« June 2005 | Home | August 2005 »
Confronted with our own decadence
It takes a long time to react fully to a disaster. After the first shock comes a kind of disbelief. So it has been with the two terrorist attacks in London. It is only slowly that people have begun to recover and come to terms with their feelings and it is only slowly that they begin to reflect on the wider implications. Our perspective and our focus need to be sharpened by time.
One of the things that strikes me more, not less, forcibly as time has passed is the contempt that Muslim extremists feel for us. They despise us for our decadence, and I feel more and more forced to accept the painful truth that they have a point. I don’t want to exaggerate; there are many things about Britain that are still great. People have shown courage and compassion in response to the bombings, and a restraint that is truly heroic. And the police have discovered and arrested the failed suicide bombers with an efficiency that is anything but decadent.
All the same, it can hardly be denied that with all our celebrated freedom, and all our wealth, we have somehow created a society that is characterised by growing disorder, uncertainty and loss. For a long time now Britain — or rather many of its institutions and traditions — has been suffering from a loss of nerve and a loss of will which amounts to a national moral funk.
The results are everywhere, in each day’s news. There is a connection between working-class lager louts looking for a fight and rich kids vomiting and copulating drunkenly in public, both here and on holiday abroad. Standards in public life have fallen very low, whether it’s the prime minister’s wife or a slaggy Hooray Henrietta on a Cornish beach or simply Big Brother.
And there is a connection between all that and the miserable failure of Britain’s schools; illiteracy here is beyond belief, disruptive behaviour is normal, exams and degrees have been debased and ministers have just had to concede that social mobility — once the pride of British society — has declined in the past 30 years and has actually fallen since Labour came to power. The education secretary has come up with the contemptible sort of gimmick that passes for a political initiative these days; she has promised (at a cost of £27m) to give every baby a book bag, containing volumes like The Very Hungry Caterpillar, to encourage parents to read with their children.
What’s gone wrong in education is a template for what’s gone wrong in other institutions. Hospitals, for instance, are badly run, filthy and in financial trouble, despite all the reforms and all the cash that have been directed at them. Last week, for instance, it emerged that though the NHS desperately needs more doctors, hundreds of junior doctors will find themselves without an NHS job when their contracts end this week; there are not enough jobs for them. The British Medical Association blames this astonishing situation on poor NHS planning.
The immigration system is characterised by incompetence that is the same in kind but perhaps even more astonishing in degree; the truth has finally emerged after years of government and evasion. And there can be very little doubt that the failures of the immigration system have created serious and unnecessary social problems here, including a comfortable environment for terrorists.
There’s a thread running though all this and what has been happening to the army. Whatever the rights and wrongs of human rights legislation it is quite clearly horribly wrong to demoralise officers and other ranks with threats of legal action (other than their own courts martial) at a time when they are facing extreme danger in extreme heat in the service of their country. It is not just wrong. It is decadent.
For if we lack the will to defend ourselves, or rather to defend those who are there to defend us, we are simply rolling over and showing to the world’s scavengers and beasts of prey the soft underbelly of decadence.
It has been decadent to let extremist imams preach hatred and violence on the pavements here. These people could perfectly well have been sent to prison under existing legislation concerning incitements to violence or to racial hatred. But somehow the authorities lacked the will or the conviction to do it.
What connects all these things is an unwillingness, which has developed since the Sixties, to stand up for things that matter. I think it began with an unwillingness to reproach our own children. Some of my parents’ generation were very lax with their children; people began to speak of the permissive society. And since then parents (including me) have seemed ever less able, or willing, to control and discipline their children. The very word discipline sounds almost prehistoric and possibly abusive.
Yet without proper discipline from parents, children can never develop self-discipline. And it is on self-discipline and self-restraint that a civilised society rests. With a loss of self-discipline goes a loss of standards of behaviour, a loss of efficiency and a loss of a sense of what matters. There is a very painful tension between instinct and society; that is the tragic discontent of civilisation, repression its painful price. The right balance is hard to find, and harder to maintain. But we can see today in Britain and in the West generally what happens when that balance fails.
I don’t suggest that this loss of conviction affects everyone. Yet it has to be said that almost nobody has really done much to resist what has been done to our institutions and our manners. There has been a long march through the institutions of a nameless and shapeless ideology, misleadingly called political correctness. It is far more important and powerful than that name suggests and it is largely responsible for the long decay of the institutions and has contributed a lot, indirectly, to the decadence I'm talking about.
Multiculturalism, for instance, has been deeply demoralising to all kinds of people in all kinds of ways, undermining their values, undermining a sense of common purpose, above all undermining the confidence of the host country. Even leading multiculturalists now, belatedly, agree on that.
