Another 15 year old girl stabbed in Croydon.

We are reminded, once more, that technocracy is not up to the task of confronting moral ills. The new elites, having eschewed morality in preference for managerialism, who see the populace as a collection of broken individuals to be soothed and improved rather than as citizens of a shared universe of values, are intellectually unfit for something like the knife-crime emergency. Their instinct is to reduce every moral crisis to a health crisis, in order that they might avoid the vast and hard questions that the existence of machete-wielding gangs raises about our society. We must remember, said Sadiq Khan’s office in its Knife Crime Strategy a few years ago, that these offenders are ‘highly complex individuals’ with a ‘range of challenging disorders such as mental-health issues linked to emotional trauma’. Therapeutic pity replaces moral condemnation; treatment usurps punishment. All this, so that they might dodge passing judgement. All this, so that they’ll never have to say anything as firm as: ‘These people are wicked.’

The inability of our ethically immature elites to reckon, seriously, with knife crime speaks to how this scourge developed in the first place. It seems clear to me that the cult of the knife is a provocation born out of the demise of moral clarity, adult authority and social discipline in 21st-century Britain. It is not only nature that abhors a vacuum – society does, too. And it is in the wastelands of unpoliced streets, of weakened family life, of parents, teachers and other adult figures feeling increasingly bereft of the moral command they once enjoyed over the next generation, that the new low-level mob rule has taken hold. A society that advertises itself as post-values, which rejects school discipline as Dickensian, that thinks fatherlessness is fine, and whose cops spend more time policing tweets than streets, should not be surprised if new social menaces emerge.

The cult of the knife starts to look like the militant wing of the cult of narcissism. Urban youths defend their ‘reputations’ from slight even more fiercely than middle-class youths protect their identities. In both cases, though, for all that they are worlds apart, a pained and fragile vanity seems to rule the day. We are witnessing a violent manifestation of the sanctification of the self. Having abandoned the great and taxing task of socialising the young into the values of the community, and having simultaneously encouraged the belief that one’s self-esteem matters over all else, Britain has no right to be shocked that anti-social behaviour has become a problem, and that violent self-regard now seems to be on the cards.