Steel Yourself to be Ungenerous

(Seriously, when I Googled 'benevolence' this was one of the first images that came up. The implication is a bit cynical even for me).

The COVID crisis is bringing many fascinating illustrations of how human beings think and function. One of them shines light on responses to government decision-making. I’ve got into several conversations about whether it’s appropriate or not to criticise the government for its actions, and as I find it hard to understand why we shouldn’t, I think about why people might say that.

Interestingly the crisis isn’t essentially ideological. If you always believed the Tories were evil, you’ll carry on framing the question in terms of their evil motivations, but whether decisions were or weren’t taken at particular moments is a more practical than ideological matter. That means we’re challenged to set aside what we might have thought before, because those patterns of thinking aren’t relevant.

It strikes me that if you have a self-critical personality, you will find it very hard to criticise anyone else. You may feel deeply that you have no right at all to be critical of other people, and instead you put the best possible interpretation on their actions. This is not necessarily bad, and certainly within some spiritual traditions, Christianity not least, we’re encouraged not to think about the failings of others. But what’s happening now challenges those instincts to the core. Faced with the brutal clarity of the situation, that governmental decisions have an obvious effect on how many thousands of people die, nice, kind, generous-minded people are forced to do what they resist doing and make a judgement. For such individuals, doing that is really cognitively painful, and the alternative is to resort to versions of ‘we all make mistakes’, suggesting that the judgement should not be made, and that anyone who does is cruel and harsh.

Self-critical people often have to learn that self-assertiveness – defending yourself and those you are responsible for against failure and harmful decision-making – is not the same as being rude and nasty. You are merely deciding that someone didn’t do effectively the job they said they would do, and were perhaps contracted to do. In democracies, governments have not only, in an election, been contracted to do a certain job, but they’ve argued and demanded to do it, and fought others for the right to. To bear that in mind isn’t unkind or unreasonable, certainly not when the consequences of decisions are so severe. It’s a matter of self-defence.