Riot and wrong
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Dramatic examples of lawlessness, such as the recent London riots, make everyone feel uneasy.
It is overblown to say that the nights of criminality have amounted to insurrection, but for the people living on the affected streets – the owners of the cars, the keepers of the shops, the civilians looking despairingly on at the wholesale destruction of their environment – the riots will have unsettled their sense that they can rely on calm, dreary, day-to-day safety and the rule of law.
Among the scenes of destruction I am reminded of William Golding’s novel about lawlessness, Lord Of The Flies, in which a group of boys slowly descend into savagery without an authority above them:
“Roger gathered a handful of stones and began to throw them. Yet there was a space round Henry, perhaps six yards in diameter, into which he dare not throw. Here, invisible yet strong, was the taboo of the old life. Round the squatting child was the protection of parents and school and policemen and the law. Roger’s arm was conditioned by a civilization that knew nothing of him and was in ruins.”
There is something both banal and horrifying about the sight of a furniture warehouse set deliberately ablaze. The reality of crime is nothing new: the newspapers routinely remind us in graphic detail of the depravity that can result from a certain mix of environment and character, and we have become almost inoculated against shock by the portrayal of violence, both real and imagined, in these days of 24-hour media.
What is not so familiar is the nagging concern that we are on the verge of being overwhelmed by these incidents; that our police forces and political leaders are standing on the shore of a mysterious sea of masked criminals to whom such taboos are alien. In the calls for curfews, water cannon and soldiers on the streets, there is a tone approaching panic.
When the reports are written, I am willing to bet that one conclusion on the escalation of these crimes over the days they have persisted will be the erosion of the strength of the law in the eyes of those involved. A lack of fear contributed to the repetition, growth, and geographical spread of these crimes. Whether you believe that laws are handed down backed by what is effectively the threat of state power, or that they are rules around which we have formed a consensus, the wide-scale breaching of laws approaches an existential challenge.
I have heard people publicly express enthusiasm for joining in the rioting, as if it were a party. Their fearlessness stems from a simple, awful logic – the less adherence there is to the law, the weaker the law becomes in practice.
The illegal downloading of pirated content is the starkest example of this phenomenon. If you are one of 10,000 people seeding and leeching Harry Potter across the internet your risk of sanction is minimal, and the notion of the law is embarrassed. If all over London people are looting shops, the risk to you in looting a shop seems diminished. The more rioters, the more stretched the police. The more crimes, the more stretched the prosecuting authority. There must come a tipping point at which the connection between the actions of these people and the sanctions society applies fails under the pressure. We are not near this point yet, but you don’t have to go far to see and hear examples of panic. We should all be reminded by these riots that without power, organization and authority the law is merely a taboo.
Rupert Myers is a barrister at East Anglian Chambers
Readers' comments (4)
Stuart Robb | 11-Aug-2011 9:00 pm
Other stark examples include expenses fraud in Parliament for which few MPs were prosecuted and fewer still had to pay all the money back, bankers who bring the country to the brink of collapse and still get multi-million pound bonuses, police who get cash in brown envelopes from newspapers for disclosing information.
If our leaders and the richest in our society are not setting the right example, it is hardly surprising that the underclass are going to think they can get away with it too.
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Anonymous | 12-Aug-2011 9:37 am
Mr Myers, unless I have misunderstood your conclusion, you appear to believe that more ‘power, organisation and authority’ are called for to preserve civilised society, but these things have hardly deteriorated over the years. Instead society is already perceived to have become considerably more authoritarian. It is the taboo element that is rapidly being lost. Golding had it right in pointing to the power of taboo. We must recognise that it would not be practically possible to keep law and order by force alone. In the lawless limit we would need to have one policeman for every non-policeman in society.
The solution is to abandon the experiment in social engineering known as Moral Relativism. Nobody seems actively to advocate Moral Relativism but somehow or other we have got it in full measure nevertheless and we must rid ourselves of it completely. We must return to ‘old-fashioned’ schooling without delay and we must teach old-fashioned values and, although it is a highly reactionary notion, we know with absolute certainty that it worked before because we did it and equally confidently we can assert that Moral Relativism does not work because we have the clear evidence before us.
A society with a very high population density cannot operate without some conditioning of its constituent individuals. If this conditioning is deemed tantamount to brain washing, then so be it. The taboo element to behaviour must be recovered, strengthened, applied and maintained.
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rupert myers | 12-Aug-2011 10:53 am
you raise a good point, and I agree that this is a problem, hence: Criminals to whom 'such taboos are alien.' Thanks for the comment!
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Tim Bradshaw | 12-Aug-2011 1:49 pm
Has this robber looting Fest at last compelled a major and open debate about the moral underpinnings of society? Or will the establishment illiberal 'liberalism' manage to stop it? The BBC is not announced any major set piece debates, eg Janet Daley vs Evan Davies, or Peter Hitchens vs Andrew Marr, or Melanie Philips vs Harriet Harman/Theresa May.
For lawyers, I would have thought Human Rights, that set of abstract laws disconnected from any actual society and its institutions needed to enforce such rights often for those working against such institutions, would be a hot issue in Jurisprudence? But no: the lawyers, like the bankers, are equally in it for the money and bling!
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