The Society of Idiots
Thoughts on a Licentious Society
That’s quite a title, I must admit. Is that what people call ‘click bait?’ I think it is apposite. The word politics is derived from the ancient Greek polites, meaning those who are concerned with public affairs. The antonym is idiotes, referring to those interested in private affairs only. We live in an age in which ethics has dissolved into personal choice and preference. It is an age in which the public realm has been systematically undermined in the name of individual liberty, and people have been ‘educated’ to look after their own interests and not look to government for collective redress and public purpose. The diminution of the public realm has been accompanied by the diminution of the public imagination, with people wrapped up in their own affairs and disdainful of what they see as politics. The libertarian capture of the state is as sweet as a nut, leaving government in the hands of those who are ideologically predisposed against the use of government for common ends, constantly advancing the anarchy that generates the collective issues that government is required to deal with – but now doesn’t. It leaves one and all at the mercy of ‘market forces’ and, we increasingly see, more things besides. Politicians and people have concluded a suicide pact, and unless sufficient numbers of people not only see through it, but reconstitute publicity in their own relations, then this civilisation will go the same way as all licentious civilisations past. People who post daily on the writing that they read on the wall are merely idling their lives away to an inconsequential end. Their words bore me rigid. I am interested in those who are not merely aware that we have a problem on our hands – how could we not be aware, when we see the evidence daily? – but are prepared to analyse its origins in order to discern a way out.
This society is rotten to the core. It’s not the people. Human beings remain much as they have ever been, capable of good, capable of bad. Human beings are quick to follow immediate inclinations, which are sometimes good but, individually and collectively, can be disastrous, and find it hard to maintain a united front for a long range good. They therefore stand in need of the moral and social supports which constrain them to the good. These supports have been deliberately weakened, even systematically destroyed in recent decades, in the name of individual liberty. We see the consequences all around us, and there is much worse to come.
I wish to comment on this news item
Assistant Chief Constable Jon Roy said missiles were thrown at police, including at two officers who were trying to help the victim of an assault and make an arrest. "Both those officers came under attack from bottles being thrown at them and were injured as a result," he added.
A joint statement from Liverpool FC, the city's council and Merseyside Police said: "Our city is still in a public health crisis and this behaviour is wholly unacceptable.
I would go much further and say that, in or out of a public health crisis, behaviour such as this is unacceptable. And so is a lot more of the behaviour that has scarred society and public life in recent times.
I express myself very clearly and very strongly in comments in the posts below.
This was a brief joy for, ruined almost immediately by the wretched behaviour of people who are perfectly tuned into the immoral, lawless, and irresponsible culture we ‘live’ in today. The enjoyment of Liverpool's great championship win was soured, and so quickly. It’s like we live in a neurotic culture in which anything good that happens is quickly targeted by negative, destructive forces and turned into its opposite. That was what was so sad about this for me, the feeling it encourages that even the rare good that may happen will come to be negated and soured and destroyed. So you stop hoping, you stop expecting. Instead, you succumb to the pervasive misery and hopelessness.
The joy was soured in the first instance by the behaviour of so many fans, and so many, I have no doubt, who simply tagged on for an excuse to engage in dissolute behaviour. They absolutely trashed the area around the Pier Head. You will get no apologetics from me on this, and no excusing of the bad behaviour of some by pointing to the bad behaviour of others. At the same time, I am not going to single out one group of miscreants and let all the others off the hook. What goes for one goes for the others. There have been endless protests, illegal parties, raves, and mass gatherings on beaches; public officials have been abused and spat at, police officers have been assaulted and hospitalized, driven out of entire areas, leaving neighbourhoods at the mercy of who knows what criminal elements. I condemn the lot without fear or favour. Other people are not so consistent. I condemn them too, for the way that their complicity and cowardice gives licence for further bad behaviour and law breaking. The scenes on the beeches and in Brixton and Notting Hill are a damned disgrace, the flouting of public authority and assaults on police officers reprehensible.
I issued this caution on the night of Liverpool’s title win:
'It should go without saying, but it needs saying in an age of libertarian licence – which is met by a moralizing hypocrisy from those big on the sin of others but oblivious to their own - that I am celebrating Liverpool's triumph alone. I advise people to behave responsibly and not mass together. Don’t put your personal pleasure ahead of public health.’
Of course, a lot of people pay absolutely no attention and do as they please. They have no conception of the public interest and public purpose. After all, why should they? We have been living in an era in which the public realm has been systematically denigrated and dismantled, in the imagination as well as in society at large. I may as well spit in the wind as issue a call to respect the public interest, since this involves an appeal to an identity that doesn't exist.
The Liverpool fans were far from being alone.
“A lot of people have chosen to be not just irresponsible but dangerous."
Does that ring any bells? It ought to. Morals as no more than value judgments, free to choose, the irreducible games of modern ethics and politics, 'the death of God.'
Then we have the illegal parties
A resident added it had been "pretty terrible round here" for the last few nights with "anti-social behaviour, alcohol, drugs and a huge amount of violence and disruption".
