Strong, cohesive communities are better at looking after themselves
If we tolerate acts of irresponsibility and crime, our society will only grow more dangerous
Last month five thugs caused mayhem in a supermarket in south London. One punched and kicked a female staff member to the ground. Another smashed an object over a disabled customer’s head before punching and knocking him out of his wheelchair. One victim ended up in hospital.
As shocking as the violence was the realisation that many people had watched on as innocent, vulnerable people were attacked. At least one bystander recorded the incident on a smartphone. Nobody appears to have tried to intervene.
Before we rush to condemn the bystanders, however, consider whether you might have put yourself in harm’s way. There were five perpetrators, apparently fit, strong and violent. Would you be confident you could overcome them? Could you be sure they were not carrying weapons? Would others back you up? How competent, and how far away, were the supermarket security guards?
Honest answers to these questions help us to understand how we have become a stand-by-and-watch society, in which the wrong people are afraid. Instead of fearing being apprehended as they attack others, thugs are often brazen in their criminality and violence. Instead of coming to the rescue of others, many of us are afraid of getting caught up in something frightening and brutal.
The supermarket incident is an extreme example. But consider less alarming scenarios. Would you say anything to somebody who drops litter, or lets their dog foul the pavement? Would you stop some teenagers from vandalising a playground, or bullying a classmate after school? Would you stop a thief or intervene as a man threatens a woman in a fit of road rage?
There are understandable reasons as to why you might not. But that we might be reluctant to intervene at such moments shows how the norms in our society are stacked in favour of the wrong people doing the wrong things. This is a serious problem on its own merits, but it is also a problem that begets others. The more miscreants get away with minor acts of irresponsibility, anti-social behaviour and criminality the more they, and others, feel confident they can get away with worse.
A society with a greater willingness to police behaviour might not produce more have-a-go heroes when serious crimes occur. But it would experience less serious crime in the first place by addressing what were once called the causes of crime. It would expect fathers to play a proper role in the upbringing of their children, even if they do not live at home. It would give greater backing to headteachers who impose discipline in their schools. It would have no tolerance for the noise, litter, graffiti, disrespect and intimidation that are too common in our towns and cities. It would value aspiration, education and hard work.
In other words, a society in which we are willing to place expectations on others and accept them for ourselves, and in which we are willing to call out unacceptable behaviour and back up others who do the same, would be a more resilient society, more capable of creating virtuous cycles than vicious ones.
And yet this argument is mostly overlooked. When ministers grapple with policy problems, the solutions they debate focus on government action and its effects on individual freedom and responsibility. The role of the community – how we can come together to help one another, how social expectations can forge better behaviour – is frequently forgotten.
For the notion of community – or at least the idea that strong communities can look after themselves – is out of fashion. The expectation that we might take responsibility not only for ourselves but for our families and neighbourhoods and people in need is often seen as burdensome. The belief that our behaviour might be better when it is policed not just by individual conscience and legal boundaries but by social norms is seen as judgmental or cruel.
And to be fair, in the past, it sometimes has been like that. We look back at the way families and communities once dealt with people who were gay, or had children outside marriage, or got divorced, or had the wrong colour skin, or fell in love with the wrong person, and feel relief that those days are behind us.
But is it really true that cruelty and unfairness are inherent in community and social norms? Is it really the case, as one sceptic put it, that advocates of community want Salem without the witch trials? Or conversely, is hoping for a world free of norms and judgment like hoping to recreate Las Vegas without the misery and social problems?
The honest answer is yes, a stronger community might run the risk of empowering the bossy and the self-righteous. But there is no reason to believe stronger social norms would restore value judgments we no longer support. As the campaign against racism has shown, social pressure can enforce modern moral standards as well as older ones.
Allowing for a little bossiness – which itself can be policed and resisted – would anyway be a small price to pay for escaping the moral free-for-all our society sometimes resembles. Judging and punishing the feckless and the irresponsible is after all the whole point of having and enforcing social norms.
But if we give up, if we find the very idea of social standards too judgmental, we will not end up with a moral neutrality in their place. We will have, as we already know from experience, negative and destructive norms instead that cause us serious social problems. Just think of the way gang membership has replaced family identity for many young people, and the way apathetic and anti-aspiration cultures exist in many communities.
“Men are qualified for civil liberty,” Edmund Burke once wrote, “in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites.” The great conservative thinker was arguing that if we are not willing to show restraint in our behaviour we risk losing our freedom to state action. But the moral chains we place upon ourselves do not always need to come from within. They can also come from without, from the community around us. We need to stop being so squeamish about judging people, and more demanding of ourselves and others.