We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata quote of the day [M]aterial prosperity enables people to develop morally as well as intellectually. It provides the very basis through which individuals can begin to live like humans and not act like animals.
– Neil Davenport, in the course of a sp!ked piece that neatly demolishes David Lammy’s barmy theory that British teenagers stab each other because they want to be rich. Lammy’s article is more wide-ranging in its insanity than Davenport allows. He ends up advocating compulsory social service and apprenticeships for all as a cure for gangs.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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Read David Lammy’s piece.
Can’t say I agree with all of it but it has no resemblance to either your description or the strawman constructed in the Spiked article either. He never blamed prosperity for gang culture, he did point out that letting a significant section of the population aspire to be consumers, but not producers, of wealth is likely to lead to criminal cultures.
And are you and Davenport really quite happy to dismiss 23 murders of teenagers in London this year as “rare, isolated crimes”? How many dead children would you consider to be a sizeable problem?
The pedo panic that keeps sensible men as far away from kids as possible (and in particular out of the primary classroom and Cub Scouts) can’t be helping.
@oldandrew — 23 murders annualised to ~32 in a population of ~7million comes to a 1 in 200,000 rate. What would you call “rare”?
oldandrew hit the nail on the head. I read the article twice and could not find any reference to “David Lammy’s barmy theory that British teenagers stab each other because they want to be rich”.
Strawman, through and through.
steve>> @oldandrew — 23 murders annualised to ~32 in a population of ~7million comes to a 1 in 200,000 rate. What would you call “rare”?
Poor math my friend. There aren’t ~7 million teenagers in London, but rather ~ 500,000 to 700,000 according to this data (the age ranges provided only from 5-14 and 15-19 so it’s difficult to make proper estimation):
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/StatBase/Product.asp?vlnk=10527
Hence it’s more like 1 in 20,000 rate, or 5 per every 100,000 of population. Comparative murder rate for the whole of London is 2.9 per 100,000 and 1.4 per 100,000 for England and Wales. So it’s definitely above norm by a factor of 2.
Up to a point. A minimum level of material prosperity is necessary for civilized and decent life, but that minimum is really not very high. I know and have known some poor people who are kind, loyal, honourable, caring and fundamentally good. Many to a quite humbling degree. I also know and have known some wealthy people who are morally repulsive. Sure, there are opposite cases on both sides, perhaps they even form the majority, but if it is here suggested that the more material prosperity the more moral and intellectual progress … well, that’s just tripe.
Material prosperity is a good purely in and of itself – I’ve seen plenty enough of the misery that its opposite causes to think anything else – but it is not the only good. Moral and intellectual progress is nurtured by quite unrelated things: a respect for learning and the learned; an ingrained love of one’s cultural heritage; the family; traditional religion; good literature; community solidarity. It is retarded by a number of things including but not limited to: the welfare state; social liberalism; social individualism; the British education system; contemporary mass culture; contemporary high culture; drug use &c.
It can also be pointed out that the violent death rate in Britain in 1950, when I was twelve years old, was 0.5 per 100 000. So much for progress!
I was brought up in a working class town in West Cumberland. No serious criminality, let alone violence and murder, was tolerated.
So essentially he wants to trade the Ukraine BACK to Russia so that they can promise to help us put the brakes on Iran?! Holy shit, how shortsighted and moronic.
This guy sounds like Chamberlain: “No just give them what they want and we can have peace in our time.”
Not that I’m a fan of Interventionist US policy but damn, somehow you gotta slow things down.
And are you and Davenport really quite happy to dismiss 23 murders of teenagers in London this year as “rare, isolated crimes”?
I am happy to dismiss them as rare. I don’t know whether ‘isolated’ is the right word, but since they do appear to grow for the most part out of a brutish youth culture confined to certain classes and localities, maybe ‘insulated’ is. Gangs set out to isolate themselves by laying waste to what’s around them. But most of us will never be unfortunate enough to be around them. I imagine Davenport can speak for himself.
They’re not good. They are not neutral. They are horrible. But they are not important. As with terrorists (which, in a sense, they are), telling them they are important is absolutely the worst thing you can do.
I think Clockwork Orange has the statistics right, but is framing them wrong: violence by young men accounts for most stranger murder and a very high proportion of injuries deliberately inflicted short of death. This is a fairly constant factor whatever the pretext: random fights, territorial aggression, gang violence, or tormenting the weak to demonstrate power.
