Time for Britain to double down on law enforcement | Dan Mikhaylov
The previous weeks’ newsworthy events signalled pessimism. The heinous antisocial behaviour, vandalism and destruction under the name of Black Lives Matter provides yet another example of how an opulent, orderly society easily descends into endogenous chaos. However, recently we might have just hit a new low. During this period of protest inspired by George Floyd’s death, many have been swift to promote finger-wagging and to construct an absurd dichotomy of the oppressors and the oppressed in attempts to justify outright lawlessness and unacceptable conduct. Our solutions to such problems cannot merely be of harsher sentences, but must address sicknesses at the centre of our society.
Worse still, the BLM movement or any other authoritarian group of intersectional radicals, intending to destabilise our society, does not fit into the category of short-lived aberrations from the norm. Far from rooted in spontaneity, the actions of these self-ascribed cultural Marxists and the ivory-towered academics who cheer them on reflect our flawed perpetuation of the policies that precipitate our transformation from organisation to fragmentation and from the triumph of virtue to moral degradation.
Pondering on this austere transition, some assert that Western civilisation, at least as we know it today, is collapsing under its own weight. It’s own internally created and cultivated belief in tolerance is increasingly proving to be its undoing. And these arguments are not entirely groundless. Certainly, plenty of opposition to the West’s cultural code has been incubated in lecture halls from the Ivy League to Oxbridge. Certainly, deleterious trouble-makers and malevolent doomsayers, including Priyamvada Gopal and the British Islamist Anjem Choudary, were not birthed abroad but received education on our streets and were exposed to our creations.
Much of the animosity epitomised by those riots constitutes a product of our introspective inclinations to doubt ourselves, even if this scepticism becomes a pernicious force and not a desirable mechanism to correct wrongdoing. This brainwashing is often found in periodicals, and similar accusations have been made about universities. Thus, the latter are expected to decolonise their curricula, while such priorities as nurturing critical thinking have largely been side-lined.
Some elements of our society are biting the very hand that feeds them by challenging the foundations on which they were built and rejecting their significance altogether at a cost to public order and stability. Granted that the symptoms of this fragmentation are endogenous, this lamentable development counts on a façade of naturality. One may suggest prosperity- in the societal, cultural and economic sense- is inevitably interrupted by such a domestic upheaval. Heavily politicised factions within our nation force it to undergo violent social metamorphoses, continuing along their eternally oscillating pattern of lurching from one extreme to another. However divergent they might seem at first sight, even antipodes (mathematically opposite points) on the Earth’s surface are incontrovertibly connected.
Humanity has observed multiple instances of order breeding disorder and vice versa: despite disproportionate impoverishment in Britain’s north in the 1930s created by the putridity of the ship-building and the coal-mining industries, and despite the simultaneously occurring geographical divides manifesting themselves in both landscape differences, industrial output, HDI and disparities in income, the country stood firm in the ensuing struggle against Nazism and its continental jackals.
Case studies by no means end there. Even so ordinary an activity as work points to this principle. Thus, we frequently suggest – and tend to do so based on our empirical observations - that productivity creates fatigue that in turn creates rest, much like a sudden acquisition of wealth stimulates lavish spending and could eventually lead to impoverishment.
With that said, the process of building order out of the brewing disorder is indeed natural. And this naturality has less to do with its inevitability or longevity; neither disorder nor order possess definite half-lives or periods of decay. Rather, they are natural. Consequently, we should not be deterred from taking action by employing these to ensure a smooth replacement of immorality, iniquity, anarchy and misconduct with something much more desirable. Religion is precisely one such weapon in our perennial fight against a deep cultural benightment and our quest for self improvement.
Our religious teachings, as based on the Jewish Talmud, the New Testament or the Quran, place a major emphasis on moderation as a precondition for harmony. The Abrahamic God is all-merciful as well as caring, and his messengers promote self-control as a key tenet of devotion. Saint Paul wrote, “Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable” (1 Corinthians 9:25), and also argued that Jesus’ disciples “will not be enslaved by anything”. Meanwhile, one of the Prophet Muhammad’s chief associates- Caliph Umar- eloquently described the righteous lifestyle, to which believers should aspire, as “Allah loves moderation and hates extravagance and excess”. Needless to mention, the Jewish Decalogue is hardly any different, as it imposes limits on what one may do, inter alia instructing humans not to commit theft, but gives the followers sufficient freedom with respect to living their lives in a way that pleases God.
These postulates are further echoed in holidays. Jews fast in the build-up to Passover, Muslims during the month of Ramadan, and Christians all across the world restrain themselves before celebrating Christ’s sacrifice for our sins and his resurrection on Easter Sunday.
However, virtuous living alone no longer suffices. All the more because fewer and fewer Britons follow religious practices and as fewer believers exist, there are fewer people to impart those teachings or those able to highlight the intricate benefits of righteous living to those who have ventured astray and now seek betterment. Only 38% of Britons regard themselves as Christians, and this represents an alarming 12% decline from the 2008 figure, mirrored by a 21% growth in the number of self-proclaimed atheists. Because of this, it befalls us to diversify our arsenal to counterpoise misconduct and reign in the plentiful conflicting forces, prevalent in, and tearing apart, our all too permissive society. Herein, we advocate doubling down on law enforcement, and propose that our laws and their implementation should be made more congruent with our societal values as we strive to amplify the amount of virtue found in our quotidian, ordinary behaviour.
More specifically, our approach considers order to have enormous benefit to the wellbeing of our society and correspondingly aims to sustain it by advancing suitable laws and ensuring their strict and pervasive application. This idea requires three further points of clarification.
