CRIME, CONSERVATIVES AND THE MARCH OF HUMAN PROGRESS
‘Nostalgia:
it’s not what it used to be’. Yeah, I know, that gag is a bit old. But the old
one’s are the best. They don’t make jokes like they used to, after
all.
Towards the
top of the (inappropriately lengthy) list of things which piss me off sits the populist
brand of mirthless anti-modern sentiment, much beloved of people phoning Radio
2, and taxi-drivers. Approximately enough considering that last fan of the standpoint,
anti-modernism spends its time looking over its shoulder towards the past,
gleaning the halcyon days of bankers in bowlers, upper lips with rigor mortis
and ‘Love Thy Neighbour’. Afflicted as I am by youthful optimism, I’ve sworn
never to get so old and twisted that I speak about how things are ‘nowadays’.
Not, of course, that it’s a matter of age as such. David ‘Broken Britain’ Cameron
earned his stripes early on (though not as early as Mr Hague, who was busy
predicting the apocalypse before he had even had a chance to go properly bald).
A lot of the Tories seemed to have emerged from the womb complaining that this
whole ‘breathing for your self’ thing was a shambles compared to the good old
days in the uterus when you got the oxygen you deserved without every Tom, Dick
and Harry sucking it up first.
One of the
reasons why this is so damn annoying is that flies in the face of demonstrable
fact. It was a nice bit of irony that, yesterday, the Conservative arm of the
government were falling over themselves to celebrate the fact that the crime
figures are falling, gleefully crowing that they’re the lowest numbers in more
than a decade. When a BBC reporter quite reasonably pointed out that he should
probably retract his whole ‘broken’ diagnosis or embrace life as a walking contradiction,
Cameron just essentially said ‘Well…some bits of it are broken’. You’re fooling no-one, Dave. I am a literature
student. I know all about that tactic: make an overhasty generalised statement
about something (the realist novel in Victorian Britain, maybe, or the entire
state of a twenty-first century first world democracy); get pushed to justify your
assertion by somebody with an annoying penchant for accuracy; backpedal in a
vain attempt to save face, pointing out whichever minimal parts of whatever you’re
talking about support your general idea…. Except I don’t think Cameron actually
did say which bits were broken. Perhaps because violent crime and public
disorder are generally considered to be a pretty accurate measure of whether a
society is all smashed up or not, for the general reason that they often literally
involve smashing said society up.
Anyway, the
general point is that all those ‘in-my-day’ers have got another big fat chunk
of information to ignore, whilst we people who think that the modern world is
actually alright, all in, have some questions lurking in the back of the brain.
Like – is society actually, really, getting better?
Obviously, ‘better’
means different things to different people. I doubt a right-wing religious
zealot is going to look at our increasing tolerance, liberal agenda and
burgeoning secularism as something to celebrate, but then again, I have yet to
find much that does please those sort of people, so perhaps best to leave them
out. And I suppose you could argue
that all these things which we consider to be signs of progress are actually
signs that we are creeping ever more swiftly away from the basic human
instincts – that is, the sort of law-of-the-jungle, strict-gender-roles,
hunter-gatherer-and-whacker-with-stick sort of model of humanity which many
people use to condemn homosexuality, feminism, social equality and many other
arbiters of civilised life. Of course, there is a big elephant in the room
here,called Income Inequality (Mummy elephant: freemarket capitalism, Daddy
elephant: globalist exploitation of third world labour). I know a lot of people
will have a hard time thinking that things can really have gotten ‘better’ when
there are billionaires and people living out of food-banks living a few tube
stops away from each other, or when two women of the same age can have their
life chances, educational opportunities, and even their ability to avoid a
severely premature death decided by which continent they’ve been born on. For
the purposes of the discussion, I ask for the ability to leave said elephant filling
space in the corner for a bit, just to spend a bit of time hypothesising about
the other stuff. He won’t get lonely. He has lots of his little friend
elephants squashed up against the walls (they’ve got names like Mounting Obesity
Levels and The Rise of the EDL, and they’re taking up a lot of room, too).
Put on your
pink glasses for a bit, though, and most of us are able to look at a large number aspects of life in the
MEDCs nowadays and see that, taking the long view, we’re going the right way.
More democracy, less sexism, more medical advances, less open violence, more
support for minorities, less emphasis on uniformity. Alright, so the past few years
haven’t been great in some of these areas, thanks to a riot or two and those
things called Conservative ministers. But, on the whole, we’re on the right
track, don’t you think?
But here’s
the niggle that’s getting to me – how long can we keep it up? Can crime keep falling? Can levels of education keep going up? Or will all these signs
of a general progress eventually reach a limit? Is there a certain amount of
violence, of poverty, of illiteracy, or intolerance and extremism and all those
other things, built into the system? If all things tend towards entropy, then
why not human society?
That was the
medieval view, of course – that the world would basically just keep declining until
it eventually ended and God came and sorted it out, with his big dustpan and
brush of judgement, picking the good bits out of all the mess and tipping the
rest into the fire for the rest of eternity. Essentially, science agrees – sun’s
gotta end one day, and this climate of ours is only going one way, too. The
long-term picture isn’t really rosy in either.
But I’m not
medieval, or religious in any way, or particularly scientifically inclined. I
know about climate change, and try to act accordingly, but if I’m honest, when
thinking of my life sixty years from now, I don’t actually rule out living in
Norfolk on account of it having become a little bit too sea-y for a retirement
home. And I am guilty, I think, of
assuming that things not only are better
now than they ever have been, but that they will continue to be so. I envisage a day when I look back at myself now
and think that I was a racist, misogynist, homophobic idiot, who believed in
theories which are so clearly not true, and was so ignorant as to think that
cancer could never be cured/world hunger would never be solved/Sherlock would never be bettered by the
BBC, and the like. But now I think about it, maybe I do need to put a bit of a
check to all these ambitions, because taking progress for granted can make us
complacent, can’t it? I tend to assume that we notice the bad bits more because
we live in a world largely without flagrant sexism, casual violence, out and
out homophobia et cetera. Perhaps I dismiss them too readily as a result?
Crime is down.
Wonderful. There are less wars and hatred and intolerance. We are, according to
Steven Pinker, essentially just getting less barbaric. But we can’t lose sight
of the fact that the potential is there to go backwards, as well as forwards. I
worry about the Coalition day to day, but I hardly think they signal the death
knell to progress in modern Britain. But some things are lurking which might do
– religious extremism, for instance, is still making a stealth approach across
the Atlantic. And we all know the perils that come when it’s taken for granted
that somebody believes in equality, and so any evidence to the contrary must be
‘banter’.
Progress: it
ain’t always just looking forward, y’know.
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