The riots in British cities over the summer have been
assimilated by our opinion-formers into the easy categories that
govern their thinking. Leftwing writers have cited urban
deprivation, poverty, and racism—in other words, factors for which
the rioters cannot be blamed. Right-wing writers have pointed their
fingers at multiculturalism, the welfare trap, and the breakdown of
family life — again, factors for which the rioters cannot be
blamed. The fact is, however, that those responsible for the riots
were those who took part in them. Rioting is natural to human
beings, and is a frequently observed effect of our inherent
savagery. Young men are particularly prone to riot: and in the
conditions of the hunter-gatherer it is to be assumed that, between
sleeping, copulating, and eating, they didn’t do much else. Young
men lapse into riot as soon as there issomething to be gained from
doing so, and whenever there is nothing serious to be lost. What
needs explaining is not the fact that they riot, but rather the far
more extraordinary fact that on the whole they don’t. What is it,
down the ages, that has contained the energies of our youth, and
ensured that they respect the lives and property of others?
The answer is “civilization.” But that answer repeats the
question. What exactly makes a civilization? What is it
that lifts human beings out of their savage condition and endows
them with the respect for order, the consideration for others, and
the habits of obedience without which the claim of humanity for a
special place on our planet is no better than the claim of rats,
toads, or mosquitoes?
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, anthropologists had the
chance to observe societies that had neither writing nor formal
institutions of government, but which were nevertheless in
possession of the precious thing that herds, packs, and riots lack,
namely perpetuity. Those “primitive” societies existed from
generation to generation, and each new generation absorbed the
customs and acknowledged the obligations that were passed on by its
parents, unconsciously preparing itself in turn to pass those
benefits to its offspring. Although there were disputes and
rivalries, and although violence would erupt from time to time, and
sometimes exist in ritualized and repeated forms, the normal
condition was one of peaceful association, in which each member of
the tribe felt bound to every other in a web of obligations that
could not be guiltlessly transgressed. The many “I’s” were subsumed
in a single “we,” and what made this possible, more than any other
factor, was the interest that the tribe took in the critical
transitions on which its perpetuity depended. Each birth was
acknowledged as an event in the life of the tribe, as well as an
event in the life of the parents. The transition from childhood to
adult responsibility was not, as now, a private accomplishment, to
be achieved anyhow or not at all, but a public concern, to be given
ceremonial recognition. In the ceremony of initiation obligations
would be solemnly assumed and the interest of the tribe
acknowledged as greater than the interests of any individual.
Marriage was likewise a public rite, and when, at last, the
individual was laid to rest among his ancestors, that passage too
was marked out as the concern of everyone.
Rites of passage (as Arnold van Gennep named them a hundred
years ago) still exist here and there in our world, notably in
societies untouched by modern communications. But nobody can deny
that they are disappearing from Europe in general, and from Britain
in particular. When the right-wing commentators complain of the
breakdown of family life, they don’t really mean that homes are now
fungible and troubled. That has been the case from the beginning of
civilization. I was raised in such a home. What the commentators
mean, or ought to mean, is that the crucial institution on which
children depend for their security, namely marriage, is
disappearing. Out of wedlock births are now the norm in Europe, and
the only people who urgently seek to get married are homosexuals,
anxious for a recognition that is rapidly losing its real
significance. The absence of this crucial rite of passage means
that birth, too, is a private matter, no longer an event in the
life of a community but a private passion of the mother, who is
helped through her ordeal (should she choose to go through with it)
by the same welfare system that will take charge of the child.
But perhaps the most important loss is that of the rite of
passage out of childhood. Coming of age was a formal welcome
offered by the community. In response to this welcome the
adolescent assumed the benefits and burdens of membership: maturity
ceased to be a biological phenomenon and was recreated as a social
gift. In complex societies like ours this transformation was not
marked by a single ceremony, although here and there the old
ceremonies existed. It was marked by a multitude of small-scale
undertakings: local offers of membership and conferrals of
responsibility that were looked on with pride by the participants
and by those in charge.
Teams, scout troops, schools, and clubs all offered their local
rites of passage; Bar-Mitzvah, Confirmation, and first Communion
were religious icons embossed on the same ready currency. In a
hundred ways adults maintained the boundary between childhood and
maturity, and offered maturity on terms — terms that involved the
whole community, and which could be accepted only by conceding the
right of the community to obedience in the things that mattered
most to it.
I GUESS WHAT I AM SAYING HERE is plain common sense. If so,
however, why should we be surprised if our societies lose the
precious gift of perpetuity, when the great transitions in which
membership can be publicly acknowledged no longer
exist? Children stumble into adulthood today, unprepared and
unendorsed. Little or nothing protects them from the spectacle of
adult disorder. The traditional goals, such as marriage and family,
are no longer held out as stages on life’s way. And the
proliferation of sexual imagery and temptation destroys both the
innocence of childhood and the responsibility of adult life, so
that the boundary between the two is erased. In a very real sense
children are left to fend for themselves, to forge out of the
debris that they witness the only kind of membership that can be
rescued from it, which is that of the gang.
The essence of the gang is that it lives in antagonistic
relation to its surroundings. The world around the gang belongs to
others, to those who have no claim to membership and whose property
and lifestyle mark them out as alien. Hence the gang emerges into a
world already closed to it, and it must do something to make its
presence known. Various avenues suggest themselves. One is to
vandalize the public space and leave a rival mark on it. This is
the real meaning of graffiti, which are the signatures of gangs,
designed both to deface the public space and to privatize its
meaning.
Other self-made rites of passage are available. The violent
confrontation with other gangs is one of them, and in British
cities this form of initiation is quite common, leading in recent
years to many deaths through knife attacks. Riot too can be a rite
of passage — a way of “joining in” that offers both membership and
liberation, and which fulfils the longing for vengeance against a
world that has hitherto offered nothing but the sign of others’
ownership. It does not normally escalate to the extent that we have
witnessed in Britain this last summer. But riot is there in the
background of adolescent life, as everyone knows who lives close to
one of our large inner city schools.
It is not only in Britain that these effects are witnessed.
Every public space in Germany has been defaced by graffiti, and
little or nothing is done to punish those responsible—after all,
punishment belongs to the authoritarian way of life that the
Germans are trying so hard to forget. At the same time, this
freedom to deface does not satisfy the hunger of young Germans for
membership or their anger against a world that has failed to
provide it. Every Friday night for the past four years automobiles
have been set alight in Berlin, and an article in Die Welt am
Sonntag recently compared the situation in the German capital
with that in Tottenham, where the British riots began. Nor is the
German obsession with neo-Nazism entirely absurd. Deprive young
people of a rite of passage into the social order and they
will look for a rite of passage out of it. That, in my
view, is the true explanation of the Norwegian mass murderer
Breivik, a man whose father had rejected him, who found no society
that would include him, and who took his revenge on young people
who seemed to be enjoying the very membership that he lacked.
It is one thing to acknowledge the need for rites of passage,
another to propose a way of rediscovering them. So far the efforts
of politicians in Europe and America have been negative. The effect
of current policies has been to subsidize out-of-wedlock births, to
remake marriage as a contract of cohabitation, and to drive
religion, which is the true guardian of rites of passage, from the
public sphere. Those policies have been embarked on with the best
of intentions, but with a remarkable indifference to what we know
of human nature. The way back to perpetuity will be long and
painful, but it is surely evident that the first step must be to
stop subsidizing the alternative.