In that I’m wholly in agreement with Lammy, too. Lammy is infinitely more pleasant and more genuinely thoughtful than most other New Labour ministers. His piece is patently sincere, not hucksterism for the latest departmental policy. He makes a few decent points – though generally on the way to a hopeless non sequitur. But the model of the world within which he explains and prescribes for this not-extraordinary disease are barking.
Many more children are killed in road accidents, but that is a subject that is familiarly chaotic, so not readily susceptible to the narrative of moral panic.
Gordon,
And the violent death rate ten years earlier had been rather higher. Meanwhile older teenagers were a lot of them still in the army, being required to be violent abroad.
Gabriel,
What I think Davenport is right about, and why I’m quoting him, is that for any given individual material wellbeing does buy opportunity to think and to develop himself, compared with not having material wellbeing. The level of such wellbeing that leaves any particular individual sufficently free of want is likely to vary from time to time and person to person. But the point is that to desire wealth is not, per se, to coarsen oneself it. If you seek material wellbeing, you are also seeking the means to moral improvement for yourself and others.
oldandrew,
I do point out Davenport is picking on only one aspect of Lammy’s article. But I don’t think his characterisation of that aspect is unfair:
Lammy says,
And,
With a crass remark like that you must be an aspiring professional politician.
Yes it is a problem, but not very sizeable one statistically. But frankly the source of that problem is the nationalisation by the state of society and the welfare statism that in effect subsidises bad decisions.
Perry beat me to it.
Lammy’s article adequately describes some of the pathologies infecting “youth” (mostly young males), and he’s absolutely right that “[y]oung men need something purposeful to do.” He also turns a nice phrase: “a resilient economy cannot substitute for a good society.” Unfortunately, he then goes on to advocate more of the tired old nostrums which bear most of the responsibility for the current situation. He wants more government involvement at all levels: controls on advertising, mandatory “public service” (i.e., conscription), apprenticeships and other training projects, more “youth services” clubs, and in general an “active state.” He is incapable of seeing that it is the “active state” which is the source of the problem.
It is axiomatic that if you subsidize something you will eventually have more of it. If you subsidize indolence (through welfare, extended unemployment benefits, etc.) it will inexorably increase. It further follows that if you subsidize indolence among young males having high testosterone levels, uncertain about their place in society and with no acceptable outlet for their natural aggressive tendencies, the inevitable result will be violence. Lammy sounds well-meaning, but clearly he’s not too bright.
Give ’em a good clip round the ear.
Seriously, it is important that young social animals are constantly reminded of their place in the pecking order.
They will always push their elders and jostle amongst each other for position. Physical punishment has always been part of the restraint.
Until adolescents learn enough about the tribe/pack/herd’s operations they need to be kept in check.
And since all social animals do it, it’s obviously natural, and therefore green, and therefore a good thing. Right?
guy herbert,
I don’t know how you think those quotes confirm the claim in Davenport’s article than Lammy is attacking affluence, unless, like the original article you are equating consumerism/consumer culture with affluence. They are not the same thing. It seems to me the issue here is a culture that encourages the consumption, but not the production, of wealth. In fact this is made very explicit in one of the quotes you included:
Two major cultural doctrines come together here and reinforce each other.
Underlying much of the argument by those suspicious of the effects of an affluent society upon youth is the age-old Christian animosity towards wealth and material possessions.
Even those who would never define themselves religiously have inherited this tenet of an overall philosophy which exalts poverty and suffering, and finds material wellbeing dangerous on a moral and spiritual level.
Lost in this animosity towards “rich men” is any distinction between those who earn their wealth by productive effort, and those who merely acquire it by unscrupulous means or the fortunes of birth.
It is not surprising, then, that many youths, uneducated in the methods of complex thought, or the cultural history of various powerful ideas, by an educational system which avoids such complications, can see no difference between gaining knowledge to work productively and earn a decent living, and simply scamming or mugging their way to wealth and influence.
Indeed, wealth and influence are goals in and of themselves, indifferent as to the means used to acquire them or the uses to which they are put.
The inverted moral universe which exalts need above all other values results in exactly these chickens coming home to roost—“I need money and power, so I can do whatever I want to get them”.
Secondly is the utterly one trick pony nature of statist, collectivist ideology. No matter what the issue, problem, or difficulty, whether personal or social, the only solution is, inevitably, some form of state program.
