London's burning

The riots are the result of a lot of different factors, but surely the global economic crisis has something to do with it. Small signs of the unraveling of our society under economic pressures brings John Maynard Keynes' 1938 essay My Early Beliefs to mind. In it Keynes reflected on how poorly his and his cohort's pre-war beliefs held up against the reality of World War I, the Great Depression, the rise of Communism, Nazism, and lesser Fascisms, and the looming menace of World War II:



"We were the last of the Utopians, or meliorists as they are sometimes called, who believe in a continuing moral progress by virtue of which the human race already consists of reliable, rational, decent people, influenced by truth and objective standards, who can be safely released from the outward restraints of convention and traditional standards and inflexible rules of conduct, and left, from now onwards, to their own sensible devices, pure motives and reliable intuitions of the good...



"In short, we repudiated all versions of the doctrine of original sin, of their being insane and irrational springs of wickedness in most men. We were not aware that civilisation was a thin and precarious crust erected by the personality and the will of a very few, and only maintained by rules and conventions skilfully put across and guilefully preserved. We had no respect for traditional wisdom or the restraints of custom. We lacked reverence, as [D.H.] Lawrence observed and as Ludwig [Wittgenstein] with justice also used to say - for everything and everyone. It did not occur to us to respect the extraordinary accomplishment of our predecessors in the ordering of life (as it now seems to me to have been) or the elaborate framework which they had devised to protect this order... As cause and consequence of our general state of mind we completely misunderstood human nature, including our own...



"And as the years wore on towards 1914, the thinness and superficiality, as well as the falsity, of our view of man's heart became, as it now seems to me, more obvious....



"If, therefore, I altogether ignore our merits - our charm, our intelligence, our unworldiness, our affection - I can see us as water-spiders, gracefully skimming, as light and reasonable as air, the surface of the stream without any contact at all with the eddies and currents underneath. And if I imagine us as coming under the observation of Lawrence's ignorant, jealous, irritable, hostile eyes, what a combination of qualities we offered to arouse his passionate distaste; this thin rationalism skipping on the crust of the lava, ignoring both the reality and the value of the vulgar passions, joined to a libertinism and comprehensive irreverence, too clever by half for such an earthy character as Bunny [David Garnett], seducing with its intellectual chic such a portent as [Lady] Ottoline [Morrell], a regular skin-poison. All this was very unfair to poor, silly, well-meaning us. But that is why I say that there may have been just a grain of truth when Lawrence said in 1914 that we were 'done for.'"



We could use a few good people skilfully to put across some rules and conventions and guilefully to preserve them right about now. More broadly (and somewhat apart from Keynes' point in this particular essay, but consistent with his other writings): Managing the economy is important. We need growth and economic opportunity to keep our social structure from becoming unhinged. Expect more of what we're seeing in the UK as long as this economic crisis continues.