Immoral support

What fuels violence among young people? Dick Pountain and David Robins on the 'Cool' ethic - a toxic blend of hyper-individualism, consumerism and resentment

The recent spate of knife and gun killings, argued Tony Blair recently, cannot be solely attributed to the effects of poverty but to a dysfunctional gang culture among young black people. This provoked a predictable outcry from black community leaders, but Blair was at least half right that the violence has roots in youth culture - though half wrong in confining it to black youth. The problem is not that young people are, in Blair's words, being brought up with "no rules, no discipline, no proper framework around them", but rather that the framework of rules they live within diverges sharply from that of mainstream civil society.

It is this framework that we called Cool (with a capital C) in our book, Cool Rules, in 2000. That capital letter signified that we weren't just talking about "cool" - the universal term of approval for the under-30s, nor about the fashion buzzword that gets attached to everything from iPods to Pot Noodle. What we meant was a complete ethic that encompasses those other senses, an extreme form of individualism that can be summarised as a conviction that society's mores apply to everyone except yourself, and possibly your mates.

Our book was misinterpreted by several reviewers, some of who wanted to see it as a moralistic attack on Cool, while others wanted a manual on how to be Cool. We should have predicted this, because Cool represents a moral sea-change, and any morality is as invisible to its adherents as water is invisible to the fish that swim in it.

Cool is an adaptation to life in affluent societies where consumption rules over production. Think of it as the decomposition product of Weber's Protestant work ethic, from which point of view - still our official morality in the Anglo-West - it can only appear as the trio of vices: narcissism, hedonism and ironic detachment.

Cool has had its historical precursors, from the Romantics to the Parisian flaneurs, but its modern form was constructed from the wreckage of old certainties wrought by two world wars, in the context of a booming consumer society in thrall to youth and - thanks to cinema and TV - with appearance. Its most significant aesthetic input came from US black culture, from the earliest jazz age right up to hip-hop.

In Cool Rules, we argued that though superficially rebellious, Cool is wholly dependent upon consumer capitalism. Product vendors constantly monitor youth creativity to discover new product categories, and the kids enthusiastically consume the results to construct/ reinforce their own Cool persona.

We also described the way young people wield Cool as protection against the depression that failure in a highly competitive and celebrity-obsessed culture may induce. If you can't win, then refuse to play the game by dissing it as uncool. What we could not have predicted was to what terrible lengths this mechanism might be stretched. Merely refusing to play a particular game - such as succeeding at school, or joining some desirable social set - is no longer sufficient. Now you need to stop others playing too, perhaps by knifing them in a street fight, or by taking a 9mm Glock automatic on to the university campus.

"What a waste!" was a refrain heard a lot in north London during last year's hot summer. When, in some areas, even young men from "good homes" started carrying knives "for protection". Amid a nationwide epidemic of so-called "black-on-black" crime - Yardie-inspired tit-for-tats, drivebys, drug-trade assassinations -we saw a series of assaults on, and occasionally executions of, complete strangers.

A typical scenario involves a flurry of street challenges and ritual insults, followed by assault/ death. A young man reportedly stabbed to death in an argument on the top deck of a double-decker bus after he asked a young drifter to extinguish a cigarette. Typical excuses proffered in court include "He looked at me wrong," or "He didn't show nuff respect."

A Somali student from a respectable family was waiting at a bus stop in a busy street when he was savagely stabbed to death by an enraged mob of knife-wielding young Somalis out to settle some obscure vendetta. And then there were the "fratricides". Jerry is said to have stabbed his best mate in the chest with a serrated army knife during a Saturday night row over a crack-laced spliff, and then asked the barman of the pub to order him a minicab to take Akim to the local A&E. Akim lost so much blood that he died shortly after arrival and Jerry turned himself in. While on remand, he tried to end his own life.

Another topic we touched on in Cool Rules, but could not treat in sufficient depth, was the way that class interacts with Cool. Beneath the global media spectacle of Cool, the detailed boundaries between the cool and the uncool are always set locally by each gang, subculture, or even just group of friends. It is therefore perfectly possible for both a gang of relatively deprived teenagers from a sink estate and the jeunesse dorée of DJs, musicians, rich kids and movie-makers all to call themselves cool, to share aesthetic values and social milieus. But, of course, only the latter group can afford the pricey material goods - cars, iPods, clothes - needed for a cool life, and they also tend to monopolise the media channels and become cultural arbiters. And so Cool amplifies the tensions caused by growing economic inequality.

Glenroy is the kind of young man who wears a permanent look of self-satisfaction and moves among his mates enclosed in a fog of self-regard, interrogating them about their trainers and jewellery. At school, an unmanageable childishness was his sole strategy against authority. His pursuit of status always requires doing others down; sex is always about manipulation and entrapment rather than seduction.

Youth party

From 10pm to 4am every night in summer, the streets where the likes of Glenroy live become a youth party, serviced by numerous nightclubs, dance halls, and a reliable night bus service. Young people from all backgrounds participate - mostly in safety, until the Glenroys become involved.

Glenroy's neighbour, Joseph, is the same age and background, but is studying for A-levels and hoping for a university place. One night at the local sixth-form centre, Joseph and a group of students, teachers, parents and friends gathered for an A-level drama accreditation evening with an examiner present. To everyone's horror, they were invaded by Glenroy and friends armed with baseball bats, looking for someone who'd dissed his girlfriend. Joseph faced down Glenroy and called him a disgrace to the community, which took real courage.

Joseph was fortunate to be a well-built lad who could handle himself, and survived. Unlike Kiyan Prince, who was stabbed to death outside his school gates in Edgware. Handsome, popular, on trials for Queen's Park Rangers football club, and from a supportive and industrious family. Or Adam Regis, aged 15, from Leyton, east London, also from a successful and supportive Caribbean family numbering Olympic athletes and professional footballers among them. He was killed on his way home one evening by unknown assailants.

The jealousy and contempt of the Glenroys extends not just to fellow students but to any organisation that serves the community by offering anything more than merely a pretext for keeping kids off the streets. So Blair was half right in identifying resentment and jealousy in black gang culture as a prime motivation for violence, but he missed out the rich - largely white - Cool culture that provokes this jealousy. He also missed that both sides share far more values with each other than they do with him - what he would regard as antisocial values concerning both drugs and violence.

This being the case, there is no easy prescription for what to do next. The Home Office has announced that it is looking at the possibility of banning gang membership, enforcing the supposedly mandatory five-year sentence for illegal firearm possession, and lowering the age of when this sentence is applicable from 21 to 18. None of that will make violence or guns uncool; in fact, banning gangs can only make them cooler.

Religious conversion

To halt an ongoing change of value systems is a very tall order indeed. The education system has proved largely ineffective, given that Cool is widely deployed to resist learning. Religious conversion is another possible exit, but nowadays this would almost certainly be into some fundamentalist sect; the 7/7 bombers could be seen as a horrible mirror image of the knife killers.

This lack of any plausible solution reflects our current social quandary - namely, that when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher set out to demolish social democracy in the 1980s, in the process they fatally weakened the ideology of "decency" that went with it. No one has so far come up with any secular substitute that is more attractive than Cool. One trembles to imagine what some of the antidotes might be.

· Some names have been changed. Dick Pountain is a director of Dennis Publishing, technical author and contributor to Political Quarterly. David Robins is the author of several books, including Tarnished Vision: Crime and Conflict in the Inner City. Cool Rules is published by Reaktion Books (£12.95)
