Harry’s Place

I never fail to be impressed by the fact that Engels was 24 when he wrote the Condition of the Working Class… We think of him and Mr Marx as old gits with beards.

Marx doesn’t date, does he? I agree, runaway galley slaves are the bane of our society.

Wow. Someone else opens their eyes just a little, and accepts, albeit grudgingly, that we’re not ‘every day, in every way, getting better and better’.

But the historical examples you quote have already been demolished elsewhere.

Glaswegian knife gang myths - see Hitchens’ ‘Brief History Of Crime’. I think it was three stabbings over ten years which created the reputation.

Serious alcoholism ? Not a problem today of course. Are you sure the Temperance movement was big in the 40s and 50s ? 1840s and 50s maybe.
Casual prostitution ? Was it really endemic ubt)in poor areas of Glasgow in the 1950s ?

But leave Swindon Irish Club on a Saturday night in 2003 and you’ll find on the road outside plenty of casual - and not so casual prostitution.

And “domestic violence, child abuse, serial adultery and even rioting have always existed in Britain but because such behaviours weren’t considered worthy of report in newspapers or needful of comment by respectable people they existed in shadow form compared to the exposure they enjoy now.”

Have you not read anything about the Victorian reformers ? Chadwick, Barnado, Rowntree, shafresbury, Booth ? Such things were of great concern to the Victorians and there was an explosion of charitable work addressing it.

I think that paragraph has more than a hint of the ‘moral panic’ theory.

Could I recommend the Labour sociologist Norman Dennis ‘Families Without Fatherhood’ on crime ‘now and then’, available from Civitas as a pdf.

And finally - the good doctor Dalrymple again, on a New Statesman lunch. I think the questioner was Charles Wheeler.

“On my right sat a man in his late sixties, intelligent and cultivated, who had been a distinguished foreign correspondent for the BBC and who had spent much of his career in the United States. He said that for the last ten years he had read with interest my weekly dispatches

Of course it’s the social workers who have made the difference… not!

Laban,

Sorry - I should have namechecked you in the post as one who agrees with Dalrymple et al that we’re heading off to hell in a handbasket :)

I can’t agree with the implication that pre-1960’s Glasgow suffered little from anti-social behaviour and crime. I haven’t read the Hitchens book on crime but if he suggests that the razor gangs weren’t widespread and violent as early as the 1920’s then he is plain wrong. he should seek out some Glaswegians who will soon put him right.

The temperance movement was relatively widespread and powerful in Scotland until really quite recently. Cathcart and Pollockshields in Glasgow were “dry” districts until the 1970’s as was the nearby town of Kirkintilloch. There were many other local councils scattered throughout Scotland which voted annually to ban the sale of drink though they are probably thin on the gound or even non-existant now they most certainly still existed in the 1940’s.

The casual prostitution I mentioned was also a widespread social phenomena though one doesn’t neccessarily find out about it from official statistics or books which I suppose makes it difficult to verify except in hearsay form.

I take your point about the Victorian social reformers but my comments on the relative amount of space given to social dysfunction in newspapers was meant to be a pre and post 1960’s comparison rather than 1860’s.

Finally I agree with the quote from Dalrymple that most middle-class people know little about their lumpen fellow citizens but as you will gather from the work of the Victorians you mention - twas ever thus.

Now for the Grand Unified Theory…

In many ways society is enjoying constant progress. We are becoming steadily more affluent, and the average citizen can now live a longer and healthier life than has ever been possible before. Scientific progress brings an ever-deeper understanding of the nature of the physical world, and technological innovation creates exciting new opportunities (like the fact that people from around the world can so easily participate in this discussion).

But that doesn’t mean that everything is getting better, and social disorder has visibly risen since the 1960s. Look at the puking and brawling in the average British town centre after pub closing time. Look at the ubiquitous graffiti. Listen to all those warnings from the police and government about not showing your mobile phone in public in case someone steals it, which represents a contemptible surrender to the criminals. Would any of that really have been tolerated in the 1950s? If not, what’s changed?

