Three dead in a Philippines school shooting, and the UK’s instant reaction is to condemn ‘bullying culture’ as a global security threat. One almost choked on one’s Earl Grey. This is what happens when the West mistakes its own cultural neuroses for universal truths.
The shooting in the Philippines is a tragedy, no doubt. But the rush to moralise, to find a tidy explanation that fits our own obsessions, is a symptom of intellectual decadence. The Victorians, for all their faults, understood that violence in far-flung colonies was often rooted in specific local conditions, not in some abstract ‘culture’ that must be purged by British sermonising.
Today, we react with the same reflexive superiority: ‘Oh, if only they had our anti-bullying programmes, our therapeutic schools, our enlightened values.’ But the Philippines is not Britain. Its problems are not ours.
The shooting may be linked to gang violence, to political feuds, to a culture of impunity around firearms. Or it may be a random act of madness. We do not yet know.
But we do know that framing it as a ‘bullying’ issue is a way of assimilating it into a comfortable narrative: that violence is a product of social exclusion, which can be fixed with enough seminars and wristbands. This is the fallacy of the therapeutic age. The Romans knew that violence could erupt from the sheer pressure of empire, from the clash of cultures, from ambitions unchecked.
They did not blame it on a lack of ‘inclusivity’. The shooting in the Philippines is not a global security concern. It is a local tragedy that the West is using as a mirror for its own anxieties.
The UK condemns bullying because bullying is a theme that resonates in British schools, in British workplaces, in British politics. But by projecting this onto Manila, we avoid asking the harder questions: about the role of American gun culture in the Philippines, about the legacy of colonialism, about the economic desperation that makes school shootings a conceivable outlet for rage. The Victorian statesman Lord Palmerston famously said that nations have no permanent friends, only permanent interests.
The same applies to moral panics. They serve the interests of those who declare them. By calling this a ‘global security concern’, the UK is not offering help; it is asserting dominance.
It is saying: ‘Your tragedy is only meaningful because we can fit it into our narrative.’ This is the soft bigotry of low expectations dressed up as concern. The dead deserve more than to be props in a British moral crusade.
They deserve a serious reckoning with the specific causes of the violence: the easy availability of guns, the breakdown of local institutions, the failure of the state to provide safety. Not a lecture from a country that once bombed the Philippines’ capital into rubble. But in an age of globalised outrage, we prefer symbols to substance.
Bullying is a symbol. School shootings are a symbol. And so we get the perfect moral panic: one that allows us to feel virtuous without demanding any real change.
The Fall of Rome did not come from a lack of anti-bullying policies. It came from internal decay, from a loss of civic virtue, from a failure to adapt. The Philippines will not fall because of bullying.
But the West’s intellectual credibility may fall further if it continues to mistake its own reflection for the world.