Ideas@TheCentre
Stick it to ‘em
Fuelled by nights of drinking and looting, two teenage girls tweeted enthusiastically about the London riots being ‘a bit of fun & sticking it to those “rich” small business owners.’
They probably didn’t know the name of the young black man shot in Tottenham, whose death supposedly sparked the initial outbreak of violence. Nor did they appear concerned about looming public expenditure cuts.
A number of major English cities are now in lockdown after four nights of anarchy. But the protests are not anger at fat-cat salaries or rampant capitalism.
Rather they are a symptom of the spiritual and moral rupture of English society. The protests are criminal, not political.
The Anglican Bishop of London, Dr Richard Chartres, thought the riots were not ‘wholly unexpected.’ If he meant that the violent scenes were foreseeable, he was correct.
A segment of English society is broken. Lacking any moral compass, the perpetrators of this violence have no awareness of the values and duties essential for the health of a civil society.
A culture of welfare dependency has corrupted the values of social and economic productivity. Family dysfunction and breakdown has stripped away the virtues of stable and responsible relationships. The law’s preference for the rights of the perpetrator over those of the victim has corrupted the dignity of justice.
A key principle of civil society is that there are necessary constraints on individual freedom – both legal and self imposed.
Yet for a generation, society – the police, the judiciary, human rights lawyers, social workers, teachers, and politicians – has been complicit in rolling back those constraints.
Distaste for imposing any measure of compulsion or responsibility on a generation of young people, be it in the home, the classroom, or in any public space, has bred contempt for manners and decency.
The result is the emergence of a culture of absolute individual entitlement and narcissistic self-centeredness that is susceptible neither to guilt nor shame.
All informal institutions of civil society – the family, the place of worship, the surf club – have both a duty and a capacity to instill the manners and decency we expect of our citizens.
The primacy of individual entitlement has perverted civil society. And this perversion was foreseeable.
The Reverend Peter Kurti is a Visiting Fellow with the Religion and the Free Society Program at The Centre for Independent Studies.
