Some time ago my wife and I were walking down a busy shopping street in London in the middle of the day and the middle of the week. The pavements were crowded. The streets were full of shoppers. Behind us was a group of six children of school age, between twelve and sixteen years old. Gradually I became aware that something was wrong. They were walking a little too close, a little too purposefully. One of the group had gone on ahead of us. The rest were in tight formation behind.
It dawned on me that they were about to make a raid on my wife’s handbag. We crossed the road and began walking rapidly in the opposite direction. The children followed. We felt a slight push, then nothing. When we reached the next corner, we turned around. The children were gone. I asked my wife to look in her handbag. Her wallet had gone. We phoned the police. They took the details. But they were not seriously interested. They didn’t even ask for a description. We understood. Things like this happen. Children miss school and go out for a day’s shoplifting or casual theft. There is not a lot we can do about it except take precautions and get insured.
Crime, and certainly juvenile crime, has multiplied to the point where it has become part of our normal expectation. If you have a car, it gets stolen. If you have a house, it gets broken into. If you walk alone down certain streets at certain times, you count yourself lucky if you are not attacked. This represents a significant erosion of our human environment, of our sense of security and trust.
At moments like this, our thinking about crime should shift into a more fundamental mode. A certain level of law-breaking occurs at all times in all non-totalitarian societies. But for the most part it is exceptional, a deviant phenomenon. In these circumstances we relate to crime in terms of the institutions of society which are directly involved: police, the courts, judges, the law, and the sanctions applied for breaches of the law – punishments and penalties.
We may ask questions about the effectiveness of these various elements. Do we have enough police? Do we apprehend a high enough proportion of offenders? Are the courts successful in identifying and convicting the guilty? Do judges apply appropriate sentences, and do those sentences succeed in their several aims of retribution, deterrence and reform?
But there are moments in the history of a society when we are bound to ask larger questions. The Bible provides several eloquent examples: in the days before the Flood, for example, when the “earth was corrupt in God’s sight and the land was full of violence” or at the end of the book of Judges when “everyone did what was right in his or her own eyes.”
So it is in any society when crime figures escalate rapidly without any obvious explanation. We have now reached that point in both Britain and America. In Britain the crime rate has risen more than tenfold since the mid-1950s, and despite the scholarly debates as to whether this represents actual, perceived or reported crimes, the escalation, especially since the late 1970s, is undeniable.
The figures for juvenile crime in the United States are particularly alarming. Though they are not fully mirrored in the British statistics, nonetheless there is enough evidence of dysfunctional behaviour amongst the young, from alcohol and drugs to petty crime and violence, to give people in Britain pause for thought too.
It may be that we will decide that we simply have to adjust to higher levels of crime in the world of the future, just as we may have to adjust to different patterns of work and employment. But the cost, surely, will be very high indeed in three directions: for the victims, for the perpetrators, and for all of us and the climate in which we live. A society of more, and more armed police, of video surveillance and alarms on every car and house, of barricaded shops and locked churches and synagogues, a society in which neither the young nor the old feel free to go out at night, in which the rich build protected enclaves while the vulnerable become the victims, is not one to which any of us can look forward with any promise of collective trust or grace.
Precisely because we do not wish for such a world, we have been engaged in deeper thinking for some time. What, we ask, are the roots of crime, its fundamental causes, the fissures and fractures in our social system? But this deeper thinking has so far failed to yield significant results. There may be a relationship between crime and unemployment. But we know that the crime rates rose, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, at a time of low unemployment and high economic growth. There may be a relationship between poverty and crime. But poorer countries than Britain have lower crime rates. There may, quite simply, be more things to steal: videos, computers, audio systems and cars. But that leaves open the question of why in some countries cars can be left unlocked, and in others even the most sophisticated security systems fail to deter. In short, the research thus far has failed to provide simple answers, perhaps rightly so since crime itself is a complex human phenomenon.
Rather than yield to despair, however, let us turn the problem on its head and ask the fundamental question: not why do some people commit crimes, but why do some people not commit crimes? Not why do people break the law, but why do people keep the law?
Framed this way, the question takes us to the very roots of our civilisation, and to its twin foundations in the Greek and biblical traditions, for it is just this issue which lies on or near the surface of much of the Hebrew Bible. It was most famously asked within Greek philosophy by Plato, in the form of the story of Gyges’ ring. Suppose, he said, you had a ring which made you invisible. You could commit a crime and no one would know it was you. What would stop you? Today that remains a highly relevant question because for every hundred crimes committed, only fifty are reported, thirty recorded, seven solved and only two result in a conviction.
Plato’s own answer was notoriously unsatisfactory, the response of the intellectual throughout the ages. It lay simply in knowledge. We are rational creatures and if we know that something is wrong, we will not do it. The Bible was more realistic. It knew that we are perfectly capable of doing things we know to be wrong, because we have an almost infinite capacity for convincing ourselves that they are right. The Hebrew Bible’s own answer is that crimes are never undetected. They are witnessed by God before whom we will one day come for judgement.
Even the Bible, though, had to confront what the book of Psalms calls “the fool who says in his heart there is no God,” just as Aristotle had to face the problem of the weakness of the human will. Knowledge of God or the good were not in themselves sufficient. A more encompassing account had to be given of human action. What emerged from both traditions was a response so simple and profound that at most stages of our history we have simply taken it for granted. It was this.
We are, by our nature, social animals. We need societies, and therefore we need laws. The laws that govern human behaviour are unlike the laws that characterise natural phenomena. They are prescriptive rather than descriptive. They do not just happen. They need to be enforced. How, then, are they to be enforced?