Poverty? Government program. Wealth? Government program. Children neglected? Government program. Children spoiled? Government program.
Need opportunity? Discipline? Economic, cultural, social, or personal, it doesn’t matter. One size fits all. The answer is always the same—draft a government program.
Never mentioned or acknowledged is the immense calamity that the state has wrought upon the populations of the world during the many wars, pogroms, repressions, dictatorships, and revolutionary attempts to remake human society, especially over the last few centuries, that are the repeated and inevitable consequences of surrendering control over the lives and fortunes of all to the whimsies of the few.
Entire generations of young men and women have now reached their majority without once beong taught that there is anything more important than their own needs and feelings. Good luck with that. I doubt a new version of the boy scouts, run by government cadres, is the answer.
Well, there are lots of ishoos here, not least just how unusual this “spate” of violence really is, since a troll through the papers from pretty much any era will find the same concerns. Violence by men is hardly knew. I could bore you all with the story about my aunt and uncle courting during the war, who were attacked by a very large GI who knocked my rather small uncle out and would have done something very nasty to Auntie Dot had a policeman not happened by, but I won’t.
I think if we’re coming up with pet theories about “why” though, I’ll fling one hat into the ring, which is that we currently are plunging into an ever more narrow path to success for young people, and this is endemic to the Nu Labour attitude. You do well at school, get a degree,
then become a non-jobbing parasiteand join the professional classes, or you’re a failure, one of the untermenschen. I think the Americans call it “Yale or jail” in their pithy manner. This doesn’t leave much of a future for those who are less academically gifted. They’re told they’re going to fail from the word go. Which is ridiculous. You can make good money being a tradesman, or running a shop. Building a business doesn’t need an IQ of 140 and a degree in business studies from Harvard. Sadly, as a society in the grip of the left, we do little to encourage youngsters to be business folks, rather than academics. So our young entrepreneurs sell drugs, and then kill each other.Really, i know everyone thinks I’m a total phillistine, but I’ve had it up to the back teeth with education, education, education in the progressive mould. All it’s doing is harshly dividing sheep and goats, and it fucks me off because a lot of those flung in the goat bin could be fine productive members of society, the enterpreneurs and workers we need. Sadly our leaders come from a class that despise such vulgar money grubbing. The Ed Balls of our polity spend their lives studiously avoiding actually doing anything productive, and that attitude rather rubs off on the systems they impose on everybody else.
I thought that those responsible for the murders of teenagers were in fact their murderers.
Blame attached to faceless entities like ‘government’ and ‘society’ comes close to excusing to guilty.
It’s an interesting position where a Labour junior minister states that, after a decade of Labour government, we have a serious and undealt with problem in the sphere of youth criminality and the doyennes of Samizdata tell him to stop making a big fuss over nothing. Judging from the pictures of the dos Samizdatists periodically display to their audience one can guess that they are, shall we say, predominantly from a socio-economic group that is somewhat insulated from the problems herein described. Nevertheless, the mark of the upright man is his attitude to the weakest and most vulnerable – just because this is a lazy platitude of the Left trotted out to obscure their giant transfer of resources to the bureaucrat class doesn’t make it any less true. As detailed, for example, in oldandrew’s wonderful blog, the view from the bottom is decidedly dark. Pace Perry, there is no single cause for the morass of the bottom 30 or so percent. Some of the contributory factors are opposed consistently and eloquently on this website, some are ignored and some are actively supported.
Anyway,
Sure fine, perhaps this does need to be pointed out.
With the bolded emendations I would not disagree one whit, otherwise it does not square with my experience.
Quite apart from the really miserable, many of the people I went to school with spend a very high proportion of their money on recreations – legal and illegal – that they require in order to be able to face going back to work again so they can earn the money to do the same. I find meeting up with these people quite a depressing experience; life is one big feedback loop with no moment of rest, a Hobbesian search for felicity with no end, even a temporary one. Or to put it another way, existence oscillates between work(ascholia) and recreation (anapausis) without any leisure (scholia).
Now, it’s quite reasonable to say that Samizdata is focusing on the very real need to shrink the state by at least half and so doesn’t need to deal with these issues. It is also reasonable, though not I think correct, to say it is a purely apolitical matter and hence not appropriate as a topic of discussion for a political blog or one of her Majesty’s ministers. But it won’t do to say there is no issue, that material prosperity in contemporary Britain is always or often a passport to moral and intellectual betterment and to dismiss anyone who disagrees as a neo-Tractarian* social fascist or whatever it is I’ll be called this time.