Despite all this, I do, now for the first time, feel a faint glimmer of optimism. One of the responses to the bombings might be a new awareness of what matters most, and how best to defend it. If that means a new sense of purpose and a new sense of conviction, then perhaps some good will have come out of this evil.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, July 31, 2005 | Comments (15)
The blitz spirit versus common sense
Terrorists will not change the British way of life, the Queen said on Friday. But they have. We will not be intimidated, we will not be terrorised, the prime minister said on Thursday. But we have been. When terrorists seek to change our way of life, he continued, we will not be changed.
But they are both wrong. We have suddenly been changed and still, in the aftermath, are continuing to be changed — “changed, changed utterly” as WB Yeats wrote in his famous poem about the Easter 1916 republican uprising in Dublin, which many at the time regarded as an atrocity and which was the precursor of more than a century of murder, terror and grief.
Terror works. I am thinking particularly of what it does to young people, to children old enough to be beyond simple comfort and to young adults. My children and their friends are teenagers or young adults and I suspect they have suffered a sudden, irreparable change for the worse in their outlook.
There is some sort of unspoken convention that at times of disaster one should speak only in the spirit of the blitz. Certainly some people are obliged to; the Queen and the prime minister have a duty to encourage us and set us an example of hope and stoicism as best they can. But I am not sure how heavily this duty weighs on journalists.
In the war on terror, as George Bush calls it, truth has all too often been a casualty — for instance, the reporting of the atrocities in London has been done through a haze of skilful propaganda with a shocking hint of sentimentality — so perhaps it is permissible for journalists to say things that are less positive, even at such a time as this.
Intelligent young adults, who have grown out of their teenage indifference to news or who have been forced out of it by last week’s bombs, are quicker to sense insincerity than older people and normally they have more tender feelings — they will have been more shocked and distressed than the middle-aged by pictures of injury and mutilation, or of people wandering about in a confusion of grief looking for missing relations or lovers. These images hit younger people harder. And — which makes it all much worse — the thoughtful ones are often more critical in the best sense of the word.
Imagine how it looks to young people, especially Londoners. They are confronted with something terrifyingly disorienting, but they are fed platitudes. They are told constantly that we are fighting the war on terror with all our might and means. Our values will fight their values, they are told, and ours will win. But this is nonsense.
In particular this demagogic clarity is nonsense. The whole thing is miserably complex and imponderable. It’s not possible to fight a war against an enemy one can hardly identify (as now) and whose values — coherent or incoherent — one must be uncertain about; besides, there is no law of life that ensures one set of values must defeat another. What matters in war is power and terrorism has immense power, whether or not it has any coherent purpose. One can be defeated by chaos and it did seem on Thursday that chaos is come again.
Besides, while waging war proper is difficult (as in Iraq) terrorism is easy, no matter how hard rich countries try — perhaps with considerable success — to forestall it, as Thursday’s almost casual, small-scale attacks have proved. I could easily go down to the Tube at any moment with something lethal in my bag.
In any case, and most tragically, young people here know that our government and the US government deliberately lied about the reasons for taking the war against terror, so-called, to Iraq. The motive was something else and it is still unclear what it was; the exposure of the lies has failed to expose the real motive.
I have talked to a couple of young people who look with deep cynicism at the way George Galloway MP was denounced and insulted last week for saying what many people believe. I am no fan of Galloway and he may well be wrong in believing last week’s bombs were an inevitable consequence of the invasion of Iraq, but his freedom to say so, as an elected politician, is surely one of the finest of those of our (sic) western values that are supposed to defeat “theirs”, whoever “they” are — something we don’t know yet.
The hypocritical inconsistency is glaring and is not lost on the young. There is something stronger and better, surely, about facing terrible things with as much openness and truthfulness as anyone can bring to bear, yet what we are offered on television is heart-warming motivational cliché and far too much heart-chilling sensational detail.
One of the many evil effects of the bombings will be a new level of uncertainty and distrust among young people about our rulers and our opinion formers. That is tragic because they face uncertainty on every side. They have grown up to see most of the certainties of their parents’ generation fade away and for many of them Thursday must have been a terrible coming of age, a loss of almost all certainty.
Even without terrorism, their safety on the streets has been uncertain for some time, with new and rising levels of violent street crime. Their homes are unsafe in inner cities too, for similar reasons, and they know the police can or will do little to protect them. The value of their exams and university degrees are increasingly uncertain. So, too, are their job prospects; the only certainty in employment is that they cannot hope for job security or even a long-term contract, and as for a pension they know now that the subject is covered in a shroud of anxious uncertainty and that their parents may become dependent on them.
Their safety in hospitals is newly uncertain, their chances of making a long-term marriage or relationship are increasingly uncertain. Their feeling that the West might do something constructive about Africa and the Third World is quickly fading into cynical uncertainty. And their generous belief in a multi-ethnic society and the great British values of tolerance is being exposed to ever greater uncertainty.
I hope I am not exaggerating. But I do think that something has changed utterly. If young people are not to retreat from uncertainty into disaffection and despair — like the terrorists themselves — what they need is less lying, less sentimentality and more truth.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, July 10, 2005 | Comments (1)
Mad, bad or simply born that way?
