Forces that shaped white-collar betrayal

Those who have ruined the country came through a mostly Catholic schools system without any sense of being part of a society

IN HIS speech in Rimini last week Diarmuid Martin said: "School catechesis, despite the goodwill of teachers, does not produce young Catholics prepared to join in the Christian community. Sometimes, after 15 years of catechesis, young people remain theologically illiterate." He might have been referring to me.

I had to look up what catechesis is. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, it is the education of people in Christian doctrine, so that they may experience "the fullness of Christian life". I also looked up what theology is and found it is the study of religious faith and of spirituality.

I have never understood what spirituality is. Anytime I have asked the response has been bathed in waffle. The following description comes from the web: spirituality is an ultimate or immaterial reality; an inner path enabling a person to discover the essence of their being; an experience of connectedness with a larger reality, yielding a more comprehensive self with other individuals or with nature or the cosmos. See what I mean?

I do not intend to ridicule belief in God or the search for the ultimate meaning. I am merely saying that I usually have no idea what people are talking about when they get into this area, even people who are thoroughly comprehensible when talking about almost anything else.

But I want to get back to the illiteracy that Diarmuid Martin talks about, after years of Catholic education. I want to make the point that it is not only in the arena of theology that people are illiterate after all that schooling; they are illiterate in areas that, in my opinion, are of far more consequence.

Just look around at our society in politics, business, banking, medicine, law, accountancy, stock broking, estate agency, the media. Everywhere scandal, people behaving crookedly, dishonestly, self-servingly, ripping off or seeking to rip off the rest of society. No sense of social solidarity, certainly not in a sense that is in any way genuine. This is not true of all society or of everyone in the areas I have mentioned, but isn't it commonplace in the wealthier reaches of society?

If it weren't how could we have got into the appalling mess in which we find ourselves: the State's coffers, broke; the banks broke, all of them; businesses broke all over the country; ghost estates; close to half a million unemployed. One of the most unequal countries in the world, certainly in the developed world. A political culture that ordains that the most obvious remedies to our predicament – a radical redistribution of wealth – is almost unmentionable and certainly unrealisable. Even a bloke from Standard Poor's said last week that Ireland was not a basket case – not yet anyway – because we were so wealthy. And that we are – probably no more than 15 countries richer than us on a per capita basis but that means nothing at all because of the way we have screwed up things so comprehensively.

Just think of the thousands of lawyers, accountants, bankers, stockbrokers and others who must have colluded in criminality over the last decade or so, in fraudulent accounting, in fraudulent trading, in fraudulent preference, in insider dealing. And such is our public culture that not one of them has been charged with a crime and, very probably, not one of them will go to jail. Many of them have made fortunes and many of them have retained fortunes.

These people didn't come from nowhere. They came out of our schools, most of them Catholic schools and they came out not just theologically illiterate but socially illiterate as well. Most of them are without any sense of being part of a society; they have no sense or little sense of being social beings, of having responsibilities to others. No sense of sharing or wanting to share. Instead they have a highly individuated sense of themselves, out for their own advancement and enrichment and, if society suffered as a consequence, nothing to do with them.

The culture that allowed this and that nurtured this was formed by the media, by education and by religion.

Some Catholic schools, the posh Catholic boys schools anyway, and I suspect the posh Protestant boys schools too, went on a lot about character, character formation, that sort of stuff. Not quite "stiff upper lip" but a bit of that: being a man, keeping one's head while all about were losing theirs. That Kipling If palaver:

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,

And – which is more – you'll be a Man, my son!

Yeah? What is more you'll be a sociopath, my son! Not a single whisper in the poem about anything to do with social responsibility, just character stuff; and that was (is?) the ethos of the posh schools that brought us the criminal generation.

Diarmuid Martin was fortunate to have avoided the posh schools. That might have something to do with the fine, courageous fellow he has become.