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.
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