What is wrong with us as a country?

We don’t realise how rich we are!

I tend to be quite careful about expressing political views online or in public. As a church pastor, my job is to help people unite around Jesus. There are a few obvious issues (matters of life and death, honesty in public life, freedom of religion and speech) which are broadly held by Christians across a spectrum of political parties. But weighing up correct tax or health policy would be unhelpful in my role.

So my aim in these reflections is not to push a particular party political line but to try and step back a bit and ask what is wrong with our culture, what might we be blind to. So here is the first attempt at this “stepping back”. We are going wrong as a country because we don’t realise how rich we are!

That might seem an odd thing to say after a cost of living crisis, when some people have struggled with household finance, and our public sector is struggling to meet needs. But stepping back and looking at a historical and world perspective, we in the UK today are incredibly wealthy. The poorest family in the UK has education and healthcare, and some sort of roof over their heads, and one way or another enough food not to starve. What we consider the bare minimum in the UK is what the middle classes of much of the world strive to achieve! Typical families live in houses which are warmer and more luxurious than medieval nobility. We have food abundance and variety that would exceed the even Royalty of the 18^th century, and would have been incredible even to middle class families 70 years ago. For most of history, the vast majority of the population was at risk of starving to death during a bad famine! And that is to say nothing of the ravages of disease, the lack of education for the poor, and the constant threat from bandits or invading armies.  

So why is it a problem that we don’t realise how rich we are?

1) Ungrateful. From a Christian viewpoint, all the good things in this world are meant to lead us to thankfulness for the ultimate source of good things, God himself. From a psychological viewpoint, thankfulness for good things helps us to appreciate what we have instead of being envious and grumbling about what we don’t have. But because we think of ourselves as poor (perhaps compared to peers or the older generation or people in the public eye), we do not express gratitude for the wealth we live with. We think that what we have is less than we are entitled to, and so are miserable. If we understood how rich we are, most people in the UK would be cheerfully thankful!

2) Judgmental. Because we do not realise how much wealthier we are than most people through history, we tend to judge people in the past harshly. Because we do not realise how much poorer they were, we do not realise how much worse their options were, and how sacrificial making the right choice was. 19^th century people refusing sugar because it was made by slave labour didn’t have a lot of affordable treats in their lives. They sacrificed in order to do what was right. I fear that much of our supposed virtue as a society is only sustained by our wealth. If we were as poor as most people have been, I fear we should find our virtue evaporating. In the meantime, an appreciation of our relative wealth should make us less judgmental of those facing difficult choices we don’t have to make.

3) Careless. Because we don’t consider ourselves unusually wealthy but rather impoverished, we don’t consider our society something to be carefully preserved. We are careless about wealth production and preservation, because we do not realise that the normal state of humanity is far poorer than our current situation. The free-market position is often careless of the cultural and social capital and infrastructure that enables a wealthy society, while the large-state position is often careless of the incentives and freedoms that enable innovation and competition to generate wealth. Realising that we are privileged to live in an unusually wealthy society would make us more careful stewards of the social and economic conditions that sustain wealth creation.

What do you think? Is not realising how rich we are part of our cultural problem in the UK at the moment?