her personality and family. She would not disappear off our communal radar. Maybe “communal” is a bit strong, because Bertie is right, we might need to concentrate our evolved minds a bit more on reviving community spirit. But the great thing is that we now have systems of accountability. In place. Don’t forget that pleasing extra phrase. We have all those things IN PLACE.

Nobody can just disappear. Twenty years down the line, none of those independent documentary makers are going to be able to find this present generation guilty of letting bad stuff happen to troubled human beings. Of standing idly by.

And, were such a shocking but essentially unique case to happen, that would be a tragedy and we wouldn’t pretend otherwise. Because we are so educated and evolved and socially conscious, we would know exactly what to do.

Once we’d got over the shudders about this particular exceptional case, we’d demand that Government put procedures in place to ensure it never happens again. Very forcefully, we’d demand it. For at least a week.

Then it would be done. Dusted. QED. Anyone for shopping?