Riots in England - an essai on the sick society? Social Capital and poetry
The Summer Riots, August, 2011
I have just left the riots behind, am looking out onto the bush, listening to bird song. I am jet lagged, a
hazy state, I moved here from the city to be closer to nature, was it also a desire for community that is a common theme in contemporary urban discourse.
Unlike the riots ones I experienced from when I lived in the UK, at Notting Hill (1976), and Bristol’s St Pauls (1980) - these riots were:
widespread:
partly due (unproven as yet) to the new social media. The Guardian reported one message, “Everyone in edmonton enfield wood green everywhere in north link up at Enfield town station at 4 o clock sharp!”
committed to consumerism:
“It's been less politicised and there's been far more looting, to the point where in many areas grabbing "free stuff" has been the main action. But there's no mystery as to where the upheaval came from. It was triggered by the police killing a young black man in a country where black people are 26 times more likely to be stopped and searched by police than their white counterparts. The riot that exploded in Tottenham in response at the weekend took place in an area with the highest unemployment in London, whose youth clubs have been closed to meet a 75% cut in its youth services budget. It then erupted across what is now by some measures the most unequal city in the developed world, where the wealth of the richest 10% has risen to 273 times that of the poorest . . . . Most have no stake in a society which has shut them out or an economic model which has now run into the sand . . . because three decades of neoliberal capitalism have already shattered so many social bonds of work and community. What we're now seeing across the cities of England is the reflection of a society run on greed – and a poisonous failure of politics and social solidarity.” Seumas Milne [i]
“These have been a disgusting few years. That form of looting known as corporate larceny continues to rage unchecked. Economic scavengers bring the world to the brink of ruin. We don't need the discrepancy between rich and poor laid out in percentages, we see the brute fact of it with our own eyes in the shops and on the roads and in the restaurants of our richest cities.” Howard Jacobson.[ii]
“ . . . we live in fear. In a society that is afraid to punish because it is afraid to judge, that does not understand the outrage of being offended against, that cannot feel the egregiousness of a crime, and that no longer even gestures at justice . . .” Howard Jacobson.
The Sick Society
On August 11 The Sun newspaper reported, “David Cameron vowed to cure Britain's "sick" society yesterday as he backed the use of water cannon and plastic bullets against rioters. Speaking outside No10, the PM voiced disgust at the feral savagery that has swept England. He said: "Pockets of our society are not just broken but are frankly sick."
Robert Putnam has analysed what underpins democracy in Making Democracy in Italy.[iii] In the South civic traditions are undeveloped, compromise is rare in conflicting interests. Putnam then looked at the USA and the evaporation of social capital there in Bowling Alone. He suggests that social capital which involves interconnectedness and interdependence is critical to the development of community. The quality of public life and the performance of social institutions are influenced by civic engagement, affecting education, poverty, unemployment, crime, drug abuse and health.[iv] Voter turnout, newspaper readership, membership in choral societies and football clubs were indicators of successful communities. Putnam states, “Across the 35 countries in this survey, social trust and civic engagement are strongly correlated; the greater the density of associational membership in a society, the more trusting its citizens. Trust and engagement are two facets of the same underlying factor - social capital.”[v] Putnam notes, ‘When I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, 75 percent of Americans said that they trusted their government to do the right thing. Last year, same survey, same question, it was 19 percent.’[vi] There is a decline in the US, which Putnam thinks is multifactorial, including: the movement of women into the labour force; mobility: other demographics (divorce, smaller families); and the technological transformation of leisure (TV).”
