Having broken communities and eroded social bonds through the unremitting promotion of the market, politicians responded both by, ironically, expanding the state and by blaming the poor. Where once families, and communities and collective institutions helped define right and wrong, increasingly the state has stepped in to impose such social norms, through everything from citizenship classes for children to parenting courses for adults. As a result, morality has come to be seen not as difficult choices one has to wrestle with, or norms one works through within a collective setting, but as a set of predetermined rules provided as a state hand-out. Morality has ceased to be ours.
At the same time, politicians have increasingly taken to blaming the poor themselves, rather than their social and economic policies, for the breakdown of family life, a lack of social values, a selfish disregard for the needs of others, and a rampant consumerism. The same values that many tolerate among bankers are condemned in the unemployed and the poor. And with condemnation has come repression, from increased CCTV surveillance to punitive workfare rules.
Because the Right has appropriated the arguments about moral failure, many on the Left have rejected moral arguments altogether. The Left talks much about the social and economic impact of neo-liberal policies. But little about its moral impact. Such willful blindness is dangerous. Morality is as important to the Left as it is to the right, though for different reasons. There can be no possibility of a political or economic vision of a different society without a moral vision too.
via www.eurozine.com
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