I don't feel like being articulate about this, but I've just read this news story. I honestly have no words to express what this kind of thing makes me feel. Let me say then, a few things that I'm not. I'm not impressed by the bullies in this incident. I'm not at all inclined to feel sympathetic towards them or rush to their defence. I'm not apologetic about seeing them as ignorant scum who should be sterilised. I'm not inclined, either, to view them as an isolated minority, but rather to view them as the cold, evil heart of British culture. Britain, which brought the world industry, mass-production and generally laid the groundwork for the cynical, materialistic consumerism that makes the world go round today. Britain which has produced young people who have nothing to believe in any more and no soul left, only a sneering, murderous, snobbish, shallow hatred of all otherness and a very mistaken belief in their own cleverness and betterness.
(PS. I was right again about Southpark being boring by attacking Goths, wasn't I? People should listen to me more often.)
I sympathise with your feelings of disgust and revulsion. It is difficult to actually describe what “British Culture” now is. We know of our history. We know of a culture that gave us “Morris dancing”, clogs, sea shanties, working class solidarity, feudalism, democracy (after the Greeks we were, though it might be a moot point if you are from Iceland, the next nation to introduce a form of democracy, though it has evolved in an arcane manner (no written constitution, no Bill of Rights). But our culture today is…. nebulous to the extent that we cannot be blamed if we look bewildered and say “just what sort of a peoples are we?” We must adopt a ‘cautious’ approach when it comes down to the sort of ‘yard stick’ that may be proffered, when reading (time and time again) about the horror that you have mentioned (I went to the link), because back in the 60s I remember older members of the public, of the ‘establishment’ angrily growling and snapping as they damned all marches by students as “typical of the decline of british culture”. Let me quickly say that I am NOT making comparisons with those – then – students and their so called ‘anti-social’ behaviour and the thugs that are mentioned in the article. But I am saying that to confuse these thugs with ALL ‘british culture’ by implying they are a significant part of that ‘nebulous’ culture is, I suggest, not on the main point. The central point, I believe, is “standards of behaviour” and the lack, or perceived lack of control and the perceived lack of example (it usually, but not inevitably, flows from the parents, the home environment) and also the perceived lack of punishment to fit the crime. But it would be better, would it not, to have the threat of a real punishment made powerful and outstanding BEFORE such crimes are committed. I am not a social worker. I am not a magistrate. I am not a politician. But I am an observer and of an age now where I can glance back and admit that there were thugs back in the 60s but I have to also admit that now there are many many more and, in general, standards of courtesy in society towards one another other are blurred or nonexistent and behaviour among certain sad and twisted and evil sections of our society (I don’t says “culture” because it is now too vague a term) is so bad that we are in danger of a spread-of-ideas that anything can be done without much retribution being invoked in a manner that will deter further crime. I may be wrong in some of my conclusions, some of my notions, but I am certain that thugs are an endemic ‘life form’, whatever ‘culture’ they live in. I do not damn and curse everyone in the British Isles for the behaviour of the evil examples that we learn about (and perhaps witness, at first hand) but I certainly understand your feelings and I cannot blame you for holding the views that you now express. It seems to be the way you describe and your reasons are rational (providing that you don’t scream when you expound them).
Q, Please read all of my post again. I gain the impression you infer I have not condemned these thugs (but perhaps I misread your response and something is lost in translation?).Perhaps your end conclusion is ‘oversimplified (?) but none of what I say means that I disagree with your conclusion.
“The nail that sticks up will be hammered down”.
