Anyone not yet weary of reading articles that strike some balance between assigning moral responsibility for and exploring the deeper causes of the looting and rioting in England's cities might like to look at this one by Howard Jacobson. It's among the less predictable and better things I've read on the subject.
You can't identify a cause by isolating an effect. Punching someone in the face while making off with a pair of trainers you don't even bother to try on... might not look like an expression of political disaffection, and every looter I've heard speak has spoken gibberish, but the best of us don't always know why we do what we do, just as the most intelligent can't always articulate their frustration. So I'm not buying the "criminality pure and simple" argument. Nothing is "pure and simple", least of all criminality, whose roots have troubled thinkers from the moment mankind began to think. Is Raskolnikov a criminal pure and simple? Is Macbeth? And don't tell me it's different in literature. The whole point of literature is that it makes you see it differently. In literature the imagination goes where morality won't.
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These have been a disgusting few years. That form of looting known as corporate larceny continues to rage unchecked. Economic scavengers bring the world to the brink of ruin. We don't need the discrepancy between rich and poor laid out in percentages, we see the brute fact of it with our own eyes in the shops and on the roads and in the restaurants of our richest cities. One medium-sized banker's bonus would probably pay for all the trash that's been looted this past week. And we don't even have the decency to conceal the extent of this legalised pillage from those for whom, without sentimentalising them, a pair of trainers is a treat...If the above sounds like wishy-washy liberalism to those who think that what's condemned is miraculously solved, let's add this: liberalism today lies in ruins, not only because it has indulged the cultural bilge that has given the looters their baseless sense of entitlement... but because it has failed, in its sanctimoniousness, to understand the necessary role illiberalism – guidelines, example, authority, boundaries – plays in the governing of society. It should never have happened that parents, teachers, and the police themselves, go in terror of the young, or in terror of the consequence of reining in their wildness. For the young's sake it should never have happened, never mind for ours. But the consequence is they are disinherited and we live in fear. In a society that is afraid to punish because it is afraid to judge, that does not understand the outrage of being offended against, that cannot feel the egregiousness of a crime, and that no longer even gestures at justice, it's no wonder there are people wildly calling for the return of capital punishment.
I have a pedantic quibble with something here, but one I'll allow room for all the same. Howard identifies 'guidelines, example, authority, boundaries... in the governing of society' with illiberalism. Fair enough - he's using the term as a quick and convenient antithesis for a meaning of liberalism that wants always to soften or dodge the idea of personal responsibility. But we should not so easily concede the meaning of the word 'liberalism' to those who treat it as merely a platform for excusing wrong-doing. Authentic liberalism as a political tradition is not, and never has been, the same as absence of all authority, as either lawlessness or anarchism or, for that matter, the Marxian vision of a stateless society. Liberalism centres on, among other things, the notion of the rule of law, and on the restraints of civil order as a necessary curb upon the less pleasant impulses of always-imperfect human beings. Against the background of this tradition, there is nothing illiberal about holding people answerable for their conduct, even when there are underlying social causes for it. (Via.)
