Riots on the streets of Tottenham. Photo credit: Nico Hogg, http://www.flickr.com/photos/nicohogg/6018692165/
Freedom comes from self-regulation, not self-abandonment.
Like many, I spent most of last night huddled in front of the news, watching in curious horror as the violence and looting seemed to spread, like a disease, from one blameless London borough to the next. It is a pity that the novelist J G Ballard is not alive to consider them. His novels concerned the intellectual and psychological malaises that festered in modern life: in his last, the ominously titled Kingdom Come, a shopping centre became the focus of violence; in High Rise, memorably, residents became feral and savage.
But these riots are not Ballardian. His concern the middle classes – journalists, politicians, children’s writers – who, unable to cope with the psychological pressures of modern life, revert to primaeval tendencies. Those characters have some layers of civilisation and morality which are removed. This is also what I discussed in my novel The Liberators, where the villainous Luther-Ross brothers offered a version of freedom – the removal of conscience – which resulted in murders, violence and rioting in Oxford Circus. They too targeted the rich, the cultured, with editors of magazines flinging off their shoes in abandonment before murdering cats and breaking windows.
These riots in London have a far deeper, more sinister significance, though. They are much more frightening than J G Ballard’s explorations of the psyche. When reading his novels we always knew that in our reality, in our world of ethics and morality and the rule of law, the consciences of the majority would never allow those things to happen. Crucially, though, whilst we remained civilised – there is no knowing what might happen in a war zone, or a devastated future. But those things are far away – were far away. What Ballard pointed up was just how thin the civilising layer is: but it’s what makes us civilised. We are a hair’s breadth away from beating each other over the head with rocks, but most of us can keep it firmly in place. The scary thing is that this is a layer that is completely absent from these rioters.
We are a hair’s breadth away from beating each other over the head with rocks, but most of us can keep it firmly in place. The scary thing is that this is a layer that is completely absent from these rioters.
Perhaps what was equally disturbing was the reaction of many passers by – not to intervene (although really, who could blame them; apart from one West Indian lady who gave the rioters what for); but to record the action, as if they too were participants in making a cultural artefact in which violence is king. I imagine that most of the teenagers doing the rioting believed that they were somehow heroic, people from music videos or other distorted and strange versions of reality. I imagine also that these looters and rioters will be eagerly watching each other on their mobile phones, convinced that what they have done is somehow fictionalised through its very recording.