Hello Lokutus. Thank you for your lengthy comment.”I am not a social worker. I am not a magistrate. I am not a politician.”Luckily for some people, nor am I.It’s funny with so much horrible stuff going on in the world how some things will affect you more than others. I’ve just found myself with so much anger after reading this article, that I’ve had to go for a walk to try and walk it off.I’m not sure I can really articulate my feelings well at the moment. I’m not a believer in capital punishment. I am a believer in a form of dealing with crime that is more about improving society on the whole rather than just ‘getting revenge’ on the criminal. I loathe violence, but I feel violent impulses myself. I’m reminded of a little speech made by the Michael Palin character in the series GBH. He’s giving a lecture to some thugs. It’s almost like a fantasy situation where you finally get this scum together in a room with some boys bigger than they are to knock their heads together if they don’t listen to the lecture. And he says, “I hate violence. I hate it so much that if I see it, I have to join in.” Now, the ways that I join in have so far – apart from some incidents at school – have been limited to metaphorical or psychic. However, I recognise myself, still, as part of this British culture, that is full of anger and hatred. I also recognise myself, thankfully, as part of something else, which seems to have a mitigating effect on this so far, like a kind of safety valve. I blame British culture simply because I feel I have been able to view it through foreign eyes since I was small. I have never been part of the usual signifiers of British society, never felt attached to the working class, or the middle class, never been Protestant or Catholic, never felt that the pub was my second home etcetera, and so I still seem to have the capacity to be shocked, in the way a foreigner is, at what seem like incidental parts of British culture and to link them to other parts of the culture.If I mention culture, therefore, it’s because as well as feeling shock and righteous anger, I also feel there should be a collective sense of responsibility for the way our culture is. And this is really and truly a difficult one to face. As someone quite removed from the incident, I find myself thinking that the bullies should be, as I said, sterilised, which is a slightly more polite way of saying castrated, of course. This got me to thinking about A Clockwork Orange. The therapy developed in that story to prevent criminal behaviour could be thought of as a kind of mental or emotional castration. Of course, there is some suggestion in the novel that this treatment is morally wrong, that you cannot treat humans like ‘a clockwork orange’. Now, if I remember correctly, the character in the story who writes this does himself become a victim of Alex and his Droogs. How does he react? If I recall, it’s with hatred. Should his hatred, then, be castrated? Should mine? Even in the slight softening of my reaction from ‘castrated’ to ‘sterilised’, I have shown how I have used the same instinct against their violence on myself, against my own inner violence. I’m not sure really where I’m going with this except to try and demonstrate what a tricky subject it is. As I said, I’m somewhat removed from the incident. Someone who is closer, the mother of the girl who has murdered, said the following:”Sophie was a thoughtful, sensitive individual and she would not have wanted her death to have been in vain.”I hope, therefore, that as a society we can use what has happened to reflect on where we are going and what changes we need to make to prevent others suffering in this way.”Now, thankfully I don’t have anything to do with the murderers in question, but I’ve grown up in Britain and I know this kind of person. I know well enough that in the wrong places in this country you can get beaten to death for wearing the wrong clothes, and I’ve been careful. Do you think it’s natural or normal to be beaten to death for wearing the wrong clothes? If that’s endemic, then it shouldn’t be. And I don’t think it is endemic. I think it is particularly Anglo-Saxon. Or Celtic, if you like, since apparently the British are all genetically bascially Celtic, anyway, as much as I’m sure the Welsh and Scots would like to think the English are genetically different. I’m getting off track… I was going to say that I’m sure many people would say these boys just need to be loved. If you think that, you try loving them. I don’t think you’ll find it that easy. Maybe this is part of the conservative streak in me. Michel Houellebecq, writing about H.P. Lovecraft, said that writers of horror are almost professionally aware of evil. I have been known to write horror. I notice that I find I have an urge to point out evil in the world, too, and the word ‘evil’ seems to pop up on this blog quite a lot. That’s not something I am going to try and quell, but it’s something for me to be aware of. It may not even be a bad thing. Well, I’m not only a writer of horror and not am I completely unaware of problems with the very concept of evil. Nonetheless, inasfar as I am aware of evil, I sense it especially in the British psyche, and especially in people such as those involved in this murder, who are not poor (I’m willing to bet that they don’t know how rich they are), who are not starving, but who are… EVIL. Believe me, I’ve sensed that presence enough in the various streets I’ve trodden in this country. I know exactly what it smells like. Evil to me is something perverse, something unnatural. So, I suppose, for now at least, what I feel like I’m saying is, I don’t think these individuals should be let off the hook, just because they’re young, and just because no one wants to sound like an old fogey talking about thugs and so on (incidentally, one of Michel Houellebecq’s characters in The Possibility of an Island has some excellent rants about young people, calling teenagers the most voracious and sheep-like of all consumers, and saying that they should all be forced into prostitution because at least then they’d be of some service to society). If you really want to avoid the appearance of being a worrying old fart, perhaps you can simply sigh understandingly and echo the sentiments at the end of A Clockwork Orange concerning ‘the ultraviolence’: It’s just a phase.However, if I now pull the camera back from my zoom in on the violence of the individual thugs, and ask about society and culture and come to the necessary question of why they do it, apart from being too thick and too lacking in imagination to use their energy creatively, I would say that they committed this murder, though they probably don’t know it, because our government, and we, dropped bombs on innocent people in Iraq. Please join the dots together yourself. Not just that, of course, but because our society as a whole is so lacking in values and substance, and is so ready to support its greed and its emptiness by violence, that they really have no other role models than thugs like Blair.