It is not often that one feels profoundly sorry for a young man who has bludgeoned his loving parents to death, taken their credit cards on a spending spree in America and then pretended they were away in Spain while their bodies rotted for weeks in his childhood home. All the same I did feel very sorry last week for 19-year-old Brian Blackwell, who was convicted of this terrible crime on Wednesday. He sobbed uncontrollably in the dock and wrote a miserable statement about how he missed his parents, how he longed to turn back the clock and be a child again.
There is something entirely pathetic about him. He is an exceptionally intelligent boy, who left school with glittering prospects as a medical student — yet his first weirdly revealing question to the police on his arrest was whether it would be cold in jail. It emerged in court that he is a habitual fabulist and liar with a weak grip on reality and a determination to live out some of his fantasies. All this quite obviously adds up to someone with something seriously, mysteriously wrong with him.
Not long ago he would have been condemned in the tabloid newspapers and probably in the courts as an evil monster. Today justice is beginning to be more merciful and the judge in this case accepted that this wretched boy, although not insane, suffers from acute narcissistic personality disorder and therefore could not be charged with murder. He was able to plead guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. Presumably this makes little practical difference. He will be locked up indefinitely and rightly so. But the story raises some extremely troubling wider questions about moral responsibility.
It must be right to make allowances for people with diminished responsibility or with mental illnesses, as the courts do and as we all do. But recently it has begun to seem that the notion of personal responsibility is being eroded by medical diagnoses. It is being medicalised. Indeed, personality itself is being medicalised, in the sense of having supposedly scientific labels attached to it. Narcissistic personality disorder of the sort that Blackwell suffers from is just one form of borderline personality disorder — a concept only about 30 years old.
Oliver James, the medical psychologist, claims that about 80% of convicted prisoners suffer from a personality disorder and most of them from more than one. That may be true — although I am sceptical — but it has some troubling implications. Why, for instance, were Jeffrey Archer and Jonathan Aitken so heavily punished and morally denounced if they were merely the victims of their own personality disorders and if they are not to blame for their startlingly weak grasp on reality? Why is anybody punished in prison for behaviour beyond his control? Equally one is tempted to wonder what the status of these personality disorders really is. What is the science behind them? I suspect that borderline personality disorder lies very much in the eye of the beholder. The medical and quasi-medical practitioners concerned do not agree on the causes or the criteria of such disorders nor on whether they exclude or include psychopathic tendencies. The latitude in all this is so great as to be distinctly unscientific. There are no objective measurements. Experts do not even seem to agree whether personality disorders are treatable.
In truth the distinguishing characteristics of one or other of these disorders would apply to some degree to almost everyone. If I found myself in the dock for any crime, I would certainly plead a personality disorder in mitigation and I am confident that I would qualify. That does not mean that personality disorder doesn’t exist, but it does mean that while there isn’t much scientific method involved, one ought to be cautious about the use of such labels.
Instead, however, we are getting freer and freer with exculpatory labels. While once children were called stupid, lazy, naughty or obstinate, now we have many syndromes and disorders — all still imperfectly understood — that medicalise their behaviour. We have attention deficit disorder, dyslexia, dyspraxia or fragile X and now — currently fashionable — autism and obsessive-compulsive disorder. If my child or yours is wilfully untidy, lazy or disruptive, there is often a genuine case for saying that it is not really his fault. In ordinary life this can be very helpful.
For years the behaviour of some of my nearest and dearest and the destructive choices they make has been a mystery to me and sometimes a painful mystery. (No doubt some of them would say the same about me.) I’m thinking of the charming and loveable person who endlessly finds new ways to mess up her life and alienate her friends. I’m thinking of the serial wrecker of relationships. I’m thinking, too, of the person whose weird little compulsions drive him and his relations almost mad with frustration. Then there is the employer whose coldness and real cruelties are something he himself cannot understand.
The fairly recent idea that these people are not choosing to behave as they do but are driven by conditions outside their control — which may well be largely biologically determined — can be an immense relief. It can bring understanding and acceptance — although not, of course, in the case of brutal murder. But how far is it practical or even acceptable to make such allowances in the real world when decisions, and judgments, have to made regardless?I think it is highly likely that the biological sciences will in time replace our primitive understanding of personality and responsibility with something much more sophisticated. The subtle interaction between nature and nurture will probably become much better understood, not least the physical changes to the brain of early traumatic experience and the environmental triggering of inherited predisposition.
Western culture is based on an idea of an integrated, coherent, solid-state self and on the related idea that we are all equally morally responsible. Yet now that science is gradually displacing these central ideas and pushing back the boundaries of responsibility and of normality itself, we are left with a growing hole in the centre of our moral universe; it is becoming harder and harder to believe in the necessary myth of equal individual autonomy. That’s what is most disturbing about this brutal murder.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, July 03, 2005 | Comments (3)
