I have watched bemused as we seem to have become less and less caring for, or even aware of the suffering of, the most vulnerable in our society. This is not to say that there are not hundreds of thousands of people who carry out acts of kindness for a variety of people in trouble day by day. Nor is it to say that we are bad people, or uncaring – although we may be insensitive to the needs of others, incompetent, or somehow unaware in other ways. Nor is it to argue, as religious leaders have often done and as respondents to the JRF consultation have asserted, that we have become selfish – although that too may be partially true.

I believe that something else is going on, a complex pattern of interactions of ideas, events, zeitgeist, and personal human attitudes that has somehow allowed us to reach this position.

The idea that we have an obligation to society beyond the demands we ourselves wish to make of it is becoming unfashionable. Utilitarianism – the greatest happiness (or welfare or benefit) for the greatest number – is a philosophy now held in severe disrepute.

Individual endeavour is adulated, as is personal autonomy. Utilitarianism might deter the huge efforts, for huge gains, of the talented entrepreneur. Thus society looks less at the welfare of the whole, and more at the welfare of the individual. And the intervention of the state is seen as less than desirable, and often less than benevolent to boot.

And yet, more than 50% of adults in England and Wales volunteer at least once a month1. People clearly do get out of bed to help others. They want to make a difference. All the polling shows that people want “to improve things or help people”, or that they feel that “the cause (is) important”.

Nor is it necessarily only older people who volunteer, despite popular preconceptions of volunteers being old ladies who sort clothes in charity shops. Indeed, it is impossible to measure the ‘informal’ volunteering that goes on within communities, except that we know it to be significant, and possibly to be in decline since 2001.

This was shown in Helping Out and in evidence presented to the Commission on the Future of Volunteering in 2008, arguing that informal volunteering was not taken seriously.

So why does the accusation of selfishness in society stick? Two reasons: one of the main motivations in much volunteering is to give the volunteer a reason to get up in the morning – more for themselves than necessarily for the people who need help, although that does not mean volunteering is not valuable.

Secondly, those who are genuinely altruistic, or who simply want to help make a difference because they cannot bear looking at their community as it is, often find it extremely hard to lend a hand. And that is because we have become seriously risk averse – fearful as a nation, scared of terrorists, child molesters and violence on the street – and as a result we make it harder and harder to help those who need our aid, and we become more and more withdrawn into ourselves.

It is hard for ordinary people to give a leg up to someone less fortunate, to help the kid in care or the granny whose life is getting tough. As a result of scandals surrounding some of our institutions and carers, such as children’s homes, schools and foster homes, we do not allow ordinary people to visit other than in a structured way.

Therefore there is no sense of the local community just ‘passing through’. The clearest example of this is our obsession, not wholly misplaced, with sexual predators on young people. That has made it necessary for anyone who works with children or vulnerable adults to be checked by the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB).

Until recently, this meant that a child in the care of foster parents could not spend a night at a friend’s house unless the friend’s parents were themselves prepared to undergo CRB checks too. Yet what children in care need more than anything else is to have ordinary friends and to live ordinary lives.

The need for teachers in schools or volunteer helpers with reading or similar to be checked for their past record also means that those who might be willing to be mentors and friends to young kids on an occasional basis – like a sort of rent-a-granny scheme – have to be CRB checked too.

In itself this is no bad thing, but the fact that we have become so stringent in our requirements about checks on those who work or have any relationship with children has perverse consequences.

First, children themselves are encouraged to be suspicious of adults in a way that may be quite unhealthy, both for themselves and for society as a whole. Second, those who are inclined to look after a child or young person who is distressed – who is, for instance, lost or being attacked by older children – will be very nervous of getting involved. An example of this is the tragic case of Abigail Rae, a two-year-old child who drowned in a pond after she escaped from her nursery school in Warwickshire.

The inquest into her death heard that Clive Peachy, a bricklayer, had passed by the toddler as she wandered down a road alone, but failed to stop and help her because he was afraid that people would think he was trying to abduct her. Suspicion of what their motives might be has forced some people, particularly men, to restrain themselves from showing ordinary common decency.

Yet many of our most troubled young people – although by no means all – have no regular male role model in their households and need to know what being an ordinary, stable, feeling, understanding man is all about.

When more than 11.3 million people will be on a child protection database by 2009 when the new Independent Safeguarding Authority comes into force, and volunteer school bus drivers and parents who host school exchanges will soon be subject to CRB checks, the question arises, as Professor Frank Furedi has put it so well, of whether the fears of attacks on children are themselves being stoked by a “stealthily expanding” growth in child protection measures.

But our fear of sexual predators on our children is by no means wholly unfounded. In recent years we have lived through the Soham murders, through a series of scandals surrounding children’s homes and special schools, through the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, and through the ever more bizarre story of Shannon Matthews.

The Roman Catholic Church is still reeling from revelations about attacks on young children by priests as well as stories of violence and abuse by priests and nuns in Catholic-run children’s homes, about which senior church members knew and did nothing. Or, worse, they simply moved the offending priests or nuns on, and did nothing to protect the children or to heal their wounds.

