— “Where does it all end?”
— “Same place it ends for you: in a wooden box.”
A sobering reminder from Gloucestershire’s best-known heroin addict that we’re given to exaggerate life’s inequities. But what’s more instructive than Alan Dainton’s surprising gift for pithy responses is what the art project dedicated to him — Behold The Man — gets wrong.
That is, the basics. A project about a homeless man living on the streets of Cheltenham while battling addiction was inadvertently about a man that was neither homeless nor wished to do anything about his addiction. Him telling me so precedes my opening quote.
Not all addiction seems best understood as either crime or disease. Alan’s most self-destructive behaviours are wilder than mine, but I’m unconvinced we engage in them for very different reasons. Enjoyment, mostly. The differences that matter are externalities: do they generate tax, or mayhem?
Conservatives will point to the failure of police to enforce the law on Class A substance abuse as the cause of its proliferation. But the absence here in Seoul of the walking dead, roaming the streets with rotting teeth and venous ulcers — asking for just ten more pounds to get a room for the night (coincidentally the price of a wrap) — isn’t just the presence of the police in society. It’s the absence of something from the culture. There is nothing universal about desperation, despair, and deprivation ending in a skag-head shuffle. Something else causes this.
What? This matters enough for first order reasons, particularly when you pivot to the Alans in the capital, who outnumber the entire population of the City of Gloucester. But there’s then the street crime downstream from Raccoon City that’s also conspicuously absent from central Seoul. You can reserve your seat in Gwanghwamun Square with your iPhone.
Nothing says ‘It doesn’t have to be like this’ quite like inhabiting cities that aren’t like it.
Of the many differences between the UK and South Korea, one stands out here. Cultural norms in Korea are the cultural norms. And they don’t permit substance abuse. What passes for cultural norms in the UK comprise anything that’s grist for the attention economy. Anyone reading The Times these days would be forgiven for thinking half the population’s at some country pile for a sex party every other weekend. (It’s once a month, at best.)
That most of the UK adult population have never experimented with illegal substances will be met with either disbelief or despair by the minority that have. UK cultural norms are downstream of media and entertainment. In Korea, they’re the sum of what most people actually think. It’s the alignment of the law with cultural norms — rather than policing policy — that makes it enforceable.
There’s a liberal trope about the kind of society we want to live in. The collapse of Japanese passport holders to 17% has settled that matter the other side of the East Sea. I predict a similar trend of Koreans abroad discovering life was better at home. Not captured by crime statistics is the degree to which these countries have a brand of crime you have to go looking for, rather than the kind that comes looking for you. For the peerless cultural freedoms and architectural riches of the western world’s greatest urban delights, there’s an alternative and under-indexed freedom in the megacities of Korea and Japan. One emerging from the orderly society possessed by the kind of social conservatism we mostly make a sport of denigrating.
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