I came across Charlie Brooker's comments (here) on the riots today amongst the great wealth of articles on the topic. It starts off brightly enough, but I find it just glib by the end. Unfortunately, that's been the media response especially on the left - "they're just a bunch of idiots - nothing to look at here" with some nuance and talk about cuts and fabrics in between. On the right, it's been a lot worse, first with the "CANNONS!" and then with the Starkeys.
I guess I could go into a whole diatribe at this point about how the fact that every talking head has to comment on these things, and how everyone in the media has to dissect (yes, Charlie Brooker, you may think you're just skirting the issue in search of a non-pontificating plateau - a plateau all the same I may add - but you're doing just that, albeit with some humour/facetiousness/glib sarcasm)... but I won't. I think it's actually a good thing to do a little bit of soul-searching.
The problem to me is that all these comments are superficially seeking the middle ground between the right and the left, but the effect is still to divide: I'm not saying there is a middle way, but the truth is, I think both sides have it right to an extent. Perhaps this is an outbreak of multiculturalism gone wrong and welfarism turned on its head; perhaps it's hopelessness through social exclusion and not enough of a grand embracing society. But again, these things can be completely applied to all walks of life, and even to Western culture if someone really is going to be broad enough.
Now, I don't want to be like the sometimes-execrable Thomas Friedman (though not completely in this column), but this all does lead me down the path of thinking that the West is in decline. Not for our economic power, though that is stagnating happily enough, but perhaps the times when we could rip off the developing world for their resources and our own populations for their labour, really are gone, and we can't afford any more to predicate societies on the supposition of growth and excess (I'll write more about this in a future blog post hopefully). I would hope that the idea of Western solidarity will win the day, though the idea of interconnected societies and communities seem so far removed from everyday thinking now that I'm not sure that we can get there.
But then again, was it ever there? Did the European nobility not feel more at ease with their foreign counterparts than with their own farmers? Did this notion of late-19th/early 20th Century of enlightened national democracy really ever exist outside those times? I mean, even the gradual stepping stones toward ever-closer unions in the world means that we all feel closer to one another, worker by worker, banker by banker, merchant by merchant, but over still over borders - though maybe not within society. Now, you could chalk this all up to the fact that it's impossible, but in this day and age of a wealth of information, you will get less ivory-tower knowledge only accessible to the few and therefore you will get some semblance of possible equality.
The great difference between all of the different strands of society that this will throw up is that you might (in the west at least) get a situation where you there will be those that are interested in bettering themselves and those that are not. That will be the only distinction. There will be those that will feel connected to the world and all of its learning and experience and material possibilities, and there will be those that can only see past their own noses. Perhaps this is my conclusion from the riots - the real tragedy is that they could only go and grab that what was right in front of them everyday. They had almost no concept of the fact in the inoppressive state we live in, with enough violence and ambition, they could go and grab John Lobb shoes in St. James' instead of a pair of Nike's they might have to throw away in 6 months; they could go to a great restaurant and make the proprietors cook up great food for them (ok, not the Ledbury), rather than stuff their faces with Haribo from their local shops; they could rob a gallery and try and sell the art to private collectors who are themselves not interested in their provenance; they could even go to parliament and attempt to get something changed with a protest, or a violent coup rather than go up against the local beat. The fact that they stayed within their own borders and communities means that the old adage of the happy ignorant man holds true, even to destruction. Nothing from their loot will have the quality that they could enjoy, because they remain ignorant of its value and of the more valuable they could go after in its stead.
I will probably retract and modify the conclusions in some way, because I fear that I'm being too disparaging to the wonders of mass production, amongst other things. And, to anticipate, this isn't about snobbery and the wonders of the "finer things in life", but about having lasting experiences with things that require you to have knowledge of how they come into this world. If your entire experience of the world is the local representation of that process, then that is self-inflicted ignorance and no amount of violence will remove that passivity of their own thought-process.
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