I will answer these comments. Thank you. Don’t worry, I’m an easygoing type. Honest. I’ve just got caught up in watching GBH from the link I posted. I’d forgotten how flippin brilliant it is. And then I shall have dinner and such. But I shall return.
I wait with trepidation – but I’m taking tablets for that.
I’ve just woken from a dream. In the dream, for some reason, I was being sent back to my hometown, a failure, and it seemed to me that the song Dispoable Heroes by Metallica was the story of my life:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87J1gQkz71o&feature=related“You will do what I say when I sayBack to the frontYou will die when I sayYou must dieBack to the front.”Etc.I arrived at my hometown and saw that everyone had been brainwashed by subliminal broadcasts. There was someone I knew from childhood about some weird errand by a house with barred windows. I tried to talk to him, but he could not hear. I walked along to my old house and saw that all the trees had been chopped down and their stumps covered with ridiculous, ugly decorations. I got to where my old house was, and I wanted to post a letter. I climbed over the barrier that had been erected and saw that the post office had been closed down. People in uniform were beginning to crowd round. I climbed, with some difficulty, back over the barrier. A middle-aged lady called me over for a cup of tea, and I spent the rest of the dream just weeping and weeping until I woke up just now.”Perhaps your end conclusion is ‘oversimplified (?) but none of what I say means that I disagree with your conclusion.”I don’t particularly disagree with what you say, either. I’ve never pretended to know everything, or even anything, so I only ever say how things appear to me. It does appear to me that this is a very British problem and that we should reflect on the most fundamental values of our society. I don’t see the same kind of problem in Japan, for example, or in Taiwan (places I have actually spent some time). I can’t say with much authority that this kind of thing doesn’t exist at all in other countries, but it seems to belong mainly to west and northern Europe, to the same kind of peoples who cut off the hands of the natives of the Americas when they had greeted them on the beaches with gifts of flowers and fruit, and who turned that paradise into hell. Europeans are not the only humans or the only animals who have ever been aggressive – we just seem to carry the most virulent strain of that virus. After posting that link to GBH last night, I was struck by how resonant it still is. The details of British politics have changed, but the feeling of ‘Britain’ seems to be pretty similar – a sick nation. It also seems powerfully prophetic to me, in showing the complexity of the the kind of power intrigues by which supposedly ‘good’ politicians, and specifically Labour, becomes corrupt. The Michael Murray character exemplifies one kind of the evil in Britain I was talking about. In the drama, at least this is mitigated by the complexity of his character, by flashbacks to childhood experiences, by a smattering of good intentions and so on. But the evil of Britain has seldom been given a more resonant screen presence than that of the “professional agitator” and thug Peter Grenville, played by Andrew Schofield.Bleasdale, the writer, of course, is very much a socialist and very concerned with trying to sort out what is real socialism from what is extremism or fascism masquerading as socialism. I wonder what he makes of Britain now, where evil has become so much more insidious, so much more tangled up. As I said, I’m not a politician. There’s a bit early in the first episode of the series where Michael Murray is trying to get a teacher transferred to an undesirable position as part of a personal vendetta, and the person he is asking to do this resigns in protest. Michael Murray makes a snide suggestion that he and the teacher are both “part of that funny-handshake business”. To which Mr Hunningdon (that’s his name) replies:”No, no, Mr Murray, I think Mr Weller and I are part of that funny decency and freedom business, and on all sides it appears to be going out of business.”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22Au0b8gjM8&feature=relatedThat was first screened in 1991. We’ve come a long way since then, and it’s a Labour government who’ve done their best to make sure that decency and freedom business has been forced to its knees.”The nail that sticks up will be hammered down”.This seems to link together with a number of things I’ve mentioned on this blog recently, such as the conformity of both Britain and Japan, and also the notion that what is generally called political conservativism is natural. I might come back to this.
