Alex Millar watches Society Outwardly Screaming
There is something very wrong with society at the moment: we live in a world where atrocities such as the killing of Damilola Taylor are commonplace and where a substantial minority feel they have the right to destroy or vandalise private or public property. This leads people to question whether things simply aren't what they used to be, to hanker after the good old days of moral values. One suggestion, highlighted by Damilola's father as to why this degenerative process has occurred is the breakdown of the family unit. It follows that a lack of fear of one's parents could quite easily lead to a lack of fear of authority in general - if one cannot respect the lowest strata of this hierarchical system then how can they respect the top? And yet this can not be the whole answer: 'fearing our parents' in the sense of respecting them, may very well mean we operate just fine in the rarefied air of the elite. However, as demonstrated by the May Day Rioter from Eton, we have little or no skills socially in the wider circles of humanity, which is unfortunately the only place which matters. And incidentally, those parent-hating youths that go around blowing up cars often have very strong internal, moralistic, values that lead them to turn to such extreme behaviour.One might agree that scum who kill senselessly, fit into Mr Taylor's theory, yet what does this term 'senseless' mean? Killing is nearly never senseless - unless perpetrated by a sociopath and yet, to many of us, the horrific crimes that we see in our newspapers or on the television screens cannot be described as anything other than senseless. So does this mean that we, society, are creating a sociopathic society? And here we see the problem, it lies not solely with our parents but is to do with the wider picture; with our conservative value system we breed hate-crimes, and with our liberal values we breed drug-crimes. So society is faced with the unanswerable question: which of these extremes is worse?
Let us first look for an answer as to why this sociopathic society that we live in today has come about? Along with the glorious democracy that was given to us by the Victorians was the creation of self worth. The price of democracy was therefore that people valued themselves more which, together with the rise in affluence, was the creation of the bomb waiting to go off.
Some would say that this ticking bomb went off following the Second World War where a generation of adults and newly born babies were brought up with the intention that they would live in a way and in the hope that they would never have to suffer what the millions died to end. The war was the product of a totalitarian state, this phobia developed to a fear of the state in general and from that a hate of the establishment - whether it was the basic unit of the parent or the entire glitzy ruling entity.
However, this argument has a fatal flaw, namely that modern democracy came to this world not because of the fall of Hitler but rather because of the rise of the industrial revolution. This was a time when the world effectively shrank in its perceived size, a revolution not just in science but also in politics - the voice of the people became a genuinely relevant aspect of politics. It was the beginning of a process which has led to the individual's position in the becoming, in a sense, autonomous. Yet, this new sense of freedom that came about with the introduction of everyday man's input into the way his life was run, did not break down the society into a heap of smouldering vandalised factories. Within the Victorian age lay something that was quite distressing in its severity but understandable given the previous years of debauchery under the Hanoverian Kings - retrograde morality aberration. Whilst generational rebellion is an effective constant in human experience, the point is that technological advances usually take place in inverse proportion to moral fastidiousness and yet the sole exception to this rule is the Victorian period. So the Victorian era which ushered in both modern democracy and repressive social conditioning effectively shaped the face of modern moral change for the West.
Therefore it would seem we have an answer - the good old days of social code ended with at the start of the 20th century, in a sort of knee-jerk reaction to the repressive lifestyle of their 1800's predecessors the flower power babies were born. And a period in which the harsh morality of the Victorians was broken down by people such as Freud, who highlighted the faults with such a conditioned state of affairs was the beginning of the disaster. Yet was this a disaster? The decay of morality is inevitable; it was not so much a collapse as a modification to fit the altered reality of the time. Victorian England was sufficiently powerful that it could impose more restrictions on its people; no one has been as powerful since. This is of course speaking in terms of the West.
We stated that technology seemed to lead to the decline of morality in the West, but this does not, on the surface, appear to have been the case in the East. We could look at Japan, a nation where technology has accelerated at a phenomenal rate and where traditional moral codes seem to be still very much intact. Japan is a tricky issue, and of course the rules are different, but it also still sticks to some of the basic concepts seen in the western example: the veneer of 'Japaneseness', and the self identification with the culture, certainly remains - but the traditions are eroding, admittedly at a slower rate than technological advance. Additionally Japan did not actually make these advances by herself, they were mostly the result of taking from others and adding to their culture. This is not the same kind of evolutionary change.
An interesting point arises - social conservatism is the same as tradition, but tradition is not the same as morality. Traditions tend to change far more often than morals as traditions are geared to specific times, places and beliefs whereas morals are not tied to anything except upbringing, memory and habit. You can remember traditions, even if they no longer exist, but if you aren't used to the morals, they won't suit you. Effectively, social conservatism is whatever the status quo is, and conservatism always loses in the long run because morality breaks free. So immediately we see that moral code and social conservatism are not in fact one and the same, it just seems that way because conservatives like to invoke morals. If their beliefs were truly moral, then it doesn't make sense that other people do not agree with them. Conservative 'morality' is what "used to be ", hence people tend not to listen to the more outspoken of conservatives as they realise that their beliefs do not mesh. So it is the moralists that run society, not the conservatives. It is simply the fact that at one point they were one and the same that leads to this nostalgic view of the "good old days when people had respect". In reality the good old days are just something dead, and will never come back, because the world has changed. So are we left in a society where moralists cannot control the 'beast' that they have unleashed? No: moralists can always control society as they reflect their society. This has the exception of unpopular dictators, but such leaders are not actually representatives of that culture and even then, they must be very powerful - even Stalin needed the tacit agreement of the peasantry.
How do leaders control a society filled with people who possess self worth? When people have self worth it follows that the leader has to change: most of the time the leader becomes the leaders, authority is split because the spreading of power reduces the risk to the common man, making him feel safer, hence stable democracy and making the common man more powerful. Yet within society there are always those who aim to undermine what they see as being an authoritarian state, because they feel they are being repressed. This comes about due to the fact that self worth is cumulative - once people have a bite of the forbidden apple they want more. However the issue is, for most of the time, not if a few feel oppressed but if the mass does. The problem arises when the culture is uncertain at this point morality becomes uncertain and a strong enough, convincing enough, voice can help write words in people's heads, this is how revolutions work. Overthrowing the culture leads to spare capacity within people's minds, space to write new rules.
Yet at the moment we have a different problem. For the first time there has been an inability to control the intransient dark forces at work - namely the acts of those who feel they can operate outside of society and have no wish to work with society to improve it with their ideas. Cumulative self worth gradually makes it harder to manage such groups within a governmental framework, and the introduction of social responsibility is required. Once again the question comes up - who decides this? Who can you trust? The conservatives who are by definition no longer relevant? The liberals who are too dangerous as they make new rules? So the choice is either hate for one or danger to the self from the other.
No one can legitimately answer the question of how to sort out the problems of society; one can only let things go on naturally. In a magical way society solves its issues - the majority of the UK is right wing, yet the socialist ideal of the NHS sits easily with most. Society is filled with those unable to make up their minds and this indecisiveness paradoxically produces harmony. Society can never collapse, although its views may mutate and evolve, it can never split up into bits as that is not in its nature. The good old days of tomorrow will inevitably be those bad days that we have at the moment.