Andrew Leigh has looked at the loss of social capital in Australia in Disconnected and reports: “We have fewer friends and are less connected with our neighbours than in the mid-80s. Other measures have flatlined, but few have risen. So what explains the trends in social capital? First, let’s exonerate one defendant. The character variously known as “economic reform”, “economic liberalism” or “economic rationalism” frequently has been blamed for eroding social capital.” He denies this position with the following weak argument, “[When] two people repeatedly interact with one another in a market, they are likelier to behave well towards one another.” [vii]
Clive Hamilton wrote over ten years ago, and I think it still holds, “While increasing emphasis is placed on higher incomes, which won't work, there is widespread concern about the breakdown of social relationships, the erosion of social capital, and a sky-rocketing divorce rate. At a time when many have no work, there's an epidemic of over-work and plummeting job satisfaction. Economic and social trends may also be causing widespread confusion about how we should live. The psychological research tells us that the more successful advertisers and governments are at persuading us to pursue extrinsic goals of material consumption, wealth acquisition, fame and success, the more we create the disturbed individuals and the social pathologies that make for a sick society.”[viii]
The riots spread from London to other cities often through social networking, Twitter, Blackberry and the main media. The rioters were:
1. Kids/youth - who love a rumble, excitement, who take drugs (every culture so far examined has taken drugs in some form or other, though often in clearly prescribed manner). Teens think differently and are not risk averse - and /or:
2. aspiring consumers, gang members, economic migrants (from the countryside or other counties) – where is the glue? As I wandered through Sydney in the last few years I have wondered that if an economic disaster were to happen (or any other catastrophe, like war), where would the social solidarity come from needed to galvanise the population?
The glue is in plastic credit, consuming, the cities have become too big for love, companionship, just gangs and small group of friends, nothing to cohere, and little to offer people shared transcendent goals.
Social Capital
These riots reflect a society run on greed and looting, the wild bravado of the young, and a lack of solidarity or community cohesion one way of handling these concepts is the concept of ‘social capital’.[ix] William Shutkin defines it as the “networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation among people for mutual benefit.”[x] That it is diminishing he blames partly on the rule of experts and professionals who are, “detached from the destiny of wage-earning Americans, their fate hitched to the forces of modern capitalism and their lives ensconced within exclusive work, residential, and leisure environments." (p39).
In fact we know ‘no man is an island, human life as a collective activity, in which individuals work with others to fulfil their intentions and achieve their projects according to local rules and norms.[xi]Erving Goffman conceived the social as rule following behaviour and that conceptions of the self as dependent on legitimisation by others. The self is an actor capable of not only viewing their own behaviour but directing it. [xii] Role playing is ubiquitous and both conscious and unconscious. Goffman later used the theatre metaphor to explain how we 'stage manage' our self image and play roles.[xiii] The role playing by so many young people in the poorer parts of inner cities is that of gang member – London has nearly 200 gangs.
Future Community
In his classic study of nationalism, Benedict Anderson posits the nation as "an imagined political community-and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign . . . It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion."[xiv] In fact nation states (European not even colonised African borders) are geographically and genealogically mostly arbitrary.
The imagined community in modern times is the powerful nation state: "Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings." (p7)
Anderson discusses the novel and the newspaper as two technologies for enabling such large communities and argues that the first European nation-states were formed around "national print-languages." Newspapers emphasise the present with "the date at the top of the newspaper”, the novel is free to roam, or to literature more generally. He notes: "Reading a newspaper is like reading a novel whose author has abandoned any thought of a coherent plot." (p33)
He notes the fiction of the census (which we are undertaking right now) that a) everyone is in it, and b) everyone is fixed in one place. The map also nails down place based identity. Now social technologies would add to his argument.
