Semi-enlightened Bishop
It is not often that Socialists can quote, even with a degree of approval, the comments of prelates. Usually their function is to tell us that this is the best of all possible worlds and, in between, to bless various weapons as being on the side of God and Good (as against the weapons of the Godless, Evil, and the Other Side). However, the Bishop of Pontefract, reported in The Guardian of 9th January, has recently made some thoughtful and thought-provoking remarks on our present social system.
He thinks that wild-cat strikes, gambling, drinking and various other symptoms of a lower moral condition are the result of feelings of helplessness and boredom, the reaction to the increasingly impersonal administration of affairs of State and industry. He accuses leaders of Church and State of failing to give a satisfying purpose for living. Citing centre-less new housing estates, the rat-race of examinations and status symbol degrees, the Bomb, and the increasing number of suicides, he comes to the conclusion, not very epoch-making we must admit, that there is something wrong with society if it imposes this kind of strain on people. The remarks were mainly concerned with the unhappy lot of industrial workers, but we know that their once more fortunate fellow workers in offices are subject to the same strain and problems and are no less bored as office routine becomes more and more broken down into one-function fragments.
After his comments on the ills of present society, the Bishop lapses into the woolly conclusions that worship of the Golden Calf is responsible for all this misery and that while poverty is heH, the hunt for money diminishes compassion and mercy.
It would, of course, be too much to expect a Bishop to draw a really solid conclusion from his views, but perhaps we can do this for him. Substituting for “the Golden Calf,” the “Profit Motive” or production for profit, not for use, and using this as our yardstick when looking at all that is anti-social going on around us today, we see that preaching and hand-wringing will get us nowhere, just as it has got all would-be reformers nowhere.
Only a complete change in the basis of society can abolish the very material Hell that capitalism has brought us to. It may be too much to expect of the Bishop, but when his flock begin to work for a new social system on earth rather than pie in the sky, and all the flocks throughout the world do the same, Man will at last achieve a world worthy of his skill and intelligence.
S.G.