A society of individual players

A practising Catholic at 60, I am irrelevant. There is no opinion I can have that is of interest or of relevance in the reality of the modus vivendi of the present world, as it has become. I am as much a foreigner here in my own hometown as I would be anywhere else in the world.

I have been trying to fight the current, thrust upon me, for a number of years but only now the penny finally dropped. It happened as I was watching Domenica In on Rai 1.

There was an interesting debate on the problem of the increasing number of teenage pregnancies. It seems the problem was that the young girls are less willing to have abortions now than before. What struck me were the guests speaking who were against this trend. They were saying that those who do not have abortions are irres-ponsible. Some were mothers with very angry faces.

The debate got very heated with those against abortion arguing that, surely in the cases where the parents were prepared to support their pregnant daughters and help in the responsibility of bringing-up their grandchildren they were rightfully entitled to make this choice.

No, they were told that this was a wrong attitude and that it would harm the natural growth of the developing child.

Neither morals nor religion came into the equation. The fact that an abortion was taking place did not even feature. It was so taken for granted that the moral question of whether abortion was wrong was not even considered.

Those on the side of saving the babies were not prepared to raise this point but continued to say that no one could or should interfere with the choices the girls were making to have their babies.

These attitudes may not be so blatant yet here in Malta but given a few more years we will be arguing in the same way.

There was one young and very courageous man who was brave enough to face this impervious gathering. He dared to offer an alternative. He believed in abstention.

This 33-year old single had had girlfriends but they didn’t last because they expected to sleep with him and when they realised it wasn’t going to happen they bolted. He explained that he would find it difficult to insert in his chat up lines that he was not going to bed with them but that he wished to get to know them first, then, if a mutual love developed they would make plans to get married and form a family.

This statement led to a blanket of silence over the audience. The shock of what he said was too great.

Frances Hogan, a respected biblical scholar and author, was visiting Malta a few years ago and she expressed an opinion that sounded quite extreme at the time. She said that the level of evil in this world is so high that prayer alone could not stop it but that it would need a divine intervention to reverse it. I wonder, is she a modern-day prophet?

We know that goodness and charity will always shine through but the general fabric of society today is so far removed from morality that a new morality is being invented, based on rights and individualism; in other words, selfish ambition.

How useful, for a change, to argue for yourself rather than think of your neighbour, except that it is shortsighted because this attitude will not offer you assistance when you need it. The scramble for individual power is producing just that, a society of individual players. They will only live within the framework of a family or stay in a job if it suits them.

It is something new and will inevitably implode at some point. As I step away from the game of life to observe it, I wait for the crash. It is inevitable.

Already psychologists are predicting a sharp rise in mental sickness in the coming years. With role-models, teachers, parents and government systems that support “individualism”, we are proposing and supporting the new generations into a life of despair.

Let me not end on such a negative note. There are alternatives, if anyone out there wants to hear them. May I suggest the words a prophet said long ago: “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it” (Matt: 16 v 25). The words of Jesus were revolutionary then and remain even more so in this world of 2012.