‘A life without adventure is likely to be
unsatisfying, but a life in which adventure is allowed to take whatever form it
will is sure to be short.’
Reading Christopher Hitchens’ analysis of the 2011 Riots
brought to mind the work of another fine wise man: Bertrand Russell; to whom
the quotation above is attributable. I shall attempt to nudge the baton between
the two.
Amidst the hysteria on all sides, the Hitch’s
article is uncharacteristically dispassionate. The emergence of gangs is to
blame, he says; inner-city brethren of anarchists, whose allegiances lie with
the pack and not the state or indeed the other packs. Spurious or otherwise,
this naturally poses the question: why are more people joining
gangs?
That this is clearly not the first question
being asked by MPs is incredible. Infuriatingly the Tory’s have chosen to
reinforce and justify accusations of ‘knee-jerk’ and ‘reactionary’ politics by
meeting aggression with aggression: ‘make their lives hell’ I believe is the
threat. From what I can gather this means bring in the Thought Police and
casually tiptoe around any human rights issues. This is half-baked short-termism
and a second best solution.
Bertrand Russell gave the inaugural BBC Reith
Lecture in 1948, titled ‘Authority and the Individual’ (highly recommended
listening). In typically eloquent and amusing style he provides a concise
history of human civilization, in which the pendulum has rocked
between liberty and control; passion and
frugality; autonomy and coercion.
When we traded our prehensile toes for
dexterity and wit, we lost the ability to swing from the trees and hang
upside-down (what shame), but gained the ability to plan and add up (what joy).
We came to appreciate the gains from co-operation within our group and were
hostile to those outside it. Competition within and between tribes led to
leadership and riches (from land and slavery) respectively.
‘Social cohesion, which started with loyalty
to a group reinforced by the fear of enemies, grew by processes partly natural
and partly deliberate until it reached the vast conglomerates that we now know
as nations.’
Russell emphasises the stresses caused by
negating these basic human instincts of competition, and how seemingly virtuous
arrangements will lead nature to ‘take her revenge by producing either
listlessness or destructiveness, either of which may cause a structure imposed
by reason to break down.’
And so it goes. We have breached the upper
bounds of the balance between individualism and collectivism, and the vacuum
left by competition, in infancy adolescence and adulthood, has been filled with
resentment and rage. These feelings have further been exacerbated by envy of
those outside and above this virtue-trap. Russell again:
‘There are those who get it – film stars,
famous athletes, military commanders, and even some few politicians – but they
are a small minority, and the rest are left to day-dreams: day-dreams of the
cinema, day-dreams of wild west adventure stories, purely private day-dreams of
imaginary power. I am not one of those who think day-dreams wholly evil; they
are an essential part of the life of imagination. But when throughout a long
life there is no means of relating them to reality they easily become
unwholesome and even dangerous to sanity.’
By regression then, we have seen the
disenfranchised re-forming ‘tribes’ - returning to the proverbial jungle - in
resistance to this ‘listlessness’. The havoc caused by the Third Way is laid
before us: an unsustainable burgeoning financial sector built with unnaturally
low interest and a mass caught in the net dragged behind – without
responsibility or any notion of it. William Beveridge, who devised the cradle to
grave welfare system himself rejected the cognomen ‘welfare state’ on the basis
that it should never reach this point, but merely serve as a subsistence that no
ordinary person would be content with.
It is inconsistent to blame all inequitable
outcomes on the ‘deliberate’ policies of Margret Thatcher, whilst pointing out
that the subsequent interventionist attempts of New Labour served only to
stretch the gap between the richest and poorest (as John Pilger does in a daft,
if brilliantly written piece here).
And equally fallacious are the bleating calls to draw an indignant parallel
between the looters and expense scandeleers, as if to exonerate the former by an
inconsistency that simply does not exist: the guilty are punished in both cases.
The first-best solution is the one that tackles
the cause. Finally, more delightful wisdom from Berty:
‘IF the unification of mankind is ever to be
realized, it will be necessary to find ways of circumventing our largely
unconscious primitive ferocity, partly by establishing a reign of law, and
partly by finding innocent outlets for our competitive
instincts.’
For a somewhat different take on things click here.
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