The Need for Moral Climate Change and What is Stopping it
nick cowen, 11 November 2008
Does anyone know, really know, how best the relentless rise of gang culture might be reversed that has come to afflict so many of Britain’s cities? Many of their run-down neighbourhoods bear today greater resemblance to the most depraved sections of south central Los Angeles than they do to the comparatively peaceful leafy suburbs that are often just streets away from them.
Anyone in need of insight into the scale of the problem and the urgency of the need for its resolution should read a truly frightening piece that appeared in last Friday’s Times. It was about the gun-bearing drug-running gangs of youths that afflict certain parts of Sheffield where, until recently, many in authority refused to admit publicly that there was such a problem.
It is easy to identify the many social factors that undoubtedly would serve to reduce the risk that boys grow up inducted into a gang that operates as a drug cartel: marriage on the part of parents; the full-time employment of at least one parent, preferably the father; and so on and so on.
The real problem concerns what might be done to achieve the social circumstances that reduce such risk where they are already missing. In other words, the problem is how to break the self-reinforcing vicious circle that repeats itself across the generations where the relevant stabilising factors are missing. One first step that desperately needs to be taken, it seems to me, is often the hardest for those who have devoted their professional and political careers to dealing with the victims of these social pathologies. This is simply the admission of what the relevant risk factors are: namely, that single-parenthood, especially among low-income groups, militates against boys growing up with the wherewithal to resist the pull of gang-culture.
It is often the wilful refusal of politicians and the social services to admit the crucial link between family and social behaviour of young children that prevents the requisite steps being taken to address the problem. Instead, money, or rather lack of it, is claimed to be the crucial variable. It simply isn’t. From the refusal to admit this link flow all manner of mistaken social policies many of which only make matters worse.
Last week’s Sunday Times contains a piece by Civitas director David Green which identifies some of the misguided social policies that flow from failure to admit the link.
Young people can and should refrain from having children, if they are unable or unwilling to make a prior commitment to each other, as well as to any children that they might have. The need and desirability of such prior commitment should be constantly hammered home by schools, family-planning clinics, and party political election manifestos. It should be beyond contention, but sadly it isn’t.
Far more than the need to combat climate change, there is today greater need to combat the moral climate change that has led to the social acquiescence of a form of family that is no less deadly than are CO2 emissions.
How come there are no concerts in Hyde Park to promote stable two-parent family life? Could it be that there are too many vested interests on the other side, just as environmentalists like to claim prevent reductions in CO2 emissions? One has to wonder.
Mr. Conway, again you have written an excellent article – an astute summary of the root causes of so many social problems. I agree very much with all of it, would however add something concerning the willingness of couples to make a “commitment to each other”. Maybe we should put a name to this concept, such as the politically incorrect label ‘marriage’. Yes, that would fit the bill. It certainly the right thing for me, my wife and our son.
And as for any changes in the climate itself, one should not worry about that. Proper science and scientists have shown that as long as there has been an atmosphere it has *always* changed, long before mankind ever came on the scene.
What happened to policy-makers who are willing to take on the tough questions and face reality? What happens in politics that turns men and women into the typical modern liberal politician-unwilling to address the root of society’s problems and swept into the popular sea of environmentalism and greenpeace?
Society is so wrapped up in the international ‘crisis’ of global warming that now our politicians are failing to address the issues of violence among our youth at home. Global warming won’t matter if society falls apart because we are neglecting our youth.
Models of the world are as good as their ability to explain and predict.
The model that members of our underclass behave as they do, because of money, could have been shown a non-starter even without trying it out for real. Look at our history, human behaviour and the dynamics at play in other nations.
Another model that people that people still strangely hang on to is that of well-meaning politicians and policy-makers. If that is the case why, each time valid and robust evidence is presented that their self-indulgent methods cause more harm than good, do the efforts just re-double? Be it through more welfare, more lenient prison sentences, more insidious positive discrimination measures etc.
Here is my counter model: Remember Maslow’s pyramid, explaining to us how we achieve different levels of need – from safety to belonging and self-actualisation? Maslow didn’t mention what happens when people get to the top….. given humans have eternal capacity for gratification.
The modern liberal politician needs to be many things to survive, but, above all, well-off and self-delusional. It is only through self-delusion that they believe in their own unerring rightness and their destiny to be considered saviours of others. It is only through being well-off that they have reached their towers without having adjusted to a different, more measured truth.
We find what we seek: They find servants to carry them to greatness in those who possess the time old human trait of hating others most for the greatest failings in themselves.
But the story is built on dreams not truths and so it is never gets to be played out on the real stage of life…
And rather as people try hardest at their failing relationships, so the liberal policy makers try hardest to maintain their own self-image and world-image, and be saviour to their victims.
To admit – at all – that their victims’ woes are self-inflicted – that prisoners are actually rather nasty pieces of work – would be as unbearable as facing up to the infidelity of a loved one.
I grew up disbelieving that the Nazis could ever rise again. Their mix of supremicist ideology, intolerance of dissent and scape-goating were the ingredients of evil; nothing to do with left or right…..
When people would rather let children be stabbed and murdered than tackle the problem – or instantly sack and persecute truth tellers in discussions about racial tensions – then I really started to wonder…
Models of the world are as good as their ability to explain and predict.
The model that members of our underclass behave as they do, because of money, could have been shown a non-starter even without trying it out for real. Look at our history, human behaviour and the dynamics at play in other nations.
Another model that people still strangely hang on to is that of well-meaning politicians and policy-makers. If that is the case why, each time valid and robust evidence is presented that their self-indulgent methods cause more harm than good, do the efforts just re-double? Be it through more welfare, more lenient prison sentences, more insidious positive discrimination measures etc.
Here is my counter model: Remember Maslow’s pyramid, explaining to us how we achieve different levels of need – from safety to belonging and self-actualisation? Maslow didn’t mention what happens when people get to the top… given humans have eternal capacity for gratification.
The modern liberal politician needs to be many things to survive, but, above all, well-off and self-delusional. It is only through self-delusion that they believe in their own unerring rightness and their destiny to be considered saviours of others. It is only through being well-off that they have reached their towers without having adjusted to a different, more measured truth.
We find what we seek: They find servants to carry them to greatness in those who possess the time-old human trait of hating others most for the greatest failings in themselves.
But the story is built on dreams not truths and so it is never gets to be played out on the real stage of life…
And rather as people try hardest at their failing relationships, so the liberal policy makers try hardest to maintain their own self-image and world-image, and be saviour to their victims.
To admit – at all – that their victims’ woes are self-inflicted – that prisoners are actually rather nasty pieces of work – would be as unbearable as facing up to the infidelity of a loved one.
I grew up disbelieving that the Nazis could ever rise again. Their mix of supremicist ideology, intolerance of dissent and scape-goating were the ingredients of evil; nothing to do with left or right…
When people would rather let children be stabbed and murdered than tackle the problem – or instantly sack and persecute truth-tellers in discussions about racial tensions – then I really started to wonder…