The British progressive imagination has a curious habit: when confronted with acts of violence committed by immigrants, it tends to indict not the criminal, but the society he inhabits. This tic harks back to the mad ramblings of the eighteenth century Swiss ideologue Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In his Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men (1755), he argued that humans in their natural state are inherently good, untainted by the corrupting influence of society: “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.”
Rousseau’s denial of human nature’s complexity has long appealed to those eager to denounce modernity while romanticising the “unspoiled”. Within Britain’s progressive circles, Rousseau’s notion that the “iron and wheat” of civilisation have ruined mankind’s innate virtue is commonplace. Non-European peoples are often depicted not as responsible agents but as blank slates who are mere victims of the Western sins, stripped of accountability.
Courtesy of Zoe Williams, we have another example of this Rousseauian tic. Once content to champion the rights of men to invade women’s spaces, Williams has now graduated to a more grotesque endeavor: pathologising sexual offences to absolve the perpetrator. Her latest offering blames the alleged sexual assault of a fourteen year old girl in Epping by an asylum seeker on anti-immigration protests surrounding the Bell Hotel. It is less an argument than a case study in the muddled moralising that passes for insight in certain quarters of the liberal press:
There are concerns about other public disorder charges, but that sort of offence can be self-fulfilling. If your accommodation is regularly surrounded by a small, hostile mob that sometimes wants to set fire to it, it’s probably quite difficult to slot into a normal, law-abiding life, or even know what a law-abiding life looks like, in this country you escaped to, having heard it was civilised.
With a straight face, Williams suggests that protesters deprived this man of the ability to understand what a “law-abiding life looks like”, as if basic moral standards — like not sexually assaulting people — were so fragile that they could be erased by the sight of placards. In her framing, the “hostile mob” stripped him of the most elementary ethical understandings, rendering him a hapless victim of his environment. While the migrant’s accountability is lost in a haze of sociological platitudes, his actual victim is reduced to a narrative inconvenience, an afterthought in a morality play about Britain’s supposed cruelty.
This worldview is not confined to Williams. Deborah France-White of The Guilty Feminist peddles Rousseau’s myth in her romanticisation of non-European, pre-modern societies. In her recent interview on Triggernometry, she praised “indigenous societies” for refusing the “Western gender binary,” insisting they led “incredibly brilliant nomadic lives” unsullied by modern evils. At one point she declared, “We brought the diseases that required penicillin.” This line perfectly encapsulates Rousseau’s logic. For her, civilisation’s very advances are proof of its corruption.
France-White conveniently ignores the ritual slaughter of the Aztecs, the warfare of Native Americans and all the rampant bloodshed Lawrence Keeley documented in his War Before Civilisation. Her vision is a fantasy, projecting a lost Eden onto complex culture to serve a narrative of Western barbarism. Like Williams, Frances-White strips her subjects of agency, casting them as innocents incapable of moral failing unless corrupted by the West.
This Rousseauian philosophy is not just confined to delusional journalists, it has even appeared in courtrooms. Take the recent case of Sadeq Nikzad, an Afghan asylum seeker sentenced to nine years in prison for raping a fifteen year old girl in Scotland. His defence counsel argued Nikzad was unaware of the “cultural differences” between Britain and Afghanistan, telling the court: “I am not suggesting that means that he reasonably believed [the victim] was consenting, but that there’s a reason why he could have misunderstood.”
This argument portrays Nikzad as a victim of the society in which he lives. Implying that a grown man could not grasp the immorality of raping a child without a crash course in British norms is thoroughly absurd. By invoking these “cultural barriers,” the barrister echoes Rousseau’s assertion that society, not the individual, is the source of moral corruption. The barrister sounded less like a lawyer than a sympathetic evangelical therapist. She may well have gotten up and said: “Father, forgive them, for they know not the safeguarding policy.” (As an aside, if Afghan migrants cannot be expected to understand consent, what are they doing here?)
The irony is staggering. Progressives claim to affirm human dignity and agency, yet when it comes to those outside the West, agency evaporates. This Rousseauian delusion is not just patronising; it is dehumanising. By portraying these people as incapable of moral agency, they are stripped of the very dignity which they claim to champion. Williams and Frances-White frame them as children in desperate need of the coddling embrace of the state, forever at the mercy of their surroundings. Every misstep is recast as society’s fault; every crime the consequence of socio-economic factors. It is the noble savage in modern garb. Rather than confronting the difficult truths of mass immigration, commentators retreat into Rousseau’s comforting moral fable. In that fable, the migrant is portrayed as innocent, the host society corrupt and critics of immigration the true villains.
Williams, Frances-White and their ilk would do well to cast off their noble savage worldview
Many members of the progressive clerisy — academics, journalists, and other peddlers of sinister piffle —churn out reams of papers which sustain this fiction. While these individuals blame a variety of factors, from media hysteria and systemic failures, to protesters and the general public, all of them erase individual responsibility.
Williams, Frances-White and their ilk would do well to cast off their noble savage worldview, their blank slate lunacy and aloof attitude to those who live with the consequences of mass immigration. If they did, maybe The Guardian could reclaim what little integrity they have left, and escape the Rousseauian delusion of their own making.