And then there are the protests. Very many of the people who were most insistent on Lockdown gave the protests their full support and in fact boasted of being on them. No one will ever take people possessed of such pathological hatred seriously ever again. This monstrous hypocrisy indicates a complete lack of moral consistency and public concern. I like consistency. I like trust and truthfulness. I don’t like duplicity. And I am struck by how unconscious many are of their double standards. Their political enemies aren’t.
I condemn the lot, without exemption. We live in a culture without institutional restraint and self-restraint, one that cannot generate the collective wit and will to address the collective forces assailing us. The behavior of too many bears too little relation to reality. The discipline of living in accordance with reason is too tiring, so people just give up and opt for liberty as licence. A lot of people just do as they please. And why shouldn’t they? Such is the morality of the day. So long as there is no harm, comes the proviso. The law and the police used to be able to exercise an external check on behaviour, for the reason that that was based on an internal check supplied by way of the virtues of self-restraint and moderation. Those virtues have been eroded. If you want my view, it will take a quarter of a century to turn this imploding culture around.
The behaviour of some Liverpool fans, and those tagging on for a ‘good time,’ was despicable. They are not alone in this behaviour. Such behaviour is rife in this society.
I am livid at the pathological hypocrisy and stupidity of far too many people. I have backed MP Jonathan Gullis' campaign against defacement and desecration and remain in touch with his page. I despise the way that people play fast-and-loose with law and civility in order to advance their ends and indulge their whims and pleasures, to hell with everyone else. This is a society in which truth and justice are mere functions of power, a society in which the interests of the loudest voice and the strongest arm prevail. That sophism is in the moral DNA of the prevailing culture. The roots are deep in culture and history. I have a feeling that the people who lament bad behaviour don’t quite understand how deeply rooted this malaise is. We have been governed by people who have systematically diminished the public realm and the public imagination, as a matter of deliberate policy, and I don’t think people quite realise this. This was Alasdair MacIntyre’s conclusion to After Virtue in 1981, where he argued that the barbarians are governing over us and have been for some time, adding that the fact that people don't see this is part of our predicament. It will take a generation and probably more to turn this malaise around.
It’s a sign of the times we live in that a brief moment of respite, even a little bit of joy, came so quickly to be upset by the actions of a number of totally selfish and completely stupid pillocks, the kind of people who disgrace this society too often. Liverpool fans massing together, letting off fireworks, making a noise, upsetting folk and threatening a second spike in Covid-19 are utterly irresponsible and reprehensible. But they are far from being alone in this. It doesn’t excuse them, it means that the condemnation should be equally ringing for one and all. For weeks we have witnessed protests involving wretched behaviour, and now illegal parties, with the police not only coming under physical assault, but being routinely pilloried in public. This behaviour is becoming pervasive and I thoroughly abhor it: illegal parties, raves, endless protests, the demo-of-the-day, a fetish of law-breaking, holidaymakers, the lot. It is all people just flouting any rule that stands in the way of their politics, fantasies, and desires: all of them pushing their own choices onto everyone else in total disregard of the public realm and the public good. Such behaviour is immoral in the first instance and lawless in the second. That’s the culture we are in, a culture in which liberty is licence, and morality no more than subjective preference. I have been writing about this for years, pointing out its implications when it comes to devising a politics that is capable of addressing common affairs, whether we talk about social justice or climate change. You simply cannot generate a collective political will on this basis, too many people will bail out according to wish and whim.
I may as well have been writing in hieroglyphs. Politics and ethics are no more than irreducible games in this culture and are utterly inimical to collective projects of the good. We live ‘after virtue,’ as Alasdair MacIntyre said (Lewis Mumford long before him). To do better, we require a habitus in which the virtues can be known, learned, and exercised, individuals joining together in communities of practice grounded in the character-forming discipline of family, work, civil action, associational solidarity, and polity, all of which fosters what Tocqueville called the ‘habits of the heart’ and public spirit, an attitude of sacrifice and service to ends that are greater than egoistic desire.
You can have all the knowledge and know-how in the world, but it cannot supplant these qualities supporting virtuous action. Knowledge is not, strictly speaking, a virtue, in that it lacks the qualities of a virtue, it is not appetitive. Knowledge – and know-how – gives the ability to act, it doesn’t give the will to act, it lacks appetitive quality. Knowledge and know-how lack the springs of action powering the motivational economy; those springs are a matter of fostering inner motives within an appropriate moral infrastructure. This infrastructure doesn’t exist, with the result that people are free to do as they like.
It was once thought that government and law would hold the ring, keep the civil peace, and act for the greater good. That view was complacent. These are not, ultimately, governmental and policing issues but issues of self-restraint and good character. The external realm will, sooner or later, be overwhelmed in being called upon to do the job that should be done in the first instance within the internal realm of personal self-discipline and social self-governance. I take a hard line on ethics. If people think they are going to advance progressive causes by way of a libertarian lawless licence then they are living in a dreamland that will be a nightmare for the rest of us. It will generate chaos.
