Eyes without a face....

# 25

….the eyes of the rioters and looters are all over the newspapers and television. Their faces are unseen, their eyes are unseeing – and I don’t mean blind. I mean lacking in understanding, lacking in empathy. Poverty is mentioned as an issue underlying the riots but ahead of material poverty there is another sort of poverty. The looting of the corner sweetshop and the hairdresser’s salon, the torching of a block of High Street shops with twenty-eight dwellings above – these are examples of poverty of imagination. The much-reproduced photo of a woman jumping from a blazing building wrenched me instantly back to the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre. I’m not comparing the looters to those terrorist hijackers but I’ve just had to read again an article written by the novelist Ian McEwan which was published in The Guardian of 15^th. September, 2001.

McEwan wrote:

“This is the nature of empathy, to think oneself into the minds of others……

…If the hijackers had been able to imagine themselves into the thoughts and feelings of the passengers, they would have been unable to proceed. It is hard to be cruel once you permit yourself to enter the mind of your victim. Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.”

Knowing the difference between right and wrong is not something we learn by rote. My parents did not tell me it was wrong to break the windows of shops along the High Street and steal their goods. Neither did I explicitly teach that to my children. I expected them to know not to do this because they grew up aware of empathy and were encouraged to be imaginative. Colloquially, we talk about ‘walking a mile in someone else’s shoes’, but I don’t suppose the empathetic traits of the looters would have been enhanced by running a mile in a pair trainers swiped from the stock at JD Sports. No, they would simply find themselves a mile away and untroubled to be wearing stolen shoes.

As you might expect, we in The Bus Lane draw the line at torching our London buses. These inoffensive pieces of machinery may lack the iconic status of the old Routemasters but that’s no reason to destroy them. Socially, these are transports of delight; they belong to us all. Beyond trashing buses and thieving fashion accessories, the selfishness of the average rioter extended only as far as looting a Blackberry, some booze and maybe a flat-screen telly. Such pitiful greed pales into insignificance when set against the avarice of politicians and bankers; the fiddlers of expenses, the manipulators of financial markets, the speculators and arbitragers, the hedge-fund gurus and the traders in derivatives. These people have had their fingers in our collective cash register for years. Only the truly hopeless and powerless have to smash windows and doors to do the same.

The sense of history repeating itself with a giddy, unstoppable, predictability is overwhelming. Read again (or discover) W.H. Auden’s poem September 1, 1939. It’s the one that begins:

I sit in one of the dives

On Fifty-second street

Uncertain and afraid

As the clever hopes expire

Of a low dishonest decade:

Waves of anger and fear

Circulate over the bright

And darkened lands of the earth,

Obsessing our private lives;

The unmentionable odour of death

Offends the September night.

Okay, Auden was writing from a gay bar in New York on the eve of the war against Hitler, but does anyone doubt that we are experiencing yet another ‘low dishonest decade’? There have been so many. His second verse ends with;

I and the public know

What all schoolchildren learn,

Those to whom evil is done

Do evil in return.

The parallels are manifold and just too depressing to contemplate for long. In the newspapers and on television the best brains in the land proffer their analyses and explanations. Very few do not mention despair and the need for a transparent investigation. There is indeed much unmasking to do – and not just of the creatures caught on CCTV. If we peel away the masks that conceal the identities of the puppeteers manipulating our economic system we find only other masks; layer upon layer of them. No one is finally in charge – not even the dreaded Murdoch! Everyone is ultimately obedient to the inhuman corporate automata running global capitalism.

Successive masks have been torn aside for two centuries now and all we have done is to reveal further masks. Behind the latest veil there is never a human face. If we survive to continue peeling long enough we might eventually confront the existential felony that lies at the heart of Capitalism. But then we’ve known about that since 1848 and where has it got us?

“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his Kind…”

I’m not telling you where that comes from. You either know already or, if you don’t, it may be best not to ask. Some of you might do your bits if I fail to break it to you gently… Let’s just say it has form. Know what I mean, bro?