Charles Murray has written a marvellously trenchant column about the lack of a sense of duty in our times, particularly amongst the financial services elite. I particularly liked this paragraph in favour of the return of a sense of hierarchy in society:

“…[I]t’s time to be honest about hierarchy. Some people end up with great
responsibilities that other people don’t. I don’t want a world in which
the underlings pull their forelocks as their betters sweep by. We
already have plenty of that. People at the top of American society are
fawned upon in ways that might have made Louis XIV blush. What we don’t
have is a corresponding ethic of obligation. The goal of reintroducing
structure in roles is not to make underlings know their place, but to
make overlings know their place.”

Reading Murray led me back, via a parenthesis, to Mark Twain after many (more than 30?) years. Twain worked for a decade and a half to repay debts incurred by his failed publishing firm, although under no legal obligation to do so. He said: “Honor is a harder master than the law.” It is the sense of honour and its fraught relationship with social convention that (amongst other qualities) makes Huckleberry Finn so marvellous a novel.

The meaning of debt – obligation in French, Anglohones note – is something we forgot in the financial frenzy. And not only the crisis but also the mountain of unacknowledged pension debt in aging societies will remind us forcefully about that meaning in the years and decades ahead. In fact, there is a social sustainability issue almost as profound as the question of environmental sustainability, given the multiply poisonous legacies we're leaving for future generations.

Lots of meat here for the relevant chapters of my forthcoming book!