Friday 19 July 2013

'Permitting more people to move about, meet and be stupid together'



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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