What continental thinkers emphasise is the future orientation of terms like ‘community’. Alphonso Lingis links individuality to the inevitability of death, and that underlies any rational community, and I think of Durkheim’s mechanical solidarity here. Lingis critiques Western enlightenment rationalism and illuminates the possibility of a community of difference, of people with no strong familial ties or other tight relationships that ease our way to admitting we are strangers and all individuals. This means taking responsibility, being aware of the greater picture and the diversity of uniqueness.[xv]
Maurice Blanchot asks how can there be a "communal" community of individuals, partly by examining the novels of Marguerite Duras.[xvi] And Jean-Luc Nancy suggests that the politics and philosophy of community is failing.[xvii] The term is what I call transcendent, a goal to be worked towards, by rubbing up against each other, not through nation building, hard work or but communication at other levels. Linda Singer puts it this way, ‘community’ is not "a referential sign" but "a call or appeal."[xviii]
The Social Animal
Many of us like to join groups - gangs, teams, professional bodies (the police), unions, regional groupings or nations. We are not all the same - that’s inevitable and a good thing. We often pretend we are all the same to stop violence, useful but untrue - unity is not equivalent to uniformity, we are social beings, eventually we must see clearly and acknowledge how we differ, our strengths and weaknesses. Rousseau believed our differences cause difficulties as we are always comparing people for their skill, intelligence, wealth, status and beauty, we desire to become “the subject of talk.” In the second Discource of Discours sur l’économie politique, Rousseau argues that selfishness derives from man being socialised, (and adds mistakenly that in his originary natural state Homo sapiens had no need for language. He exhorted: “Do what is good for you with the least possible harm to others.” (3.156)
Being intensely social we share stories and emotions, but more than that we are contagious - people imitate the facial expressions of others and often come to feel as others do. Christakis and Fowler in Connected discuss mathematical modelling of flocks of birds, ant colonies and schools of fish reveal no central controlling director instigating sudden movement, rather a collective intelligence appears to emerge, and suggest that network science shows the same principle works for us and that as individuals we behave as part of a super-organism. They state: Seeing ourselves as part of a super-organism allows us to understand our actions, choices, and experiences in a new light. If we are affected by our embeddedness in social networks and influenced by others who are closely or distantly tied to us, we necessarily lose some power over our own decisions. Such a loss of control can provoke especially strong reactions when people discover that their neighbours or even strangers can influence behaviors and outcomes that have moral overtones and social repercussions. But the flip side of this realization is that people can transcend themselves and their own limitations. In this book, we argue that our interconnection is not only a natural and necessary part of our lives but also a force for good. Just as brains can do things that no single neuron can do, so can social networks do things that no single person can do.” [xix]
Being with happy people increases our feelings of well-being, hence the intense emotion of cult members – that can flip from happiness to angst. And happiness is easier to catch than unhappiness. A statistical analysis suggests that each happy friend boosts yours by 9 percent, while each unhappy friend drags you down by only 7 percent. (Darwin studied sympathy in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, it enables us to predict behaviour as well share experiences. Contemporary neuroscience has demonstrated the existence of mirror neurons which activate when witnessing another's actions or emotional reactions, underlying behaviour.)
Capital
Despite peer pressure, mores, the law and the institutions and bureaucracy that encapsulate modern living, we are agents with a choice - to obey instincts or not, unlike animals we self-fashion Democracy in Athens required citizens (male, adults, property owners) to be flexible , empowered and skilled.
We forget how recent universal suffrage is. Just after the English civil war, in 1647 a debate at Putney between Ireton and Cromwell and representatives of the radical Levellers took place, based on John Wildman’s "Agreement of the People," a kind of social contract for the revolutionary English government. Cromwell wanted voting rights to be dependent on owning property, or voters with no permanent interest in the land and country could easily transfer their person and interests elsewhere. In reply, Thomas Rainsborough for the Levellers pointed out that many in the New Model Army had spent their capital on the war effort, and now that their sacrifice had won the war, they were to be denied the liberty they fought for. Tony Judt notes that the ‘welfare to work’ program instigated in 1996 by Bill Clinton (and copied in the UK and Australia), "introduces a conditionality to social citizenship" i.e those who are working and leading productive lives ('The Wrecking Ball of Innovation', The New York Review of Books, (December 12, 2007) .
Most of the rioters did not own a house, many had no jobs, many were not adult and did not have a stake in the nation or the streets they rioted through.
To be a good citizen needs empathy, flexibility, imagination, Social Capital – familiarity with kin, institutions, practices and the confidence to negotiate them – skilled practice and education, They need what Pierre Bourdieu calls ‘capital’ in its three areas: economic, social, and cultural. Bourdieu argues that economic capital is the "root" of all forms of capital, but all are important. He realised that It's not just the $$ you earn, the family, what job you do, but it’s about what you buy, what you do in your leisure time, and your relationships with others. Economic, educational, social and cultural capital are learned cultural competencies and knowledges. Social ability is necessary for the accumulation of social capital, and this requires skill to create and manage a network of relationships "of mutual acquaintance and recognition." [xx]
Mobs (from the Latin mobile vulgus, 18th c term for the labouring poor)
Looting as tax avoidance or fraud by banks and multi-national companies is ongoing yet corporate looting is rarely punished. Mob violence instils fear – the force of the law came down hard, ridiculous sentences of jail for being given a stolen item.
