A Fountain of Stupidity

There's a certain kind of columnist who, whenever some deplorable event occurs (such as the recent riots in Britain), doesn't hesitate to use it to rail opportunistically against some perceived moral failing. Reliable scapegoats to blame include liberals, immigrants, and atheists. And the morons who read these columnists eat it up.

Michael Coren is that sort of columnist.

He offers "six ways to prevent a repeat of London, Vancouver, Toronto scene". But his "six ways" are mostly vague appeals to religious morality, with no specifics.

Let's look at each of Coren's solutions in turn:

1. "Reduce the role of the state and, as a balance, increase the role of the family."

Right, because in the days when the state played little role in supporting health and the poor, there were never, ever, any riots in Britain? The Economist dismantles that claim. England has a long history of violent youth; the Economist traces it back to at least 1751.

Coren says, "parents are not informed by law if their underage daughters tell doctors or teachers they are sexually active, but they are left to face the consequences when teenage pregnancy or STDs occur." But ironically, he supports a church that declares birth control to be a sin. No disconnect there, no sirree.

2. "State-supported education and health care may, arguably, serve a purpose, but state-supported welfare and social services have become so all-embracing that individual self-reliance has evaporated. The balance is important here. Neither the fanatical libertarian nor the obsessive socialist model works."

I'd agree with the last line, but not the first. Where's the evidence? The last time I looked, European social democracies such as Sweden and Norway were prospering (in terms of objective measures, e.g., healthy life expectancy, longevity, child mortality, and homicide), while more libertarian countries such as the US do not do as well. And European social democracies lead the world in scientific papers per capita; no sign that social democracy has sapped "self-reliance" there.

3. Stop the war on religion. Whatever your view of faith and God, the massive decline of religious observance and community in Britain has removed one of the glues that held the country together.

This is just an insane fantasy. There is no "war on religion", metaphorically or otherwise. God-soaked commentators like Coren are just so used to not being questioned about their beliefs that they mistake demands for evidence, or questions raised about their beliefs and their consequences, as a "war". In reality, it's just that religion is increasingly being subjected to the same standards as other truth claims about the world. Religion has been exempt from these standards for far too long. If, for example, Coren supports the Catholic Church's ban on condom use and thinks that this ban is a boon to people in developing countries, let him make that case without appealing to sectarian dogma.

I don't deny that religion can hold people together. But it can just as easily drive them apart. There are many reasons why immigrants came to North America, but the religiously tolerant climate of their home country wasn't one of them. Coren doesn't present any evidence that the "war on religion" led to the riots, and as the Economist article shows, similar violent events have occurred in England for at least 250 years.

4. Control immigration, so it is based on the cultural and social needs and unity of the host population as well as on compassion and economic growth.

And what do you think immigration is based on now? Go read this page from Citizenship and Immigration Canada to see the kinds of professions that Canada is looking for. Surely physicians, nurses, social workers, and psychologists contribute to the "cultural and social needs" of the country.

5. Liberate the police from the whims of political correctness and government fashion.

Right. If only the police had been able to taser those damn rioters, that would have taught them a lesson. After all, it's not like the police had anything at all to do with the immediate cause of the riots.

6. Do not romanticize the worst of lower-class antics on TV and in cinema and music. Entertainment once presented a world worthy of aspiration, now it glorifies the mud and muck.

This is exactly the same argument that the small-minded made 60 years ago against classics like Caldwell's Tobacco Road. Coren is no better.

Boors like Coren don't have any interest in thinking deeply about the causes of mob violence and how to remedy them. They're just interested in blaming the usual suspects from some assumed position of moral superiority. From their mouths, a fountain of stupidity spews forth.