This month, two men were killed on the streets in unpredictable violent confrontations. The triviality of the initial incidents was, in each case, horribly mismatched with the terrible consequences of their interventions.
Evren Anil, recently graduated with a first-class degree, was fatally wounded on 5 August in London after he complained to two youths who threw a chocolate wrapper into his sister's car. A week later, Garry Newlove died in Warrington, Cheshire, from wounds inflicted in a beating after he confronted a gang of teenagers who had been throwing stones. "A true hero. Trying to take our street back. Standing up for what is right," read one tribute left with flowers outside his house.
The media have paid homage to the men's bravery. But the louder message, frequently reiterated by the police, is not to attempt to challenge yobbish or violent behaviour.
With such incidents fresh in his mind, our web editor, Ben Davies, faced exactly this dilemma of how the good citizen should behave on seeing someone weak being abused. He had to decide whether to cycle on or try to prevent a possibly life-threatening injury to a woman who was being beaten up. As his account on page 20 makes clear, there are no formulaic answers.
The Labour MP Keith Vaz, chair of the home affairs select committee, believes that such violence erupts when people are confident in the public's reluctance to interfere. "If five people had intervened in your case, the perpetrator may have been less willing to continue," Vaz told Davies.
No government will advise citizens to get stuck in and reprimand youths for dropping litter or bullying someone, even if the chances of retaliation are remote. (Interestingly, surveys show us readier to "have a go" if the victim is a dog.) The official advice is to keep safe and pass the problem to an expert. But the wider penalties of this to society are clear and increasingly lamented. The more we believe that the distress of others is not our problem, the more atomised society becomes. The more we are advised to keep ourselves to ourselves, the less cohesive society becomes.
It would be absurd to suggest that such a "walk on by" philosophy already prevails. People do look out for each other. We have been reminded in the past few days of the humanity of Philip Lawrence, the head teacher killed 12 years ago when he went to the rescue of a child. Everything we heard about him later made it clear that the way he acted would have been habitual, part of his everyday protection of the children in his care. It is the worst of ironies that the release of the killer of this humane man, Learco Chindamo, should provoke an attack on the Human Rights Act.
Public policy increasingly favours self-help over social solidarity, a point David Cameron almost made on Radio 4 recently when he blamed "social breakdown" on the policies of "No 11 Downing Street".
The main political parties rarely credit us as voters with collective idealism. Instead, they appeal to us as individuals looking out only for ourselves and our families rather than sharing ambitions for decent schools, well-equipped emergency services and hospitals within reach. Nothing could illustrate this better than the current silly-season debate on taxation.
Cameron's claim to be ready for a fight to defend the NHS spoke to a near-universal aspiration for good hospitals accessible to the communities they serve. But given that his resolve came hard on the heels of a pledge to abolish inheritance tax - a direct appeal to the self-interest of those wealthy enough to leave property worth in excess of £300,000 - it lacked all credibility.
This could have been an opportunity for Labour to argue the case for the rich to pay their share towards building a cohesive society. Instead, the new chancellor, Alistair Darling, met the IHT proposal with confirmation that Labour will raise the inheritance tax threshold to £350,000.
Few of us, we should be thankful, have our belief in acting for the collective good tested in the extreme circumstances that faced Anil, Newlove and Lawrence. But we all make choices to walk on by or to express our common humanity, not least by being willing to pay more for a decent society.
The Diana soap opera
The tenth anniversary of Diana's death on 31 August is already provoking so many acres of coverage and dewy-eyed reminiscence that even republican-minded New Statesman readers would be hard-pressed to avoid the subject.
While we acknowledge her role in helping to reduce the stigma of Aids and her campaigning against landmines, here at the NS there has been no wringing of hankies. Yet one has to admit that the royal family seems distinctly boring now that the princess is no longer around to annoy her relatives, go on holiday with unsuitable paramours and lend her undeniable glamour to a string of worthy causes.
After all, if we have to have a royal family, is it not preferable that it at least earns its keep as a kind of high-society soap opera? In their heyday, Diana and her jolly-hockey-sticks sister-in-law Sarah Ferguson certainly did that. Diana's troubles, her assignations with married men and her manipulation of the media could have been a script from Dynasty, had the writers turned to the English nobility. Fergie's toe-sucking ventures with a Texan businessman nicknamed "Osram" (due to his bald pate) were more downmarket; they could have belonged in Dynasty's spin-off The Colbys.
With Diana gone and Fergie mostly out of the way in America, we are left with the predictable solidity of the older Windsors and the equally predictable antics of the younger generation. No wonder the public yearns for the Windsors' very own Alexis.