Yet with all that, such a level of protection as we have instituted will make children unable to trust anyone. Those accused of any attack on children will be run out of town and are therefore likely to go underground. And those who want to help children whose own families may be the worst abusers, by far the majority, or children whom circumstances have let down in a big way through parental death or family breakdown, are deterred by the bureaucracy that they have to deal with.

It is as if we are trying to create a risk-free society, which we know in our heads and our hearts is impossible. The result is that we restrict and regulate, hoping to make abuse impossible, while knowing we cannot. And, that way, we deter the willing and the kind.

Community breakdown

Our attitude to older people can best be described by our willingness to accept a high level of neglect and abuse of older people, despite knowing that it goes on. We would not tolerate it for younger people. Yet, curiously, we fail to be truly shocked when older people die in hospital in Kent because the circumstances of infection with clostridium difficile were so pervasive, and patients were being told to “go in the sheets” rather than helped to the commode or the loo4.

We live in a society which has tolerated older people suffering from malnutrition in hospitals, tolerated lack of pain control in care homes, and accepted inadequate payments for older residents in care homes and the poor quality food and care that flows from that. And we have tolerated a society that has seen the disappearance of public loos, park benches and park keepers, all essential if older people are to feel comfortable and safe going out of the house.

Related to this is a lack of clarity about who is responsible for whom – a result of what many respondents to the JRF consultation describe as family breakdown’, but which is in fact a mixture of straightforward family breakdown and a change from lifelong relationships to shorter, but faithful, marriages and partnerships (loosely this can be described as serial marriage/monogamy).

As a result, it has become less clear who is responsible for whom in terms of caring for elderly or disabled relatives. Are you, for instance, responsible for your ex-mother-in-law? Then we are also increasingly unclear as to who our ‘neighbours’ are. Our attitudes to community and outsiders have shifted. We still have a certain amount of suspicion of ‘outsiders’, though many people relish the diversity of our cities.

There is also a growing body of opinion that feels our policies towards asylum seekers are plain cruel, and that if we cannot sort out our immigration and appeals system it is hardly fair to blame those who are trying to come here, even if some are ‘economic migrants’ rather than true refugees.

For, at one and the same time, individualism became paramount; the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher stated that there was no such thing as society12; and consumerism hit new heights and the consumer, rather than the citizen, was king. That was the very period when the obsession with looking inwards grew in intensity, combined with a political and philosophical view that the individual should control what happened to him or her.

All these factors combined led to a distaste for looking at the welfare of society as a whole. For we are individuals now. We demand things. We go for the personal. We understand our own needs. We look inside ourselves, and we access information on the internet. We know what we want and we will demand it.

The idea that we might not each of us be able to have what we believe we want and need is anathema to us. We have become demanders, not citizens – people who look to ourselves rather than to the whole society. It was always thus, to some extent. The tendency is not new; it has just acquired far greater weight. But the words so often uttered until just a few years ago, particularly by elderly people, that ‘I have had my turn, it’s someone else’s now’, are becoming rare.

We see no need to moderate our demands or say that we have had our share. Though we may feel that the doctors have done enough for us in the way of interventions and we want no more, it is no longer about what we regard as our fair share. Instead it is about when we feel, as individuals with autonomy, that we have had enough.

Trust is both political and ethical. In a society where voting figures go down and down, and where trust in politicians is at an all-time low, reassessing what we provide for the most disadvantaged, including the oldest in society, is difficult to do. What we have is a failure of trust combined with an aversion to risk: those who work in our services do not trust the politicians not to blame them when things go wrong.

What we have is a society that thinks politicians lie when they promise things for all of us, including the most disadvantaged. Improvement in education? Show me. More higher education?Where is it, and why have I got to pay for it? And so on. Yet trust is essential if we are to value our services. And risk aversion makes for poor services, where no one will do what seems natural and kind in case they get accused of behaving improperly or riskily. They do not feel they are trusted to do the right thing.

Indeed, trust is ‘blowing in the wind’, and a trusting society will be hard to claw back. Politicians are, often unfairly, regarded as only out for their own ends, not ours. But if we want a society where people feel that fairness is part of the ethos, we need to be seen to be involved with our politicians and thinking about our society. We cannot just let it go, and then complain. And if we are too individualistic, then we will suffer.

Our happiness, as Richard Layard has argued so cogently13, will suffer, and so will our sense of belonging. When David Cameron argued that “we know we have a shared responsibility; that we’re all in this together, that there is such a thing as society – it’s just not the same as the state” (leadership election campaign, September 2005), he was reflecting back on his predecessor Lady Thatcher’s famous comment.

But he was also saying something important. We are all interrelated, but the state may not be able to put all the ills of our society right. The result of this is that everyone will have to make more of a contribution to righting the wrongs of society. Altruism will need to be fashionable again, and helping others, for whatever reason, will need to be a part of our daily lives.