Q,You “cherry picked” from my first length reply and omitted the contextual lines that followed. Here they are. I am not a social worker. I am not a magistrate. I am not a politician. But I am an observer and of an age now where I can glance back and admit that there were thugs back in the 60s but I have to also admit that now there are many many more and, in general, standards of courtesy in society towards one another other are blurred or nonexistent and behaviour among certain sad and twisted and evil sections of our society (I don’t says “culture” because it is now too vague a term) is so bad that we are in danger of a spread-of-ideas that anything can be done without much retribution being invoked in a manner that will deter further crime. I had also cast ‘doubt’ on the usage of the description ‘British culture’, and I implied it to be a nebulous term. The correspondent, called “Peter”, went even further than I had. I think he has used a concise and more (better) definitive statement.
Peter A Leonard writes:
Recently Bernard Hogan-Howe, chief constable of Merseyside police, made a much publicized statement regarding mandatory sentencing for illegal possession of firearms. I appreciate he may be a man in search of a pension with his own high profile murder case still unresolved, but in making this statement (basically an attack on the Judges, bless ‘em) he said: “ there will always be gangs and criminals”. Such a statement highlights a problem existing in the UK (and the US), but demonstrates that current methods of criminal rehabilitation and even the policing of our society, is fatally flawed!Bernard Hogan-Howe is more or less telling us there’ll always be gangs, there’s no cure so lock ‘em away – we don’t know what else to do with them. We’ve lost the battle, if not the war. The barbarians are at the gates, but we will continue to use the methods and practices that have continuously failed us in the past – but even more so! A long prison sentence will deter people from carrying a gun, won’t it?Well, taking evidence from the States where the three strikes rule exists and is used (yes, folks a life sentence…not a namby-pamby five years) gun crime rates are much higher than in the UK. We even see that imposition of the death penalty fails to deter. In fact in talking about “a deterrent” when it comes to the commission of a crime, we are making the assumption that a criminal is utilitarian in the weighing of costs and benefits, that he/she is rational and will be deterred by sanction, and will be aware of and thinking about the known punishments while in the commission of the offence, whatever it may be.I’m afraid I can only say cobblers to all that.Taking “gun crime” as an example, as a society our main concern I’d guess is the use of firearms in a homicide. But murder already carries a life sentence in the UK, so why worry about a mandatory five years for possession of the firearm? Sure I can see it’d have a lot of populist appeal, and make good headlines for somebody. But there in may be the root of the problem. Everything is about window dressing.There were 49 deaths from firearms in the UK last year, a decline from 55 in 2006. During 2007 we had Tony Blair claiming the spate of knife and gun murders in London was not being “caused by poverty, but a distinctive black culture”. His remarks angered community leaders, who accused him of ignorance and failing to provide support for black-led efforts to tackle the problem.” Blair said people had to drop their political correctness and recognize that the violence would not be stopped “by pretending it is not young black kids doing it”. Well, the good news is the Home Office has already announced it is looking at the possibility of banning membership of gangs. WOW! That’ll work, won’t it!At least Blair acknowledged “Economic inequality is a factor and we should deal with that, but I don’t think it’s the thing that is producing the most violent expression of this social alienation. I think that is to do with the fact that particular youngsters are being brought up in a setting that has no rules, no discipline, no proper framework around them.” He went on to suggest some people working with children knew at the age of five whether they were going to be in “real trouble” later.The most interesting comment he did make, though, is this: “We need to stop thinking of this as a society that has gone wrong – it has not – but of specific groups that for specific reasons have gone outside of the proper lines of respect and good conduct towards others and need by specific measures to be brought back into the fold.”While I think Blair a monster, I do find his comment above persuasive. This was followed up by the Times in December last year with an article suggesting that of the 47 killings in London between April and September 2007, the majority of the accused (55%) were non-British, or migrants (in a further 23 murders, the article suggested, the nationality of the killer/s was unknown). So deep-rooted cultural differences were involving in the Times sampling, for example, “honour killings” and revenge murders stemming from Albanian village rivalries, with the accused persons coming from Peru, China, Albania, Romania, Lithuania, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh.The article went on to mention that “Hertfordshire police had to investigate a murder linked to an Albanian clan feud, and in Cambridgeshire a Lithuanian man was burnt alive. The case was suspected to involve rivalries originating in his homeland. Polish citizens have been killed this year in Leeds, London, St Helens and Wrexham,” the article suggested. It then listed a number of murders involving Albanians, Lithuanians and Pakistani perpetrators in various other locations within the