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COMMENTARY
August 10, 2011
Tale of two crises
We are spoiled for choice of topics this morning. For, in addition to the usual acute crises, across the Middle East and so forth, the news is filled with two immediate mega-crises. The debt crisis has come home to roost in every Western capital (except Ottawa, for some reason), with accompanying stock market crashes and other indications of economic meltdown.That is definitely a big crisis. Yet it is being challenged for headline space by the riots which began in Tottenham, then spread across London, then urban England. These have already wreaked more destruction than anything to hit that island, since the Luftwaffe in the Second World War. Superficially, these two megacrises have nothing to do with each other. The initial Tottenham riot on the weekend was triggered by a local "issue." A peaceful protest suddenly turned into a race riot, thanks apparently to malicious rumours spread through the social media. Everything happened very quickly after that; whereas the debt crisis has unfolded at a stately pace. Yet both proceed naturally from the normal operations of the Nanny State. They are end products of an historical process in which Western societies have been bureaucratized on a scale unimaginable in the human past. At one end, we have the universal bankruptcy that follows government spending beyond the means of any taxable economy to sustain. And at the other we have recipients of that material and spiritual largesse. We have huge numbers of people who were never under pressure to "get a life," and were consistently excused for dishonourable behaviour. The good news, is that more and more people can see this clearly. The bad news is that there aren't enough of us to make a difference. "Events" alone now determine the way in which the Nanny State comes down, and what will replace it. Blaming people - I have a very long list - is not going to help. The people who advocated the "progressive" policies that led to this general wreckage will not acknowledge the slightest responsibility for it. And they can anyway do nothing: for the option of throwing even more borrowed money at these problems is now gone. But those who say the behaviour of England's rioting "underclass" is incomprehensible, are uncomprehending. Read, for instance, Anthony Daniels, a.k.a. Theodore Dalrymple (pen name), who has been patiently explaining the extraordinary irresponsibility and casual criminality of the British underclass, for decades now, from his direct experience as a prison psychiatrist, and at the tough end of the welfare system. Britain led the West in the expansion of "social democracy" after the last world war. It is where the moral rot from it goes deepest. When I was writing for this paper from England at the end of the last century (it now seems such a long time ago), I said that of all the countries I had ever revisited, England was the one most changed. The England where I had lived in the 1970s still had points of connection with previous Englands. Thanks to postwar socialism, it was largely dysfunctional. But it seemed that it had accumulated enough moral and material capital, over the centuries, to continue declining for another hundred years. I wasn't present through most of the Thatcher period, during which the British economy recovered, almost miraculously. "Markets were freed," but nothing was done to address the moral decay, compounded by massive immigration, and the segregating effects of "multiculturalism." Returning after the Thatcher era, I was struck by the contrast of economic recovery, with continued moral dissolution. London itself, in the sense of the buildings, was still there, but it seemed the people had left, and been replaced by these incredibly wealthy savages, who were also fashionistas and foodies. The stunning change was in public manners. The English had been docile and polite; suddenly it seemed almost everyone - whether native or immigrant - was loud, boorish, pushy, vile. Most striking: people who (from their accents) had come up from the bottom of society, took ritual pleasure in bullying those who (from their more educated accents) had come down from the top. The class system - a powerful organic construction, of centuries - had been dramatically inverted. In following the riots, through many once-familiar neighbourhoods, I think back on this. To my mind, the basic attitudes of the underclass - a hardened, live-fortoday atheism; unconcealed envy and greed; inability to care about the consequences of one's actions; indifference to any kind of social taboo - had tinctured the whole society. Those who flaunted their wealth, and those who intended to loot it, were united in a new kind of social compact, based on the purest materialism. "Free markets" can remove obstacles to the accumulation of wealth. But they cannot replace the glue that holds a society together, after it has been dissolved in the bureaucratic acids of that Nanny State. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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