'We're Racist And That's The Way We Like It!'

This was the chant on the lips of a small group of Chelsea football fans as they abused a black resident of Paris in the city’s Metro after their team had drawn with Paris Saint-Germain. Condemnation from politicians, football administrators, supporters’ groups and Chelsea Football Club has been swift and united; rightly so.

This odious behaviour was perpetrated by a tiny fraction of the many thousands of fans who (strangely) choose to support Chelsea, but it is symptomatic of an emerging problem: groups and individuals who not only fail to ‘live by the rules’, but who glory in their perversity.

I am not talking here of benign individual preference or healthy freedom of expression, which I should like to think I champion, but of destructive unethical, tribal behaviour.

What is to be done when people simply reject the principle that racism is evil and refuse to believe that there is anything wrong with this stance? What is to be done when humanitarian principles are cast to one side and prisoners of war are burned to death? What is to be done when tanks, artillery and troops are supplied by a sovereign state to rebel forces within another sovereign state and then the entire enterprise denied as if such weaponry could be bought on e-bay?

My questions are aimed not so much at what might be done by way of immediate practical remedy. We can ban the racist football fans from attending other matches, we can attempt to supplant ISIS from its strongholds and we can employ diplomacy and economic pressure to curtail further Russian involvement in Ukraine. My questions are aimed at the underlying malaise that enables people to believe that racism, torture and aggression are all OK. How do we counter this type of mentality?

I hate to talk of ‘moral compasses’ that have been lost, but I can’t ignore the fact that many of the ethical and social mores that have contributed much to civilising human behaviour over the last half-century or so are under attack; not by reasoned argument, but by dismissive, populist groups who simply act out of tribal loyalty and self-interest.

At the core of the problem is a significant rejection of the maxims that all people are of equal worth, that our shared humanity is important and precious; a rejection that there is anything wrong with naked self-interest and narrow group-identity. Religious underpinning of morality has been largely rejected, humanism has shown itself to be as effective as whistling in the dark; where and how do we find grounds for opposing this dangerously growing trend? Anyone seen a moral compass anywhere?