To: et.letters@telegraph.co.uk
Re: Success of "restorative justice" throws bright light on society's failings
Date: Wed, 23 July 2003

 

Dear Sir/Madam,

Although one could hardly expect "restorative justice" to work with every offender, the fact that it works with so many gives a clear indication of how society is failing us all (Criminals who offer to apologise may escape prosecution, 23 July 2003).

Modern society has largely been formed, and in many ways malformed, through economic forces. 

We often lament the breakdown and failings of the nuclear family, thereby forgetting that it was not designed (i.e. did not evolve) to exist in isolation, but as part of an extended family and the wider local community, which economic developments have virtually destroyed. Our modern economy requires a mobile workforce and atomised, malleable and acquisitive consumers.

Millions of people are left feeling unfulfilled and alienated in mass, consumer society, but with no experience or notion of what it is like to belong to an extended family and community, they are at a loss as to what is missing. Apart from the odd family member and a few friends and acquaintances, and the virtual world of TV, film and other media, there is just the social jungle, in which one has to survive, in which everyone, it seems, is out to exploit or get one over on everyone else, which, after all, is the very basis of economic life, and where "success" is getting as large a piece of the cake as possible (measured in pounds, dollars or euros), if not for oneself, then for one's family, with little or no consideration of how, to what extent it has been earned. A barrister might earn 10 times as much as an equally hard-working nurse, or a celebrity might earn a 100 times more. Where is the social justice, the sense of community in that?).

Many people obviously have difficulty in recognising - or remembering - that others members of mass society are also people, which is why it is so easy to offend against them, and why "restorative justice" can be so effective, by restoring, not justice, but the sense of community that is missing in modern society.

 

For the vast majority of modern families these complementing and supporting structures have long all but ceased to exist, made redundant by an economy that has no need for them, but rather for people who are mobile, unattached to immobile extended families and local communities.

What nowadays is referred to as the “local community” is usually nothing of the sort, but just an ill-defined collection of individual households living in virtual isolation from one another. For all practical purposes the “local authority” has taken the place of the extended family and local community, providing services paid for with money taken from alienated and thus resentful ratepayers and taxpayers.

The local and national authorities may in some respects be better at providing for our material needs than the extended family and local community were, but in the same way that a “robot mother” might provide, within the limits of its programming, for all the material needs of a child: the essential human element is missing (of which "love" is just one, ill-defined, component).

Governments are always trying to alter the scope, while improving the efficiency and programming of our "robot mother" (all the various social services), but they will never be able to replace the human element of the extended family and local community of which which economic necessity has deprived us.

If you chop off a person's hands and feet you wouldn't be surprised that they were no longer able-bodied. It's the same with the family. The economy has left it a torso, to which the government has attached artificial limbs. They are not completely useless, but are no replacement for the body's natural ones.

Modern society has been formed (or rather, malformed) by economic forces, which economists would have us believe are natural and thus immutable. If fact, they are natural only in the sense that they are largely based on man's primitive, animal nature. It is time we started asserting our higher, more human nature and basing our economic activity and lifestyles on that instead. The socialist experiments of the last century provide ample lessons on how NOT to go about it.