UK. From the above I’d suggest talk of a “British Culture” is erroneous – thus any argument suggesting it exists as an entity in its own right is fundamentally flawed. The culture here today is fragmented, consisting of various ethnic and religious groupings, each with its own traditions and rules of behavior (or lack of same), its own arts and moral code – this in turn is superimposed onto the rotting canvass of an indigenous culture, which itself displays substantial regional variations. I do agree that violence begets violence. Our society tends towards violence – a reflection perhaps of the violence nationally we perpetrate on others? (which comes first, the horse or the cart?) Our society is also highly materialistic – the pursuit of “wealth” to the exception of all else is “unhealthy”. It is this materialism, I’d suggest, that has eroded most other “values” and helped create a society where there are areas without rules, or disciple, or a proper social framework.“Binge drinking”, proclaimed a recent newspaper headline, “is a national disgrace!” We drink because we are affluent and empty, because there’s nothing for us to believe in. In the heart of a so-called democracy we stand disenfranchised. All crime is rooted in society. Our environment, who, how and where we live affects how we develop and can make a difference between a life of crime or becoming a “good citizen”. Environment, ethnic, social and family backgrounds all have their part to play. The social background, particularly the impact of inner city degradation, is probably the most significant. Inner cities and the related problems of gangs, drugs and delinquency, where as a society we have been complicit in the creation of ghettos and “no-go” areas, make “good” newspaper headlines that help boost flagging circulations.And with crime comes the desire for revenge, the good ol’ vigilante spirit, “Death Wish” rules ok. Which is what’s happened in Brazil, isn’t it? Four to five kids murdered daily by death squads in the favelas. Kill the kids, reduce the number of potential criminals. Last year Delphine Douyère after a stint as aid worker in Bosnia and Mexico went to Rio to help rescue young Brazilians from poverty and crime. She, her husband and a co-worker were subsequently hacked to death – by one of the youngsters they’d helped!Still, at least the “one child” law in China has introduced an element of legislative control to the “murder” process (although to be fair the government condemns the killing of unwanted children). Usually the victims there are girls…consequently China’s male population already outnumbers the female by some sixty million. But female infanticide isn’t confined to China; In India, for example, historically because of Hindu beliefs and the rigid caste system, young girls were murdered as a matter of course. A recent study by the Community Service Guild of Madras found “female infanticide is rampant”.While we like to worry about the number of deaths by violence in the UK, in Jamaica in 2005 no less than 1 ,674 Jamaicans were killed, the majority young men gunned down in gangland shootings. Over the past eight years the Jamaican police have shot dead some 2,000 people, many in extremely questionable circumstances. Currently, despite a fairly compact population, six people per day are murdered on average in Jamaica.And what about the heartland of democracy? In 2006 there were over 92,000 cases of reported rape in the USA, and 17,034 cases of murder. That compares with 17,190 rapes in 1960 and 9,110 murders – so safe to assume crime is a growth industry thereabouts, too!The worst countries for murder are (top ten):1.Columbia2. South Africa3. Jamaica4. Venezuela5. Russia6. Mexico7. Estonia8. Latvia9. Belarus10. UkraineThe UK comes in at number 46 (out of a survey of 62 countries by the US government last year).And finally to demonstrate it’s not necessarily culture but people that are the problem, in February 2008 a woman watched her father kick her mother to death in New Zealand. The link is here:http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO0803/S00018.htmSorry about the length of this, gone on more than I meant to.Regards.Peter
Q,I am not being a critic (well, not on this occasion), but when you selected a quote from my post the qualifying subsequent sentences were unseen. And if you look again at what I said, when I first replied to your excellent essay, you will observe that I am not saying Britain is okay-ish; I am trying to bring – as I always have tried to do, and as you would expect – a ‘balance’ to this important debate. The quality of your writing (standard and content and style) and your thoughts are excellent (look back into the past four years and read my praise for your undoubted talent). If in some unintended way I have misrepesented my self (or you) I offer a complete apology. I value my time enriching myself reading your blog and I would never seek to cause you offence. But I do infer that you welcome posts and that you would take on board almost anything that is germane to the subject that you write about. Once again, sorry If I have upset you in any way. It was never meant to be so.LP
Hello. It’s okay. I’m not here either to start a newspaper or a political party. I didn’t ‘cherry pick’ anything. I just happen to be a private individual who gives more time to his blog than he probably should for the sake of what really matters in his life, but less time to it than is necessary to make it truly impressive or of much use to anyone.Any arguments that Britain is okay-ish or not exclusively bad are fine by me. I welcome information and views. Please don’t expect me to be holing myself up in a fortress. I’m not. I’m just going about my daily business.I’ll probably write a bit more on this later.
