By now everyone has heard of the terrible, senseless rioting that has occurred in England over the last several nights. Max Hastings of the Daily Mail
explains why it is happening, in his opinion, and everything he says, down to the last detail, sounds like he's talking about the U.S.
This is a very important essay, exposing as it does the culturally corrosive acid that is modern liberalism. Everything Hastings deplores in his piece is the outworking of the liberal assumption that individuals should be unfettered by any discipline, rules, and consequences for their behavior. It's the result, too, of three generations of the liberal emphasis on the inherent goodness of people, personal autonomy, and a state generated sense of entitlement.
Here's Hastings' conclusion:
A century ago, no child would have dared to use obscene language in class. Today, some use little else. It symbolises their contempt for manners and decency, and is often a foretaste of delinquency.
If a child lacks sufficient respect to address authority figures politely, and faces no penalty for failing to do so, then other forms of abuse — of property and person — come naturally.
So there we have it: a large, amoral, brutalised sub-culture of young British people who lack education because they have no will to learn, and skills which might make them employable. They are too idle to accept work waitressing or doing domestic labour, which is why almost all such jobs are filled by immigrants.
They have no code of values to dissuade them from behaving anti-socially or, indeed, criminally, and small chance of being punished if they do so.
They have no sense of responsibility for themselves, far less towards others, and look to no future beyond the next meal, sexual encounter or TV football game.
They are an absolute deadweight upon society, because they contribute nothing yet cost the taxpayer billions. Liberal opinion holds they are victims, because society has failed to provide them with opportunities to develop their potential.
Most of us would say this is nonsense. Rather, they are victims of a perverted social ethos, which elevates personal freedom to an absolute, and denies the underclass the discipline — tough love — which alone might enable some of its members to escape from the swamp of dependency in which they live.
Only education — together with politicians, judges, policemen and teachers with the courage to force feral humans to obey rules the rest of us have accepted all our lives — can provide a way forward and a way out for these people.
They are products of a culture which gives them so much unconditionally that they are let off learning how to become human beings. My dogs are better behaved and subscribe to a higher code of values than the young rioters of Tottenham, Hackney, Clapham and Birmingham.
Unless or until those who run Britain introduce incentives for decency and impose penalties for bestiality which are today entirely lacking, there will never be a shortage of young rioters and looters such as those of the past four nights, for whom their monstrous excesses were ‘a great fire, man’.
Do read the whole column. It's an eye-opener.
I have one criticism, though. It has to do with the above sentence which says, "Only education — together with politicians, judges, policemen and teachers with the courage to force feral humans to obey rules the rest of us have accepted all our lives — can provide a way forward and a way out for these people."
Those things are all necessary, of course, but what's really at the root of Britain's problems, and ours, is an accelerating secularism. Unless young people can be given a transcendent purpose, grounded in belief in individual responsibility to a personal God, none of the rest will make much of a dent in the problem. Unless society affirms that there is indeed a transcendent purpose and a God who establishes it then it has no compelling answer to the nihilist argument that everything is meaningless and we may as well just burn it all down.
