Book-burning ‘morality’ at the root of our ills?

THE ongoing media exposure of virtually every agency of church and state, revealing a shambles of ineptitude, dishonesty and wrongdoing, is indicative of a country whose morality in high places is confined to feathering one’s own nest, blowing one’s own trumpet and protecting one’s own party or institution at any cost.

Considerations and values such as right and wrong or the greater good are either obsolete or never existed in practice in this neck of the woods.

The worldwide financial crisis is not the only factor contributing to the mess we are now in.

For quite some time serious financial resources have been poured into the investigation of corruption, the abuse of children, the maltreatment of women and other equally serious irregularities. The compensation paid to victims arising out of these enquiries has been enormous.

In the event of the absence of a worldwide recession, the likelihood is that bankruptcy was coming down the tracks anyway.

A quasi-religious group advocating a ‘No’ in the recent Lisbon Treaty referendum asked the question: “Do we need an EU supreme court to overrule our values?”

Responding to this a well-known and respected observer replied: “Yes, we bloody well do”.

How right he was.

There are reasons for everything and for the purpose of identifying the causes that gave effect to the stifling of intellectual development and economic progress in this country for decades, if not for centuries, it becomes necessary to take a look at history.

On May 10,1932 Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, a Catholic, presided over the burning of upwards of 30,000 books at Opera Square in Berlin.

In this country around that time, and for several decades later, the wholesale banning of books was in progress.

Authors such as Frank O’Connor and numerous others fell foul of this censorship and many other great writers of the time were obliged to live overseas.

Catholicism, with its traditional liking for ignorance and of course Nazism, would have been condemned by Socrates who once declared that “the only good was knowledge and the only evil was ignorance”.

Many commentators question the propriety of basing morality on myths for sooner or later myth is recognised for what it is and disappears. Then morality loses the foundation upon which was built.

Would this explain the inertia and indifference and, more recently, the collapse of the economy?

Pat Daly

Suncourt

Midleton

Co Cork