No interpretation of events is final, so it is not surprising that a war of words has begun over the meaning of the riots in London and elsewhere. What is perhaps more surprising is that even conservative commentators, for example in the Daily Mail and the Spectator, have drawn a parallel that might have been expected from members of student socialist societies in the 1960s, comparing the looters who have terrorized Britain to the bankers who were involved in the financial crisis of 2008. For these pundits, the looters only did retail what the bankers did wholesale.

The comparison is alarming for several reasons….

The rioters in the news last week had a thwarted sense of entitlement that has been assiduously cultivated by an alliance of intellectuals, governments and bureaucrats. “We’re fed up with being broke,” one rioter was reported as having said, as if having enough money to satisfy one’s desires were a human right rather than something to be earned.

“There are people here with nothing,” this rioter continued: nothing, that is, except an education that has cost $80,000, a roof over their head, clothes on their back and shoes on their feet, food in their stomachs, a cellphone, a flat-screen TV, a refrigerator, an electric stove, heating and lighting, hot and cold running water, a guaranteed income, free medical care, and all of the same for any of the children that they might care to propagate.

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The culture in which the young unemployed have immersed themselves is not one that is likely to promote virtues such as self-discipline, honesty and diligence. Four lines from the most famous lyric of the late and unlamentable Amy Winehouse should establish the point:

I didn’t get a lot in class

But I know it don’t come in a shot glass

They tried to make me go to rehab

But I said ‘no, no, no’

This message is not quite the same as, for example, “Go to the ant, thou sluggard, consider her ways and be wise.”

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So several things need to be done, among them the reform and even dismantlement of the educational and social-security systems, the liberalization of the labor laws, and the much firmer repression of crime.

David Cameron is not the man for the job.

The belief that the theory of evolution and the neurosciences have something important to tell us about the inescapable problems of human existence has once again become fashionable. In my view, this is false and facile; a reading of the first chapter of William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience should explain why.

In other words, [argued James] humanity is stuck with the obligation to test the truth of its ideas, which no amount of reflection on their origins will ever do. The possession of self consciousness and propositional language means that naturalistic explanations will always remain insufficient and will never pluck out the heart of our mystery.

The evident glee of the rioters, celebrating and smiling triumphantly among the devastation they wrought, as if in victory, is testimony not to their outraged feelings, but to the strength of the destructive urge that lies within us all and has always to be kept under firm control. I remember as a child the sheer joy of smashing a radio on our lawn with a croquet mallet, a joy that was quite unrelated to any personal animus against the radio, which could not possibly have done me any harm. I loved the destruction for its own sake and wanted it to continue for as long as possible, smashing the parts into dust long after there was no possibility of repair, feeling that I was almost performing a duty in being so thorough in my annihilation of them. And the first riot, in Panama, that I ever attended — reporting on it for this magazine — taught me that rioting is fun, that the supposed reason for it is soon forgotten in the ecstatic pleasure of destruction….

In Liberia during the civil war, I saw in Monrovia the meticulous dismantlement of every last vestige of civilisation. The hospitals, for example, had not been destroyed by bazookas or bombs in fighting, but by a kind of obsessive vandalism by the rebels who had swept through them. Every castor had been cut from every trolley; every item of equipment had been damaged irrecoverably. In the Centennial Hall, the principal ceremonial building in the country, where presidents were inaugurated, I saw the body of a Steinway grand piano resting on the ground, surrounded by its legs, which had been carefully and no doubt laboriously sawn off. The library of the university had been ransacked, not to steal the books (I doubt that the vandals were great readers), but for the sheer pleasure of assisting entropy in its great work of returning the world to chaos. Incidentally, it is not unknown for librarians in Britain to react against the orderliness of their institutions in a similar way; but one can easily imagine the joy, the uplifted hearts, of the vandals in Monrovia as they went about their painstaking destruction.

Do we worry too much or too little about our health? I can never quite make up my mind, but it seems to me probable that there is an inverse anxiety law: those with most to worry about do so least, while those with least to worry about do so most.

To treat each meal as a medical procedure, however, is certainly to go too far in the direction of caution, even if a little bit of what we fancy does us harm. The comic poet and member of parliament (a combination of careers difficult to envisage today) A P Herbert, who was born in 1890 and died in 1971, satirised this tendency in his poem The Vitamins, published in 1930 in his collection Ballads for Broadbrows.

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Herbert published in Punch and was somewhat put out that his work was not esteemed more highly by the literati….Such a complaint could easily slide into anti-intellectualism.

Unhappily, then as now, what was good for us was not always what we most liked: “Well ‘B’ occurs in nuts and peas, / In lentils, beans, and things like these, / In wholemeal rye and wholemeal wheat, / And bread that is not fit to eat, / In roes of fish and some dried fruits, / And milk and yeast and uncooked roots; / And death, as far as I can see, / May be preferred to eating ‘B.’” The solution is close at hand: “I have found a Vitamin / In brandy, burgundy and gin.” Quite right, provided, of course, that it is not overdone; by which I mean, consumption greater than mine.

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. On the contrary, he would simply feel that the subventions were not sufficient to allow him to live as he would have liked.

There is nothing that an intellectual less likes to change than his mind…

Chewing gum is trodden into the pavements of even the most exclusive areas and it sometimes seems as if we think that what a beauty spot really needs is an empty, glaring-orange Lucozade bottle. Britons often drop litter without awareness of the alternative. Sometimes, though, they are not so thoughtless: they give the matter some thought and then decide to drop the litter anyway.

THE riots in London and elsewhere in Britain are a backhanded tribute to the long-term intellectual torpor, moral cowardice, incompetence and careerist opportunism of the British political and intellectual class.

They have somehow managed not to notice what has long been apparent to anyone who has taken a short walk with his eyes open down any frequented British street: that a considerable proportion of the country’s young population (a proportion that is declining) is ugly, aggressive, vicious, badly educated, uncouth and criminally inclined.

Unfortunately, while it is totally lacking in self-respect, it is full of self-esteem: that is to say, it believes itself entitled to a high standard of living, and other things, without any effort on its own part.

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…the riots are a manifestation of a society in full decomposition, of a people with neither leaders nor followers but composed only of egotists.