Lack of ideology is the main worry

We either have faith in humanity’s ability to better itself or else we begin to flounder, says Haydn Shaughnessy

SINCE the London riots fired up commentators have been asking, “is there an ideology behind these riots?”

It is the absence of an ideology among rioters throughout England that is the real worry and it’s what makes the riots relevant for every city in Europe and the US.

The “criminality” versus “ideology” argument goes like this. These riots are fundamentally criminal acts, an opportunity for a criminal class to act with impunity.

But, so the counter-argument goes, these crimes have an undercurrent of ideology; they are the voice of the unheard.

Of course they are largely criminal acts. But the bigger story is the dwindling of confidence in the idea of progress.

The distinguished US sociologist Robert Nisbet pointed out 30 years ago in History of the Idea of Progress that an idea of progress is as fundamental to a society based on science and technology as the idea of liberty was to the Enlightenment.

It’s a cornerstone of institutions and beliefs.

We either have faith in the ability of technology and science to keep taking us to better expressions of humanity or we begin to flounder.

And over the past 40 years we have floundered more and more. Gradually we have adopted a more cyclical view of how history unfolds. We have become tolerant of and embraced the idea that society, institutions and governments rise and fall.

That tolerance opens the door to a high degree of relativism in the way in which we make judgments about our institutions.

We tend to invest less in the idea that these institutions have been tried, tested and refined over centuries and see them instead as fundamentally flawed ways of organising human activity. The next logical argument is that we are better off without them.

Like it or not, the problem is that we have lost faith in our ability to progress continuously towards some greater end point.

We need to understand why — the ecological issues around fossil fuels plays a role but so too does the inability of leaders to stand out and support the idea of progress.

We need leaders in government and the tech community to give us a vision of where science and technology is headed, and how it makes us better as a society and a people, and to articulate why that is an inclusive vision.

So you might argue, what has that got to do with people who loot?

People who loot should be locked up.

Meanwhile we have to find credible ways of affirming rather than simply imposing our core values.

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