Mirror of Justice

Kevin Lee's post, quoting another blog, attributes the recent London riots to the disparity in wealth between the rich and poor in capitalist societies, warning that the same could occur here.

Others see the London riots as teaching rather a different message.  Herewith a couple examples:

First, from the Land Down Under, this excerpt from an editorial in The Australian:

What we have on the streets of London and elsewhere are welfare-state mobs. The youth who are shattering their own communities represent a generation that has been suckled by the state more than any generation before it. They live in urban territories where the sharp-elbowed intrusion of the welfare state during the past 30 years has pushed aside older ideals of self-reliance and community spirit. The march of the welfare state into every aspect of urban, less well-off people's existences, from their financial wellbeing to their child-rearing habits and even into their emotional lives, with the rise of therapeutic welfarism designed to ensure that the poor remain "mentally fit", has undermined individual resourcefulness and social bonding. The antisocial youthful rioters are the end-product of this antisocial system of state intervention. * * *

Nurtured in large part by the welfare state, financially, physically and educationally, socialised more by the agents of welfarism than by their own neighbours or local representatives, these youth have little moral or emotional attachment to their communities. Their rioting reveals not that Britain is in a time warp in 1981 or 1985 with politically motivated riots against the police, but that the tentacle-like spread of the welfare state into every area of people's lives has utterly zapped old social bonds, the relationship of sharing and solidarity that once existed in working-class communities.

Second, from Theodore Dalrymple writing in the City Journal of the Manhattan Institute:

The riots are the apotheosis of the welfare state and popular culture in their British form. A population thinks (because it has often been told so by intellectuals and the political class) that it is entitled to a high standard of consumption, irrespective of its personal efforts; and therefore it regards the fact that it does not receive that high standard, by comparison with the rest of society, as a sign of injustice. It believes itself deprived (because it has often been told so by intellectuals and the political class), even though each member of it has received an education costing $80,000, toward which neither he nor—quite likely—any member of his family has made much of a contribution; indeed, he may well have lived his entire life at others’ expense, such that every mouthful of food he has ever eaten, every shirt he has ever worn, every television he has ever watched, has been provided by others. Even if he were to recognize this, he would not be grateful, for dependency does not promote gratitude.

Third, from Shaun Bailey writing in the Guardian:

The biggest problem our country has faced over the last two decades is that everyone thinks the government should do everything. Personal responsibility and community responsibility have been replaced by state responsibility. If the riots have shown us anything, it is that this approach does not work.

While Catholic social thinkers traditionally have been drawn to class warfare themes, tending to see antisocial behavior as rooted in economic injustice, is that really likely to have played a meaningful role in the opportunistic thievery and wanton destruction of their own neighborhoods exhibited by the London rioters?  Or might it be the case that at least some of the fault may be placed with the overly government-centric approach of liberal social experiments, which has bequeathed European welfare states with multiple generations of welfare dependency and the ever-expanding state, with the inevitable withering away of personal responsibility, neighborhood solidarity, and community (including faith-based) charity?

Greg Sisk