How did England's cities become engulfed in a Lord of the Flies nightmare? Moral relativism is to blame, not gang culture

Toby Young of The Daily Telegraph talks great good sense on the riots:

There is a whole network of feelings and beliefs, some of them conscious, others not, reinforced by conventions and taboos, that underpins the rule of law. Once these constraints fall away, the whole edifice becomes much more fragile. If the sole bulwark against anarchy is fear of getting caught – fear of the police and the punishment the lawbreakers will receive if they’re hauled before the courts – then the centre cannot hold.

It was this fear that evaporated in some of England’s cities on Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday nights. Among crowds of young people, the collective belief in the power of the state collapsed and, to paraphrase Yeats, the blood-dimmed tide was loosed. There was a kind of mass realisation, reinforced by the television coverage, that if enough people broke the law simultaneously the police were powerless to do anything about it.

[...]

It seems likely that those involved in the disturbances were not, predominantly, from one ethnic group or from any particular socio-economic background. The sickness that David Cameron referred to on the steps of Downing Street yesterday is endemic and all-pervasive.

The root of the problem is that the bonds of civilisation – the whole panoply of conventions and taboos that Golding refers to in the above passage – have become too weak. In our increasingly diverse and multicultural society, the only values that command anything like universal assent are procedural ones – ethics, rather than morality. We’ve been taught to value tolerance and mutual respect and to abhor racism and homophobia – essential conventions if all the different “communities” are to get along – without being asked to believe in anything substantial to anchor those conventions in. On the contrary, the prevailing orthodoxy that’s taught in our schools and universities is that one set of substantive moral values is no better than any other and to claim otherwise is to risk appearing racist or sexist. Indeed, there’s a widespread belief that the survival of the procedural conventions depends upon a general skepticism about anything deeper or more meaningful – that the one strengthens the other. In fact, as we witnessed in England’s cities earlier this week, moral relativism does not lead to peace, love and understanding but to a kind of Hobbesian nihilism. Far from propping up the procedural values we’ve come to depend on, moral relativism has left them fatally weakened.

I believe the role of materialism should be examined as well, but there is a lot here to chew on and much to agree with. Give it a read, because there is far more in this article than what I excerpted. Combine this article with Oddie's and with Zoe Williams', both of which I've previously posted, and you'll have yourself a winner.