Cory Doctorow became a British citizen this morning. I was privileged to be invited to the ceremony in Hackney Town Hall. Beforehand I spent an hour walking the streets in Hackney that had been the locations of looting earlier in the week. What was astonishing was the air of quiet normality. The clean-up operation seemed to have been virtually comprehensive. Here and there some windows remained boarded up, but in general it would have been impossible for a stranger to know what had gone on. At one point I got lost and wandered into a Turkish tailor’s shop to ask for directions. He smiled and told me I was “twelve minutes” away from my destination. “How can you be so precise?” I asked. “Well”, he said, “unless you are a very fast walker that is what it will take”. He was spot on.

The citizenship ceremony was fascinating and oddly moving. In addition to Cory (attired in his special Union Jack jacket), there were about 20 other ‘new’ citizens, of whom the overwhelming majority were non-white. They were a wonderfully variegated lot, some dressed to the nines, others in what might charitably be described as “smart casual”. They came from all over the world, from Angola to Zimbabwe. We gathered in the Council Chamber, and after a time the Speaker of the Council, an imposing black woman in impressive robes entered to preside over the proceedings. She made a nice informal speech about the importance of citizenship, what a precious thing it was, and about the responsibilities and rights that it conferred on its holders. Then each new citizen was required to swear an oath or make a declaration pledging allegiance to “Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, her heirs and successors”. Interestingly, some of the candidates elected not to read from the supplied script but asked the Registrar to say the words, which they then repeated. (From which I inferred that some of them might have literacy problems, at least in English.) Most of those who read tended to mumble a bit. The only one who was as clear as a bell was Cory (no surprise there).

After that, all the candidates stood and collectively made the second part of the declaration. They were then welcomed as citizens of this great country, and presented with their certificates of naturalisation by the Speaker. Many opted to have friends and family included in the resulting photograph. One person was asked if he had any friends or family. “Yes”, he replied, “but not here”.

It was a touching and impressive occasion, the more so because of its location. It was impossible to square what I saw and heard in Hackney today with Cameron’s odious ranting about a “sick” society. What I saw were people whom I found infinitely more preferable (and probably more valuable to society) than the denizens of Canary Wharf or Eaton Square.

Thirty years ago today, the IBM PC was launched. Not many machines can be said to change the world, but this one did.

I love New Yorker covers.

This was the term coined by Gavin Essler Esler on Newsnight last night as he struggled to comprehend the mayhem in London. What’s interesting about the media coverage — and the public utterances of politicians as well as members of the public who have been interviewed by reporters — is its demonstration of how anger disables rationality. At the moment, to even attempt to argue that this “mindless” violence takes place in a wider context is seen as tantamount to condoning the madness.

Nevertheless, here goes.

1. The looting, mayhem and arson that’s gone on is just that. It doesn’t have any political motive or justification. Some of it is hard-headed, organised theft (for example, the looting in Birmingham). We shall probably see evidence of this emerging as some looters are caught and prosecuted, because they are not people from the area where they’ve been apprehended, but incomers from outside the area who have come looking for stuff to steal.

2. But mostly what’s gone on looks like vandalism on an extreme scale — chiefly because it involves youths trashing their own neighbourhoods. Vandalism is always puzzling because it seems motiveless. But it’s socially determined, nevertheless, in the sense that it occurs only in certain contexts. (Which is why, for example, one sees so much of it in Britain and Ireland and so little in some other societies.) In Britain, vandalism is a sign that kids feel no sense of responsibility towards their environment, which in turn reflects a sense of alienation from it. The environment is not something they value, because their perception is that they get very little from it. So no matter how “mindless” their behaviour appears to be, it takes place in a context. And that context is shaped by economic and social conditions.

3. Most of what passes for “analysis” in the mass media can’t seem to grasp the point that behaviour is a multi-causal phenomenon. That’s why it’s idiotic to look for the thing that is “causing” looters to loot. There are lots of forces at work — a system of ’causes’, if you like, and the outcome at any given time is the resultant of those causes at that time.

Larry Lessig pointed out many years ago that behaviour is determined by the interaction of several things — norms, laws, markets and architecture. Norms are socially determined; laws are framed by legislatures and implemented (or not) by security forces; markets have their own impersonal logic, and are often skewed by cartels and monopolies; architecture is determined by planners and developers. Young males growing up in the poorer parts of British cities have been affected by all three: social norms that are normally shaped by regular employment, education and stable family life are warped by poverty, crime and deprivation; the law is implemented in a discriminatory way (as shown, for example, in the way young blacks are regularly singled out by the Met for stop and search); the job-market is effectively closed to thsm; and the architecture of housing estates and run-down streets is ugly, alienating, dispiriting and intimidating to a degree rarely appreciated by the middle-classes, who never visit these places.

4. The spread of rioting from borough to borough and from city to city is clearly viral. The mass media are busy blaming “social media” for this, but in fact the ‘virus’ could just as plausibly have been spread by television images (as it was, for example, in the Watts riots in LA in 1965.

Either way, it’s just a contemporary manifestation of an old phenomenon. It reminds me of the famous psychological experiment in which two identical cars were abandoned, one on a street in Palo Alto, the other in a downmarket part of New York. The New York car was vandalised and stripped instantly, but the one in Palo Alto remained untouched for a week. Then the experimenters smashed its windscreen — with the result that the vehicle was comprehensively trashed in a day. In other words, in normal circumstances, the behavioural barrier to smashing a shop window is quite high. But once one shop has been violated, then the barrier is immediately lowered. When a dozen shops have been done, then effectively all restraints vanish.

