Losing faith
I made the mistake of watching the news the other night and it made me wonder if we have anything resembling upstanding individuals in positions of responsibility any more.
Have our leaders fallen so far from grace that we no longer trust any of them? Are heroes now the mainstay of movies, novels and comic books? It might seem an odd question but we seem to have more villains in the public eye and so few heroes standing up to them.
This doesn’t appear to be something new, we have had a long list of positions of responsibility that have fallen from greatness to positions of mistrust and disdain. Let’s start with our political leaders, who always seem to get the most interest as they seem to be the ones with the least amount of self restraint where their own self serving interests are concerned. Here in the UK we have Boris Johnson, who between accusations of corruption, breaking parliamentary codes of conduct to have his flat furnished to his personal preference, cronyism amongst his inner circle where lucrative contracts are passed to their friends rather than by public tender, the list goes on and on. At what point did this become acceptable and when will our so called bastions of truth, the media, hold them accountable? I fear our bastions of truth have also succumbed to the greed and corruption which seems to have gripped our political leaders. So if no one asks the questions, are our leaders no longer made accountable?
Do we have any basic institutions that have been kept clear of such falls from grace?
Our religious institutions certainly haven’t, abuse and corruption seem a little too closely associated with many of them, especially considering they are meant to be associated with the purity of humanity and spirit. That is not to say all are corrupt, just that divine inspiration seems to struggle against the wishes and wants of human beings.
Our historical institutions are also mired in numerous issues, our standards of what are acceptable behaviours have changed over the last few hundred years and whilst taking archaeological treasures from sovereign countries is now viewed as being irresponsible I do not recall many museums returning such treasures to their rightful owners. That’s before we move onto the worrisome concerns regarding our teaching of history - we have not reviewed the histories we teach even though we know that many historical curriculums are riddled with inaccuracies based on what we know today.
Sporting institutions have also come under much scrutiny, the widespread doping scandals in competitive and lucrative sports, corruption with the football association, the drive for ever larger profits within the top earning football clubs and the so called “super league”. I am not even going to start on cycling! All of this undermines our true sporting heroes, those who believe in the ethos of fair play and competition. In the face unfair competition, these true heroes should be recognised for their steadfast adherence to their ethical values.
Environmental standards are also approaching more and more of a critical point, viewpoints of our role in the planets demise versus our negligent abuse of the environmental and at risk species is not the clean cut discussion it should be. We have a generation being brought up to believe that human beings are destroying the planet through our actions upon climate change. How we have gotten here I find articulately galling as it demonstrates our inability to resist a “quick fix”. We have two paths converging that are not as related as we are lead to believe. The earth goes through cycles or warmaking and cooling over several hundred years, geologists have tracked this and have known about it since the 1990s when it was first published. We are exactly on track with this cycle and as our CO2 levels climb, the global temperatures will start to fall. This has gone on for thousands of years and has not been impacted by our activities following the data we have to this point. My main environmental concerns are around our willingness to pollute the air we breath, the water we fish in and the land we live on - this impacts not only ourselves but many other species and will result not in the end of the world, but a loss in diversity and beauty within it. I suspect the temptation to link this to rising global temperatures to try and use fear to drive changes in behaviour was too hard to resist. Where has it taken us? To a point where we are discussing the accuracy of global warming models and not focussing on our increasing level of pollution. The global warming argument has done more harm than good to highlighting our pollution levels globally.
What about science I hear you ask? Well, the list of corporate actions that have undermined our scientific endeavours goes on - from chemical engineering to manufacturing. Faith in large pharmaceutical firms received a massive uptick over the last 2 years with the emergence of Covid and the vaccines to combat it, has this faith been well founded and will it be maintained are two areas I look forward to seeing play out. We made a huge leap forward with gene therapies and gene delivery systems with our RNA and DNA vaccines, both untested on the global stage. Will we have faith in our own science to accept the observations of side effects and be willing to account for them in any future advances? That will be down to our ability to stay the course - transparency will be key to the acceptance of our actions and our learnings under such testing times, if we are seen to cover things up we will lose that faith. We rarely get things right first time, it takes courage to admit that and to demonstrate improvements going forwards.
So what are we left with? Do we have any long standing institutions that have kept to the moral causes and have remained heroes in the public eye? I am happy to hear about the ones that have….
