The Corruption of Moral Sentiment: Revisiting Ill Fares the Land — Part 4

“A man standing in an abandoned parking garage that's filled with graffiti in Detroit” by Andrew Amistad on Unsplash

The next section of Judt’s book is called “Corrupted Sentiments” and is prefaced with a short quotation from Tolstoy about the way humans learn to accept conditions of living if all around them accept them, too. Judt is calling attention to the fact that we’ve gone from a situation where growing equality was seen as a good thing — we lived with this through the period of the social contract until the 70s — to one where:

…thirty years of growing inequality have convinced the English and Americans in particular that this is a natural condition of life about which we can do little. Page 21

It can seem rather backward-looking to keep harping on about the great years between 1942 and 1978 but, unlike the right’s mythical years of national pride and greatness, these were years of moral progress, in which society was becoming fairer and true civil rights were accepted as the norm. Accepted by all but those who felt their privilege entitled them to a bigger share of the financial pie, that is.

Judt’s section title refers to how the human cost of financial decisions have been ignored. It was Adam Smith who most eloquently described how worship of wealth and the wealthy and the disparagement of the poor would lead to what he called “the corruption of our moral sentiments”. This…