Holes in the Moral Fabric¹, 3 December 1993.

footnotes: ¹ The Times

Jamie Bulger is dead, but the debate his murder has provoked refuses to die. No candle we could light to his memory is more important than this.

Moral reflection needs time the way the human body needs oxygen. But time is the one thing of which we starve the great moral issues of our age. When James died the thing I most feared was a surge of attention – massive media coverage – followed by silence as the spotlight shifted and the next crisis filled the front pages. Our ethical seriousness is measured by our attention span, and ours has grown dangerously short.

Blessedly, this has not happened. That is perhaps the best news to have emerged from this bleak and hellish tragedy. We rightly sensed that something more was at stake than the murder of a two-year-old child by ten-year-old children, a freak outbreak of unrestrained evil. There were larger issues, and we who had no part in the act nonetheless felt implicated.

That is not moral panic but an honest recognition of the threads of collective responsibility that make society more than an aggregate of individuals. Together we form a moral entity. “Any man’s death diminishes me,” wrote John Donne. The fact that we felt personally diminished by James’s death tells us that we are still morally alive.

Morality begins with law, and law is predicated on individual responsibility. But morality does not end there. Nor does James’s death end with the trial and sentencing of his murderers. Though the murder itself was a cruel aberration, it had a social context. It was this. The moral fabric with which we clothe our children has grown threadbare. The holes have begun to show.

We have bestowed on our children a culture of violence, ritually celebrated at football grounds and on films and videos. Our children experience violence as street culture, as male initiation, even as quasi-religious catharsis. No society can allow this and survive. Violence has victims, and they are usually the most vulnerable and innocent.

We have systematically dismantled our structures of authority. Who, today, has survived our relentless iconoclasm? Politicians, religious leaders, the royal family, have been mercilessly savaged until there is no one left whose word carries moral force. We recognise public faces by their caricatures on Spitting Image. They have become figures of fun. In the process, we have robbed our children of any credible model of who we would wish them to be.

We have tolerated the collapse of the family. We have done so in the name of personal fulfilment, sexual liberty and the inalienable right to follow our desires. No abdication has had more fateful consequences. We have allowed the social stigma attaching to absconding fathers to disappear, assuming that their place could be taken by the State. But the State is not a person, and it is from persons – especially parents – that we learn what it is to be moral. The result is lawless children who have to be restrained because they have not learned restraint.

We have dissolved the bonds of community. The most piercing fact about James’s death was the number of people who saw him being abducted and did not come to his rescue. We cannot blame them. The privatisation of morality has taught us not to interfere. This too cannot continue. We need the support of neighbours, friends and an active community, none more so than mothers struggling to bring up children alone.

In teaching our children moral relativism we have placed them in the world without a moral compass, even hinting that there is no such thing. In the name of tolerance we have taught that every alternative lifestyle is legitimate and that moral judgement is taboo, even “judgemental.” What is right becomes what does not harm others, and in time degenerates to what I feel like doing and can get away with.

We have given children no framework within which to learn civic virtue and responsibility. We must devise ways by which service to the community becomes part of every child’s experience of the growth to adulthood. Morality is taught by being lived. It is learned by doing. Community service is more powerful than any formal moral instruction, even supposing an agreed curriculum could be devised. Nothing would more dramatically change our children’s world. It will cost much to do it. But not to do it will ultimately cost more.

These are starting points for a debate that must continue until it reaches practical conclusions. The most important thing the government can now do is to establish a formal framework to take the argument further before interest dies. It should be non-political, and should acknowledge frankly that governments alone cannot change people. There are other agents of change in society. They include religious leaders and educators. If they are denigrated, moral renewal will fail. If they are enlisted, it may succeed.

We have reached a critical juncture in our social evolution. A political order based on liberty and tolerance has yielded a Britain significantly less tolerant and more violent, harsh and abrasive than the one my grandparents knew. A single, unspeakable tragedy has made us look at ourselves in the moral mirror, and what we have seen looks dishevelled and tired. A child has died. Our national soul must not die with him.