I trust to the basic decency of the 'common' folk to prevail. Beyond that, I will continue to press hard on my lifelong commitment to an ethic of 'rational freedom,' one that is based on transcendent standards of justice. It is not a popular view in an age of subjective choice and preference, which is not surprising seeing as it is aimed directly against such emotivist and expressivist ethics. But it is the right view.
My long-standing view of 'rational freedom' is premised on an overarching and authoritative moral framework, a character forming culture of restraint and self-restraint, governments that govern, and a moral infrastructure that fosters habits of the heart within virtuous communities of practice. That’s not the world we have, hence the converging crises we face. These crises arise from the uncoordinated, incremental actions of individuals.
So if large groups of individuals say to hell with the public good and break the rules and regulations, then don’t be surprised: we have been living ‘after virtue’ for a long time. The cause of reclaiming said virtue is not helped by those who reserve to themselves the right to choose the good as they see fit, presuming that since the good they choose really is good – they believe - then everyone will be reasonable in choosing likewise. On that presumption, we will go to the wall. Everyone thinks that the good they choose is good, and can see no reason why others would object. Standards in such a world are arbitrary.
We need communities of virtuous practice and character-forming discipline which foster the habits of the heart and public spirit, sacrifice and service, and a consensual devotion to common ends.
There are worrying scenes all around at the moment, and I've been on to it a long while. I saw the way my dad got robbed, and I saw the permissiveness of this culture and the powerlessness of the police to hold things together. I've been on to this rot for years: it isn't accidental, the roots lie deep. And it means that my little attempt to have some peace and pleasure alone with my memories gets disturbed by an inescapable social and moral malaise.
So let me come now to the hypocrisy with respect to the above, which is the thing that truly enraged me and had me set about all and sundry on social media (including people who were not quite as guilty as I charged them. Collartoral damage. I needed the heaviest of the heavy artillery given some of the targets, who frankly could care less about consistency so long as they get their way. I really do not want to live in a society in which such people prevail).
One minute I was enjoying Liverpool football club’s title victory, the next thing I was having to wade through acres of anti-Liverpool and anti-working class bigotry, a kind of reverse wokeness.
Let me first of all say that I was utterly disgusted by the behaviour of the crowd that massed at the Pier Head Liverpool to celebrate the title victory. In or out of Lockdown, with or without the threat of Covid-19, I would have been disgusted and would have condemned the actions. As I have been constantly disgusted by the actions of people in this so-called ‘culture.’ I have been issuing condemnations for a long time now. I have been isolating the causes and identifying the solutions for a long time, too. On the night of the title victory I posted on FB in celebration, and issued a caution that ‘it should go without saying, but needs saying in these times ..’ So I did expect people to do the hell as they please. And they did, and so ruined what would have been a happy memory. The behaviour was utterly selfish as well as stupid, hogged the headlines, and took attention away from the people who had earned this triumph by talent and hard work. But that’s the parasitic and narcissistic culture we are in, people helping themselves to the efforts of others. It is, as Weber wrote, an age of ‘convulsive self-importance.’ That he wrote those words in 1904 should tell us that the roots of this moral and cultural malaise go deep, I quote Weber often. To no effect. When people are prepared to examine the nature of a society that lives ‘after virtue,’ then I may take their complaints and lamentations more seriously. Because there is something I have noticed about many of the biggest complainants, and that is that they are wedded to the very society that is implicated in this rot. They reserve to themselves the right to choose the good as they see fit and resist any overarching attempts to constrain conduct – which is the way out of this morass – only to express shock and disbelief when others also choosing the good as they see fit choose a good that harms the public peace and the public health. Such a permissive libertarian culture works only in the context of appropriate modes of conduct and character formation. These have been progressively eroded to leave what is becoming a free-for-all, restrained only by the force of external mechanisms of police and law. These issues are not policing issues, but self-policing issues. The external force of law and order ought to be only a last resort in a society in which people are capable of exercising self-control. That is no longer the case, we live in a society in which liberty has been equated with throwing off inhibitions and restraints. This has been a matter of public policy, with government being captured by forces with an ideological aversion to government being used for the public good. An economic libertarianism has been justified in terms of its ‘trickle down’ effects benefiting all. The facts show a massive redistribution of the share of income, away from labour and towards capital, most especially the super-rich. It has been an explicit class politics. What has trickled down most of all is liberty as licence, sanctioning plainly selfish and immoral behaviour. The view that government is inimical to liberty, which is the central claim that neoliberal ideologues have repeated for forty years and more now, has raised a generation of individuals who do indeed believe that they have a right to pursue the good – basically their own pleasure – as they see fit, and to hell with a public realm that, to them, does not exist. The deliberate promotion of self-regarding behaviour has cultivated a character which scotomizes public life.
