Reading the ‘Reading the Riots’ Analysis

The following is a transcript of an introduction to a recent discussion on the 'post-riots' analysis

By Neil Davenport

Despite the looting and anti-social violence that took place in the riots of August last year, many seem to agree that the behaviour constituted a social protest against poverty, against relative deprivation, against police harassment and a general sense of frustration. Anyone who challenges this consensus is viewed as not taking into consideration ‘the social context’ or callously lacking in empathy for poverty-struck youth.

The social background of the many of the youths involved, most of them unemployed from poor and often troubled backgrounds, is undeniable. Indeed, this is held up as proof time and time again that material deprivation, a lack of hope for the future, must surely be to blame for their actions. The apparent radicalism of this analysis is there for anyone to see. But those who see the riots in the same breath such as the Arab Spring or protests against welfare cuts in the UK should perhaps ask why is it that the Conservative Party also agrees with many of the lefts analysis. Namely, that British society has failed poor people and poor families and what is required is greater state intervention to alleviate their frustrations.

As I and other writers on spiked have pointed out, it is precisely the state’s constant impulse to erode people of any autonomy and responsibility that is a bigger factor in causing the riots than material envy. This isn’t a Charles Murray style attack on the ‘feckless poor’, but rather how therapeutic norms in education and other state agencies have nurtured a nihilistic, self-pitying rage in young people. The language that teens have developed, often as a result of educationalists presenting the outside world as a barrier to their development, is a brittle sense of expectation that somebody else exists to make their life easier. As someone who has been teaching in London for nearly a decade, I’ve long noticed how student’s trot out demanding lines of the ‘where is that revision book you said you were going to do for me.’

This is what I mean by assertive victimhood, whereby an individual’s presentation of pained helplessness in the face of insurmountable obstacles becomes a justification for aggressive demands on others. Most young people going through the English education system learn about the importance of self-esteem, and the protection of self-esteem, against other people. The only way self-esteem can be protected and nurtured, is through an enabling state making allowances and provisions for all the suffering and disadvantages that they’ve experienced.

You can’t under-estimate how some young people will see others, or the wider community they live in, as being to blame for their subjective grievances. This is what therapeutic norms have done – replaced solidarity with a simmering resentment against others who are in some way to blame for their self-esteem issues. As an example, many looters deliberately chose to loot stores where they were unsuccessful for a job, their enraged sense of hurt or disappointment became a justification for looting and robbery. Likewise, robbing individuals on the grounds that they were ‘rich’ is simply saying that somebody else’s apparent success is making their self-esteem feel worse and thus retribution is justifiable. It’s not so much that poverty was the cause of the riots, but rather how being poor or marginalised justifies a degraded sense of fatalism and anti-social behaviour. It is the rallying cry of the lumpenproletariat, not of working class subjectivity.

Of course, making assertive, interest based demands on society has, in the past, the potential to transform society for the better. In more political periods in history, such demands for more were always designed to enlarge subjectivity, liberty and possibilities, rather than for somebody else to pamper your financial needs with no effort or responsibility from yourself. I think this has to be said, but a refusal to work or contribute to society, on the basis that you’re nobody’s mug, has always been the hallmark of thieves and crooks, not the working-classes. Unfortunately, the self-esteem grandstanding at the heart of therapeutic culture endows criminality with psychological authority.

The interesting aspect of the post-riots discussion was a dramatic turn around in how marginalised sections in society were discussed. They have been transformed from objects of scorn and revulsion to objects of pity with a touch of Robin Hood style romanticisation. In many ways this development is simply flipsides of the same coins: gormless automatons in need of state intervention to either stop them boozing or eating fatty foods or rioting and looting. Indeed, it is the justification for state intervention in society that the rioters have been drooled over by many liberal-based commentators and some politicians. Far from being radical or exposing malign power structures in society, blaming poverty and renewing demands for increased state intervention in society just about keeps the political class together.

For liberal-leftists, increased welfare is seen as a blow against free-marketeering or the Tories austerity measures. This isn’t Social Democracy as it was understood in the post-war period, but the fatalistic, controlling and authoritarian version of social democracy that was pioneered by New Labour in the nineties and which never went away under the Coalition Government. Although Cameron’s Conservatives had good instincts on the agency destroying aspect of the state, their empting out of cohering political beliefs means they’ve had to rely on instrumental bureaucracy as a way of connecting with society. Bereft of traditional conservative values - whether on nationalism, personal responsibility or the family - and with nothing to replace it, holding society together through targets rather than beliefs always gets the better of them. As a consequence, there is an instinctive hostility towards personal autonomy in case individuals exist outside these points of connection and thus influence with what remains of the political class.

The problem here, of course, is that the state intervening further in society, usually on the basis of promoting fatalism, is only going to exacerbate the destructive trends that lead to last Augusts’ riots. The more that the state promotes incapacity, helplessness and therapeutic ‘you are damaged’ rhetoric, the less young people will be able to act in a creative, purposeful, morally autonomous way. The riots didn’t expose the dangers of material deprivation or material envy, but it did expose how destructive the culture of assertive victimhood and grievances has become these past 10 years. If there is anything positive to come out of a discussion on the riots, it should be a serious re-think on officialdoms attitudes towards therapeutic values.