Last thoughts on the riots

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.

Riot links

I thought I'd at least share a few things that I've maybe cross-posted elsewhere.

Social worker on the riots
Police officer on the riots
Interesting take by a former Croydonite
Don't particularly agree, but worth a read also
More on why this is the end of England as we know it...
Guardian weighs in with who did what and why
And the FT - I like this guy's humanist touch

...and one to say it's the same as it ever was

London riots

Haven't really been compelled to write anything in a while, but the riots in London have given me pause to think about what's going on.

I think the points have been made that the riots are really an expression of disenchantment manifested through material gain, which is of course the wrong action to take. However, all day, while wanting to castigate the perpetrators of the actions more and more for destroying my beloved London and in meaningless carnage, I've wanted to find ways to think of why they're somehow justified. It leads me to think that the problem is really societal - in the same way that a trader is rewarded for finding a dumb client to take his worthless stocks and CDS off his books; the same way that a real estate developer will develop a building by cutting corners that means he's only building a house for the next 20 and not 100 years; in the same way that an actor will get his agent to negotiate a fee on a film which means that the supporting cast will be of a lesser calibre... it's all a product of a culture of our civilisation in which individual rapaciousness is somehow justifiable by the company that person keeps: I'm sure all of the above examples could quote a bunch of friends/enemies/colleagues/shareholders/rival companies who would do the same thing flashes/blinks/flaps in unthinking/automatic logic. And it's this that justifies it. And then you get one or two who do corroborate that kind of cynicism, and it makes it ok. In a sense, this is what true competition is, and thus, meritocrats find that kind of thinking appealing, because only with true competition do you get growth.

I beg to differ.

The problem for me is that this kind of thing was never intended as good capitalism, and it's not justifiable for a democratic society. It bands together all things that were always seen as evil - avarice, envy, covetousness, etc. because those are always the momentary impulses that we all have to suppress if we really want to not just think of others, but think of for ourselves in the long run. But when you glorify the institute of short term gains and you put it under the heading of decision-making, then you really do get a society which becomes very self-interested.

I don't mean to conflate too many things together, but I really think that unless we start looking to an ethos where people are rewarded for more for long-term projects, which have to win out over periods of time, then there will be no great social effect. Short-termism destroys more potential than it unlocks, and in the case of the riots, it shows how much passing opportunism is a terrible thing to try and base a measure of success on.

Just to make it clear, I'm not saying that this is the typical mode of people that work in professions as I quoted, and that's also not to discount all of the people on the street as opportunists (some are legitimate protesters, others are just common idiots), but what I mean is that as a society, we haven't really explained it to ourselves the kind of fallacy behind that sort of thinking. It is not taught in our schools (where short-termism has won the war over longform expression in any case), it's not carried by our media (which is increasingly interested in the sounbite narrative of adversarial contests), it's not espoused by any kinds of leaders (where we hail those primarily who came from nothing to great power) and least of all it doesn't find it's expression in art (where the succinct expression of a simple idea, beat, joke, point is the pinnacle of artistic endeavour). With odds like these, and no possibility of weaving everything together to form a rational context, no wonder nihilism seems like a pretty viable way out.

Song 24

Straight outta the Mighty Boosh.

YELLE - Safari Disco Club / Que veux-tu (exclusive full length edit) from Yelle on Vimeo.

Song 23

Just saw this. From the best band around.

Song 22

Only caught up with this now. Great track.

Song 21

Song 20

Crap budget video, great song.


Broken Bells - The Ghost Inside OFFICIAL VIDEO (Protein Exclusive) from Protein® on Vimeo.

Midterms

I for one am quite glad that the US is returning to normalcy and a split house and more equally-divided senate. It will make for less hysterical politics, I hope.

Still, the thing that continually annoys me is how ideologically non-sensical the two parties are. It's become about identity politics, but as such, it's become the worst kind - representing the kinds of hypocrises that usually colour one's outlook, but this time trying to pretend that that identity actually means something. The American voter is confused, and it is largely to do with the fact that the old terms of what is left and what is right are completely redundant. In this sense, I can completely see why the Tea Party is so amorphous and cannot be truly representative of a world-view as such - it is tradition-based in as much as it harks back to a less complicated era where the government couldn't encroach on your life because it was fundamentally your client (and not the other way around as it is now), but also where corporations couldn't act institutionally because their profits were the result of actual hard work and ingenuity that was seemingly tangible and understandable.

Everything has changed though - from morality that needn't be prescribed to morality that should be defended as a bare minimum, to economics that should still be formulated in common sense values. I mean, who cares about human rights when they're overblown to cover someone with an idiotic position; who should care abut aggregate supply and demand when they don't correspond to the reality of a balanced family budget?

From this confusion comes a mix of things that don't make sense - conservatives, posing as libertarians, posing as moralists, telling people that government should keep out of their lives; liberals, posing as socialists, telling people that they'd like to see efficient markets so that the corporations have less sway over their lives.

Seriously, it's at times like these that you do want to just scream: I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more! but then you realise that we're in an age when protest is redundant, when security is all-encompassing and where your rights are a pure function of the morality of others. Back in the das when those slogans were dreamt up, they meant something. Now, ideology has the stench of unknowable dogma and thus all current dogma is interchangeable - "Want more government? Vote for me?/ Want less government? Vote for me two years later!" The stupidity of it all is that no-one is actually going after the things that matter, which you really have to hand it to the Tea Party for noticing, in part.

I mean, Barack Obama is a great President of the United States. He really is, given his circumstances. However, he needs to stop playing the confused game of right and left politics, because neither make sense any more.