AT THE Assembly Rooms, this Edinburgh Festival, the mighty actor Simon Callow is giving a show which he calls A Festival Dickens, a pair of monologues drawn from the work of the great moralist and satirist, and set in the chaotic, money-grubbing 1840s England of the early industrial revolution.
One of the characters he plays is Dr Marigold, a good-hearted travelling man who lives by selling cheap goods off a cart; and whose later life is entirely shaped by his need to make amends for the awful truth that his first wife, a violent woman, bea
t their beautiful little daughter so severely and frequently that the sadly weakened child eventually died of a fever in Marigold's arms.
And it always seems to me that it's a good idea to imbibe a sharp dose of Dickens, before entering into any grand generalisations about the collapse of good parenting in our times. It's a particularly good idea when we are confronted with documents like this week's latest survey from the Prince's Trust, which identifies a "lack of role models" as one major reason for young people joining gangs and going off the rails, and announces the supposedly worrying figure that one-third of young people don't regard either of their parents as an inspiring model. For it was, as they say, ever thus; and history is littered with the stories of eminent people whose prime motivation in life was not to emulate their parents, but to get as far away from one or other of them as possible.
Undue sentimentalising of old-fashioned family life apart, though, it remains true that ours is a society which struggles to find and sustain any role models worth the name; and that failure affects the moral quality of the lives of adults as well as children. Essentially, each society chooses its heroes and role models to reflect the values it holds most dear. During the first 60 years of the 20th century, for example, while Britain fought its way through two world wars, a high premium was placed on patriotism, self-sacrifice and a stiff upper lip; meanwhile, in working-class communities, men in particular could still win high local status through a combination of physical strength (or useful book-learning) and basic civic virtue.
But what we have to grasp now is that both of those old, communal value-systems – the public-school one and the working-class one – have been blown sky-high by the political and social choices we have made since the 1960s, and cannot be restored. We have moved from a society dominated by fairly rigid social rules and strictly enforced public values expressed through strong local communities, to one dominated almost entirely by the cash-nexus, and by the mediation of reality through screen images; and, at the same time, we have allowed income inequality to increase to the point where very few ordinary working people can seriously expect to achieve anything in terms of status or security, through a lifetime of hard work, except an endless running to stand still.
The result is that, with just a few outstanding exceptions, almost all of the major role models and heroes of our society, made famous through national or world media, belong to the ranks of the global super-rich and enjoy a lifestyle to which the vast majority of their admirers cannot even begin, realistically, to aspire. Children who spend hours every day sitting in front of a screen dominated by images of superstars like Madonna and the Beckhams know perfectly well who the big players in today's world are, and that their parents are not among them. And they also know that if they follow in their ordinary parents' footsteps, they will never be one of those people whose existence is validated by huge buying-power and constant media appearances; they will remain "nobodies", unblessed by fame.
Under the circumstances, in other words, the surprising thing is not that one-third of children fail to regard either of their parents as role models, but that two-thirds still do. And it speaks volumes for the truth that in the day-to-day detail of family life, parents whose public status is humble, and whose means are ordinary, can still make a huge positive impression on their children through other human qualities, such as love and tenderness, respect and humour, wisdom and courage.
Let's be clear, though, that however well parents do their job, teenage children growing up need more than any one family can give them; they need a sense of moving out into a caring community that will offer them new options and alternative world-views. And having done all we can, over the last 30 years or so, to smash up those communities in the interests of freedom and social mobility, it seems to me that we now have an obligation to try to re-moralise our public life a little; if only so that we can still say to our children, with a straight face, that certain qualities such as selflessness and trustworthiness are good to aspire to, and that people who embrace them will earn respect and status in our culture.
So can we begin to reshape our economy and society around an ethic of trustworthiness, creativity and service, rather than greed and licensed criminality? Probably the idea, nowadays, is just too revolutionary. But if we want evidence of the practical, down-to-earth reasons why we should be doing so, we need only look at the recent dangerous structural collapse in the money markets, caused by a foolish ethic of untrustworthiness carried to its illogical extreme. And we might also look into the eyes of our teenage children; who, so long as we show deference to these brutal values in public while trying to reject them in private, will read the mixed signals we are sending them; and eventually draw their own conclusions about which gang they want to join, and why.
The full article contains 1013 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
