“I’ve always done the right thing by her, and now this…”
Joyce’s relationship with her sister is a long-running sore, in which it would appear that Joyce has been the undeserving victim of sibling hostility.
“Ah, you know what they say: ‘Charlie is quick to put the boot in’, ‘A good deed never goes unpunished.’”
“Oh for heaven’s sake,” Elizabeth rejoined, “must you always be so negative?”
“Because it’s true,” Charlie is unrepentant, “altruism’s a myth, there’s always a pay off”.
“He’s right,” Cecil joined in. “Virtue’s its own reward; no one got ahead by doing the right thing.”
The discussion was cut short by the call for bingo, but it set off some ideas in this old head. The “right thing” has ancient provenance and contemporary authority. From the Code of Hammurabi to the UN Declaration of Human Rights, the concept is at the very foundation of all legislation designed to respect and protect the vulnerable. In place of Darwinian brutalism, it proposes an ethos of collective altruism. It may be commissioned, or even imposed, but with time and use, it becomes a popular reflex. It underpins the contracts of care which have built up over millennia to provide the warp and woof of social cohesion; it informs the benefits of the welfare state, the accessibility of the NHS.
Doing the “right thing” was the electoral mantra of the tribe that will now direct our way of life for the next five years. The phrase has a public school ring to it, the sort of demand addressed to the plebs of the lower fifth by the head of house in an assembly designed to outline the aspirational programme for the coming term: “We may not win the sports cup, but let’s be known as the house which does the right thing” sort of thing.
Its endless repetition surely entitles the public to require the direction of policy to be gauged against this ethical litmus test. However, the accelerating inequalities within our national community reveal how quickly those contracts can unravel. There is evidence of a growing impatience with the “unfit”.
While Help for Heroes rightly talks up the needs of those disabled by the bullets and improvised explosive devices of enemies, their civilian equivalents whose wounds are the result of the slings and arrows of misfortune are demonised as scroungers. No administration that enriches the wealthy, impoverishes the deprived and reduces support for the weak, vulnerable and disabled can claim to be “doing the right thing”.
The voice of older people should lead the chorus that challenges what is in every sense, economic, social, ethical, “the wrong thing”. We possess existential authority. After all, we are effectively weak and disabled ourselves. We need increasing levels of care as we survive beyond our time and bring greater and more complex needs to the table. There is no payback, we don’t get better, we don’t contribute, we are simply dependent. We can offer nothing in return. We are reliant on collective altruism and, as social grandparents, we should insist that in any family, austerity must start with cutting back on bubbly and foie gras rather than bread and water.
Not only do we crumblies retain public sympathy. Our exemption till now from the sanctions of austerity suggests that we are politically significant, so we should surely exploit that status to make common cause with the disabled and deprived sections of society, rather than compete with them for larger slices of a diminishing cake.
Sadly, the share of the vote suggests that we have become addicted to cake.