John Rees and Lindsey German point out that: “London has a rich history of mob violence and the mob been an object of fear for London's wealthy almost since the city was founded.”[xxi] And it’s not just political. Sporting events can produce violent episodes, football hooliganism goes way back - in Constantinople chariot races between ‘demes’ or associations were violent affairs, but during one week in AD 532, chariot racing fans rioted burning down nearly half the city and killing many thousands of people. Four died in the English riots.
The idea of a "group mind" or "mob behaviour" was put forward by the French social psychologists Gabriel Tarde and Gustave Le Bon. Psychologist Tamara Avant notes, “There are some group characteristics that increase the likelihood of violence, such as group size and physical anonymity. ‘and many rioters were masked and hooded. “Typically, the bigger a mob, the more its members lose self-awareness and become willing to engage in dangerous behaviour. Second, physical anonymity also leads to a person experiencing fewer social inhibitions. When people feel that their behaviour cannot be traced back to them, they are more likely to break social norms and engage in violence.”
Back in 20s, psychologists looked to explain herd behaviour, Kimball Young, suggested there were three distinctive states. The first is a sense of absolute rightness in what he is doing with his fellows. Second, there is always a large component of hatred and violence in his attitudes and actions. And third, the participant has a heightened sense of his own importance. That is, he indulges in a kind of paranoic ego-expansion.”[xxii] However sociologists David Schweingruber and Ronald Wohlstein refute these views that crowds demonstrate almost pathological behaviour (championed by Gustave LeBon) and argue violence in crowds is extremely rare and when it occurs it is normally carried out by a small minority.[xxiii] It was a large minority last week.
But as John Rees and Lindsey German assert: “riots never just happen. Neither are they the product of some sudden and mysterious decision by criminals to organize a mass society wide excuse to rob Debenhams. The riot always has social and economic roots and it is always a protest by the excluded and the poor against the conditions forced on them by the rich and powerful.”
The Ads
“Welcome to New Haven, Connecticut - the Northeast's hottest hub for businesses seeking a world-class workforce, business friendly atmosphere and cutting edge research institutions. Surrounding New Haven are bucolic suburbs steeped with classic New England charm.”[xxiv]
Two chilling experiments have shown how easily led we are, and not even in mob situations.
We will pay you $4 for one hour of your time. 1961
Persons needed for a study of memory
He wars a lab coat over a shirt and tie, a thin man with small head
A scream. ‘Let me out of here, let me out, you’ve no right to hold me where, let me out.
A big man with white short sleeved short and plaid collar, blond hair shave dup the sides
‘I’m up to 390.’ ‘Please continue
‘Bird, car, train, plane.’
Silence from the room next door,
‘Something happened to that man in there;’
An authoritative voice calmly says, Please continue teacher’
65% gave lethal shocks that they thought could kill
We can do dreadful things.
Stanley Milgram conducted obedience experiments at Yale University in 1961-1962. He found, surprisingly, that 65% of his subjects, ordinary residents of New Haven, were willing to give apparently harmful electric shocks-up to 450 volts-to a pitifully protesting victim, simply because a scientific authority commanded them to, and in spite of the fact that the victim did not do anything to deserve such punishment. The victim was, in reality, a good actor.[xxv]
In the summer of 1971, a young social psychologist PhilipZimbardo set up a mock prison in the basement of Stanford University's psychology building. The Stanford Prison Experiment showed people adapting to their roles as either prisoner or guard (assigned via a coin toss) in only 6 days with brutal effects, though all had been assessed as "normal" on the basis of personality tests and clinical interviews.
