One of my British colleagues commented drily about the London riots, 'It's what happens when it's the school holidays, the kids are bored and we get two weeks of long, warm, dry evenings. Bit of heavy rain would put a stop to it.'
A minimalist explanation, but its earthiness and local sense rightly question the huge theoretical, not to mention apocalyptic, superstructures that are being erected on the nihilistic behaviour of excitable young people. Such events have everyday causes. They conceal as much as they reveal deeper, underlying conditions.
That said, it is possible to reflect, not on the deep causes that we cannot see, but on the normal things that we might have expected to see in the scenes of destruction in London, but did not see.
The most striking absence was that of authoritative adult figures. The figures we saw on TV screens were young, many of them children. We saw no sign of parents searching for or curbing them; no local community leaders intervening in the mayhem; no mayors or councillors, no local clergy or doctors, no police. Almost the only adults we saw were those who had suffered powerlessly in the riots.
Only at the beginning, when a group of local women went to the police station to find out what had happened to the alleged police shooting victim Mark Duggan, only to be rebuffed, was there space made for the authority of elders. That in retrospect was the last opportunity of avoiding the riots.
Ultimately the only figures of authority who seemed to matter were the Prime Minister and his police chiefs. He returned from holidays, gathered with the heads of the police, and they planned the fight-back. That was the lowest level, it seemed, at which authority could be exercised.
This leads to the second thing lacking in what we saw. There was no sense of society, nor of connection of the kind that generates respect. The furniture shop of a patently good man, a feature of his suburb for some generations, was burned down by people who would have been his neighbours. The experience of the rioters seemed ecstatic, an ecstasy that alienated them from everyone else.
The absence of adult authority and of