The Spectator's Notes

8 August 2009

Charles Moore's reflections on the week

Archbishop Vincent Nichols told the Sunday Telegraph that Facebook and the like meant that young people were ‘losing some of the ability to build interpersonal communication that’s necessary for living together’. Just after reading the Archbishop of Westminster’s words, I happened to be going to confession in his cathedral. Preparing for it, I read what the Simple Prayer Book says about how one should examine one’s conscience: ‘Careful preparation is vital in order to make the most of this encounter with our loving heavenly Father. Find some time to be alone and quiet to reflect on your life, your relationship with God and others.’ It struck me that my relationship with God closely resembles what worries Archbishop Nichols about Facebook. God and I have never met. Sometimes I tell myself that the relationship is going well and that God really does love me. At other times, I feel that He completely ignores me. When this happens I — like, I would guess, almost all believers — feel like teenagers on Facebook, as regarded by the Archbishop: ‘the friendship... collapses and they’re desolate’. As Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, ‘my lament/ Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent/ To dearest him that lives alas! away’. Archbishop Nichols is right that we must have ‘rounded communication’ to build a ‘rounded community’, but the very existence of prayer is an acknowledgment that the human predicament is inevitably unrounded and therefore also requires a much more hazardous and lonely form of communication.

My most learned regular correspondent writes: ‘Seventy per cent of old people own their homes. The average home is worth about £150,000. Who would not take Mum to Zurich for £150,000?’ He concludes that euthanasia ‘will be as with abortion: from small beginnings for special cases, to normal practice within a generation’. I hope he is being too pessimistic about human nature, but there is certainly something strange about the fact that the cry for assisted dying has become louder as we have got wealthier. There is particular outrage at the idea that people should have to sell their houses to pay for long-term care, with the implication that those in this terrible situation would be kinder to themselves and everyone else if they took their own life. But when you think about it, isn’t long-term care exactly the sort of ‘rainy day’ against which capital is supposed to provide? And if you are living alone and going into such care, isn’t it reasonable to sell a house that you no longer need? And this is not to mention the help which children and other relations can provide. Of course all these decisions are hard, and are often made in distressing circumstances. But my point is that the collective despair about care for the very old in Britain today is not justified by the economic facts. We are better placed than ever before to look after old people. It is just that we don’t want to. We prefer freeholds worth six- or seven-figure sums.

1 | 2 | 3 Next page

More articles from: Charles Moore | this section

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comments (1)

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Post comment

ian skidmore

August 11th, 2009 10:55am Report this comment

Just hope that the God of whom you speak so highly does not inflict moor neurone disease or any of the other horrors which lead people to wish to end their lives prematurely. Where is the evidence that anyone has used that Swiss option toimherit money?

Post comment