[Newsbot]

Filibuster Cartoons
Title: Brain riot (click to view)
Date: August 12, 2011

I must admit that my initial reaction to the London riots was one of jealousy. After all, but two months ago, Vancouver experienced a massive riot of our own, and the international attention we received was hardly comparable. It seemed offensive, both to my sensibilities as a Canadian (long the ignored, uninteresting middle child of the western world) and a Vancouverite (the ignored, uninteresting middle child of Canada itself).

Of course, in the days that followed, it quickly became clear that the multi-day British riots, which will soon be celebrating their week-iversary, and the riots that followed our Stanley Cup loss, were actually two very different things. As awful and revealing the riots in my city were, and I certainly had a lot to say about them at the time, the spectacle in England has been infinitely moreso.

What caused the unrest? Officially, the death of Mark Duggan, a black man who was shot to death by English police Saturday night, a tragic incident spawned by (and isn't this always the case?) confusion over how armed he was and what he was planning to do with his weapon. But any hope that the ensuing violence and chaos would conform neatly to some sort of Rodney King-esque symbolic battle between Britain's downtrodden urban blacks and racially-insensitive police establishment were quickly dashed when Britons of all races and backgrounds began to get into the fun. Incriminating photos posted on blogs such as Catch-a-Looter, show a fairly multicultural range of faces, stealing TVs and smashing windows, and even the rich diversity of Britain's class system seems well represented, with college students, teaching assistants, and other middle class suburbanites rubbing shoulders with the inner-city poor.

What's become depressingly clear, therefore, is that these riots aren't really "about" anything per se, in much the same way the Vancouver riots weren't. They're merely an expression of some omnipresent, disgusting side of contemporary youth culture — a culture that views all laws and authority figures, as well as basic social conventions like manners and private property, as illegitimate shackles of oppression. The second those shackles go, and one is free to steal, smash, and screw anything that catches one's eye... well, only then is one truly free.

There's this monstrously repulsive and evil comic on the Internet that is fairly popular in some circles, for shock value, if nothing else. I read an interview with the strip's author a while ago, and I found it quite revealing, since it seemed to summarize a sort of logic I feel is becoming increasingly mainstream amongst members of my generation. Asked why he happily draws scenes of such incredible depravity, the artist described himself as a nihilist, claiming that only by embracing nihilism once can obtain "the ultimate in spiritual freedom." And perhaps that's true, so long as the rest of society, the people who build your homes and cook your meals and program your computers, are willing to believe in all that oppressive crap, and create an entertaining and well-lit world for you to inhabit.

A very good article on the riots by David Goodheart at the Prospect described the violence in England as representing a sort of "post-political disaffection," that doesn't really stem from anywhere deeper than a vague preference for feeling perpetually unhappy and victimized. The entire bothersome business of having to justify one's own destructive acts with a coherent set of ideological principles, or even slogans, is now evidently oppressive, too. Basically, anyone who is not you is simply wrong, and you're no longer obligated to even say why.

How is it that so many young people have wound up like this, so impulsively entertained by vicious violence and so seemingly empowered by the sheer senselessness of it all? Britain's conservative commentariat certainly have no shortage of theories.

Many, such as this woman, have pointed the finger at the decline of traditional families and traditional education, both of which have been systematically undermined in recent decades by new, more progressive and "tolerant" models. Single-parent households, high divorce rates, latch-key parenting, and out-of-wedlock births have all risen massively in both popularity and acceptance in the UK, as passing judgement over someone else's familial background is recast as the worst sort of bigotry. Undisciplined, unruly children may result, true, but at least no one's feelings are hurt.

British history, meanwhile, is now increasingly taught as merely one long slog of oppression. The entire history of human relations is defined through narratives of abuse and victimhood. Whites oppressed non-whites, men oppressed women, Christians oppressed non-Christians. Anyone in power was wicked, anyone out of power was wronged. This is certainly the lens through which I learned the history of my own country, and indeed the entire history of the western world. For many adults my age, I imagine it's seriously difficult to imagine learning of history in any other way. Small wonder, then, that so many of us are willing to continue the fight, and battle the vague spectre of "oppression" in our own pampered lives, having been taught for so long to fear its omnipresence.