“819 goes ballistic, he starts ripping up his pillow and mattress and shit, and they put him in solitary confinement. . . . one of the guards comes and says, “We think he’s breaking down.” So I bring him up to a recreation room . . . When prisoners were going to be released we brought them there to settle down, cool down, before we took them to student health, whatever. So I bring this guy there, 819, and I’m saying, “OK, 819, look, time is up, we’re going pay you for the whole time,” and. . . this guy starts crying again and says, “I’ve got to go back!” “What do you mean?” He said, “I’ve got to go back and prove I’m not a bad prisoner.” And so that was a shock. And so I said, “Wait a minute, you’re not a prisoner, you’re not 819, this is an experiment, you’re a student, your name is Stewart.” And at that point I said, “And I’m Phil Zimbardo.” [xxvi]
26 years later Zimbardo comments: “The reason that I was shocked but not surprised by the images and stories of prisoner abuse in the Abu Ghraib “little shop of horrors” was that, three decades earlier, I had witnessed eerily similar scenes as they unfolded in a project that I directed: naked, shackled prisoners with bags over their heads, guards stepping on prisoners’ backs as they did push-ups, guards sexually humiliating prisoners, and prisoners suffering from extreme stress. Some images from my experiment are practically interchangeable with those from Iraq.” [xxvii]
The above are powerful examples of how our environments are vital to our wellbeing.
Natural Capital
A lack of green space and nature characterises where the riots took place. There is evidence that encounters with natural environments are healthy and add to wellbeing. Julia Newton comments on public space in an ethnically diverse area of East London: “Current policy agendas recognize the role played by the environment in health and well-being, but the therapeutic properties of public open spaces are not restricted to design, nature or aesthetics. They include social elements through shared and collective use.”[xxviii]
“The globally emulated and envied American way of life, to say nothing of our individual states of wellness, will be undermined more surely by stinking air, foul water, incessant noise, inhumane cities, pesticide/herbicide/fungicide/and antibiotic tainted foods, increased exposure to ultraviolet radiation, a countryside depauperate of its native flora and fauna, and all the other subtle and not so subtle environmental degradations than by economic recession or higher taxes.” J. Baird Callicott, [xxix]
The role of poetry and literature
“Athenian democracy was a bold and unique experiment. The average citizen suddenly found himself with unprecedented political and judicial power – power that required him to make life and death decisions. However, the Athenian “people” had no formal education or experience in political and legal matters. There was a high probability that mob rule and unruly passions could overtake the city. Thus, the Athenians recognized the need for a public forum that could refine judgement – an institution that was political but that also gave citizens a certain degree of reflective distance from politics. Thus, they created an aesthetic space in which to consider “experimental situations” and nurture the art of deliberation. This was the primary political purpose of the City Dionysia. The yearly festival of watching tragedies, and comedies, was not simply “entertainment” that Athenians could take or leave. Attendance at the Dionysia was mandatory. For all of the revelry and drinking that took place at the festival, its intent was to inspire thoughtful debate.” Paul Corey[xxx]
Anderson and Nancy both suggest, though from different points that literature can mediate in assisting us imagining community differently.
After hearing of the Peterloo Massacre at Manchester in 1819, Shelley wrote the Masque of Anarchy in Leghorn, Italy in ‘violent emotion’. which he describes the contemporary condition of the working class in England:
Asses, swine have litter spread
And with fitting food are fed;
All things have a home but one -
Thou, Oh Englishman, hast none!
According to his wife, Mary, the news, “aroused in him violent emotions of indignation and compassion." The poem suffers as a result, though I am not arguing for Wordworth’s take on the origin of poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquility."
The Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy felt impassioned to write a poem, ‘Birmingham for Tariq Jahan’ (he spoke nobly about not seeking revenge though he had just lost his son, Haroon, in an apparently deliberate hit and run during the riots in Birmingham on August 10th. Two of Haroon’s friends were also killed, two days later the poem appeared in the media. To give you a flavour:
and you three stood,
beloved in your neighbourhood,
brave, bright, brothers . . .
then the man in the speeding car
who purposefully mounted the kerb …
I think we all should kneel
on that English street . . .
