I’M IN my local supermarket, in the domestic products aisle where a woman next to me is throwing three nine-packs of Andrex Toilet Tissue Quilts into her basket with the ardency of a thief.

My hackles, although I’m not entirely sure what they are, most certainly go up. Why are you buying up all this loo roll? Do you run a B&B in which guests begin their day with prunes? 

There is no shortage. Are you a moron?  Worse. Are you a greedy, selfish moron?

I look around the supermarket shelves at the spaces where product was once bountiful. The biggest space, it seems to me, is the Morality shelve. 

Here we are facing a pandemic in Covid-19, a scourge of Biblical proportions and Scots shoppers have turned into pale-faced locusts, devouring hand sanitiser, tinned vegetables, dried pasta and long-life milk. Waitrose are even having to limit the sale of wipes. 

Right now, comedian Susan Calman features in a banking ad in which she pays for a bloke’s coffee out of sheer niceness. But does the ad laugh in the face of the reality?

Scots mythology has suggested we’re a kind, compassionate nation, that takes our turn of the stairs, takes off to fight the Spanish civil war and looks after our elderly neighbours.

Nicola Sturgeon once declared angrily, in a southerly direction, at an SNP conference in Aberdeen, “Your morality is not our morality” aiming her ire at the Conservative Party, (voted for by England) yet implying Scotland to be a more moral nation.

However, if this were once the case recent events suggest we now live in a very different moral world.  And what if we go into lockdown? Will we behave like the tens of thousands of northern Italians who when faced with quarantine fled south faster than cowboys during the California gold rush? 

What’s happened that we’ve turned into a character in the 1959 film paean to selfishness,  I’m All Right Jack? 

Jonathan Sack’s new book Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times offers explanation.  “This moral sense that we ought to make life better for others has been starved of oxygen for a while.” 

Sacks says we moved from a ‘we’ society into an ‘I’ society in three waves. “One was the Sixties social revolution which turned ‘morality’ into whatever works for you.

“Then came the Eighties Reaganomics or Thatcherism, reflected in the film Wall Street as ‘Greed Is Good.’  Then along came the financial crash (of 2008).”

We should also consider lost morality to have come about through the collapse of institutions that instilled selflessness, a sense of community. We’re in a post-religious era; church leaders are missing from our lives, as are Scouts and Guides and youth club leaders.

Meanwhile, social media is facilitating trolling, slut shaming, gaslighting and cancelling. 

And if our moral compass is wonky, what hope do we have when confronted by the might of Covid-19?

Anthropologist and cognitive scientist Samuel Veissière wrote of the danger in an article for Psychology Today; ‘How COVID19 is infecting our minds, not our lungs'. “By exploiting vulnerabilities in human psychology selectively bred by its pathogen ancestors, it has already shut down many of our schools, crashed our stock market, increased social conflict and xenophobia, reshuffled our migration patterns, and is working to contain us in homogenous spaces where it can keep spreading.”

Veissiere describes the rush to stock up on household items such as toilet paper, rice and hand sanitiser as “epidemic hoarding”. 

But what of those who are clearing the shelves? Perhaps people are simply protecting their family;  ‘My children’s bums come first’.

Well, the short-sighted selfishness may be understandable, but it’s not excusable. And what excuse does nasal-voiced singer James Blunt have for buying up, as his wife discovered, 18 tins of tuna from his local shop?

Broadcaster Andrew Marr said we will be able to judge the temperature of the ‘we’ versus the ‘I’ society  moral levels soon by how many people are prepared to self-isolate, or not stockpile food.. 

Jonathan Sacks meanwhile believes we are still a moral nation, “but in a smaller canvas, with colleagues and friends.”  And Britain no longer has a strong sense of ‘we’, the people. 

That’s tragic. Aristotle maintained we learn moral virtue through habit and practice. Well, we’re clearly losing the habit. And we need to practice more, to highlight irrationality and absurdity.  We need to ask questions of why anyone needs to buy up Calpol or Andrex Quilted by the box load. 

We need to remember pandemics go beyond politics. What we all have in common is we’re human. Let’s remember what that’s supposed to entail.