This malaise is deeply rooted. I have been calling it out for years, calling out its architects. Hilariously, some of the people making the biggest noise about the behaviour of the Liverpool fans, making highly moralistic claims about Lockdown and covid-19, were those who actually voted for Johnson and hence bear responsibility for the debacle that is the policy of the UK government on covid-19. When it comes to tasting, tracing, lockdown, PPE, the lot, the Johnson government has been slow and ineffective from the very first, resulting in who knows how many needless deaths. Take any calculation you like, the UK’s record is wretched. The UK government has been so incompetent from the first that it raises questions of complicity with respect to the idea of herd immunity. It looks like they have shilly-shallied in between two distinct policies on health and economics, to give us the worst of both worlds. That’s not my subject here, you can do your own research to find out. I raise the issue to state forthrightly that I will take no lectures on covid-19 and public health risks from people who voted for the Johnson government and have continued to apologize for its ineptness (at best) throughout this debacle. I also note the tendency of such persons to double-down hard on the behaviour of people breakdown lockdown rules and guidelines so as to take the critical gaze away from the sheer incompetence of the government itself, whose tardy response at every stage has been response for a large number of deaths.
Then there is the other crowd, the people who really incited my anger. Weeks ago, the UK government was on the back-foot over the fact that one of its key advisors, Dominic Cummings, had broken the rules. The lame defence was offered that he was only following his instincts and doing as we would all do, looking after his poor sick family etc etc. Drivel. People have made real sacrifices, ruling against their immediate instincts, in order to maintain a united front for the long term common good. Cummings’ behaviour was outrageous.
People who insisted, on the need for Lockdown, and who criticized the UK and US governments for their tardy and ineffectual responses to covid-19 were entirely right in my view, and I said so repeatedly on social media and here on blog posts. A big issue was made of the libertarians of the right in the US who protested en masse against lockdown, affirming liberty as an overriding principle, something much more important than public health. They were roundly condemned. I condemned them in no uncertain terms.
I took apart the libertarian class politics of this covid-19 debacle in the US and the UK.
It’s an open and shut case. I was detailing it from the first and then just gave up. Government incompetence (and that’s being charitable) has been so clear that anyone who didn’t get it, didn’t want to, and even death on a wide scale was insufficient to wake them up.
The latter four articles were from early April. I’ve been detailing this issue from the first. I also linked it to my consistent view on ‘rational freedom,’ the dominant and organising concept of my philosophical work and political vision.
So, you know something, I don’t need loud lecturing, moralizing individuals who are big on the selfish stupidity of certain individuals in society whilst being completely silent on government complicity and culpability – still less those claiming the Johnson government has done a ‘great job,’ all evidence to the contrary (how many damned times did I read that drivel), disturbing my peace. I can see the plain ideological switch going on, the attempt to shift responsibility. In fact, I can smell it long before I can see it, because the conniving duplicity stinks the building to high heaven.
I also noted the highly political insistence of those who were plainly supporters of the Johnson government to ‘keep politics out’ of coronavirus. In other words, to silence critics raising some very awkward questions about the incompetence – or worse – of the UK government. I note how quickly, how loudly, and how relentlessly these same people hone in on the behaviour of people. Consciously or otherwise, this is a plain attempt to shift blame from government policy to people.
So I have what may be called ‘form’ on this issue.
This next blog post is particularly significant in the context of the subject matter of this post:
This post is particularly significant since it draws on the words of Dr John Ashton, who is scathing on the UK’s government’s complicity in this Covid crisis. Dr John Ashton isn’t just a medical expert who called out the government’s death-dealing ineptitude from the first, but also a Liverpool football supporter who was present at the Hillsborough Disaster. He was ignored and sidelined in this current crisis just as he was ignored and silenced when telling the truth about Hillsborough. And that is precisely the subject of ‘the politics of the pathetic,’ the pathetic being the collusion of politicians and people. Both are culpable in this deterioration of public life and moral community.
I will return to the Liverpool angle shortly.
What really blew the united front on Covid-19 were the BLM protests, coming as they did just at the time of the Cummings controversy. Doctors and experts were warning that the danger with the Cummings double-standards on the part of the government was the general public would think that if it’s OK for him to follow his instincts, then it would be OK for them to do likewise. Before we had much time to see one way or the other, all hell broke loose on the streets. Because of the actions of one Minnesota policeman, all police, in the US and the UK, became targets of protests. Indeed, the entirely of both countries as institutionally racists. People who had spoken in the most vociferous terms against libertarians stoking revolt against Lockdown in the US suddenly found that there is, after all, an overriding principle, one much greater than the coronavirus threat to public health. Tens of thousands were on the streets protesting, social media went mad with people cheering them on. There were even attempts to emphasize how responsible protestors were in wearing masks and maintaining social distance. How many police were hospitalized again, remind me?