Reforms have consequences, and many British conservatives can now sit back and say the dire warnings they've been issuing from the 60's onward have, in fact, been borne out. Permissiveness and non-judgement have, in fact, bred a culture that is more lawless, violent, and gross than the one that came before it. A series of top-down experiments to make the United Kingdom more egalitarian, unstructured, multi-cultural, and post-modern have all been attempted, and if not failed outright, at least yielded some pretty disastrous side-effects.

Prime Minister David Cameron is a man I have an enormous degree of respect for, primarily because he, unlike other conservative leaders in the Anglosphere, has had the courage to identify anti-social behavior and social breakdown as serious problems slowly gnawing away at the very foundations of western civilization. He seems to take the idea of a "society" seriously, and in that respect, may be the best man for the job of fixing the broken one that his government has inherited.

[Pseudonym]

"The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society."
-Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan

You can set up whatever political structure and governing system you want, but unless you have a functional society, it won't matter.

[martin14]

Quote:

There's this monstrously repulsive and evil comic on the Internet that is fairly popular in some circles, for shock value, if nothing else

Link please.



I don't know if Cameron has the strength to take on 40 years of apologies, permissiveness,
left wing PC BS that has made the UK turn into a laughing stock.

Some ideas, yes, but since they involve favoring certain groups, no doubt
they will be denounced by the left on a regular basis, a left that created the
problems in the first place.

[ShepherdsDog]

Britain has been a fairly homogenous society for almost a thousand years. the main differences were in wealth/class and which Church you went to. Now in the last 30 years you've seen it become a multi ethnic and multi religious society.
The differences/contrasts between native Britons and the new British citizenry is quite sharp.

In a sense we had it easier in NA. We began as multi ethnic societies, by European standards so accepting new immigrants wasn't that difficult. It doesn't seem like much to us, accepting Germans, Swedes and eventually Slavs, because for the most part they all resembled each other and in a few generations it was nigh on impossible to tell one group from the other just by looking or listening...everyone spoke English. Each new group was alittle more different from the original British, Dutch and French colonists.

Over time the new immigrants became more exotic in appearance and culture, but they still made the effort to fit in. Even if they didn't look like the majority euros, they still adapted to the culture. It has only been in the past twenty years with a specific culture that we have experienced any true friction.

It sort of makes you think of the story about the frog being put in tepid water, with the temperature being increased slowly, and the frog being put into boiling water.

[CommanderSock]

ShepherdsDog wrote:

Britain has been a fairly homogenous society for almost a thousand years. the main differences were in wealth/class and which Church you went to. Now in the last 30 years you've seen it become a multi ethnic and multi religious society.
The differences/contrasts between native Britons and the new British citizenry is quite sharp.

In a sense we had it easier in NA. We began as multi ethnic societies, by European standards so accepting new immigrants wasn't that difficult. It doesn't seem like much to us, accepting Germans, Swedes and eventually Slavs, because for the most part they all resembled each other and in a few generations it was nigh on impossible to tell one group from the other just by looking or listening...everyone spoke English. Each new group was alittle more different from the original British, Dutch and French colonists.

Over time the new immigrants became more exotic in appearance and culture, but they still made the effort to fit in. Even if they didn't look like the majority euros, they still adapted to the culture. It has only been in the past twenty years with a specific culture that we have experienced any true friction.

It sort of makes you think of the story about the frog being put in tepid water, with the temperature being increased slowly, and the frog being put into boiling water.

in the Americas we've had 'exotic-ness' from day one, before the slavs or swedes ever set foot on the continent. Natives were very exotic to euros, so were the Africans brought in to terraform. Multiculturalism is a failure, but so was whatever preceded it. Life before the 60s wasn't any better for the majority of people.