Firstly, the collapse of the old social hierarchy has significantly reduced the stigma attached to behaviours that would once have been seen as lower class, such as public drunkenness, and drunkenness alone accounts for much else (such as Swindon Irish Club on a Saturday night). But drunkenness is popular because it’s fun, so without strong social disapproval many people will do it to excess.

Secondly, limitations on sexual activity have been drastically reduced due to a variety of factors, not least the invention of effective contraception which removed the overriding practical necessity for women to refrain from sex before marriage in order to avoid having a child without the means to support it. That is not in itself a bad thing - the sexual choices of consenting adults should be a strictly private matter - but it would look that way to a social conservative who sees such behaviour as inherently immoral.

Thirdly, drug addiction was an insignificant problem in the 1950s but is a major one now. Addicts and dealers commit a huge amount of crime, heroin does to its users what Gin did to the underclass in Hogarth’s time but much faster, and addiction turns previously responsible people into amoral monsters. For this we can blame the 1960s. The hippies created an enormous demand for drugs and thus encouraged criminals to move into this new and highly lucrative market. They created a new criminal industry, which needed to sell harder drugs and create more addicts to sustain itself. In the crack epidemic of the 1980s the working class paid the price for the hedonism of selfish middle-class dropouts in the 1960s.

Fourthly and most importantly, the loss of cultural confidence that has been noted in other discussions on this blog leads to a lack of certainty about what constitutes acceptable behaviour. How can we condemn others when we’re so uncertain of ourselves? The left would probably blame consumerism and the right the moral relativism of the sixties radicals, but the second is actually a product of the first.

The sixties generation had grown up with the first flowering of the consumer society, and simply wanted to extend the complete freedom of choice that they had always taken for granted in other areas into those that were still governed by moral strictures. Consumerism encouraged them to believe that they had a right to get whatever they wanted right now, and teenagers inevitably just wanted to have fun, get drunk, and get laid. The result was a counter-culture ideology of free sex, free drugs and total personal freedom that was inimical to any idea of self-restraint, and which therefore felt threatened by any idea of moral judgement. This differed from a principled libertarian position in that libertarians recognise the personal responsibility that comes with personal freedom, whereas the sixties ideal of instant gratification without consequences was simply consumerism taken to its ultimate conclusion. It was anarcho-consumerism.

But the counter-culture also developed a Year Zero mentality that encouraged the rejection of all existing social institutions in favour of whatever new way of living they chose to invent. Burke would have recognised it as the same attitude he saw in the French revolutionaries. So the counter-culture’s lasting contribution to progressive politics was to inject it with an automatic hostility to everything that the previous generation had believed in, including all the positive achievements of Western civilisation. Simply by happening the radical social changes of the 1960s had fractured any consensus about what the values of Western society were. But the Year Zero mentality implanted a lasting uncertainty in mainstream society about whether their own culture was an achievement to be proud of or a vile stain on history. This self-doubt continues to undermine society to this day, and one of the most urgent challenges now facing moderate leftists such as the Hatchet gang is to articulate why progressives should be proud of the positive achievements of Western civilisation, and must fight to defend them. The most dangerous threat to a democratic society is not that its citizens may fear to defend it but that they may cease to believe that it is worth defending.

This also helps explain why so much of the revolutionary left is now committed to negative causes (anti-war, anti-capitalism, etc.) rather than to promoting an alternative vision of society. If everything Western is uniquely evil, all you have to do to be on the right side is to oppose whatever the West does. There’s no need to propose an alternative because by definition anything else is better.

Fifthly, some of the radicals dropped back in and rose to positions of prominence. Many naturally went into the media or academia, where they could make a living through self-expression. Therefore the kind of leftism that predominates in the academic and media establishment is instinctively anti-Western in the broadest sense. Whether consciously or not, they want to convince us that our society is something to be ashamed of because they feel it in their bones that the West is bad. So in producing TV shows, books, etc. that express their values they promote the loss of cultural confidence, and works that depict violence and societal decay simply reflect their own sense of the rottenness of Western society. Thus, they both encourage the growth of disorder and exaggerate the extent to which it has actually taken place.