*(If JP or NickM is reading, the comment about Tractarians is a JOKE. I’m not seriously accusing Samizdata of opposing efforts to de-protestantize the CofE so try not to fly off the handle).
I certainly don’t think that prosperity makes for better people. Whether we are morally better or worse than say, our Viking/Celtic/other ancestors is impossible to chart against some index of wealth. Correlation is not the same as causation. I’d argue that in some respects our observance of moral standards, such as honesty, honour, care for the weak, etc, have degraded in some, if not all, parts of society. On the other hand, tolerance for certain groups who might have previously been persecuted has arguably improved in the West, if not elsewhere.
Above all else, when thinking about the changes to Western society since the Industrial Revolution, the position of women has improved, I would argue. Their chances of being forced to marry someone against their will – with the notable exception of parts of the ethnic minorities – have dramatically changed for the better. Their right to own, pass on and inherit property, for example, have improved markedly. And these are not just legal improvements or improvements in GDP. They are moral improvements also.
veryretired:
What arguments, where? You appear to be piling a circumstantial ad hominem on top of a strawman.
Ian B:
Oh for pity’s sake. I wish we did have more of that educational elitism in this country. The problem with the underclass is not that they are given educational aspirations they could never achieve, it is that they are given no educational aspirations at all.
Allan:
Now this argument, I like.
Well I’m sorry you didn’t like my criticism of Education with a capital “E” thar, oldandrew, but I’m trying to draw a distinction between education, learning stuff, and Education, spending as many years as humanly possible in the Education System. The latter has become an obsession of our society. It is believed to be an intrinsically Good Thing. Is it?
For someone to pursue knowledge is, I would agree, a Good Thing, though not without costs. For some to, for instance, develop a deep understanding of the history of ancient Greece is nice, but we must remember that everyone doing that isn’t producing anything as such; a society can support a certain size of intellectual class, but at everyone else’s expense. We shouldn’t forget that. I’m happy for a few history dons to bumble around their colleges, but when millions of people are spending millions of unproductive man years studying for the sake of studying, we must raise a hand and ask a few questions. How many people with expertise in sociology, film studies or english (a degree in reading books, for fuck’s sake) do we really need? Why is it presumed that anyone doing so is doing something intrinsically better than spending those years gaining experience as a plasterer before starting their plastering business?
Our fanaticism for Education as a measure of worth of a man is leading to literally millions of degrees which are unusable and unused. So the Edjication System is attributed meta-justifications. It’s not really the shallow knowledge provided by a degree in PPE that counts, we’re advised, but the experience of farting around at Uni for a few years at everybody else’s expense apparently makes those who do so better in some way. They’re better “socialised” (lolz) they have some magical experience of life that the dullards who just left school and got a job don’t have. And that leads to much of the job market being controlled by graduates who will only employ graduates, and a social stratification.
And then we look at that shower of graduates running the country; the Browns, Balls and Blears, and we realise what a pile of toss that is.
The reality is, IMV, that the graduate mania is simply old fashioned class preference. It’s about a particular path through life that makes a person “our kind of person”, a member of the same social class. It’s pure unalloyed snobbery. There’s nothing directly wrong with elitism if you’re defining “elite” as objectively better than not-elite in some way. But elitism such as I am describing, which is merely the inclusion of members of one social class and the exclusion of others on the basis not of merit but of membership of a particular social club, is, I would argue, distasteful bilge of the highest order. Feel free to consider me a knuckle dragging philistine; sadly my highest educational achievement was 25 yards swimming, and I cheated on that.
Anecdotally; my dad I and were discussing a mutual acquaintance the other day, and my dad mentioned that his son had just finished teacher training after his degree. Then he said “Just think, 27 years old and he’s never done a day’s work in his life”. That’s something to think about. A person getting on for half way to retirement that has never engaged in an economically productive act. Is that really so laudable?
Ian B, I would agree 100 per cent. I’d add that old-fashioned apprenticeships, which were mentioned inthe original post in a not entirely friendly way, are a good thing, and should be encouraged by cutting away all the mounds of red tape currently foisted onto employers. In previous posts I have argued for such things as cutting, not increasing, the compulsory school-leaving age to encourage youngsters to start earning a wage earlier, rather than being kept in artificial infancy for so long.
