Try to keep calm in the epicentre of instability
THE LONG days of the year are accompanied by a genuine heat wave. After months of “incidents”, society finally begins to fray: a lone White Van Man ploughs into a crowd of Muslims on Seven Sisters Road. The fourth outrage of an unstable time.
London has become the epicentre of the Anglo-American world’s disintegrating politics. In a conflation of Karl Marx’s famous phrase, we are watching tragedy and farce — at the same time. We are suffering tragi-comic whiplash. The tragedy of Grenfell Tower was quickly followed by the farce of the hard-left not missing the opportunity to miss an opportunity.
It became clear within hours that the victims of the fire were overwhelmingly immigrants and rehoused refugees, most of whom were Muslim. All but one of the rituals of our time followed. Faith leaders were quickly on the scene to show the care and concern of the whole city. A tidal wave of aid washed over the survivors.
The missing ritual was leadership from the top. Theresa May failed to show any understanding of what had happened, no empathy, no anger. In the gap her absence created, hard-left rabble rousers took to the streets. By the time of Sunday’s annual Al-Quds Day march, the left-wing conspiracy theorists and antisemites had put their own narrative on events.
It is the internet and social media that does the most to create the circumstances that allow us to calm ourselves in the wake of a terrorist atrocity and get freaked out at the rise of antisemitism. Even if you don’t do Facebook or Twitter, too much reporting and general conversation is framed by what appears there.
On Twitter, with its 140-character limit, information — and lies masquerading as information — combine together to become the nihilist perfection of online discourse: the assertion is its own proof.
In this weird moment when there is so much stupidity about and so many platforms on which to express it, it is easy to become unbalanced.
Striving to maintain balance as society goes through epochal change is the challenge of our time. It has been the challenge for the Jewish community in every period when the old order disintegrates and what will come next is not clear. Remember the words of the 18th-century Jewish sage, Moses Mendelssohn: “Adapt yourselves to the morals and constitution of the land to which you have been removed.”
In Britain today, that would mean live by the one slogan we all acknowledge as having moral and near constitutional force: “Keep calm and carry on.”
Michael Goldfarb is a London-based author, journalist and broadcaster