A feral over class?

# 28

   Someone has got some explaining to do; or at least some serious thinking as a prelude to offering a more convincing explanation. It’s just too easy – let alone wrong and gormless - to blame the riots and ‘our broken society’ solely on something they are calling ‘the feral under-class’. If there is an under class and their behaviour is indeed feral – presumably using feral as an adjective meaning untamed (cf feral cats) and uncultivated (cf wild flowers) – our starting point has to be that they did not make (or even ‘un-make’) themselves that way. The existence of consistent and enduring social relationships is a pre-condition for the process known as ‘socialisation’ to take place. It was ‘socialisation’ during our childhoods that prevented the rest of us from growing up ‘feral’. No recognisable social structure, no family life to speak of = no socialisation. Who was the British Prime Minister who said (Clue: in 1987) that there was no such thing as society? And then proceeded to do her (Clue) level best to smash any worthwhile social framework that did not conform to her own stridently petty bourgeois (Clue) mentality and her obsession with the private-self?

   It’s not as if we weren’t warned; as if no one saw what was coming. Alan Bennett was only one among many. In his play Forty Years On (first staged at the Apollo Theatre, London, in 1968) the Headmaster laments,

“We have become a battery people, a people of under-privileged hearts fed on pap in darkness, bred out of all taste and season to savour the shoddy splendours of the new civility.”

More than forty years have passed since Forty Years On and the comparison with battery chickens remains horribly accurate.

   Gradually during my lifetime the values I learned at school concerning mutuality and interdependence have been overwhelmed by notions of individuality and the accompanying imperative to seek immediate gratification. Qualities of loyalty, trust, self-discipline and commitment have all been shot to pieces or at best gone missing in action. The simplest adjective we have to describe the sociological concept of ‘the unrestrained self’ is selfish. At the end of his book The Corrosion of Character (1998), Richard Sennett wrote that a regime “which provides human beings no deeper reasons to care about one another cannot long preserve its legitimacy.”

   And staying with Richard Sennett; his masterly 1977 work The Fall of Public Man describes how, in the nineteenth century, wealth gave individuals commanding access to the public realm. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, wealth was increasingly being used to ensure protection from the public realm. With the post-war settlement here in Britain, there came the universal franchise, nationalised industries, state education, extensive public housing, the NHS and the rest of the Welfare State. In response to all this socialism, wealth immediately sought access to tax-consultants, holding companies, private trusts, off-shore bank accounts, private education, gated communities and private medicine. And the new morality that accompanied these new uses for wealth was the morality of the private self. It became a morality unrestrained by worries about neighbours, communities and the public good. It was a morality of individual greed which to any reasonable observer might seem to be no morality at all – to be borderline feral in fact.

   To date (September 2011), about 1,300 people have been before the magistrates on charges arising from the riots across England this summer. By comparison, only a handful of parliamentarians were taken to court in the wake of the 2009 parliamentary expenses scandal. The number facing charges was but a fraction of the more than 300 MPs and peers slapped on the wrists and allowed to pay back sums they had fiddled on their expenses. To the best of my knowledge, not one single banker or city-trader has been prosecuted in the British courts for the scandalous breaches of trust, the years of professional negligence, the total disregard for the public interest and the widespread dereliction of due diligence that preceded the financial collapse of 2007/8. Dodgy and immoral though the activities Sir Fred Goodwin and his ilk may have been, they apparently weren’t illegal and therefore can’t be prosecuted. Which is hardly surprising when you consider that it’s others of his ilk in parliament, in the law courts and at the Bank of England who make the laws and regulations in the first place.

   Deep down inside, banking depends on a confidence trick. It lends out money which isn’t really there. Thus, when the sub-prime shit finally hit the speculative fan, excremental bad-debt rained down on all the economies of the western world. Governments obediently pumped public money into the failing banks. It was the tax-payers who had to put all their futures in hock to bail-out the delinquents. Suddenly it was okay for private debt to become public debt. Five minutes later the same bankers were telling us that we were living beyond our means and had allowed sovereign debt to spiral out of control. Excuse me? Wasn’t it the bankers who’d been living beyond everyone’s means? No, apparently not, and so we now endure an indefinite period of austerity until the perpetrators decide the public deficit is under control. That’s surely some catch, that Catch-22!

   In recent blogs I have banged-on at length about the unethical behaviour of politicians, lawyers, journalists and newspaper proprietors. These are the very people who are now telling us that the rioters came from a generation who hadn’t been brought-up to know the difference between right and wrong. Oh yes? And James Murdoch, how sure are we that he knows the difference between right and wrong? Personally, I blame the parents – especially the absent father…the broken home…

   Now is the time to pre-fix a few professionals and corporations with the ‘f’ word; a time to talk of feral capitalists, feral bankers, feral lawyers, feral journalists, feral spin-doctors and feral politicians. A whole feral over class in fact.