It’s okay. No need to apologise. I was a bit taken aback at ‘cherry pick’, but it was in quotes, so I kind of assumed that you were using it as a convenient phrase. Yes, I do welcome contributions. Thank you. I was wondering whether I should explain my thought processes a bit more clearly, but even thinking about it, it seems like it will take a very long time. Maybe I’ll attempt a start here.I’ve said before that I hate my blog, and I don’t think it’s of particularly high quality. I suppose that’s partly because … let’s see… intelligence is not knowledge, however, a person needs (not absolutely) a subject on which to stretch their mind in order to be able to get to know it better. I’m afraid that, as I’ve said before, my own education is very poor, which is something that I very much regret, so I’ve had very little on which to stretch my mind. My mind has mainly been exercised on abstract fantasy of one sort or another. So, the very patterns of my thought are conditioned by, well, by language as a subject, and the products of language in the form of literature. I certainly don’t want to trivialise the event that is the main topic of this post, but I feel I should stress that I probably look at it more from the point of view of a story-writer than anything else. So, for instance, when I talk about evil, although it is something that I have strong feelings about, it’s also something that has a ‘function’ in a ‘story’. … I knew this would take ages to explain… I’ll try and be brief, just because I still haven’t had lunch yet. So… if I hate my blog, and if I sometimes feel quite engaged by my blog, it’s because it’s a bit of a weird hybrid. I’m used to writing fiction, and seeing everything in fictional terms, and this blog ostensibly deals with things that are not fiction. But my approach is not really a ‘social commentary’ approach. Probably nowhere near as much as it appears to be, depending on how much it appears to be. It’s more like an ongoing project of self-sabotage or something, which is quite interesting, because, why would I do something like that? I don’t know.I shouldn’t deny the ‘social commentary’ aspect I suppose, but I’d feel very silly if I were making any great claims in that area. It’s definitely not my forte. I think I only ever really begin to get vaguely near approaching a tentative feeling of confidence about my mental abilities when it comes to introspection, at which I’m passably good. So, I myself don’t really know what the point of a post like this one is, except that, for me, too, it’s something to be examined. I appreciate the kind of contribution that Peter makes, because that’s not something I’m particularly good at. If I have seized on ‘British culture’ it’s because what I really want to do is convey impressions, and this is very much part of the impression I’m trying to convey. I certainly don’t think of it as some kind of empirical truth. Perhaps I’ll leave it at that for now, but I’ll try and clarify some things later.
I’m not going to discuss in length and haven’t read all comments. I’d just like to point out that one person is quoted as saying something about alcohol abuse in that article. Working with people who have committee crime, let me just say that statistics show a link between alcohol and crime, (especially violent crime.) at least half of all violent crime, the offender was drinking. Out of the crimes where the offender was sober, we find, in most cases, that the victim was drunk. Alcohol causes crime
An excellent post from Momus here:http://imomus.livejournal.com/2008/03/29/“current methods of criminal rehabilitation and even the policing of our society, is fatally flawed!”It certainly appears that way. I realised, actually, that some of my original comments assumed that there’s a solution. Of course, there might not be. It’s always possible that humans are just hopeless and we’re imminently about to destroy ourselves, and that nothing could be done. I know that many people would love to shoot me down in flames for this, but I’d like to suggest that, if we can, we should actually change and try and realise the potential of the human race instead of sabotaging it. “We need to stop thinking of this as a society that has gone wrong – it has not – but of specific groups that for specific reasons have gone outside of the proper lines of respect and good conduct towards others and need by specific measures to be brought back into the fold.”I suppose I think it has gone wrong, or rather, that it’s been wrong for a long time, has improved in some ways, worsened in others, but is generally reaching crisis point around now. Which is not to say that ‘spcific measures’ should not be take about individuals, depending on what those measures are, of course. “So deep-rooted cultural differences were involving in the Times sampling, for example, “honour killings” and revenge murders stemming from Albanian village rivalries, with the accused persons coming from Peru, China, Albania, Romania, Lithuania, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh.”I assume that you mention this to debunk what I’m saying about British culture, or at least to look at it from another angle. I certainly do appreciate this kind of information, as it always helps to be given a more detailed picture of a situation, or to put it in a