Recommended Reading: The Riots

Anthony Daniels takes David Cameron's 'sick' Britain theme a little further, claiming in the NY Daily News that 'young British people are among the most unpleasant and potentially violent young people in the world' and in The Australian that Britain's 'young population is ugly, aggressive, vicious, badly educated, uncouth and criminally inclined'. 


In an interesting post at the LRB blog James Meek writes about how, when it comes to riots, London differs from Paris and although we live side by side in reality we're miles apart. 

From new grudge break to ancient mutiny

There is something terrible about wanton violence, destruction and ransacking. Most troubling, for the observer, is the ecstasy and alacrity with which it is carried out, that it seems to happen for no reason other than a desire for mayhem and havoc. When the Vandal king Genseric sacked Rome in 455 it was as much about loot as the destruction of Rome as an idea an emblematic act in itself.

After the disturbances of Monday night it would be useful to draw a distinction between the feckless thugs intent on violence and those involved only in the looting. Some will have been involved in both, of course, but others (a majority?) simply sought to capitalise on a moment of mass lawlessness. It is safe to assume that a fair number of the looters broke no other laws that evening. They were not involved in arson, nor did they assault the police. But why were they so eager to join their thuggish peers in looting their own neighbourhoods?

Here are some facts about the looters. They had homes to go, clothes on their backs, and were well (in some cases, abundantly) fed. They have all had the chance to be educated and were raised in a society where, until Monday at least, the closest we came to ransacking shops was the stampede that customarily accompanies the opening of a new outlet of Primark.

We comfort ourselves that we are not fundamentally brutal and egoistic the moment enforced law is suspended. Yet the looters in Clapham, freed of their everyday constraints, were committing crimes that only a fear of the law normally prevents. So Monday's looting remains unexplained, and we are left looking for answers. I doubt if we will find any. 

Our society relies on two types of law. There is the obvious deterent of police on the street, the courts and the prisons. But there is also what Primo Levi, in If This is a Man, called ‘the moral sense which constitutes a self-imposed law’. In an ideal society the former would render the latter redundant. But is it unreasonable to expect, in a semi-civilized society like ours, that it should at least hold sway? I hope the law catches up with the looters and they're forced to confront their misdeeds. It’s too convenient to write it off as herd behavior. We witnessed an anarchic, primal lust for material goods. In a you-are-what-you-have culture, where he who dies with the most toys wins, where the things you possess are thought not only to represent you and display your financial worth but be integral to your identity, should we really be shocked when people seek to obtain illegally things they feel so far from being able to afford?

Whatever the reasons, such a swift and wholesale disintegration of order is deeply concerning. It seems obvious now that London’s simmering gang culture would spill onto the open street; there was going to be a moment when these hardened thugs could no longer satisfy their nihilistic bloodlust by fighting each other, and when you're on tele everyone knows how tough you are. That moment arrived on Monday night. The Met and the rest of us could but watch on in stunned disbelief. It is only our intrinsic sense of right and wrong that prevents us running with the mob. If we have lost Levi's 'self-imposed law' it must be the job of the courts to administer justice until we've found a way of reclaiming it. 

God's Creation blog

Not enough action. Needs more conflict. Maybe put in a whole bunch more people, limit the resources, and see if we can get some fights going. Give them different skin colors so they can tell each other apart.

***SPOILER***

One of them is going to eat something off that tree You told them not to touch.

Read it all here. 

To go on living

I used to be a member of a gym. After a couple of months I couldn’t remember why I’d joined, so I quit. Those hours I spent on the treadmill are lost forever. Unlike team sports, going to the gym has no social dimension. But health bores are everywhere, and their struggle to be healthy has itself assumed unhealthy dimensions. Why are people so obsessed with exercise and healthy living? Mark Edmundson thinks that ‘health and well-being are now simply ends in themselves. We want to go on living in order to go on living, and not for much more.’

Trent Bridge crowd a disgrace

Praise aplenty this morning for the Indian captain MS Dhoni after his decision to allow Bell to be reinstated after tea. But instead of lauding Dhoni we should be lamenting the despicable behaviour of the Trent Bridge crowd, the petulance of Ian Bell, and the questionable conduct of England captain Andrew Strauss.

Unbelievably, when interviewed after the game, Bell seemed to express relief, not that Dhoni had magnanimously allowed him back to the crease but that the Indian captain had come to his senses, claiming "the right decision was made for the spirit of the game". Even allowing for his humiliation, which must have been very great indeed after such an elementary mistake, it was an astonishingly crass thing to say.

The fault for the entire debacle lay with Bell. The ‘spirit of the game’ was only broken if Kumar (the fielder on the boundary) deliberately set out to deceive the batsman by acting as though the ball had crossed the rope. Such a ploy seems inconceivable. Every Indian fielder, Eoin Morgan and both umpires appeared to be aware the ball was still in play. Tea was not called. The fault belongs entirely to Bell. Since when is it part of any sport - ‘spirit of the game’ or not - to automatically enact a reprieve for idiotic mistakes? There is no suggestion the Indian team were involved in a deceit or that they played any part in leading Bell to believe the ball was dead.

The dignified manner in which the Indian players came onto the field after tea amid deafening boos, the faces of the crowd contorted and ugly, made one wonder how England’s players might have reacted in similar circumstances. Would Pietersen have provocatively cupped his ear to the crowd like a football? Either way this much-vaunted ‘spirit of the game’, which appears to me no more than simply being sporting, should be practised by the players and the crowd; the former failed, the latter failed demonstrably. The sheer hypocrisy of a vitriolic crowd booing a team for supposedly having breached an unwritten code of conduct cannot have been lost on the TV audience.

What about Andrew Strauss? Aware of the hostility of the crowd, the Indian team, and Dhoni in particular, would have been feeling vulnerable during tea. We’re full of praise for Dhoni this morning, but the lateness of his decision suggests he was prompted to reach it only after a visit to the Indian dressing room by the England captain. India are a professional team and Dhoni is an experienced captain, why couldn’t we let them reach their own decision? There is something sickeningly condescending about an England captain lecturing the tourists on what is, and what is not, permissible under this gentleman’s code.

As Mike Atherton points out in The Times this morning, the last time the burden of such a tough call fell on the shoulders of an England captain he failed. Guardians of the ‘spirit of the game’? Only when it suits us.

After Dhoni’s act of enforced charity yesterday, England cannot win this Test with their heads held high.