Somewhere, Edmund Burke is doing the Happy Dance

As a conservative sorta guy Edmund Burke wouldn't really be in tune with today's millennial snowflakes. Yet there are things they're doing which he would thoroughly approve of:

Millennials have nevertheless dealt with the breakdown in the social safety net through community support, connectivity and responsibility. We’ve used social media to create a new kind of economy, one where decisions and directions have the potential to be mitigated, controlled and owned by those formerly most vulnerable. In an era of welfare cutbacks, young people have responded by crowdfunding the needs of their peers.

Burke, of course, thinking that that war against the collapse of society best being fought by the little platoons:

This form of selfless community organisation flies in the face of what older generations would have us believe about selfish, lazy millennials, but nobody should be surprised – a recent YouGov study in Australia showed that respondents under 30 were those most supportive of socialism and wealth redistribution over capitalism in comparison to other ages. It many ways, we see social capital as more of a viable resource than money.

That the young and untried like ideas that don't work in greater numbers than those tempered by experience is not a great surprise. But none of us oldsters are against social capital, nor against the rallying around. As with Burke, it's who does that rallying and under what level of compulsion.

The best level being those very little platoons in action here, just people getting on with it themselves, under no compulsion at all other than that they wish to do this.

But when I had the misfortune of having three cameras break on me consecutively, as a freelance photojournalist, I was thrown into panic. My livelihood was directly compromised by a series of unlucky mishaps. It was hard to pretend that I wasn’t on the verge of a breakdown as I catastrophised about what I would have to do in order to get back on my feet.

After a day of appeals on Twitter, I earned a few hundred dollars to buy a new camera; the donations were all from young people who had experienced similar things, or from people who liked or supported my work.

We might or might not have chipped in ourselves. But that the problem was solved without the compulsion of state socialism shows that it's not in fact needed to solve such problems, does it not? That, perhaps, art can be done without taxation and arts grants? 

Burke did say that left to themselves, allowed the room to do so, that people on their own will solve many to most such problems. How wondrous of the millennial snowflakes to prove this for us all over again.