Alexander McCall Smith, due to speak in Sydney on the theme 'Society is Broken', is writing in today's edition of The Age about the condition of Britain in the wake of the recent riots. We shouldn't have been surprised at what happened, he thinks, since the social and cultural causes of a broken society have become clear. As to the social causes McCall Smith speaks of the destruction of the family and of children brought up 'in chaotic households where there is no consistent authority'. He says more than this about the cultural causes, and it is the cultural causes that my own comments will focus on.
McCall Smith writes:
We don't know what we believe in and are busy bringing up children who share our confusion. The result is that we have massive numbers of people who are dishonest, indifferent to casual violence or aggression, and devoid of respect or consideration for others.
He alludes to studies showing indulgent attitudes to theft, fraud and cheating; and he ascribes this whole lamentable situation to an 'espousal of moral pluralism' - the idea that there is no right or wrong in general. Schools can no longer teach values, there being no shared values to teach. In addition, we are surrounded by a popular culture that 'celebrates dysfunction, violence and anti-social behaviour' and 'is selfish and aggressive... has no interest in improving the extent to which concern for others, old-fashioned good manners, or any of the traditional virtues, including honesty, are actively stressed and propagated'. It is, as you can see, a most unhappy state of affairs.
McCall Smith concludes by saying we 'must try to assert values', must 'decide again to believe in something and begin to teach those values'.
The first question I would raise is whether it is really moral pluralism that has made it impossible, or difficult, to teach the sort of values that he is emphasizing here. I doubt it. Honesty, respect, civility, non-violence, may not be universally shared values but I would have thought that some variant of them is fairly common across enough major cultures that they could continue to be taught even while allowing to moral pluralism such truth as it possesses. Yet it might be the case that, though they could still be taught, there has been an insufficient effort in teaching them for some time now, so leaving McCall Smith's worry intact.
My second point is more fundamental. Teaching the virtue of honesty and teaching against its corresponding wrongs - dishonesty, cheating, fraud, theft etc - may be more effective in some social environments than in others. Not to beat about the bush: people may be more sensitive to appeals to honesty and suchlike if they think they're part of a wider collectivity that is itself organized and run along fair and honest lines than if they don't think so; than if they think there's something deeply fraudulent about the claims made on its behalf to being fair.
How many people today believe that societies as unequal as ours are comprehensively or even approximately fair? I don't know the answer, but my hypothesis would be: few. Even the defences of capitalist societies as they now are, made by their supporters, tend to centre on the absence of feasible alternatives to it. But fairness? The prinicipal arguments to this effect are all but threadbare. 'Fair equality of opportunity' is not a feasible ideal in a society with hugely unequal resource holdings. 'To each the fruits of their labour' is an argument which trades on (a) the notion that what the fruits of a person's labour are is an unambiguous datum, and (b) the presumption that the extent of said fruits can be adjudicated independently of the institutional context in which each 'labourer' puts out his or her effort. Both (a) and (b) are open to the simplest of challenges.
My own hunch - and it is no more than a hunch - is that honesty and its cognates may be harder to teach in a social context where the justifications for the acceptability of poverty alongside gross wealth are less and less convincing to more and more people.
Lest this be taken for a root-causes-style apologia for looting, setting fire to people's shops and homes, and the like, I had better make clear why it isn't. I am just as unsympathetic to the looters-not-criminals-but-alienated-dears school of thought as I am to the terrorists-not-murderers-but-poor-diddumses ('aggrieved', 'radicalized', 'driven to', etc) school. There is no acceptable morality - or sociology for that matter - which makes it OK to take the injustices, or putative injustices, of the world out on randomly selected others, by wronging them; and this applies as much to injustices that are systemic as it does to those deliberately inflicted.
The values McCall Smith alludes to do need to be insisted on and taught. But the real patterns and relationships of life may make this easier or harder to do.