It is easy for all of us to be critical of our governments and of our media. But in a democracy we elect our governments and the media feeds us what we like to consume. When we elect leaders without pity, when our judges fail to show pity, when our civil servants act without pity, or when our media pursues ratings by denying pity and love, there is every chance that they are reflecting us back to ourselves. When there is a major failing by government to live up to our public morality, there is every chance that we have all been infected to some extent, adopting the utilitarian calculus that the ends justifies the means, that nothing is good or bad in itself. It depends only on the political or economic consequences.
A senator can change parties after election pleading that there is no real difference between the party policies. If that is so, surely political morality dictates that you stay with the party to which you were elected until the next election when you seek to make the move. But self-interest is equated with common sense, and the attempted move is justified if it succeeds. Paul Keating once advised that in any race you should always back self-interest because you know it is trying. In the corporate sector, middle-order managers wonder why they should be honest when directors misuse company property for their own personal benefit.
When retiring as a teacher at the Australian National University in 1975, Manning Clark asked if it had all been worthwhile. He recalled attending the requiem mass at St Christopher’s Cathedral in Canberra the previous year for his friend Eris O’Brien:
The procession after the service reminded me of the Catholic, Protestant, and the Enlightenment—symbolising what one had thought our history was about, in part. But there was a sequel. Outside the church, as that bell tolled its melancholy dirge for the dead, I was seized with that dread which has never been far from me in the last ten or so years: that the bell was tolling a requiem for the only vision of life with which I had any bond. I feared that all these three ways of looking at the world, and the men who believed in them, were about to be replaced by men who believed in nothing; men with the appetites of the sybarite and the morals