Not enough

As the Middle East takes itself over the brink again, plenty of people will find plenty wrong with the start of this sentence. By that I mean that there are the two main sides and within that definition there are many important grades of subtlety and difference. Each side will argue that it is not ‘the Middle East’ that has made northern Israel and southern Lebanon a war zone: it was the Israelis who started it. Or Hizbollah.

Each news reporter must balance his or her own knowledge and the tastes of their employer in reporting what happens. But the conclusion they inevitably reach – that the cycles of violence will be further perpetuated by the piece of violence they are reporting on – tells us nothing. It’s a conflict that vividly demonstrates the importance of understanding history – though even that statement may merely direct a person to the biases of the past.

But it’s too simple to back out of history, too easy to say that the violence will continue unless it stops. It is right to ask the hard questions, because only then can we begin to understand the hard actions of those involved. It will nevertheless only be a beginning – never an ending – to our insight.

To apply this closer to home, it is not enough for Britons to ride the wave of partial prosperity that has been ours since the early 1990s whilst employing our tolerance for wrongness and farce to disgustingly high levels. By ‘not enough’ I mean that we should all be more aware of what the standards of public life are in Britain now (and aware that they have been both worse and better in the past), aware of the vital role our as-good-as-you-can-hope-for media plays. We should take politics and investigative media seriously, we should – as Churchill put it – ‘seek no sordid gain’ and we should be aware of what is right and what is wrong. There certainly is such a thing as society and we’re all living in it right now.

This is not a call to arms, but a call to thought. A call that says that laughing snidely about the Labour government’s shabbiness is not enough, that accepting appalling service is not enough, that being badly managed as a country, a region or a person is not enough. It’s easy to write this and much harder to do anything about it, I know, but, sadly, that conclusion is also not enough.