I like to think that I benefited from my uni degree, but I would be the first to admit that it was not quite the avenue to high pay that some might have thought it to be.
Both IanB and oldandrew are correct.
1) It is true that the massive expansion of secondary and higher education has no economic justification and is almost certainly harmful; that it is unjust that taxpayers have to support ever more people doing useless things; that the equation of university graudation and emplyability is a social disaster based upon fallacy and bluff and that a very great proportion of the time spent in institutions of education is purely wasted
2) It is also true that standards in education are shamefully, nay criminally, low; that much more can and should be expected of students at every level; that low expectations are a self fufilling prophecy; that a respect for genuine learning is almost dead in society at large and is actually dead among meainstream youth and that a good dose of intellectual elitism would be most salutary.
The sad fact is that the more education hours we get the less education value we receive, not only per hour but absolutely. Education is one of the many comepeting goods that are ends in themselves; it does not need to be justified in economic terms as our barbarian government thinks. A degree in English literature, if it is spent studying the greatest acheivements of our civilization withsome of the greatest minds of a generation, it not useless, it is priceless (though I accept that this does not provide an obligation on others to pay for it) both for the individual lucky enough to receive it and for the civilization of which he or she is a member. A year spent doing O levels,* though, provided a superior education to most degrees today.
(Brown, Balls etc. are not by any decent standard educated. Balfour, Gladtone, Pitt etc., on the other hand were, as Scruton puts it, not intellectuals but certainly educated men).
Ian B.
You are still talking about degrees. This discussion was about juvenile criminals and their culture.
Do you not get that these are utterly unrelated issues?
It’s actually almost comical, like you wanted to rant about student layabouts and useless media studies graduates, but being unable to find anything on that topic you thought you’d bring it up in a discussion of gang violence and knife murders and hope nobody noticed.
Oldandrew, it seems you haven’t understood what I said at all. I admit my comments were not comprehensive, but I thought they were fairly clear nonetheless.
The issue IMV, or one of the issues, is that the Education mantra impresses on youngsters that if they are not going to follow the Education path, they are failures, and then what one might comically call the “graduate mafia” makes sure they will be. There is nothing at all wrong with leaving school and starting work, but as a society we look down our noses at that, discouraging youngsters from even trying to do anything worthwhile with their lives. They recognise that they are not going to be part of the elite, so they drop out and seek other means to make their mark on the world, which are often rather destructive. Gang culture is one such thing; a way to acquire status.
So what I am saying is that this monolithic progressive ideology centred around education, higher education, and entering a certain social class, stifles diversity. There are many useful, productive things the less academically inclined can do which may well lead them to the wealth they aspire to, but without killing people in a criminal netherworld. I believe that as a society we are actively discouraging that. Just one aspect is the trapping of such lads (and lasses) in school, which they hate and where they are failures, when they could be starting in the workplace, away from the enforced infantlisation.
We need to stop treating them as goats.
Anyway, it’s just one part of the problem as I said initially. But your suggestion that these things are “unrelated” is in my view rather naive.
Ian B.,
The point is that what you are saying is flat-out wrong. The culture of the underclass is not formed as a result of graduates looking down on non-graduates. Most of the underclass don’t even know what a graduate is. They simply wouldn’t distinguish between graduate and non-graduate careers. You may have a big issue with graduate snobbery but it doesn’t reach the underclass.
Your attempt to run your own issues with graduates into a discussion of juvenile criminals is a comic juxtaposition. You might as well claim they turn to crime because they couldn’t get into Oxbridge, or win the Nobel Prize for Economics.
I get the feeling you’ve never met any of the this underclass of yours, oldandrew.
Funny, that’s what I was thinking about you.
As for myself, I’m fairly confident that I have no shortage of experience of the youth of the underclass’ lack of interest in, or appreciation of, education.
Ah, oldandrew, but which is it they don’t appreciate- education or Education?
All of the above. The distinction you make is irrelevant to them.
“Why do we have to learn French? It’s not like I’m ever going to go to France.”
“What’s the point of maths? If I want to work something out I’ll just use my phone”
“Reading is boring.”
“Why do we always have to do work in your lesson. Can’t we have a fun lesson. You know one where we just chill?”
And if they don’t eat their meat, they can’t have any pudding! How can they have any pudding if they don’t eat their meat???