In addition, before multiculturalism and "pc" culture, there was no shortage of riots and pogroms which were strife with ethnic and religious bigotry. The past 50 years have actually been very peaceful for western civilization in that respect.

We haven't had a Tulsa yet, or anti catholic riots. And when we have riots, they are very low key affairs. Compare London's riots today to the Garden Riots. Even race riots are far tamer today.

Those lamenting for the 'good old days' are suffering from the grass is greener syndrome.

[Canadian_Mind]

Why does everyone mention the swedes when they speak of people we had a hard time getting along with? WTF did the Swedish do?

[Psudo]

Canadian_Mind wrote:

Why does everyone mention the swedes when they speak of people we had a hard time getting along with? WTF did the Swedish do?

It irks us that those dang vikings discovered America before Columbus and have such an overabundance of pretty girls. Dang Swedes.

[Zipperfish]

The thing is every time something like this happens, people try to colour it within the context of their own perceptions and world-views. To the conservatives, it's a breakdown of social mores, as JJ contends. To the liberals, it's a disenfranchised youth or some such thing. Or the police are too lenient. Or they are too tough. It's amazing how one event can support so many opposite viewpoints.

If anything, the Vancouver riots taught me that you don't actually need a reason to have a riot. Just an excuse. People get caught up in the mob mentality, which is basically a bloodlust-lite, similar to what happens when a bunch of chimpanzees runs amok. We're herd animals essentially. I don't think class or culture have all that much to do with it. Of course, like everyone else, I'm just looking at it through my perspective--Darwinian, in my case.

[DrCaleb]

Zipperfish wrote:

If anything, the Vancouver riots taught me that you don't actually need a reason to have a riot. Just an excuse. People get caught up in the mob mentality, which is basically a bloodlust-lite, similar to what happens when a bunch of chimpanzees runs amok. We're herd animals essentially. I don't think class or culture have all that much to do with it. Of course, like everyone else, I'm just looking at it through my perspective--Darwinian, in my case.

I remeber the Canada Day riot in Edmonton. Same shit. A little alcohol to weaken the self control . . . and other people follow 'just because'.

[andyt]

And all those causes aren't mutually exclusive. Evolved behaviors underlie it, and the cultures we create. We have certainly had a change in social mores, not all to the good. (Tho the past wasn't a rosy colored as the conservatives think) Disenfranchisement plays a part. I'm not sure if I posted this article, but it argued that the police need to be just tough enough - too lax is no good, but so is an overreaction. What there isn't is one simple answer.

[raydan]

The bigger the crowd, the lower its IQ.

[BartSimpson]

raydan wrote:

The bigger the crowd, the lower its IQ.

Indeed. Obama drew bigger crowds than anyone else in 2008.

[raydan]

BartSimpson wrote:

raydan wrote:

The bigger the crowd, the lower its IQ.

Indeed. Obama drew bigger crowds than anyone else in 2008.

Population of the United States - 311,968,000
Canada - 34,547,000


...need I say more?

[ShepherdsDog]

This is a common theme for populist parties. The larger the crowd, the simpler the message. It worked well for the Communists who were often preaching to the uneducated masses. The Fascists and Nazis had it a little harder as they were preaching to the middle class.

[Trenacker]

I think that JJ hit the nail right on the head in his original post after the Vancouver Riots. Although the London riots appear to have started with the truly disaffected and disenfranchised, they quickly spiraled out of control because of a superabundance of young people ready and willing to participate.

Young people are typically aggressive, especially during the teenage years. It's one of the reasons that youth bullying is so pervasive. They are also social: bullying is always sociopathic, but a bully who continues the humiliation in private, without an audience, is a sociopath, and those are more rare.

