‘Bad things shouldn’t happen to good people’, 13 May 2007

Marxists argue that how people think and behave is ideological, in that the dominant class in society has ways and means of ensuring conformity to their interests, which are tied to the requirements of the economic basis of society, currently capitalism. Marxists also believe that the economic basis of society evolves in distinct stages, but with a complicated transition between stages due to the conditions for the following stage accumulating while the class divisions and ideology of the current stage hold change back until onward momentum brings about a fairly abrupt and sudden revolution.

One cannot map all behaviour onto the dominant ideology. Take one topical instance: the huge popular interest and emotional response to the abduction of a little girl, Madeleine McCann, taken from a holiday apartment in a resort in Portugal while her parents were dining in a nearby restaurant. My own response was similar to other people’s, in particular to my own daughter’s, who identified with the family because of its similarity to her own, the wife a GP, the husband a hospital consultant, though in different specialisms. I found myself obsessed with the little tragedy, waking up thinking about it, anxiously following news coverage. My sympathy ebbed a little due to the information that the McCanns are ‘devout Catholics’, and I found the media coverage, and sentimental hype, sickening, there are, after all, worse things happening in the world.

So what is going on here? Two things, I think: firstly the belief that ‘bad things shouldn’t happen to good people’; secondly the McCanns being ‘like us’, and bad things shouldn’t happen to ‘our people’. The first is an ideology belonging to religion, to the belief in a divine Creator, and hence that what happens is ‘meant’, hence ‘everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds’, as Dr Pangloss declares in Candide, Voltaire’s satire on Leibniz. The satire, of course, plays upon determined adherence to this idea despite evidence to the contrary, and the determination to make it all right, whatever that takes. The second thing that is going on is tribalism, which results in an insidious bias in media reporting, whereby bad things happening to beautiful, young, white Westerners is more lamentable than even worse things happening to Asian or black people, or the old and ugly – or to other species or to the planet. Of course, the people deploring what has happened to this beautiful, white, innocent little girl from a good family are not all like them, but they would like to be, and this makes us all part of our tribe, determined on righting this wrong, and if that is not possible, finding the perpetrators and punishing them with all the righteous fury that we can muster. If this was an abduction by or on behalf of paedophiles, as seems most likely, and if the perpetrators are caught and imprisoned, they will be punished most cruelly by fellow inmates, who manage to claim membership of the tribe of good people on the basis that they are at least better than paedophiles, who are the lowest of the low.

The relevance of this phenomenon to my question ‘what is philosophy?’ lies in the fact that ‘bad things shouldn’t happen to good/our people’ has little to do with the dominant ideology and capitalism – apart from newspaper publishing feeding off it. It is older than capitalism, and hence perhaps a product of morphic resonance, a social habit deeply scored in the stuff of human behaviour.

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