I said there and then that the moral, mental, and psychic restraint and self-restraint was over, that this was the green light to one and all to do as they please. I also said that such behaviour will make it doubly difficult for government to reimpose lockdown should any second spike occur. The hypocrisy of the liberal left on this has been nothing short of pathological. I could only explain it in terms that right wing commentators use about the ‘woke’ generation – entitlement. There is a strong middle class sense of being exceptional, in the senses that causes of concern to them are immune from normal constraint and criticism. I noted this with respect to Extinction Rebellion last year, the sense of having exemption on account of being reasonable, respectable, peaceful, and non-violent protestors with the right cause, indeed, a cause so unimpeachably right as to be unanswerable.
I will state plainly that I despise it all from top to bottom, not least because I see the attitudes as class laden. The sight of middle class environmentalists indulging in what can only be described as an orgy of double-standards on social media in the aftermath of the Liverpool title celebrations at the Pier Head lit the touch paper for me, and I exchanged harsh and unpleasant words with any number of them. To my discredit, some who were merely condemning the behaviour received a tongue lashing from me. I condemned the behaviour in similar terms, too. To my credit, I was entirely right to hold those guilty of blatant hypocrisy to account, pointing out the naked class basis of this hypocrisy. Liverpool football supporters – and Liverpool and football together – were being exhibited by the sanctimonious middle class as examples of depraved and feckless behaviour, in precisely the same manner as the middle class has portrayed the working class since time immemorial. If you can’t go back that far, then try the days when the Victorians referred to ‘the dangerous classes.’ Liverpool has been used to such portrayals, often reflecting an anti-Irish and anti-Catholic bigotry. I had no intention of standing by and letting this pass, and let fly. Some who got caught in my blast were undeserving, most deserved a whole lot more than they got.
More than anything, I find the hypocrisy of people vomitable. I find it deceitful and cowardly. And I find it complicit in the very society those parading their virtues feign to condemn.
The above identifies a range of quite distinct targets: libertarians against lockdown, middle class authoritarians for lockdown who suddenly become libertarians when protesting for their pet cause is the order of the day (no one will take people of such mountainish hypocrisy seriously ever again, a hypocrisy so pathological that those who are guilty haven’t the first idea of their double standards), bourgeois offended by working class culture (remember Owen Jones’ Chavs? The attitudes are still with us, no wonder the greens struggle to garner support, there is a huge disconnect), and the plain anti-Liverpool bigots.
I particularly despise those who took the opportunity to stoke the historical hatreds and animosities between the cities of Liverpool and Manchester. These things end in violence, in word and deed. Worse still is the evidence that many indulging such stupidity have naught to do with football. Should any violence issue as a result, such people would be the first to castigate the behaviour of football fans. I reserve a particular contempt for people who incite such hatreds, for the very reason that, as a football fan, I have seen the damage it does, not merely in terms of football violence, but in terms of responses to that violence. I was present at the Hillsborough Disaster and saw the deathly consequences of the cages and fences that were erected in order to control crowds in the 1980s. I don’t take the incitement of hatred between rival football clubs lightly. In fact, I am scathing of it. The people who do it should be caged themselves, and crushed with a slow and increasing intensity.
Not that I am a violent or vindictive person. The opposite, in fact. I am a peace-maker who sees that the way of peace may require decisive action against those hell-bent on trouble.
I have a past that is steeped in both Liverpool and Manchester and see any attempt to stoke divisions between the two cities as a pathetic fraud. I studied in Liverpool for my first degree, and then did seven years doctoral research in Manchester. I have fond memories of and immense respect for both cities and the people in them. I can’t praise either highly enough and appreciate the distinctive qualities of both. In fact, in terms of academic identity, I am classed as a Mancunian. Such is my identification on a number of academic sites, Academia, Mendeley, ResearchGate and others. I am also very proud to be classed among that little group of Manchester essentialists and Marxist-Aristotelians that nobody but a tiny handful of academics know about. There probably isn’t that much of a group, to be honest, but in my imagination I remember Lawrence Wilde – who chaired my oral exam – talking about this in an interview on YouTube. I would also draw attention to the fact that Alasdair MacIntyre and Terry Eagleton are Manchester men. In terms of philosophical ideas and academic history, I am a Mancunian.
So you can imagine my utter contempt – and anger – in seeing people playing Manchester and Liverpool off against one another. I pray for the day that people may actually grow up. But, of course, as Benjamin Barber argued in his book Consumed, this is the age of ‘infantilism.’ I argue for a virtue ethics, for the creation of a personal character as well as a society around the cardinal virtues and their 'daughters' (to use Andreas Kinneging’s term in The Geography of Good and Evil). Talk in such terms, and people run a mile. And then they complain about the consequences of a society that, in the words of MacIntyre, lives ‘after virtue.’ One day, people may actually get serious about addressing the malaise we are in. Until then, I should just keep working and not pay people much attention.
But peacemaker I have always been.
