In Jason Heale’s column “Our character deficit . . .”, he cites incidents of politicians and relatively rich businesspeople letting the masses down and, therefore, not to be trusted. He also pontificates by paraphrasing definitions from a book by David Brooks. In doing so, he settles on: “Character is moral strength and integrity. It is moral logic, not an economic one.”
Seems like a reasonable definition, although I would posture that the logic to be applied is based on economics and social security.
Therefore, when the socal security environment changes — as it has in the past decade — the moral logic that is applied to how we act in trying to survive in today’s social and economic environment, would be termed as criminal under the moral scrutiny of yesteryear.
In as far as that environment has changed, so has the logical base which our society allows our character to change in order to seek survival. That is the same survival instinct that is in all people, at all social levels — be they justice officials, police and military personnel, “middle class” and especially the poor . . . it is the poor who are called criminals, while white-collar crime is more often written off as being “stress-related” rather than “criminal”.
Unfortunately, there is very little going on in the world today which is encouraging of a fair and flourishing society. Perhaps such a society may arise phoenix-like from the ashes. Let us just hope those ashes will not be radioactive . . .
