When the shit hits the fan it’s time to think afresh

London burning. Parliament recalled. Boris heckled. Clegg tootling around saying "Hi, I'm Nick". You tell me what to read to get some sort of handle on things.

Goering reportedly said: "When I hear the word 'culture' I reach for my revolver." Actually, it was a character in the play Schlageter by the Nazi 'poet laureate' and SS-Gruppenfuhrer Hans Johst. But it gave Malcolm Muggeridge the chance to invert it: "When I hear the word 'gun', I reach for my culture."

The slogan of the liberal intellectual throughout the world, I suppose.

In the early hours of Tuesday morning – Clapham, for God's sake, Ealing, Bromley, where the chap who wrote Doctor in the House, Richard Gordon, lives and walks his dog, for God's sake – I reached for my culture and came up empty-handed. Or as near as damn it.

A scrap of Louis MacNeice fell off the bookshelves:

World is suddener than we fancy itWorld is crazier and more of it than we think,Incorrigibly plural.

True as it is - what have the last few days been if not sudden and crazy? - it doesn't get us very far. Rummaging around gets me a tiny bit further, but it's not on paper but vinyl: an old LP of West Side Story that once belonged to my mother.

When you're a Jet, You're a Jet all the way From your first cigarette To your last dyin' day. When you're a Jet, If the shit hits the fan, You got brothers around, You're a family man!

That chimes a bit more with the Blackberry Messenger, Triple-DES-encrypted bulletins flashing between rioters, with their talk of "da Feds" and "da brothers". Gang warfare, so they say, but they say it quietly. Maybe we should have another read of Elias Cannetti's Crowds and Power – but that's more about why crowds obey their rulers (and why governments are paranoid).

Novels? Theoretically, yes, but most contemporary novels are by definition up to their necks in culture, while the people who are at the root of why London's burning don't have culture. Nor do the youths who are actually doing the burning, the rioting and the looting.

The nearest that fiction can get us (apart from William Golding's Lord of the Flies) is perhaps the steampunk/urban fantasy genre, brought to maturity by the extraordinary China Mieville, whose Embassytown, published in May, deals with a world in effect built and sustained by discourse.

Relevant, since our own world seems to be going to hell in a handcart because of failures of discourse. Though say that to some scrote strolling with a looted telly past a blazing furniture shop and you'd probably experience the extremely effective discourse of a brick in the mouth.

And then there are the leadership books. You know the ones. Written for business people who never will actually be leaders because they're too occupied reading leadership books. This month's winner of the eye-catchingly dismaying business leadership title, The Leadership Wisdom of Jesus: Practical Lessons for Today, has nothing to tell us about how the hell we got into this mess and what we're going to do about it.

So, as I said, you tell me. My only suggestion is to take the long view. Indeed, perhaps the longest view of all, though it might be the only one which will save us: assume that most of what we know is actually wrong.  

A good place to start is a book that I had on my radar a while back, now widely-revised and reissued a few weeks ago. It's Jessica Williams's 50 Facts That Should Change The World and the title pretty much says it all.

It’s broadly in Freakonomics territory, dealing with the three immutable laws of existence: Sod's, Murphy's and the Law of Unintended Consequences. And Williams's 50 Facts plays into all three.  

Cars kill two people a minute. The average EU cow gets more in subsidy per day than 75 per cent of Africans have to live on. There are 161 branches of Starbucks within five miles of Oxford Circus. A third of the average Kenyan household budget goes on bribery. The world's illegal drug trade is the same (financial) size as the legal. A third of Americans believe aliens have landed.

The list, of course, continues; each with an elegant essay which expands upon that particular fact, sometimes in surprising directions. It may not provide an easy answer to what's going on around Britain this week; but it encourages a fresh eye and the abandoning of a few assumptions. And without those two, we'll get precisely nowhere in this incorrigibly plural world.

• 50 Facts That Should Change The World by Jessica Williams, Icon Books. ISBN 978-1840468465 ·