And — please note — this is not a justification for the smashing of shop-windows but a plea for a serious attempt to understand what underpins the current crisis. If we don’t learn from it then we’re screwed.

5. Finally, there’s a stink of hypocrisy in all this. Our politicians are all incensed and enraged over the torching of cars and buildings and the looting of a smallish number of shops. But they passively tolerated the looting of our entire economy by bankers — who instead of being made to feel “the full weight of the law” (to coin Boris Johnson’s phrase about the looters) have been allowed to award themselves £14 billion in bonuses this year. It makes one sick.

… in 1914, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia and the world descended into a bloodbath.

Le petit dejeuner, originally uploaded by jjn1.

First Provencal breakfast this year!

The FT’s (and Oxford’s) John Lloyd is a thoughtful commentator on media issues. He is also an early entrant into the debate about what should succeed the Press Complaints Commission with a modest proposal published in today’s FT. The nub of it is:

So we have a dilemma. State-backed regulation is seen as illiberal, and would be opposed (on liberal grounds) by all of the press. Yet self-regulation – paid for by the newspapers, dominated by News International and Associated Newspapers – has proved self-serving and supine.

The answer to this dilemma is not to create a new regulator with statutory backing. Instead it is to increase the group’s base of stakeholders – and to include in the number of institutions making up that base the government itself, as a representative of the public interest.

How would this work? When the PCC is replaced, a new organisation should be established, which I would call the Journalism Society, in a similar vein to the Law Society, the representative body for solicitors in England and Wales. This body should be open to being as global as the media are fast becoming. And it should be independent.

The Journalism Society’s stakeholders should include representatives of the government; the educational establishment; civil society (for instance relevant non-government organisations and policy institutes); industry and finance; and the news media. All of these would be committed, under its charter, to pluralist, independent, opinionated news media, working within the law.

All of which is fine and dandy, but avoids at least two thorny problems.

1. The most important is the question of sanctions. As I understand it, the Law Society (through its Solicitors Regulation Authority) can suspend a lawyer’s right to practise, just as the BMA General Medical Council (GMC)* can ‘strike off’ a medical practitioner.

Would the Journalism Society have similar powers? If so, how would it define a ‘journalist’ — always a tricky problem and one that has become insuperable in a networked age? Legal regulation works because, in the end, the state delegates the right to license legal practitioners. John Lloyd’s idea would only work if the state did likewise with journalists. I’d be very surprised if this is what he has in mind.

He claims that a Journalism Society would do a lot of good. For example,

It would allow journalism to take itself seriously as a trade claiming a democratic mandate. It could set and patrol ethical standards, monitor training and qualifications and above all be a forum within which journalists could map out the nature and future of their craft at a time of rapid change.

Agreed. But in the end effective self-regulation requires formidable sanctions that can be applied as a last resort. And that’s where the real problem lies. Regulation works in broadcasting because the state has a monopoly control of a scarce resource (electromagnetic spectrum). But — at least in democracies — the state doesn’t have monopoly control over the intellectual or ideological spectrum, which is why the very idea of regulation is so problematic.

2. The Law Society (and the BMA GMC) models work because they are tied to specific legal jurisdictions. John Lloyd’s vision of a Journalism Society that is “open to being as global as the media are fast becoming” means that it wouldn’t be confined to a particular jurisdiction, which in turn means that it would be totally ineffective.

*Correction: Thanks to Jonathan Rees for pointing out that it is the GMC and not the BMA which is supposed to regulate medical practitioners. But its difficulties and limitations merely serves to reinforce my argument.

So I decided to try to write the book I wanted to read. I wasn’t at all sure how to go about it. One evening, in New York, at a gathering of writers and historians interested in the West, my boss, Alvin Josephy, pointed to a white-haired man across the room. He said, That’s Harry Drago. Harry Sinclair Drago. He’s written over a hundred books. I waited for my chance and walked over. Mr. Drago, I said, Alvin Josephy says that you’ve written over a hundred books. Yes, he said, that’s right. How do you do that? I asked. And he said, Four pages a day. Every day? Every day. It was the best advice an aspiring writer could be given.

And, on avoiding the trap of the Whig Interpretation of history:

Thornton Wilder talked, in that Paris Review interview, about the difficulty of recreating the past: “It lies in the effort to employ the past tense in such a way that it does not rob those events of their character of having occurred in freedom.” That’s the difficulty exactly—how do you write about something that happened long ago in a way so that it has the openness, the feeling of events happening in freedom? How to write solid history and, at the same time, give life to the past and see the world as it was to those vanished people, with an understanding of what they didn’t know. The problem with so much of history as it’s taught and written is that it’s so often presented as if it were all on a track—this followed that. In truth, nothing ever had to happen the way it happened. Nothing was preordained. There was always a degree of tension, of risk, and the question of what was going to happen next. The Brooklyn Bridge was built. You know that, it’s standing there today, but they didn’t know that at the start. No one knew Truman would become president or that the Panama Canal would be completed.

From a marvellous Paris Review interview with David McCullough.