Firstly, this solution is not intended to be lasting, nor absolute. As the renowned Latin saying goes, tempora mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis (times are changing, and we change with them). Whence it will be mistaken not to tailor the nature of rules to correspond to the time’s pressing circumstances, and not to resile from our proposal, after its impact is felt. With anarchy on our street the times call for us to again do this today, proportionate to the situation and our cultural demands. This does not presuppose that our values- i.e. what we cherish and take to indicate good behaviour- may at some stage grow outdated. Instead, it is our ability to share them that demands profuse modification, and it would not be reactionary for the state to turn to the Church for guidance on morality. The two’s separation is but a human construct, not a truism, and divorcing ourselves fully from religion will not bode well for the world, since the former in many respects helps justify secular demands for mutual respect and communal cooperation.
Secondly, enforcing benevolent manners and encouraging equally benevolent deeds will not go against the social fabric. Here, we are not striving to emulate Austria’s Joseph II, who was so concerned with his subjects’ well being that he actively pursued reform of everything they did, including authorising burials in reusable coffins. This dictatorial habit is alien to us. In Britain, the tradition has it that we believe in striking an equilibrium between enforcing orderly conduct and protecting free will. If Christianity has managed to formulate a middle path by simultaneously stressing freedoms and championing stewardship, its followers should likewise be capable of discovering this balance elsewhere in life.
Thirdly, though it is easy to lambast such crackdowns as a deliberate affront on liberty, yet this accusation could not be more divergent from truth. Ancient Chinese scholars of the Warring States Era (475-221 BC), preoccupied with the selfsame problem of comprehending the endless oscillating cycles of division and unity, arrived at a similar conclusion from the premise that extremes produce one another. One renowned civil servant, whose works have enabled China’s reunification into a single polity under the country’s first Emperor, Qin Shi Huang, was Lord Shang. His theory of desires, outlined in the Book of Lord Shang, states that humans desire multiple things, and no authority may alter this fact. Still, those aspiring for good governance and political stability can concentrate human actions on one ambition to make it more attainable and unite the individuals involved by cultivating single-mindedness. According to his logic, this leaves no room for internal turmoil, since less energy is wasted on quarrels, whereas divisive private interests will be relegated to the background of human cravings and supplanted with the so-called uniformity of purpose.
Emperor Qin Shi Huang was made to understand the threat of internal turmoil.
Much like we today, the fourth-century BC scholar saw turbulence in the different corners of the known oecumene, as the old order, based on the emperor’s charisma, had long fallen into disrepair and its successor, bureaucratic imperial rule, was yet to make a global appearance. He realised that times change, people change, and the tools for effective governance should change accordingly, and proposed that social stability and harmony predicated exclusively on the rulers focusing on “what is essential” under the circumstances. By this logic, if the people control their affairs in a democracy, they too should focus on carrying out those measures that are essential to preserving what defines and unites them.
Benevolent and theoretically auspicious though it was, virtuous governance was insufficient in his view. Its success was limited by the paucity of righteous individuals, from whom the rest of the society could learn, as well as by the absence of guarantees that the lowlifes or the wrongdoers would be interested in embarking on the path of goodness in the first place. Today, similar comments may be made about our religious institutions: their existence is laudable and what they preach is useful, yet they are far less influential than they used to be in the past, no doubt in part as fewer Britons turn to them and their representatives for advice.
His solution to these deficiencies was to despoil governance of the human factor and promulgate laws to enshrine righteousness into the human psyche by additional means. In his words, this fostered such conditions where personal virtue was less important to successful rulers, and humans were more inclined to act correctly in the light of existing laws. This policy of exemplary law was designed as a transient measure to forestall the diffusion of evil habits and incentivise an organic return to social cohesion, remembering, “It is the people’s nature to be orderly, but it is the circumstances that cause disorder”. For this, he proposed a strict system of punishments and rewards that dictated public responsibility, but, at the same time, prescribed their universal and inflexible application as well as efforts to educate citizens about the laws’ contents and resultantly secure their trust. Once punishments and rewards are internalised by humans, he continued, they would abandon their pursuit of excess, the need to cajole or to libel one another, and would become more virtuous and united, thereby rendering the laws obsolete.
He wrote, “If the country’s order depends on the judgment of the family, it attains supremacy; if it depends on the judgment of the officials, it becomes only strong. ” Law enforcement arguably contributed to the former by virtue of promoting the latter.
Obviously, times change, and we change with times, which is why blind imitation of the tools, employed by Lord Shang would be indecorous and frankly pointless. Our goals are different: he hoped for a powerful, expansionist state driven by meritocracy alone, whereas we want to preserve the social fabric and the glue holding us together. Our backgrounds are different: he lived at a time, when nationalism, democracy, or intersectionality could not have featured in any conversation, whereas for us, these terms almost seem congenital because of their widespread use. Even our extremes are different: we might see warring political movements, but they are not as belligerent as the princely states competing for the imperial throne.
And yet, we both recognise that order is essential and should be maximised not just by cultivating good behaviour at home, at school, or in places of religious worship, but also with the aid of government.
The world’s vicissitudes may be natural, and we might not fully eradicate destructive forces that dominate the BLM movement and materialise in calls for dismantling our monuments and customs. But so are our tools; doubling down on law enforcement and lobbying for laws that encourage virtues and impede malevolence, criminality, and vice may serve an important purpose in rescuing our prosperous society from collapsing due to its own prosperity. The rebalancing act is yet to come.
