The Examined Life: August 2011

Like most people who’ve expressed a view on the English city riots this month, I wasn’t there. Having relocated last year from inner London to a small countryside town an hour’s drive away, my experience of the unrest was mediated through television, Twitter and news websites. It was also filtered by the habitual tendencies of my mind when faced with events that seem to be creating widespread anxiety (it likes to take a contrary line: “Everyone is over-reacting/the media frenzy is out of proportion/don’t they know there’s a famine in Somalia with millions of people at risk of starvation?” and so on).