broader context. However, I feel that I should point out that if I make a statement like “Britain leads the world in soullessness” and illustrate that with a news story about murder, whatever point I might have been making is not nullified by the fact that killing occurs in other cultures, too, or that British culture is not particularly homogeneous. That British exists as an entity in its own right is a flawed argument? Hmmm. I think it’s a rare argument indeed that’s not flawed. Just in order to try and explain my original post a little more, I’ll make a few remarks. “Britain leads the world in soullessness” is obviously, I think, not intended as an objective pronouncement. It is an emotional statement. I realise that some people would think that it is therefore completely superfluous, but I don’t. I think the worst thing that can be said against such a statement is that, not having visited every country in the world, I can’t possibly know whether this is true or not, even subjectively. However, are we to simply disallow all such statements? By all means qualify them, comment or argue. There is certainly no ulitmate truth in this kind of observation, but I wouldn’t say there’s no truth at all. What are we to do, for instance, with statements such as, “People are friendlier the further north you go in Britain”? I’ve heard this from a number of independent foreign sources. Do we dismiss it as something we might as well never have heard, since there’s ‘no such thing’ as northern and southern culture and people can be friendly or unfriendly anywhere? Or do we wonder why so many people have this impression? Impressions are events in the world, too.Another point I would make here is that I am not suggesting that soullessness correlates mathematically with rates of murder. ‘Rates of murder’ is quantifiable. Soullessness is not. I’m talking about qualities here rather than quantities. Maybe there are some things that can be mathematically correlated, I don’t know, but it wouldn’t be rates or murder, or killing. One problem here is that I have my own particular way of using certain items of vocabulary, and I can’t really blame people for getting the wrong idea about what I’m saying. However, not only have I grown up in Britain, but I have had the opportunity to compare culture or society here (and I don’t make quite the distinction that seems to be made between these two above) with that of the culture/society of more than one other country. Japan has a much lower (violent) crime rate than Britain, and America a much higher. I have spent periods of time in these countries, and, if I had to rank them for soullessness (which I wouldn’t, because I’m talking about fleeting and nebulous, but nonetheless very recurrent, impressions, rather than attempting to build some kind of system), it would probably actually be, in ascending order 3) America 2) Japan 1) Britain, though actually, they’re all pretty much neck and neck. But anyway, I’m not talking about mathematical rankings. I’m talking about a particular kind of feeling, attitude, atmosphere etcetera that I know very well to exist in Britain and not in other places to which I have been, a very particular kind of hatred. I’d like to be able to define it, but I think I can only really gesture broadly towards it, even though I recognise it with distinctness when I see it. A few clues – it tends to involve violence indulged in for no actual personal gain, but just for the sake of violence (think ‘happy slapping’), it’s aggressive rather than defensive. You could well call the Columbine killings evil or soulless if you want to, or the Virginia Tech massacre, but I don’t see them as having the same ‘quality’ as this kind of violence at all, even if they are on a larger scale. There is, instead, a quality of revenge or anger. There is something altogether more sneering and vacuous about the violence that takes place in Britain. Maybe violence of exactly the same ‘quality’ takes place elsewhere in the world, too, and I can imagine it does, for instance, in France, and really pretty much in any first world industrialised nation. I find it hard to imagine it happening in pre-industrial nations. Maybe I’m wrong, but, so far I haven’t seen any evidence to the contrary. I associate ‘happy slapping’ style violence with the cold-hearted British temperament that despises imagination, that produced the industrial revolution, and that pushed capitalism across the globe, the temperament of a people profoundly out of touch with nature. Anyway… I’m only really adding these remarks because I feel my intentions have probably been a little misunderstood, not because I really have any urge to disagree with what you’re saying, with the possible exception of ‘culture’ being irrelevant.”Alcohol causes crime”.Yes, I agree. One of the worst of all drugs, for many reasons, as a recent survey has, I believed, pointed out, making a nonsense of British drug laws.Anyway, I may write more on all this later.
Peter A Leonard writes:
“If once a man indulges himself in murder, verysoon he comes to think little of robbing; andfrom robbing he comes next to Sabbath-breaking,and from that to incivility, soullessness and procrastination. “
Well, yes, it’s a very slippery slope from murder to procrastination, and one with which I am lamentably intimate.