This is not what poetry is best at – see my comments on the responsibility of poets (bottom of page).
[i] Seumas Milne, Guardian, Wednesday 10 August 2011
[ii] Howard Jacobson, ' They may be criminals, but we're the ones who have created them', The Independent, Sat, 13 August 2011
[iii] Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993
[iv] Robert D. Putnam, ‘Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital’, Journal of Democracy 6:1, Jan 1995, p65-78.
[v] Robert D. Putnam, 1995, p73.
[vi] Robert D. Putnam interviewed by Edgerton, "BOWLING ALONE": An interview with Robert Putnam about America's collapsing civic life. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/gergen/fallows.html
[vii] Andrew Leigh, Disconnected: The Decline of Community and the Fraying of Social Fabric in Modern Australia, University of NSW Press, 2010,
[viii] Clive Hamilton, ‘The Dark Side of the Australian Dream’, with Robyn Williams Ockham’s razor, ABC Radio National, 20.06.1999.
[ix] James S. Coleman developed this theoretical framework. See ‘Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital’, American Journal of Sociology (Supplement) 94, 1988, S95-S120; and The Foundations of Social Theory, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990, p300-21.
[x] William A. Shutkin, The Land That Could Be, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000, p30
[xi] Rom Harre & Grant Gillett, The Discursive Mind, Sage Publications, 1994.
[xii] Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. based on field work in the Shetland Islands as a postgraduate student.
[xiii] Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis, Northeastern Univ. Press, 1986. Goffman's Asylums (1961) is an ethnographic account of how patient's personal identity is erased in mental hospitals, institutions that control behaviour and even thought. Forty five years too late for the Nazi asylums which erased identities permanently.
[xiv] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Rev. and extended ed. London: Verso, 1991, p6.
[xv] Alphonso Lingis, The Community of Those who Have Nothing in Common (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994
[xvi] Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community (1983) Station Hill Press, 1988,
[xvii] Jean-Luc Nancy, "The inoperative community" (1984) trans. Peter Connor, in The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.
[xviii] Linda Singer, ‘Recalling a Community at Loose Ends’, Community at Loose Ends, ed. The Miami Theory Collective (Minneapolis and Oxford: U of Minnesota P, 1991, p125.
[xix] Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, Little, Brown & Co, 2009,pvii. “This book focuses on our ties to others and how they affect emotions, sex, health, politics, money, evolution, and technology. But most of all it is about what makes us uniquely human. To know who we are, we must understand how we are connected.” pviii.
[xx] Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The forms of capital’, in J. Richardson (Ed.) Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, New York1986, p248.
[xxi] See John Rees and Lindsey German, ‘A short history of the London riot’, 9 Aug, http://www.counterfire.org/index.php/articles/75/14476
[xxii] Kimball Young (following the work of Everett Dean Martin), ‘Crowd Behavior and Personality’ in Chapter 21 in Social Psychology: An Analysis of Social Behavior. New York: Alfred A. Knopf (1930): 522-536.
[xxiii] David Schweingruber and Ronald Wohlstein, ‘The Madding Crowd Goes to School: Myths about Crowds in Introductory Sociology Textbooks’, Teaching Sociology April 2005 vol. 33 no. 2 136-153
[xxiv] http://www.newhavenbiz.com/
[xxv] See http://www.cnr.berkeley.edu/ucce50/ag-labor/7article/article35.htm
[xxvi] see http://www.prisonexp.org/slide-33.htm
[xxvii] http://discovermagazine.com/2007/apr/book-excerpt
[xxviii] Julia Newton, ‘Well-being and the natural environment: A brief overview of the evidence’, DEFRA discussion paper, 2007, p31
[xxix] J. Baird Callicott, ‘Environmental Wellness’, Literature and Medicine 15.1 (1996)
[xxx] Paul Corey, ‘Voegelin’s Account of Tragedy in the New World Disorder’ 2002, http://www.lsu.edu/artsci/groups/voegelin/society/2002%20Papers/Panel92002.shtml