The indifferent culture
mp3
At the weekend, Eleanor Mills, writing in The Sunday Times, described an occasion where a whole bus full of people failed to intervene to stop a violent offender. As one passenger got off the bus, he was violently assaulted by another who punched him in the head, kicked him to the ground, and then calmly got back on the bus and resumed his journey. As Eleanor relays it:
"Silence fell….when I looked up I inadvertently caught the thug’s eye. “What you f****** looking at?” he yelled. I cast my eyes down quickly, glad that there were many bodies rammed in between me and him. No one moved, said or did anything. We all tried, desperately, to mind our own business."
Then, today, the Telegraph reported the story of Stephen Wills who was killed at the weekend by joyriders while riding his bicycle. As Stephen lay dying in the road, a number of cars drove straight past, and one even ran over his legs, but none stopped to help. Eventually, a passing taxi driver did call an ambulance, but by then it was too late.
I cannot say whether the people in these specific circumstances did the right thing or not as I don’t know the details, but the stories do highlight the fact that our culture is beset with an attitude of indifference. Why is this? Have we forgotten that ‘all that is required for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing’? I wonder if the answer is contained in Eleanor Mills’ acknowledgment: “We all tried, desperately, to mind our own business”. Could it be the case that it is our obsession with individuality that is the problem here? For the obvious corollary of ‘minding our own business’ is that I won’t mind yours, I won’t look out for you, I won’t care for you, and put myself in harms way in order to serve you. Could it be our rampant Western individualism that is the issue here? And I say Western deliberately as it strikes me that this is just one area where we have a lot to learn from our African brothers and sisters.
In recent years, the African Union – the organisation that seeks to facilitate intra-African cooperation - have moved in theory, if not in practice, from a principle of “non-interference” to one of “non-indifference”. They have seen the consequences of idly standing by and doing nothing. In contrast, our society seems to be moving in precisely the opposite direction, at least at the personal level. Increasingly, our secular commentators are telling us that what is required to solve society’s problems is to recover our ‘independence’ from what they perceive to be the shackles of religion. In his book, Blind Faith, Ben Elton advocates precisely this line, critiquing the church while promoting the culture of the individual.
The problem with this though is that the logic of individualism leads inevitably to an indifference toward others. In complete contrast, the Judaeo-Christian tradition is one of interdependence, not independence, where we are not called to ‘mind our own business’, but rather to spend ourselves in the service of others. If freeing ourselves from the shackles of religion involves freeing ourselves from the needs of others then I, for one, would prefer to remain enslaved.
Justin Thacker, Head of Theology
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