Tuesday, February 17, 2015
By Lindsay Johns for the Daily Mail
Published: 10:50 GMT, 9 July 2012 | Updated: 11:19 GMT, 9 July 2012
Controversial: The Right Reverend Peter Price said taking part in a riot could be a 'spiritual experience' Last night the Rt. Rev Peter Price, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, in an official response paper on last summer’s riots which he delivered to the Church’s General Synod, made an exceedingly alarming and, in my opinion, deeply rash and misguided statement. He claimed, quoting the late Fr Austin Smith, that rioting can be an “ecstatic spiritual experience.”
To wilfully promulgate such an idea is as dangerous as it is absurd and even more worrying when it comes from the mouth of a senior member of the clergy. Whilst agreeing with the Bishop that indulging in certain forms of mass activity can indeed be cathartic, to suggest that wilful destruction and vicious criminality is “spiritual” is clearly a step too far, as it both seemingly condones and exculpates the rioters’ nefarious behaviour by employing theological casuistry.
Claiming that rioting can be a spiritual release, one which offers a glimpse of the divine (as can be taken from the Bishop’s words), is not helpful or constructive in the slightest, but in fact, yet more pc madness, this time with a religious bent. It is a statement which is both regressive and exceedingly morally flabby, let alone highly inflammatory.
Whatever next? Rioters will be able to claim, as part of their defence in court, that they took part in last summer’s destruction because they saw it as a sure-fire conduit to God, divine illumination and a passport to heaven?
Don’t get me wrong. I am all in favour of certain forms of peaceful mass activity. I love nothing better, for example, than to participate in the Notting Hill carnival – for me, at its best a type of Baudelairean “bain de multitude” where joyful, happy revellers enjoy music and dancing together in a state of communal positivity. But such an experience is neither criminal, nor for me spiritual. It is an anthropocentric social activity.
In this instance, I think the Bishop is wrong to employ a very loaded religious lexicon when describing the motivations of the young rioters. Deriving an illicit thrill from a type of behaviour is very different to a divine experience. In referring to rioting in this theocentric way, the Bishop is providing a religious framework (and with it, a justification) for the rioters’ behaviour. In short, the Bishop is offering a kind of reversed theodicy – a vindication of the ways of men in search of God.
Rash: Claiming that rioting can be a spiritual release, one which offers a glimpse of the divine (as can be taken from the Bishop's words), is not helpful or constructive in the slightest Despite the overwhelming evidence of human history pointing in the opposite direction, religious belief should, I think, be positive, ennobling and uplifting, replete with love, goodness and kindness. From my rudimentary knowledge and understanding of Christianity, surely these are the central tenets which one should embrace?
Yet cast your minds back to last summer, to the horrifying images we saw on our TV screens of remorseless violence, casual looting and palpable destruction. Show me where the love, kindness and goodness in those images were, and I too will rush to have a similar "spiritual experience". If running amok with flagrant amorality, viciously looting shops and torching buildings at will, destroying other people’s property and wantonly indulging in violent anti-social acts (and in some cases even taking human life) is a conduit to a spiritual experience, then I am more than happy to remain a devout atheist.
What irks me about the Bishop’s pronouncement is that I am so tired of this excessively liberal, apologetic, bleeding–heart refrain which is continually espoused by (admittedly well-meaning) people who in most cases hardly ever set foot in the inner-city, who continually seek to excuse the behaviour of last summer’s thugs by dint of inane platitudes and naïve, fuzzy, feel-good sentiments.
Police presence: Last summer we saw horrifying images on our TV screens of remorseless violence, casual looting and palpable destruction. As someone who has volunteered in the inner city with young people for many years, it strikes me that it is not physical poverty which is crippling our young people, but a debilitating poverty of aspiration. It is not a glaring lack of opportunity which is handicapping our youngsters, but a glaring lack of positive male role models, a chronic neglect of education, absent parents and an abysmal dearth of draconian discipline and rigid perameters. Certainly that is not all the fault of young people. Au contraire, we as adults are of course partly responsible for not inculcating better values in our young people. But personal responsibility in the end rests with the individual.
To hear the Bishop talk, with his description of young people “condemned” to living lives devoid of hope in run-down, blighted urban areas, one would think that young people across the UK are all living pitiful, doleful existences in Victorian work houses, existing on meagre rations of bread and dripping in a fetid miasma of Dickensian penury. Thankfully, that is far from the truth!
Doleful existence: The Bishop talks of young people 'condemned' to living lives devoid of hope in run-down, blighted urban areas Whilst I sadly acknowledge that genuine (albeit First World) poverty does still exist in pockets (which we should of course seek to rectify and extirpate with alacrity), poverty is a relative term. First World poverty is very different to Third World poverty. The overwhelming majority of young people in the inner-city (for a variety of reasons, including their having embraced the bling culture aesthetic, including a love of the “get rich quick”, vacuous, materialistic hedonism) possess at least two smartphones and several pairs of designer trainers each, not to mention other expensive sartorial and technological accoutrements. Sorry, but I don’t call that genuine poverty.
In fact, it is widely acknowledged that the latest gadgets and the best clothes are always to be found in the inner cities, as the denizens’ priorities are different to those of the middle classes (who value education and other long–term gratifications as opposed to short term manifestations of ostentatious wealth and material success).
Young people’s myopia to the vast array of opportunities that they do in fact possess, fuelled in part by a culture which actively encourages them to indulge their desire to ceaselessly wallow in a perennial state of victimhood, continues to stymie their progress to maturity and self-actualization and prevents them from taking their taking part as constructive members of society. People in Africa who walk miles to and from school each day in the boiling sun have it hard, but somehow through sheer hard work, commitment and determination still manage to get excellent grades, excel at school and make something of their lives.
Inexcusable: No one will gain if we continually seek to make excuses for those who chose to riot None of the young people I help to mentor in Peckham rioted, although many admittedly received the BBM broadcasts on their smartphones. Rioting may have been a morally-flawed short cut to a new pair of trainers of a flat screen TV, but I sincerely hope that none of my kids would have been so foolish as to think that it was a conduit to God.
There are certainly no “one size fits all” easy solutions to last summer’s riots. There are many grass-roots causes for the appalling scenes we witnessed. But to continually exculpate the pernicious behaviour of the rioters and make lame excuses for their atrocious criminal comportment, be it sociological or now religious, makes a mockery of the many young people who live in the same “run-down, deprived” areas but who consciously chose not to riot or indulge in barbarity.
No one will gain if we continually seek to make excuses for those who chose to riot. What’s worse, if we don’t start to man up quickly and apportion blame where it deserves to be put and rectify these causes, last summer’s riots may well happen again. The causes do not lie in the heavens or in our desire to fuse with the divine. Only the most devout or the most deluded could ever possibly want a repeat of that “spiritual experience”. Let it be known: Rioting is no passport to a spiritual nirvana. It is, and should be, a passport to prison.
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