They say that there are a number of signs that you are getting older – police men and women look really young, it is harder to do physical activities that you once did with ease, and the memory is not as good as it used to be. I think there might also be agreement that another sign is that you start to look at the present world with somewhat jaundiced eyes while remembering the world of your youth as a kinder and gentler place than it probably actually was.

So it may be just a sign of aging but I have been seriously wondering lately if the world has not gone a bit mad of late. The question arose because of a series of comments on the world that came at me from a number of different directions around the same time. The starting point was reading Mary Pipher’s book Reviving Ophelia, which looks at what is happening to adolescent girls in our world. Pipher suggests that young women are growing up in an environment that is “limiting their development, truncating their wholeness and leaving many of them traumatised”. This hardly seems like a sane way to look after our young people.

Then there are the side effects of what is called post-modernity. What impacted me most strongly in the world depicted in Zygmunt Bauman’s book  “Post-Modernity and its Discontents” was the nature of the contradictions that people have to live with. For example he talks of how people work hard to create an identity but once they have found one it becomes a liability. People, he says, have to prove that their identity needs no proof.

There is also the madness that we have witnessed in the financial world these past few months that the commentators tell us is the result of greed. Philip Bell in his book “Critical Mass” suggests that in our free market world people make decisions based on “a rational assessment of the opportunities for private gain” i.e. they act out of selfishness. Moreover, he adds “the economic climate today does seem to cultivate, encourage and even compel this kind of behaviour’.

Perhaps the world has always been a bit mad and we are just facing a different set of issues from those that effected previous generations. I am indeed getting older but I am wondering now that while the world is more “crazy making” in the sense of playing games with our sense of reality have we been responding with a proportionate and appropriate degree of anger. Perhaps I should worry less about growing older and more about getting madder – mad enough to be motivated to find better strategies of resistance to the cultural messages that threaten to drive us around the bend and more creative ways to offer the world the better alternative that we believe we find in the gospel.

Fr Pat O'Shea lives at St Columbans Lower Hutt, New Zealand.