What I find interesting about this, XC, is that it’s the kind of thing I thought when I was living in the UK. One of the best things about being an ex-pat in a country so far away from ‘home’ is that you get a good sense of the way the rest of the world see Britain. It’s in a way that you would never assume they do. They consider us largely irrelevant to world politics (I’m not interested in whether or not this is so) and hardly worth mentioning. The mighty UK has no impact on the daily lives of vast numbers of people. I love that fact. The reason I mention this is because your view is very much of the British situation (bear with me, I know you weren’t making any claims to be talking about anywhere else). A lot of what you say just doesn’t fit with what happens here and in the other places I’ve lived. It was suggested somewhere above that poverty is a major cause of yobbish behaviour but I see far more extreme poverty here and almost no yobbish behaviour – In six years, our only experience of a violent fracas involved a pissed up Scot and two thugs from Yorkshire.Quote:
Originally Posted by Xamonas Chegwe
There is an area of Kowloon that is the most densely populated place on earth – everywhere you go it’s as if the rock festival has just ended - but there certainly isn’t the same aggression and violence that you see in any major UK city centre on a Friday and Saturday night. I see a far greater work ethic here in Asia than I ever saw in the UK. People here barely survive doing the most menial of jobs – jobs that people simply wouldn’t do in the UK. Obviously there are many, many other factors that are relevant to the issue but actually living in another culture does help defamiliarise your own and also makes you ask some interesting questions about your own assumptions.
I also find it interesting that you doubt there has been any fundamental change in social values (although I’m not sure who said that the change was ‘fundamental’ – it’s certainly alarming). Would you agree that values do in fact change ever or is it always just the lament of old farts like me? We no longer burn women believed to be witches as public spectacle. This suggests to me that values do change and, given your identification of the speed and capabilities of modern technology, perhaps they change far more quickly now than ever? You see, I think the views you express are a part of what’s angered me in the last two decades. You say, “there will always be a nostalgic view of bygone days taken by the old. Besides, we used to have a lot more wars in the good old days, so we could ship our scum off to foreign parts and let them run riot there.” This is a view I have seen many times, primarily from Guardian readers. Anyone who decries a fall in values must be an oldie befuddled with nostalgia. (It’s a shame the word has been appropriated in this way – etymologically it means the pain of going home.) It’s as if the fact that awful things existed in the past means that we should accept pitifully low standards now. Each generation has looked on the next with supposedly greater understanding – ‘we were no different’ – but we were. My world certainly was and I disagree that I simply look back and remember only the nice bits. If you refuse to be judgmental of modern youth because you think that we were no different, then you fail to give them any worthwhile sense of responsibility. For me, the most important lesson you can teach children is that they aren’t adults. That way they eventually make better adults. Whether intentionally or not, you are providing them with excuses and they will grab them as inalienable rights. They seem to learn quickly when it comes to rights. When I was teaching in the UK I remember one despicable student telling me, “You’re only saying that to me because I’m white.” He’d seen the benefits to be had by playing the race card and decided he was going to have some.
Despite Virgil identifying my argument as being primarily with political correctness (which I believe might have been mocked out of use as a phrase but not as a sentiment), I would say that my main gripe is with dumbing down and the attempt to accommodate rather than address poor behaviour. This of course means that I long for a time when you could leave your doors unlocked and we had National Service.
Grumbleguts – you express a similar view to XC’s. No, I didn’t think you were serious but I do think you are avoiding the issue. It’s far easier to denounce views like mine as the intolerant conservatism of someone living in an imaginary Eden of the past. That way you don’t have to address the kind of appalling behaviour that made me, as a damn good teacher, get out of the UK. You see, when you are confronted with it every day for six years it appears more like a reality than the misunderstanding of a nostalgic old fart.
On the subject of National Service, I once taught an Israeli lad who told me that for his ‘gap-year’ he would be returning to Israel to do his bit for his country by enrolling for NS. I had nothing but admiration for him, although I could have satirised him as a gung-ho, brainwashed idiot who had no idea how he was being manipulated to risk his life for an abstract ideal. Had he been English he could have sung out, “England is mine, it owes me a living.”
You’ve let them in boys – you’ve allowed them to exploit democracy in the area where it is most vulnerable – its tolerance.