Sixthly, even right wing and apolitical media outlets have a strong interest in publishing sensational crime stories to give the reader a frisson of fear and/or an invigorating sense of outrage. Sex and death sells. But in a media-saturated world, this creates an exaggerated fear of crime because it sends the constant message that nobody is safe anywhere. Of course, there has always been a gutter press, but in a self-confident society their lurid tales of mayhem would not have such an effect.

Finally, the state discourages individuals from taking any role in the maintenance of law and order. The bigger government gets the less people feel that anything is their personal responsibility anyway. But citizens are actively discouraged from “taking the law into their own hands”, so anyone who feels tempted to challenge anti-social behaviour knows that if the offender attacks them they are likely to get prosecuted for assault if they defend themselves with any vigour. Crime is portrayed as a matter for professionals in which the public has no right to interfere. Since the police cannot be everywhere at once this reduces the ability of society to maintain order.

I’ve long held a theory (too lazy to research it though) that the only thing keeping the UK from interwar low levels of crime is the drug trade. But the trade as we actually have it is spreading the attitudes and behaviour of the ‘underclass’ (anyone else feel a bit uncomfortable talking about other people in this vein?) into areas where it was previously unknown, a point which Dalrymple often makes. Is there anything in this idea?

On Glasgow…

Firstly, I don’t understand Marcus’s logic that Glasgow had a worse problem with alcoholism back in the days when there was a large temperance movement. This is absurd on its face. Interesting to hear that Cathcart used to be a dry district. The streets of Cathcart are now full of shouting, fighting drunks every night of the week. Explain again how the lack of a temperance movement is evidence that drunkenness isn’t a problem.

As for knife-fights and casual prostitution, check and check: still here, still popular. Except some of the guys use swords instead of knives now. A few years back, my then flatmate answered a knock at the door to be greeted by a twelve-year-old girl who asked how much he’d be willing to pay to fuck her. Glasgow is one of the few places in the developed world where the most common cause of head injury isn’t traffic accidents: instead, it’s assault.

Glasgow has improved in many ways over the years, but the social behaviour of your average white working-class Glaswegian is not one of those ways, sadly.

By the way, Andrew, should a unified theory contain seven different points?

Squander Two,

My point about the Temperance movement was that alcoholism was perceived to be such a widespread social problem in Glasgow (and elsewhere) that at least one generation of political leaders (left and right but since it was predominantly a working-class problem mostly left - see Willie Gallagher) were so marked by the scale of the problem that they swore off the drink themselves and attracted enough public support to ban its sale in many places (by the way it was not just Glasgow where this happened the USA banned alcohol on a national scale).

I know that drunken behaviour is still umpleasant for those on the receiving end, having been on the end of it in Sauchihall Street recently, but I stand by my statement that alcoholism and drunkenness was more widespread in certain of the poorer Glasgow Districts in the recent past (1940’s/1950’s)than now. I only have oral hearsay evidence to back it up though.

Is the Swindon Rugby Club members only, or can anybody go along and partake of the drunken debauchery apparently on offer there?

I think its remarkable. Marcus posts thoughtful and well-argued piece in which he implies a challenge to prejudices he himself has every reason to share. His post is about social progress and about the representation of society (ie history and the media, which is if you like our daily history).

Then everyone has chosen to answer with degrees of theorising or opinionated heresay (ie prejudice). I guess that’s blogging. And I suppose we did start with Mr Dalrymple generalising from the particular!

I tend to agree with Marcus.

Here’s a thought - (a) lets not confuse pockets of poverty and / or depravity / social breakdown with degrees of this at a societal level.

(b) Lets also not confuse taste with culture, or with social integrity. Was society ever unified in a vision of common ideals and progress?