I was at the Liverpool match when the minute’s silence for Manchester United manager Matt Busby was held, only to be disturbed by a handful of morons. Just a few, so few that I doubt that it would have been heard by the rest of the ground. I reminded one and all that Matt Busby was a former Liverpool captain who could easily have become Liverpool manager. And a footballing great. There was no great scene, silence was quickly restored in any case. And most people other than the tiny handful – just teenagers who knew no better – agreed. I have also been present when the crowd have sung the Munich ’58 song, as well as Hillsborough song. Utterly disgusting both. The way to overcome this kind of thing is not to incite and inflame or respond in kind. That degrades the situation further and debases us all. You work to establish common respect. I was present at the Liverpool vs Manchester United game shortly after the life support machine for Hillsborough victim Tony Bland was switched off. The minute’s silence was disturbed by the chanting and jeering of a number of Manchester United fans. Instead of an outrage that feeds on itself, I emphasized that 99% plus of the Manchester United fans respected the silence, as they did, football fans together.
I am sick to the back teeth of the neurotic obsession too many people have with the worst that people can be. It tells me that people prefer a powerless lamentation to actually turning things around on the basis of nurturing the best among us. I’ve seen the worst that people can be. It never impressed me then and it impresses me even less now. Better is possible.
I take particular objection to the way in which Liverpudlians were exhibited all across social media as ‘animals.’ I saw that very term used over and again, as a term of abuse, even on the pages of environmentalists. I saw that term repeated too many times for me not to respond (inviting the correction that non-human animals do not foul their environments the same way, which is true). Forget the qualifiers of ‘some,’ they don’t wash. I saw too many instances of lazy, unconscious generalisation or insinuation. The spectacle of middle class greens and liberals tripping over themselves to hurl abuse at Liverpool football supporters was too much to let pass, the zeal with which they set about their condemnation revealing pure class contempt. I know these people, in the main they are well-heeled, comfortably off, remote from the harsher socio-economic realities suffered in places like Merseyside. They are the kind of people who can be relied upon every year to denounce Black Friday, condemning the frenzy of people seeking a bargain. What they don’t see is that this is the only time such people have a chance of purchasing goods that they, the materially comfortable, take for granted. I don’t care for Black Friday and consumerism, I can live lightly easily. It’s the sanctimonious middle class sneer that sticks in my craw, the haughty disdain for people they think beneath them, and beneath contempt, worthy only of being exhibited to solicit abuse and reinforce a sense of cultural superiority.
The abuse of the Liverpool supporters at the Pier Head as ‘animals’ immediately reminded me of the ways in which Liverpool fans were abused in the press and the media in the aftermath of Hillsborough disaster. And I remember well how great swathes of the great British public were only too keen to join in the abuse. I remember the nervous silence in my company, with people biting their lips lest they tell what they considered to be the unpalatable truth – the Liverpool supporters were responsible for the Hillsborough Disaster, the police narrative was true, Liverpool fans killed their own. Why? Because they are basically animals who can’t behave like normal, decent folk.
I know all about the morals of the decent folk and the nature of their moralizing. At a time when Liverpool people were burying their dead in the aftermath of Hillsborough, journalist Edward Pearce took the opportunity to abuse Liverpool in the most despicable of terms:
"For the second time in half a decade a large body of Liverpool supporters has killed people ...the shrine in the Anfield goalmouth, the cursing of the police, all the theatricals, come sweetly to a city which is already the world capital of self-pity. There are soapy politicians to make a pet of Liverpool, and Liverpool itself is always standing by to make a pet of itself. 'Why us? Why are we treated like animals?' To which the plain answer is that a good and sufficient minority of you behave like animals."
Edward Pearce, The Sunday Times on 23 April 1989
Pearce went on reflect that if South Yorkshire Police bore any responsibility, it was "for not realising what brutes they had to handle." Professor Phil Scraton described Pearce's comments as amongst the "most bigoted and factually inaccurate" published in the wake of the disaster ("No Last Rites: The Denial of Justice and The Promotion of Myth in The Aftermath of The Hillsborough Disaster;" Scraton et al., 1995). A number of complaints were made to the Press Council concerning the article, but the Council ruled that it was unable to adjudicate on comment pieces, though the Council noted that tragedy or disaster is not an occasion for writers to exercise gratuitous provocation.
That was a week after the disaster. I remember that week well. I remember feeling just about OK despite having been in the midst of the most hellish events, until the abuse, insults, and lies started. And when they started, they came thick and fast. Those scars cut deep and don’t heal with time: they are permanent, they do not go away in time.
The truth of that day was clear and plain, it was under the noses of all with eyes to see. But that’s the problem with bigotry and prejudice, people don’t believe what they see, they see only what they want to believe. And they wanted to believe that Liverpool fans were ‘animals.’ The authorities were culpable, but a truth that many don’t want to hear is that so too were too many of the public. And still large sections of that public can be found wailing at the descent of society into a moral abyss. You, my friends, are complicit, too happy with your prejudices, comfortably dumb.
It took a quarter of a century and more to expose that lie. I fought like hell against it throughout those years, and I retain that fighting spirit.
