Jakob Augstein, a columnist for Spiegel Online, thinks the recent riots have foreshadowed for us the possible shape of disaster to come.
Now [he writes] we can picture the form of our tragedy - all we have to do is watch it on YouTube. The images of the London riots are a preview of our future. Malaysian student Asyraf Haziq sits bleeding on the ground as a man approaches to help him up, only to then help three others plunder the contents of the defenseless man's rucksack, leaving him alone on the street.
This is rock bottom for humanity.
Steady on. Not quite rock bottom, surely. I say this (a) in the light of the fact that the disturbances were brought under control in what, in the large, must be considered a rather short time; and (b) in the light of historical comparisons showing that there are very much deeper rock bottoms than this one was. But do I take Augstein too literally? The incident, he perhaps means, gives an inkling of - symbolizes - deeply rotten human impulses that, left unrestrained, can quickly lead to much worse inhumanities. And it contains the potentiality of a more widespread social breakdown that could overwhelm us if we do not heed the warnings. Perhaps. It's a matter of interpretation, and I leave it to readers to assess for themselves the balance of emphasis in the piece as a whole. For me, what Augstein says matches David Cameron's 'moral collapse' and goes beyond it some:
The riots in London have done to the West's social self-image what Fukushima did to the concept of nuclear energy. It was a super maximum credible accident - the imagined, but never expected catastrophe. A moral meltdown.
Meltdown, catastrophe - and not just for this country, but for the self-image of the West as a whole.
A calmer view would be that, troubling as the images of lawlessness were, they should not have been altogether surprising. In general, it is wise not to overestimate the strength of civilized restraints. More particularly, if people feel they have no stake in something, they're more likely to trash the place and take what they can get when they can, than if they do feel they have a stake in it. This is not a 'root causes' attempt to excuse or condone the recent violence - an attempt of the sort I despise. Everything has causes; including, for example, wealthy people acting to further their own interests in gross, uncaring, unprincipled and sometimes law-breaking ways. The habit of citing background causes (only) when one wants to draw attention away from the bad choices made by those who could have chosen better and differently is an infestation of political debate. No, I do not excuse anything of what was recently done in the way of lawlessness. But there is reason to think, all the same, there might be less of this in a society less scarred than ours is by the polarities of wealth and social deprivation.
On the other hand, while this should be a matter of concern for all democrats and for the guardians of public order, there is also nothing for the left, dedicated as it is to opposing unjust inequalities, to be complacent about. For the looters and burners are symptomatic not only of an alienation from society at large but also of the failure of any alternative social vision, any politics of reforming hope, to capture their interest and their energies. A pressing question for us on the left is why, if the signs of social injustice, of self-serving greed and whatever else one cares to name of this ilk, are so blatant, no large competing perspective has been able to make its way among the disaffected or to mobilize their efforts towards something more positive than looting and rioting. Those leftists who spend their days spinning apology for this sort of thing (and for worse) might like to think about how they could contribute instead to forming a more appealing vision of ways to challenge the extremes of capitalist inequality, and social injustice more generally. It would be a better use of their time.