The London riots are yet another episode in the slow disintegration of Europe. London is no longer an English city, it's just another pin on a map. Much of London is a bunch of Third World cultures living in a geographical area that they have no cultural or emotional connection to. The culture around them is as shamelessly materialistic, vulgar and violent as anything in the dark ages-- with the occasional tip of the hat to politically correct values involving the environment or tolerating gay people. And the same goes for the rest of Europe's capitals. Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Brussels and Oslo are all obvious examples.

The real showdown in London was not between opportunistic rioters and the impotent police, but between African looters and Asian storekeepers fighting a purely materialistic battle. And if the UK's immigration trends do not change, in a generation or two, the battle will have a much more open character. A struggle for ownership of the city.

The problem with London is the problem with Chicago and Paris and Los Angeles and most of the rest of the free world. It's not enough to stick a nametag on a city and assume that its population can be swapped out with no social chaos or consequences.

A culture is a consensus. Change the culture and you change the consensus. The elites imagine that the consensus can be programmed by throwing enough TV ads, school courses and social media games at whatever bunch of people happen to be living in a geographical area. And they're invariably shocked to realize that it doesn't work that way.

The human being is not a machine. He is a member of a group. And groups are naturally exclusive. Gangs are the group at its most primitive. Feral packs of young males on the prowl. And above the gang is the tribe, the community from which the group comes. Above the tribe is the nation.

Multiculturalism leaves the nation part vague and strengthens the tribe. And the tribe naturally leads to the gang. The multicultural vision insists that populations can be defined by political identities regardless of their culture, race and ethnicity. And that is clearly not so. Nor can cultures be stripped of all their politically disapproved elements to create a harmonious multicultural paradise.

The USSR tried that experiment already and failed. But what the USSR tried to do with massacres, secret police and rigidly controlled schools, its more moderate leftist colleagues are foolishly trying with rainbows and wishful thinking. And while you can line up a color spectrum of immigrants in an ad, shovel them into the same educational system and pat yourself on the back when some of them spend time together outside of class-- you haven't really changed anything. What you have created is every bit as shallow as the multicultural ad so ubiquitous in our time. A phenomenon all surface, and no depth.

It's not that the multicultural society is an unreal thing. Africans and Pakistanis have been changed by their exposure to England. And England has been changed by its exposure to them. But it is generally the worst qualities that have been passed to each side. This hybridization has made the youth culture in Europe's major cities so relentlessly ugly.

Popular culture transmits negative values far more easily than positive ones. When the popular culture is also values free and built on shock so that people with low attention spans and high filters will pay attention to it, all it communicates is the romance of the animal impulse. The thrill of doing what you want. Education would have a long way to go to counter that, but an educational system reflects the values of its elite. And they don't have any.

The multicultural society's values are political not cultural, ideological not moral, and subjective rather than objective. These values are expressed in ritualistic behaviors such as volunteering, recycling or not making openly racist remarks (unless you are a victim of racism, in which case it's okay), but not in anything deeper than that. Compliance with these ritual behaviors is compelled, but unlike meaningful moral education they do not change those acting out a hypocritical rite.

The rituals of liberal education do not answer the larger questions that lead to a moral worldview. Instead they inflict the burden of universal responsibility for everything on everyone, but the idea of universal responsibility is indistinguishable from universal irresponsibility. And the addition of political gradations based on race and class assigns different levels of responsibility creating a moral upper class, which is responsible for everything that goes wrong, and a moral lower class, which is oppressed and responsible for very little. Children of a lesser god.

The multicultural society's common culture is based on sports teams and popular entertainment, and you cannot build a nation on that. However you can build a riot and looting spree on it. And from there on in it splinters into gangs. And gangs are what happens a portion of society collapses and is recreated at the most basic level.

This culture of bits and pieces, scraps of popular entertainment and some form of tribal identity, isn't limited to gangs in the ghetto. Think of Breivik hammering together ancient history, video games, personal grievances, political agendas and popular culture into the leadership of an imaginary gang. The Templar Knights.

