‘Twas Ever Thus: England Has Always Been a Land of Dope and Gory
Civitas, 22 July 2008
As father of two teenagers growing up in the nation’s capital, I am only too acutely aware of all the physical as well as moral dangers to which young people are exposed these days. No weekend passes hardly but that, along with countless other parents, I spend many hours plagued by mounting anxiety as to their physical and moral well-being, until, by the sound of their latch-keys turning in the door, I know them to have returned safely to the nest from wherever earlier that evening they may have sallied forth with friends.
No one can or should, therefore, reproach me for complacency or callousness if I say I am beginning to suspect that recent media concerns about a so-called epidemic of knife-crime as well as of drug-taking among the country’s young, may well be something of an artificially engineered moral panic that could obfuscate attention from being drawn to what needs to be done in relation to these problems.
Don’t get me wrong. I am all in favour of the proscription of the carrying of knives in public and of the unauthorised possession of all the narcotics currently proscribed. Yet, I believe, we run the risk of misdiagnosing the causes of such crimes and misdemeanours and thereby of misidentifying their remedies, if we somehow think these problems to be particularly recent.
Yesterday’s Times contained an excellent article by Mike Hume, who, by trawling its archives has shown that concern about the allegedly ‘unprecedented’ high incidence of juvenile violent crime has been a constant feature of public life in Britain since Victorian times. One sentence quoted in it from an 1862 editorial in that newspaper has particular salience, since it reads as if it could have been written only yesterday or tomorrow. It runs:
‘Our streets are actually not as safe as they were in the days of our grandfathers. We have slipped back to a state of affairs which would be intolerable even in Naples.’
Reading Hume’s article got me thinking. Maybe things were little different as regards drug-taking. A few minutes spent flicking through Alethea Hayter’s Opium and the Romantic Imagination bore out my surmise, as the following passages taken from it make clear.
‘By the end of the seventeenth century, opium addiction … had become a known practice in England…. By the eighteenth century the opium addict could be met in most walks of life in England…. A habit that was lifelong with such well known figures as [William] Wilberforce, Isaac Milner [Dean of Carlisle], James Macintosh [lawyer and one-time Recorder of Bombay], and Robert Hall [Baptist divine]… was obviously not then regarded as a stain…. Every one, in fact, at that period took laudanum occasionally…. The greatest demand was in the cotton spinning districts of Lancashire, and there … [according to] a local chemist “on a Saturday afternoon the counters of the druggists were strewed with pills of one, two, or three grains, in preparation for the known demand of the evening”… A medical report declared that “there was not a village in all that region round but could show at least one shop and its counters loaded with the little laudanum-vials even to the hundreds, for the accommodation of customers retiring from the workshops on Saturday night.” Laudanum was cheaper than beer or gin, cheaper enough for even the lowest-paid worker…. Lancashire was the worst area, but many of the big industrial towns, among them Sheffield, Birmingham, Nottingham, had an exorbitant demand for opium, and the whole counties of Yorkshire, Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire had a reputation for the number of their opium eaters …. Nor was London much behind….’
If violent crime and drug-taking have been as ubiquitous in this country as these passages and those quoted by Mick Hume suggest, then, arguably, their currently high incidence cannot simply be attributed to other recent phenomena, such as the break-down of the two parent family, the influence of MTV ‘gansta-rap’, the permissive society of the sixties, or whatever.
Their ubiquity suggests the best remedy against them must perhaps lie not only in their continued proscription, but with redoubled efforts at educating today’s young as to their perils.
It will doubtless be a long hard and doubtless bloody battle. But one small way in which the media might help in is for them to stop glorifying the likes of notorious drug-addicts like Pete Doherty, Amy Winehouse and Kate Moss. Young people are impressionable, and the constant appearance of these so-called ‘celebrities’ in the media can only send out all the wrong messages.
There obviously was a time when alcoholism and drug taking did decline dramatically. This coincides with the temperance movement, an offshoot of the Methodist, evangelical and Tractarian revivals of the 18th and 19th centuries.
People who were born again and became committed Methodists forsook drunkeness and invested their energies and money in chapel, family and hard work. They created co-ops, friendly societies, mortgage societies and all manner of voluntary and charitable associations. This gave growing adults a range of meaningful and rewarding activities to be involved in through which they could develop self respect and self esteem.
It was not schooling or mere education that did this as knowledge alone is not enough to bring about personal and social transformation. It was the work of the Holy Spirit. This moral and social change came to be expressed in legislative change.
With the growth of the welfare state many of the opportunities for Christian voluntary work dried up and with it the uplifting spiritual fulfilment that goes along with helping others out of the goodness of one’s heart instead of being a paid social worker. And the legislation against vices such as drinking, gambling and homosexuality were also repealed making it easier for people to follow their baser instincts.
To recover such a society means to recover a relationship with the divine. This may come out of the blue as it has in the past or it may come from Islam. One cannot imagine it coming from the established churches in the near future unfortunately.
Dismantling the welfare state and returning the institutions that make it up such as schools and hospitals to civil society would help. NOT to the commercial sector, which did not create them and would only apply a business and consumerist ethic which is completely inappropriate and very destructive, but making every school and hospital an independent charity which the local population could support.
“Yesterday’s Times contained an excellent article by Mike Hume”
Not so sure about “excellent” — no mention at all about the objective levels of crime in the various periods. Without concrete data on crime rates, the argument is frivolous. Periodic outbreaks of violent crime will always happen, but one cannot look at current lawlessness and claim “’twas ever thus” unless one supports the assertion with reliable historic crime figures.
..Besides which, living memory (if one is old enough) tends strongly to suggest ’twas not ever thus. Britain faces some serious problems: it’s immensely unhelpful to portray them as part of the scenery.
And we’ve had endless “education” about drugs and violence, yet — just like “sex education” — these things don’t work (indeed it appears they might in certain cases constitute a Keynesian stimulus to the activities they’re designed to limit). I went to a “bog-standard comp” and watched the ne’er-do-wells in my year scoff at all this “education”, then go on proudly to flout the advice given by the “educators”. Restoration of proper authority is what is required. And the blame does indeed lie largely with family breakdown, with Sixties-style anything-goes permissiveness, with rampant rights-obsessed egotism and a debased, brutal, consumerist “culture” (crime-mythologising rap “music” included).
Misdiagnosis will merely reduce the likelihood of remedy.
There may have been problems in the 19th century similar to those we are experiencing today with drugs, but my own memory goes back a mere 60 years to the days of my youth when drugs were an unknown quantity and the annual murder rate was something like 200 p.a. – compared to, I believe, something like 1500 today.
We can probably find an appropriate time in our past that will make our present problems seem unexceptionable but I prefer to think that we had gradually worked our way out of the abuses of the past into a more civilised society in the past 80- 100 years and that we are suffering a terrible relapse now.