Don’t we need to try and find ways to measure any ‘progress’ objectively and agree our terms - not argue our theories? This is part of the process but surely the key is for us to attempt to find agreement on what we all deem to be social progress (opinionated as we are)?

One could argue that we occasionally ‘have a moment’ of social agreement on immediate goals but even that is by no means common across society - I’m thinking of when larger percentages of the population than usual share SOME (but not all) views on what is good for society - maybe during WWII, or just after re. the 1945 Labour government and the creation of he NHS (though the GPs took some persuading on that).

Maybe another example would be for a tiny fraction of time each side of Mr Blair’s first election - when I spoke to middle-aged bankers who had voted Tory all their life but were voting Blair because they felt Thatcherism had gone too far and damaged both society and government. Sure that all changed, but for a moment there seemed to be a higher than usual degree of ’social agreement’ at a cultural, if not at a uniformly applied political, level.

Alternatively, maybe the relative poverty of the poorest is an issue here. I can think of parts of London which look unchanged since I first have memories of them in the 1970s but I know that things have changed for the better when I relate my visual and media headlines to the experiences of people whom I know living in these areas. But they are still in many cases terrible areas to live where hair-raising things happen.

Then again new monsters are often more scary than familiar ones.

Sure there will be examples where something has got worse, its naive to imagine things go uniformly forwards towards a better tomorrow EVERYWHERE, on the other hand they do ALWAYS CHANGE and the key issue has to be how we assess if any givwen change is an improvenment - or more to the point how we agree on that.

Marcus last paragraph is I think very relevant with respect to this.

Chris,

I agree about sifting out the Dalrympian underclass insomuch as it is a permanent historical phenomenon similar to and perhaps contiguous with a criminal underclass. Despite the attention that it receives from politicians and the media I don’t think that it has that much to tell us about social progress.

I also wholly agree about the qualitative difference between personal tastes and social integrity. That said, though, there certainly was a time when society was unified in its notions of integrity. I am just old enough to remember it (I think I must be at least twenty years older than you).

I am impressed by aspects of Andrew Z’s Grand Unified Theory. He’s not afraid to stick it to the sixties. But we should remember that while social fashions went through the mill then the fundamentals of future social change were enacted in parliament by men a generation older. Herein, then, is if not a measure of our progress then at least a judgement on it: has social liberalism been, on balance, a cost or a benefit?

Prejudice runs thick in these parts, of course. I am an anti-authoritarian social conservative - impossible, occasionally painful, but true. In the absence of a definitive audit of the aforesaid costs and benefits I am left with a gut feeling on the issue - plus Norman Dennis, of course, and Jill Kirby, too). I would certainly appreciate hearing a few ideas on how genuine objectivity might be introduced.

The issue of material progress is less complicated. We are richer. Simple measures would be the growth in real per capita GDP and/or change to the official definition of poverty and the numbers classified thereby. A second and related measure here might be the proportion of the working population neither paid welfare nor employed by the state in welfare-related functions.

Finally and in fairness to all libertarians, some measure of political (not social) freedom should be included in this exercise. So, in what relative volumes have laws extending governmental and quasi-governmental interference in our lives been enacted - or, faint hope, repealed?

Guessedworker, I strongly agree with the suggestion that we need a proper audit of how society has actually changed since the earthquakes of the sixties, and of what the costs and benefits actually are. Can anyone recommend any previous work in this area? Surely someone must have tried to do it already?

It might actually be something that bloggers could do - some kind of collaborative project with contributors from across the political spectrum, to dig up the numbers and find out what happened and why.

Incidentally, I suspect that there is probably a generational shift in progress, with the old leftist establishment moving towards retirement and more conservative generations coming through to replace them. My gut feeling is that the force of the future will be an anti-authoritarian (or outright libertarian) moderate right: Schwarzenegger Republicans in the U.S. and people who think like Jackie D or Andrew Dodge in the U.K.