I deliver the lesson that the quarter of a century Hillsborough campaign for justice teaches people with respect to politics. I pay particular attention to the notions of Liverpool people as being self-pitying. I would suggest you read and learn the lesson.
I come to comments attributed to Boris Johnson, but which were written by Simon Heffer. As editor of the Spectator (between 1999 and 2005) in which these comments were made, Johnson took public responsibility.
The extreme reaction to Mr Bigley's murder is fed by the fact that he was a Liverpudlian. Liverpool is a handsome city with a tribal sense of community. A combination of economic misfortune — its docks were, fundamentally, on the wrong side of England when Britain entered what is now the European Union — and an excessive predilection for welfarism have created a peculiar, and deeply unattractive, psyche among many Liverpudlians.
They see themselves whenever possible as victims, and resent their victim status; yet at the same time they wallow in it. Part of this flawed psychological state is that they cannot accept that they might have made any contribution to their misfortunes, but seek rather to blame someone else for it, there by deepening their sense of shared tribal grievance against the rest of society.
The deaths of more than 50 Liverpool football supporters at Hillsborough in 1989 was undeniably a greater tragedy than the single death, however horrible, of Mr Bigley; but that is no excuse for Liverpool's failure to acknowledge, even to this day, the part played in the disaster by drunken fans at the back of the crowd who mindlessly tried to fight their way into the ground that Saturday afternoon. The police became a convenient scapegoat, and the Sun newspaper a whipping-boy for daring, albeit in a tasteless fashion, to hint at the wider causes of the incident.
These are repulsive words. The column, it transpired, was not written by Johnson. Johnson was the editor. As editor, Johnson commissioned and published the article and took responsibility. Leader columns or editorials are often written by someone other than the editor, although conventionally the editor takes responsibility for them.
Johnson previously apologised for the editorial in 2012, saying:
I'm very, very glad that this report does lay to rest the false allegation that was made at the time about the behaviour of those fans. I was very, very sorry in 2004 that the Spectator did carry an editorial that partially repeated those allegations, I apologised then and I apologise now. I do hope the families of the 96 victims will take some comfort from this report and that they can reach some sort of closure.
The truth about Hillsborough was clear even to the most bigoted, prejudiced and stupid by 2012, or at least the existence of a consensus on the truth so wide as to make it advisable for the bigoted, prejudiced, and stupid to keep their mouths shut.
In 2012 Simon Heffer wrote in the Mail that he was responsible for the article - at least the first draft of it.
Read on the sordid tale of the Johnson/Heffer calumny here, in this detailed take down by Phil Scraton:
If you had been involved in ripping advertisement hoardings off the walls in order to carry the dead, the injured, and dying, as I was, and if you had been involved in instigating the recovery when the official emergency response was non-existent, only to be portrayed as ‘animals’ in the immediate aftermath of the disaster, responsible for the death of your own – a charge which stuck for years - then you may begin to understand a little bit of the rawness in seeing Liverpool fans being exhibited in such bad light. The behaviour of Liverpool fans at the Pier Head was appalling, I said so. I said much more, in fact. The behaviour angered me. Because it was wrong, irresponsible, selfish, and oafish; because it tarnished a celebration; it trashed the achievement of the football team; because it ruined my brief moment of joy; and because I knew – I just knew – it would encourage the middle class liberals to parade the ordinary folk of the world as feckless, selfish, and stupid, whilst also legitimizing the anti-Liverpool bigots who still infest the world with their licensed racism – the people who are still bitterly resentful that the good old days of casual racism has been extinguished, but still nurture a need to abuse that has to go somewhere. Scouse jokes were all the rage in the 1980s.
The qualifiers ‘some’ Liverpool fans don’t work in this context. There is no ‘some’ in a city where each and all are united in solidarity. There is a peculiar unity here, which was certainly a strength in the fight for justice in the aftermath of Hillsborough. That’s one reason I was so angry at the behaviour of the fans, because I felt as though it reflected on my and that in some way I was responsible. And, I have to say, many of the condemnations were pretty damned general. As though Liverpool fans have been the only ones breaking the united front! How very convenient to have Liverpool on hand as the scapegoat for errors that most certainly lie elsewhere. We can start with the incompetence and culpability of the UK government. We can continue with Cummings. And we can certainly point the finger at the protests and the enthusiasm with which far too many cheered them on, rationalized their destruction, even openly praised it and called for more. The united front fighting Covid-19 was broken a while ago. I said so at the time, that the protests, coming soon after the Cummings controversy, would give the green light to politicians, people, the lot. I condemned it at the time. But I also said it was now hopeless. And now I see Liverpool fans taking the flack from moralizing bigots who have been complicit in one way or another in the things that led to this debacle. Not on my watch.
The Liverpool spirit is a great spirit, and I will not desist in proclaiming it proudly.