I disagree that young people are especially angry at all forms of oppression, but I think we end up at the same ultimate conclusion if we merely agree that young people are receiving a narrative of self-empowerment and socio-cultural awareness from teachers and society that has unintended fallout. Reinforcing a young person's self-image and advancing his or her self-worth is a worthy and important goal. Teaching that people chose to live differently, and to express themselves in different ways, helps them to make their own choices with greater confidence. Unfortunately, the message is often misunderstood on the receiving end, where it is seen to delegitimize all attempts by anyone, anywhere, to offer correction, no matter how justified, or even tactful. If people may choose to live differently, and nobody can be accused of deviating from a specific "plan," then criticism of "deviant" behavior is really something more pernicious: molding. This attitude is also a highly effective (and sometimes self-defeating) defense mechanism against the outward pressures that rise to crescendo (and become so decisive) during adolescence: to participate, to conform, and, perhaps most significant, to perform.

I also disagree that the rioters do not want jobs, or placement, in the society that they outwardly seem to shun. Just because they are maladapted at present doesn't mean they intend to stay that way in the future. We talk about teen stress as if it occurs only to a relatively sedate set of overachievers. We talk about it as it relates to "helicopter parents." Why don't we talk about it with respect to inner-city youth? Nobody aspires to be a drug dealer or a thug. At some point, it simply seems the best way to get along. It may be glamorous, but that is only by comparison to the prospect of under-employment or unemployment. We can also talk about it with respect to students that are coming along nicely but have not yet secured a future -- with respect to teaching assistants who are at the cusp of professional achievement, but have not yet reached it; with respect to members of the middle and upper classes who have had the necessary foundation laid by others, but are undecided about what to do with their lives.

Would I blame it on culture? Not without caveats. First, we fool ourselves if we believe that contemporary culture is uniquely obsessed with sex or violence. What are the Iliad and the Odyssey but stories about men at the height of their prime (and hubris) who became drunk on women and wine, then completed great deeds to be remembered long after they were gone? The walls of Rome and Pompeii were scrawled with pornographic graffiti. And all one has to do is read C.V. Wedgwood's great introduction to The Thirty Years' War to be reminded that the life of a medieval peasant was variously backbreaking and terrifying: torture, violence, rape, and starvation were pervasive.

Second, while I think it would be silly to believe that individual parenting was substantially more effective in the past, we certainly have grown more wary of the kind of community parenting that was a given in the United States until about the 1980s. Now, nobody is entitled to discipline our children. More important, they must be protected -- from society, from eachother, and from themselves. Nobody may trespass, nobody may judge, nobody may rightfully punish without prior consent from the parent, who has a natural inclination to defend, or at least secure, their child before removing him or her from context and then administering independent correction or punishment. It is a Janus-faced mistake: at the same time that children learn to expect that adults have the answers -- a grand delusion that peaks when they arrive in college and frequently discover unqualified guidance counselors and disinterested professors who are useful only to the self-starting -- they also learn (again) that nobody may presume to hurt or correct them. They pay a price for having to be disabused of both fallacies later in life. In the course of two decades at the end of the twentieth century, we went on a journey. In 1990, when a child stepped off the bus in the United States with a bloody nose, his parent might take him quietly aside and ask, "Do you need to know how to fight?" By 2000, after Columbine, that same parent would board the bus and loudly demand of the driver, "Who let this happen to my child?!" Combined with the lesson that all the choices they make are valuable and right, merely because they are their own, it is a powerful (and dangerous) recipe for excuses.

But JJ had it right that there is at least one new aspect to modern culture that further encourages the teenager's natural impulse to "go out and break something." He doesn't require particular disaffection; only the expectation of fun and the promise of equal parts anonymity and fame. Anonymity, because it provides both the moral justification (violence that be blame "on the mob," or which appears inevitable, and from which others will surely profit even if oneself does not participate, is easier to join) as well as the necessary expectation of going unpunished. The police deterred; in most cases, rioters escaped without incarceration. Better yet, they are depicted on the television and in social media. It is simultaneously a chance to be famous, with seemingly little risk of getting caught. And if they are caught, well, it is hardly their fault: there were so many rioters, and where were the police, anyway, when all that looting was taking place? Besides; they haven't got a chance to share in all the wealth promised to them by their political leaders.