When the nation stands for nothing, then the gang emerges. The invader barbarian gangs on one side, and the nativist gangs on the other. Multiculturalism brings this to the surface very quickly. And if not for general prosperity in the West, there would be far more nativist gangs in the streets. It is likely no coincidence that Breivik suffered economic setbacks, before trying to pick up the pieces of his life and turning into a serial killer. And economic turmoil in Europe will only further sharpen these tensions.

The spiraling violence is a burning sun in the sky. A warning that nations are sliding into the abyss. America has been able to survive the loss of some of its major urban centers, and even to revert some of those losses in the nineties, but that has only dampened the pain of the underlying problem.

Europe has less territory and more centralization. New York may seem like a major city, but it isn't even the capital of its state, and its influence on national elections is insignificant. Similarly Los Angeles is not a capital, neither are Chicago or Philly. It's one reason Michigan isn't as dysfunctional as Detroit. American major cities are surprisingly expendable. Many of them were all but discarded three decades ago. London and Paris are not.

While the media outlets ponder why the looters did what they did, the answer is fairly simple. There was no reason for them not to. Their formal education taught them that they have grievances and that violence is a legitimate response to such grievances. Their informal values of popular entertainment taught them that being smart means grabbing what you can, and the idiots are the ones who let themselves be robbed. The two sets of values combine neatly in just about any robbery or crime.

The moral of popular culture is that life is a game and that its only rule is to do whatever it takes to succeed while trying to stay loyal to your friends. These values are hopelessly primitive and hopelessly ubiquitous. They can be found in gang culture and the machinations of reality stars on programs watched by tens of millions of people. They are the new moral code.

Values are now almost as antiquated as the telegraph. What schools really teach is tolerance, which is the code by which the gangs interact outside of violent encounters. The mores that allow the tribes to do business with one another and even occasionally socialize.

Pre-Mohammedan Mecca was a tolerant place. And then one family with a gang based around a fanatical ideology took it over. The rest is Islamic history.

Social media strengthens these forms of tribal and gang organization. The flash mob forms raids out of thin air. It decentralizes the rank and file organization, while allowing leaders to manipulate a much larger group. The real world takes on the characteristics of the video game environment with teamwork, points scored and a complete lack of empathy for the victims. Life is just a game. And there's nothing to do with it but play it.

But why shouldn't it be this way? What is London now but a set of noises derived from a dead language used by a dead empire, and why should the gangs and third world tribes who roam it care? And why should the radical brats who have been taught that borders are evil and all of humanity is one tribe? This is about how power derives from identity. And it's a clash of two identities.

There are two Londons. The city of brick and steel occupying a set of coordinates in space and time. And the consensus of what London meant, the idea of it, and with it the idea of England. Take away the consensus and you're left with brick and steel. And what can't be smashed, can be burned.

Why not steal from those outside your tribe and why not loot with your gang? When the police push, why not show them what you can do by taking over portions of the city, and looting as much as you can? The answers all involve morals and larger ideas about values. But mostly they come down to the idea of the city as a larger community. And the gangs and tribes have never accepted that idea. They have their own community, and their own identity. And that's what they fight for.

This is a question that faces not just England or Europe, but much of the civilized world which used immigration to import people from tribal cultures, and have discovered that the tribes are back. Not the polished experimentation in Celtic or Morris dances, but places where no revival is needed. Where the tribe is instinctual and the laws of the tribe are natural. Islam is the dominant form of this organized assault on Western civilization, but that is because it is the most organized and the best funded of the bunch.

The final irony of it all is that the attempt to leapfrog nations and cultures to a transcendent global form of social organization-- instead led back to primitive savagery. Globalism empowered the gang and multiculturalism turned modern nation states into tribal enclaves. That is what the mobs are really about. The raider has turned. The tribals are back. And native Europeans are the Romans watching the barbarians come through the gates.

A Nation of What