Riots

It is time I fulfilled the promise of my headline.

Riots broke out simultaneously in London last night starting in over twenty 'flashpoints'. Croydon to the south and a police station in Birmingham were on fire. There was further trouble in Liverpool and Bristol. Masked children roamed the streets on BMX bikes ransacking stores and stripping PC World of its entire stock. Over 225 arrests were made, including a boy of eleven. Some of the kids in the mahem were as young as seven.

The ostensible cause of the riots was revenge against the police for shooting Mark Duggan. He was himself in possession of a gun which may or may not have shot the bullet embedded in the handset of a policeman from Scotland Yard's firearms unit.

There is nothing the devil likes more than tit for tat. If you can prove that a good man made a mistake, then hey presto! You've got carte blanche to kill, injure and rob as many innocent people as you like. The whole world can be regarded as one great blob of hostile otherness. It deserves everything it gets.

Where does this impression come from, that the world is full of evil people who deserve to be stripped of everything, followed by a horrible death?

It comes from babyhood and childhood: the time when the emotional substratum is laid down. A child learns to love or hate from his own parents. The skill with which the parents manage family interactions is crucial to his or her consequent development.

But now we live in an age where more than fifty per cent of marriages end in divorce and many children are born into loose-knit families that do not involve marriage at all. A happy couple who have been married for more than six years is as rare as a queer tomcat.

Mothers are bribed into divorce by the near certainty that they will be 'awarded' most of their husband's wealth plus custody of the children by the courts, followed by government benefits. So the incipient urge to find a new partner after five or six years (the recipe for a second-rate or decadent culture) is actively encouraged.

Civilisations at their height incorporate conflict into relationships: they learn to quarrel without hatred and without destruction. Love can survive this 'managed' conflict, but it cannot survive a deceitful superficial harmony. Good people can laugh while they quarrel. Conflict, like evolution itself, is one of the essential ingredients leading to a beautiful creation. Without it, life would be bland, tasteless and dull.

Conscious people know all this, because it is obvious. Surds do not, because their innate hedonistic drive can see no sense in anything except self-gratification. When it comes to surds, social harmony is an engineering problem. Let us study the data and see what leads to a society with maximum harmony and minimum crime.

The best is an intact family which does not watch violent videos and maintains careful control of the content of computer games. Holding up a mirror to nature is fine: but if nature is reflected in a distorting mirror which revels in blood, sex and gore. it gives children, especially those with absent fathers, a totally UNTRUE picture of normal life which they will then adopt as a template of normality. In the old days, children would imitate the elders of the tribe. Modern children see ANYTHING THAT COMES THROUGH A SCREEN as the ideal on which to base themselves. Children without fathers will splash around trying to get an idea of what masculinity is, and the screen is where they will look.

Mothers who look after their children in a two-parent family are like gold dust. They shine and never tarnish. They bring good luck and wealth to the whole society.

Mothers who try to justify their divorces by vilifying the fathers to everyone including the children, will conjure up nothing but enemies and bad luck. Their children will be stuck in shallows and in miseries.

There is a very easy way to stop divorces and separations: the courts should give custody of the children to any father who asks for it. The statistics in a major study showed (Hathaway and Monachesi: Adolescent Personality and Behavior: MMPI Patterns of Normal, Delinquent, Dropout and other outcomes - Table 92 and 93) that single fathers kept the crime rate of their children at the same level as the average for the whole sample of over 7000 families, whereas single mothers produced a crime rate amongst their children which was even higher than that of children who lived with neither parent.

In other words, single mothers are much more likely to rear the type of children involved in yesterday's riots.

If custody were granted to fathers (currently this happens in only 2% of cases) then the mothers who rush into divorce (80% of divorces are instigated by mothers) might think twice.

The ideal that I, for one, admire, is a stable two-parent family.