towards and victimisation of voluntary organisations and personal initiative groups, such as co-ops. The distortion in the extreme collectivist direction has created welfare structures which both shackle and discourage personal endeavour. An alternative approach, based on personal and community responsibility, which encourages a variety of social organisations and associations - including the family - would lead to a less ideological approach. It would lead to a sharing of social burdens and place a premium on active compassion. It would also open possibilities to participate in the shaping of a responsible society in ways which are less anonymous, which stimulate a more imaginative response, which generate open-hearted generosity, and which create more solidarity between the giver and the receiver.
The Personalist Approach - Young People
Beveridge's quotation from the psalms spanned the generations: 'I have been young, and now am old.' Writing in the post First World War period, when so many young Europeans had been slaughtered in the trenches, he surveyed a country whose moral character and physical strength were then being sapped by poverty and want. He said, 'Their effects were felt in the break-up of families, in the waste of education on children too badly fed to learn, in the stifling of chances for the young through unaided struggles to maintain the old, above all in the sense of insecurity which breeds recklessness and bitterness'.4 Today, the challenges are different. Notwithstanding the grain of poverty which runs through our society (see Chapter 5) very few children are too badly fed to be unable to learn. According to a recent advertising agency report, the goals of the younger generation as they become adults will be to have more money and more luxury goods. But, as in Beveridge's day, there is still insecurity and bitterness - especially among many young people. Perhaps it is the naked materialism, inversion of poverty, and the insatiable desire for consumerism, fuelled by advertising, which has created this new insecurity. What kind of Europe are we bequeathing to the coming generations? How can we address the issues that depersonalise and degrade our young people? Some of the statistics in Chapter 4 which relate to young people are very disturbing. Their position has worsened as the assault on the family has increased. They are entitled to a more vigorous and compassionate response.