At the core of both traditions is the fundamental principle that it is better for laws to be self-imposed than imposed by external agencies. They are transmitted from one generation to the next by habit and example. They are acquired pre-reflectively before they become the subject of reflection. They are learned in early childhood through the family and reinforced in later life through education, the community and social sanction. The rules are objective, known and shared by everyone, and a central task of society is to ensure that they are internalised by the young and thus perpetuated and adhered to over time. The entire mechanism of law-enforcement occupies only a subsidiary place in this scheme. It is what happens when the mechanism breaks down. The main burden of the system is internal, not external, restraint. Law enforcement begins in the mind, not on the street. Better to control oneself than to have to be controlled by others.
At stake in this conception is a fundamental idea about human dignity, namely that we reach our full dignity as human beings when our behaviour flows from our own decisions rather than from threats of external force. That is the difference between what Locke used to call liberty and licence. It is what Burke had in mind when he said, “Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites.”
Because not all of us would arrive at these laws by our own reflection, and because they must be handed on to the young before they reach the age of reflection, society depends on its mechanisms of moral transmission being in good order. That involves general consent to certain laws as expressions of the collective good. It involves the family as what sociologists call the agent of primary socialisation. And it involves a supportive role for schools, voluntary associations and local communities. Without these, the process of moral transmission will fail, and many things besides law and order will begin to disintegrate.
What has happened – and it is the single most important thing about our social environment – is that these structures have very largely broken down. The story of that breakdown has been told many times, and there is no need to rehearse it here other than to say that it is a story in two chapters. The first belongs to the history of ideas, from Kant to Nietzsche and John Stuart Mill. The second belongs to sociology and to that period in the 1960s and 1970s when ideas that had been circulating among an elite for over a century became lived reality for a whole generation. Today we live with the consequences, some good, others little short of disastrous.
We no longer believe in an objective moral order. Instead we think of the good as something to be pursued individually rather than sought collectively. Education is no longer seen as the induction of the young into the rules and virtues of society. Rather, it has become a way of helping children make private choices as individuals. Above all, we are in danger of witnessing the end of the family as a stable and persisting unit through which future generations are nurtured and internalise the rules we have so painfully arrived at on our collective journey through history. If one of the consequences has been a rise in crime among the young, how could it be otherwise, since we send them so few clear moral signals and are dismantling the one structure – the family – within which we can effectively do so?
Let me be clear. I am not laying the blame for the rise in crime on the breakdown of the family, still less on one-parent families. Instead I am suggesting that a complex set of interlocking processes has taken place in which the breakdown of the family has been both a consequence and an accelerating cause. In such circumstances I am reminded of the question which, according to the Talmud (Berakhot 32a), Moses asked God: given such a background, what should Your children have done not to sin?
When one in four children is born outside marriage, when one child in three grows up without a father, when four marriages in ten end in divorce, when the very concept of parental responsibility is seen as an affront to women’s right to pursue careers and men’s right to pursue their inclinations, when the responsibility for socialising and controlling children has been abdicated in favour of the state in the form of schools, councils, and the police, what shall some children do not to turn to crime?
Let us not underestimate the momentous significance of this change. We have deconstructed the mechanism of primary socialisation. We have abandoned the task of teaching our children a clear sense of right and wrong, perhaps because we are no longer sure that there is such a thing. When our children need us, we are not there. We have given them videos, but not our time, computer games, but not our guidance, condoms, but not an ethic of self-restraint. Who can blame them if they translate our relativist ethics into the proposition that what is right is what I feel like doing and can get away with. We have placed the full burden of the maintenance of social order on external agencies. We have moved the enforcement of law from “in here” to “out there.” In the name of liberating our children we have done what a future age will surely see as abandoning our children. In so doing, we have effectively turned our backs on the biblical tradition on which our conception of a free society was built.
I believe that no civilisation can go far down this road and yet survive. This is not a matter of party-political controversy, but a matter of social ecology, of the conservation of our environment of law-governed liberty.
Far more interesting than the questions a society asks about itself are the questions it pointedly does not ask about itself. Whereas we have had vigorous debates in Britain about the relationship between crime and the economy on the one hand, crime and law enforcement on the other, the debate we have not had is about the relationship between crime and the devastated moral landscape we have created for our children. Whenever it seemed to be about to begin it was shot down with Macaulay’s famous remark that “nothing is so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.”
If we cannot have this debate, then we will indeed have arrived at the stage about which Livy said, contemplating ancient Rome, “We have reached the point where we cannot bear either our vices or their cure.” At such a point a religious voice becomes invaluable because it brings to the relativities of our time the perspective of a long ethical tradition. From that perspective, I sense the need for a prolonged and rigorous conversation between educators, judges, the police, politicians of all shades, religious leaders and parents about what we need to do to repair the broken cross-generational transmitters of moral rules and virtues.
If that conversation is to begin, one proposition must be ruled out at the outset, the proposition that has been used to silence debate thus far: namely that the stable family, and with it an objective moral order, have died like the dinosaur, never to return. This fallacy deserves to be challenged. It is not so. There are certain things that, as private individuals, we cannot change. We cannot single-handedly end unemployment, or bring world peace, or save the whale. But we can affect our children. Over them we have an influence greater than any pop star or politician. And a greater responsibility, because it was we who brought them into being. We severally took the family to pieces, and severally we can put it back together again.
A society in which the whole burden of law and order is placed on the police, the law courts and parliament is unsustainable. It cannot be done, nor should we wish it to be done. If we believe in personal moral responsibility, then we believe that a law-abiding society is created by the habits of self-restraint, cultivated in early childhood and reinforced thereafter by the moral signals we send. To put it simply; every law enforced in the heart means one less policeman on the street.
