Too many teardrops

Moral panic is the right reaction: we are afraid of our young

Theodore Dalrymple

1 September 2007

True grief is often swamped by the mawkishness of strangers

Personally, I prefer moral panic to complacency. In the first place, it is more sincere, and while sincerity is not always a virtue, insincerity of the kind upon which so much contemporary complacency rests is almost always a vice. Moral panic is much less dangerous than complacency because, unlike complacency, it can be corrected by ridicule and sometimes even by argument when time proves it to have been unjustified. Unnecessary laws can be repealed. Complacency, however, is dangerous because it can lead to an irreparable disaster, or at any rate an avoidable situation that takes endless life and treasure to repair.

What of the murder of Rhys Jones, what does it mean or symbolise? The complacent will claim that gun crime is not increasing, that murders of children by children remain very infrequent, and that a crime such as this produces a moral response totally disproportionate to its real significance.

The person who panics, however (and it is only right that we should acknowledge that there is a certain illicit pleasure to be had from panicking in this fashion), points out that official statistics are untrustworthy and manipulated politically to reassure the population, when the population knows how bad things are from its own direct experience. They know that even if crime is not increasing, it already places an intolerable burden on society, particularly on the poor who suffer the brunt of it; but that, in any case, all the indications are that violence has increased, is increasing and ought to be reduced.

I am without equivocation on the side of the panickers. For too long the complacent have told us that it is not crime, but fear of crime, that is the problem; or that the increase in crime in the past three quarters of a century is more apparent than real, because the means of communication and therefore of recording crime have improved; or that the British are simply reverting to genetic type — namely drunken, brutal, cruel and violent.