Stop being a victim
Image via WikipediaOnly two groups of people seem to be getting a kick out of the rioting in England.
Firstly the rioters themselves, the nihilistic urban youth who are getting cheap thrills from looting shops, bashing bus stops, and burning down houses. And secondly middle-class radicals, trustafarians who live off daddy's cash, who get a rush of political adrenalin whenever they see blacks burning stuff because it shows that "the oppressed are fighting back!"
These two sections of British society might look and sound very different from each other, with the former more likely to wear tracksuits and trainers and to speak in urban cockney slang, while the latter is usually decked out in skinny jeans and tortoise-shell glasses and speaks with an easy-to-spot "mockney" twang. But they share some important traits, helping to explain their weird meeting of minds over recent riotous behaviour.
Firstly, neither side contributes a great deal to everyday society, the rioters being largely unemployed or even unemployable youth, and their middle-class cheerleaders being either permanent students or professional campaigners. Secondly, both sides live off other people: many of the rioters are dependent on the welfare state while their head-tilting, doe-eyed sympathisers either also live off the welfare state (student loans etc) or off their parents' estate (access to family cash etc).
And thirdly, both of these sections of society have been well and truly schooled in the modern-day cult of victimhood, in the grating trend for embracing self-pity over pursuing political goals or self-improvement, leading them to view every hardship that they face as an insurmountable affliction enforced on them by The Man.
Perhaps the most patronising argument put forward by the well-to-do riot-sympathising lobby is that the poor little black kids in certain bits of Britain suffer terrible social deprivation and therefore it isn't surprising that they occasionally go mental. A liberal journalist has "mapped the riots with poverty", drawing up a map of London which shows that the poorer parts were far more likely than the wealthier parts to have experienced a riot over the past five days. In short, these people are poor, ergo they burn down pizza outlets.
One radical commentator has argued that "there is a context to London's riots that can't be ignored", which apparently is the "high poverty and large unemployment" in some urban areas. "Poverty is fuelling the London riots," another observer claims.
Of course, no-one can deny that there are many social and economic problems in parts of London and other British cities. But the idea that being poor somehow leads directly to becoming a looter simply doesn't stand up. Why, for example, have the slightly older generations in the same poor parts of Britain, those in their 20s or 30s who live in not dissimilar conditions to the youth, not gone out and burnt things down? There have been poor people in Britain for a very long time, but they have not reacted to their poverty by wrecking their own neighbourhoods. Instead they joined collective groups, or agitated for work, or pooled their resources and helped each other out, or got on their bikes, moved somewhere else and looked for work there.
The idea that social deprivation is an explanation for the rioting is meant to sound sympathetic, but it is actually superbly patronising. It treats the less well-off sections of society almost as automatons who apparently do not bear true moral responsibility for their behaviour in recent days, since they were only responding to the fact that they live in less-than-pleasant urban areas and lack the economic advantage of other sections of society.
The pitying left-wingers who long to hug these put-upon working-class folk need to bear in mind that no matter how poor people are, no matter how lacking in advantage, they are still moral agents capable of making choices between right and wrong, between forging ahead with their lives or lashing out against their neighbourhoods. The claim that their poverty makes them violent is more outrageous than the right-wing law'n'order lobby's claim that they are just "thugs" - at least the law lobby recognises the rioters' capacity to make moral decisions; the leftish lobby just depicts them as the inevitably messed-up end-products of Bad Experiences.
There's another reason the poverty-causes-rioting argument doesn't carry water - because we had very similar disturbances in Britain at the end of last year, but back then the protagonists were mainly middle-class students rather than urban ruffians. In fact, back then it was the trustafarians and the better-off bits of youthful Britain, those currently sympathising with the urban rioters, who went on the rampage.
In November and December 2010, students with pink hair and trendy pop-band t-shirts also smashed up London, kicking in the windows of McDonald's restaurants and throwing metal bars through the doors of banks. What made them do it - poverty? What poverty?
In recent days, there has been an attempt by some in the British media to distinguish between the student protests against tuition fees at the end of 2010 and the urban riots of the past five days. But the similarities between these two violent episodes are far more important than the differences. In both instances, we had young British people depicting themselves as the terrible victims of evil politicians and lashing out against anything they could get their hands on: banks, restaurants, shops, war memorials, whatever. It's just that where the riotous students were fairly well-spoken and went on to get newspaper columns, the urban rioters are a mumbling bunch who will not, I wager, be snapped up by Fleet Street.
What unites these two groups is not, of course, shared life experiences or similar living conditions, but rather a victim mentality, a view of themselves as rather sad and pathetic individuals who will scream and scream and scream if they don't get what they want. They share an infantilised view of themselves and of the world around them, believing that others, primarily the state, should take care of them. So where the student rioters were effectively pleading with the state to support them financially into their early adult lives, the urban rioters are likewise largely dependent on welfarism. What both sides seem to lack is self-respect, moral resourcefulness, social wherewithal.
This is very different from the radical protests of the past. Modern-day rioting, of both the posh and poor varieties, is not motivated by a desire to exercise autonomy, by a striving to live independently and experimentally, but rather by a belief that one should always be looked after and cared for and cooed over. In our therapeutic, welfare-entrenched age, our era of Oprah-style victimology, it seems that youth on both sides of the track run the risk of conceiving of themselves as permanent victims of powerful forces.
