A stitch in time saves 99, and it is clear to me, at least, that much of what our late and great 21st century societies lack is the capacity to express authority in an appropriate and timely manner.
That’s a shame. We’ve lost the skill for it, the practice, the nuance, the ability to put a well-timed stitch in place for the sake of making for a greater, better society.
We have lost the old-fashioned colonial notion of society-building. Now, it’s every individual for themselves — and this ideology is reinforced again and again, as the only rational and truly moral ideology.
Yet a stitch in time saves… at least nine, was a much more effective practice, in every way engendering respect for the sense of a fair and rational society, of which we were a part. If this practice of colonial white society had been extended further and wider to include more of the non-white individuals who lived in the general geographical area, a stitch in time would have saved 999 999!
In any case, the practice of an inclusive moral approach directed towards building a unifying sense of culture, was effective practice at the girls’ school I attended. The female teachers there were all effective moral arbiters, able to produce solutions to almost any disruption of order, in a way which gave a sense that we were not only respectable participants in the society, but that we were also growing in moral wisdom by having our disputes thus arbitrated.
But that sense of enjoyment and participation in even the more negative aspects of life has been lost, perhaps for all time, by the current modes of practice in society — which are geared more towards a punitive approach.
When as an individual, you really have a moral problem, in most cases I have found, you are expected to deal with it alone — without the benefit of good advice, support, wisdom or indeed, a sense of being included in society even in the very process of working through a difficult problem. Rather, you are isolated in your quandary, effectively quarantined by the processes of dealing with your own uncertainties, until you have resolved your issues somewhat, and then may re-enter the company of other slow-breathing, carefully plodding and non-disruptive individuals. Only at this point of resolution are you considered to be truly participating in “society”.
Whereas in the past if someone was causing me a lot of trouble, either on the home front, or in the workplace, I would have been able to engage the support of some older woman who was in good standing in the community, now there are few such women with any moral authority of their own. At best there are individuals with institutional authority, which is limited, mechanistic and quite crude. There are no upstanding folk who would — because they could — gently go behind the scenes to have a quiet word with the offending patriarch. Such an old-fashioned approach, which would have been used in the past, would have had the effect of consolidating a standard for what is acceptable as normal behaviour within a particular context. it would have acted like the proverbial stitch in time which saves nine.
These days, however, the culprit doesn’t get to know that what he was doing was wrong until somebody takes the case on by extracting vigilante justice. And yet the culprit himself probably didn’t intend to be an asshole or a destructive menace — he was acting out without restraint in a society which refused to discipline him. Half of him was actually waiting, anticipating reprimand, so that he could be sure that he was being included in society, as a moral individual. Yet, being an authoritarian through and through, he wouldn’t listen nor be restrained by the threats and counter-actions of a low status individual.
He would only have listened to a woman whom he thought already had social authority.
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