There is really nothing useful to be said about the recent shooting of an 11-year-old boy in Liverpool - and it is being said at enormous length across all media, endlessly. However, I offer a sidelight. When it comes to saving individuals from the kind of life that can result in this kind of crime, Christian conversion (usually to some regrettable form of authoritarian Pentecostalism) is undeniably very effective indeed, on a purely individual level. It was mentioned in an interview by the doughty Archbishop of York, but swiftly passed over as, presumably, irrelevant. But is it? In the 19th century, the churches and other Christian organisations reclaimed and civilised great swathes of the civil wasteland created by industrialisation. Could they do it again with the grim legacy of consumerism-welfarism? It's hard to be optimistic - but then it's every bit as hard to see anything else making any difference. (Least of all, Jacqui 'Glottal Stop' Smith's bright idea of providing a safe place for crims to dump their old guns when they trade up.)
Meanwhile, Liverpool, with its famous community spirit, erects the traditional Wall of Silence...
Sunday, August 26, 2007
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
Worthy of a hundred-comment dust-up, this one. But is there not a contradiction in your argument? If the churches were successful in reclaiming and civilizing "great swathes of the civil wasteland", how can you then say Christian conversion is only effective "on a purely individual level"?
ReplyDeleteGood point, Peter. I think it's a case of That was then, this is now. We live in atomised times, lacking many of the social structures - not to mention the glue of deference - that subsisted even in Darkest England in the 19th century.
ReplyDeleteOf course if conversion is only effective at a personal level, that means it's unlikely to have any wide social effect - more a case of here and there A Brand From The Burning (as they used to put it in simpler times). But black churches, in particular - like black schools - do seem to be more aware of what the problem in their midst is, and more effective at dealing with it, than the engines of the state. Maybe if - as poor old Cameron seems sometimes to be suggesting - the state were to stregthen such institutions (obviously not just black, or just churches and schools) and encourage them to get on with it, there might be a wider improvement.
Yes Nige, we are very atomized socially in the sense of putting great stock in our individual freedom and choice to live as we will. There are some very good reasons for this, but what we don't see anymore is how what starts as the assertion of a political principle can come to colour our very perception of what the problem is objectively. Just as an example, we touched on alcohol the other day. Almost all of us believe as an article of faith that excessive drinking is, at bottom, an individual affliction to be treated on an individual basis through AA or religion or whatever. The notion that my moderate drinking can and does contribute to somebody else's excessive drinking (and that therefore I should be restricted in some way) offends and, frankly, scares us. But it is screamingly obvious to anyone who frequents a slum or aboriginal community. Do you know why those Mediterraneans are so temperate? Self-discipline and individual responsibility? No way. Drinking is traditionally integrated with family life and if you drink too much, Mamma isn't happy. And if Mamma isn't happy, nobody is happy!
ReplyDelete(Disclaimer: No, I am NOT the resident teetotaller or Probibitionist.)
Those black churches and schools see the reality a lot more clearly than the rest of us do.
Who is cooler, do you think: Desmond Tutu or 50 Cent? Which of the two would your average inner city yoof most likely want to be?
ReplyDeleteThe path to civilisation is irrevocably lost.
All you can do is to lobotomise them (or let them do it themselves, with their pissy homemade guns).
David Hare addresses this very well in his play, "Racing Demon." Check it out, guys.
ReplyDeleteThe most humane & sensible course is to sterilise the lot of them. They'll be a nuisance for a while, then they'll shoot or o/dose themselves, and things will brighten up. It's a strange & evil fact that the people least qualified (by character or circumstance) to raise children have the most - the result is a generation of sociopaths, or 'chavs' as they're known, or 'the British' as they will soon be known.
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ReplyDeleteYes, it's a valuable point that if you really want to change your life then a spiritual experience of some kind may be necessary. But it doesn't have to be a Christian one or even one associated with a particular religion, though for many it will be not least because in embracing a religion a person will also be embracing a healthy community instead of the gangster community or no community.
ReplyDeleteI haven't read Ian Duncan Smith's report on "Breakdown Britain" but his approach sounds very sensible: solid practical measures on a lot of different fronts, from the tax system to the proper care and teaching of the very young, before they are old enough to get into trouble.
I'm not sure Labour are up for anything like this. It would require them having to face their delusions about the perfectibility of human nature as well as their delusions about the effectiveness of the State and its bureaucracy - as if waving ASBOs at gun-toting nutters is going to make any difference. So I'm a little pessimistic about Jacqui and co. As someone said on TV the other night, they still seem in denial about the whole thing.
respect is the keystone to civilization.
ReplyDeleteLiverpool creates a wall of silence over the shooting? Nice one to latch your anti-Liverpool prejudice onto a dead kid, well done. Anyway, don't you remember the recent public inquiry into the shooting dead of a 15 year old boy in Moss Side, in which nobody came forward, and secrecy for witnesses of the kind seen in a mafia trial was employed in light of the wall of silence in Manchester? What was that all about then? Yo're a walking talking and hilarious caricature of a bitter and obsessed Mancunian.
ReplyDeleteActually, Jay, that was Nige not me and he's definitely not from Manchester.
ReplyDeleteCould there be anything worse than a bitter & obsessed Mancunian who's not even from Manchester?
ReplyDeleteI'm a Londoner me, and there have been plenty of Walls of Silence there too. The thing is that Liverpool so insistently proclaims its uniquely warm sense of community (among many other loudly trumpeted virtues). A pudding's end, I say.
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