Caring is not all its cracked up to be

Sometimes, conspicuous compassion does real damage. The retired anthropologist Roger Sandall shows how well-meaning efforts to promote Aboriginal "identity" and "cultural awareness" in schools have increased indigenous illiteracy in English. This renders young Aboriginal people almost unemployable and condemns them to a life of poverty, ensuring another generation of victims for the rest of us to feel sorry about.

Why do we so desperately want to show we care? It is a symptom of what the psychologist Oliver James has dubbed our "low serotonin" society. Despite being healthier, richer and better-off than in living memory, we in the West are more depressed than ever. Institutions such as the church, marriage and the family have withered in the postwar era. Raised in fragmented family units, more of us live by ourselves. Ostentatious caring permits the lonely nation to forge new social bonds. As James concludes: "A common impulse behind wanting to give love unconditionally to non-intimates is the desire to receive it."

From the review of patrick wests book published by CIS december 2005