I don’t suffer abuse. And I don’t care for selective condemnation, either. There is plenty going on in contemporary society that merits condemnation, these activities at the Pier Head being one of countless examples. I damn the lot, equally, without fear or favour. I know where this behaviour comes from. There is a culture of immorality, lawlessness, and licentiousness within this society, and I go hard on it in my writing. It won’t make me popular, but I don’t court popularity. I am prepared to go it alone, not least because I see the blinkered stupidity that conformism and false loyalty cultivates. I emphasize the creation of a habitus in which the virtues can be known, acquired, and exercised, a society which combines material sufficiency and virtuous action within right relationships, the cultivation of the habits of the heart and the spirit of the laws, the character-forming discipline of family, work, civic association and responsibility, and polity. I was going to say ‘culture’ instead of ‘discipline’ there, as in Paideia or Bildung, so not to fright the timorous and pusillanimous, but I am now doubling down hard on the liberty as licence that pollutes this decadent society. And I damn the barbarians who have been ruling over us for so long now. These are the people whose immorality trickles down to create a barbarism below. It is called libertarianism. And it sends souls to perdition.
As for this society, I call it a bucket of crabs. It is a society of neurotics, people who have given up on the future and have lost all hope. They are mired in misery and have become addicted to all that is wrong, instead of identifying the healing potentials of much that is right and focusing on the work of reconnection and restoration, knitting the healthy together to form a strong and ever expanding web of proper functioning order. Instead, there is a constant focus on the worst, as if seeking proof that the world is every bit as bad as you believe it to be. There’s plenty of evidence to find, mind. A society in which freedom is equated with personal choice and preference is a society of constant negation and self-cancellation: you raise people up a level, people bail out, break ranks, choose their own good – and why not, seeing that that is the prevailing morality - and in the neurotics come to pull everything back down again.
I have much more from where that came from. I suffered a quarter of a century of it.
One day, maybe, human beings may develop the wisdom to proceed from an understanding of their own sins, sins of omission as well as commission, before becoming so preoccupied with the sins of others. I don’t care for the overconfident hubris that is big on the sins of others and oblivious to one’s own. The thing I have missed most of all in Lockdown is being able to go to Church, the one place of stability and sanity in my life, to confess, to restore, and to go back into the world in peace.
Every single joy and pleasure, every relief and respite, is quickly, and relentlessly negated and destroyed. We live in a culture that cannot help but negate itself. The culture is sterile.
The hypocrisy of this insane, neurotic society can be too much to bear. Hence I insist that a humanity that insists on going it alone and living in accordance with its own reason and own choices is basically damned. Human beings cannot save themselves by their own resources. And salvation is the very thing they stand in need of. They have thought to go it alone in pursuit of emancipation, only to find themselves fractured and at odds with each in face of collective forces they can neither comprehend let alone control. To do better requires that human beings develop a collective will and wit; it requires a united front backed by character and determination in a common cause.
I hold to a long term transformation at the level of ethics, conduct, and culture, and I have social media to be antithetical to that, fostering short term attitudes, a fetish of outrage and protest, but also despair – despair because actions and attitudes are rootless and therefore fruitless. In that, it mirrors the ethics and politics of the age, an emotivism at speed on steroids.
Covid unity was broken by the protests, there’s little point denying it. I said at the time that it will be well-nigh impossible to hold the line now, especially as summer and good weather approaches. The people who backed the protests, were involved, whipped them on, escalated the demands on social media, and generally engaged in a frenzy of fantasy need to take a good hard look at themselves. And the people who were most vocal about Liverpool fans as well as ordinary folk on the beaches and such like need also to examine why they were less vocal when it came to the protests, to the extent they were not openly supporting them, that is. I said it at the time that no-one will take these people seriously ever again, it is the time when the politics of permanent protest jumped the shark, and I dissociate myself complete from it.
I have a particular dislike of law-breaking. More than anything, we need to strength public commitment and restore public authority in order to develop the collective wit and will to address the scale of the problems that are upon us. These mentalities and actions reinforce short termism and libertarian licence. Even worse, they justify an authoritarian reaction on the part of the very political forces that unleashed this libertarianism in politics and economics in the first place.
I despair of people, I really do. It is at times like this that I find solace in the words of Pope Benedict XVI: ‘Human stupidity is exceeded only by God's mercy, which is infinite.’
'Today, a particularly insidious obstacle to the task of educating is the massive presence in our society and culture of that relativism which, recognizing nothing as definitive, leaves as the ultimate criterion only the self with its desires. And under the semblance of freedom it becomes a prison for each one, for it separates people from one another, locking each person into his or her own "ego".'
Pope Benedict XVI, June 2005
So who out there is prepared to surrender their ego and be bound by a moral code that is greater than their own personal will and desire?
Right, I thought so. Well carry on with the presumption that because you choose well that others will also choose well, and that public good will coincide and social harmony break out and all will be free to do as they please and other such fantasies. What we have is a mutual indifference which, when it comes to public mediation and social existence, breaks out into mutual contempt and cancellation. The police and law cannot, ultimately, maintain the civil peace in a society in which individuals have lost the capacity for self-restraint and self-respect.