So spoke Dickens’s Mr Bumble, and he had a point, up to a point.
At the height of the Industrial Revolution, Victorian London was overrun with slums. Crawling out of them were thieving guttersnipes run by crime lords like Fagin and murderous thugs like Bill Sykes.
Poverty and squalor were so widespread that workhouses proliferated, with street crime providing the only alternative for orphaned urchins. A bleak picture any way you look at it, and Dickens painted it poignantly with his masterly pen.
Crime was rife, and in 1874 alone there were over 10,000 indictable offences committed in London. Are you shuddering with revulsion? I certainly am… but hold on a moment.
Fast-track 150 years, and last year Londoners found themselves on the receiving end of 270,000 violent crimes. Not all indictable offences, let me point out, just the violent ones.
Add to this non-violent crimes, such as theft, burglary, financial offences. While you are at it, add also crimes that were indictable in Victorian London but aren’t really any longer, such as shoplifting, and you’ll realise that crime has gone up by two orders of magnitude, while the population has grown by only one.
That means, and sorry about such obvious calculations, that the per capita crime rate in London is now 10 times higher than it was at the time of Fagins, Sykeses, Artful Dodgers and workhouses.
And there I was, thinking that crime is caused by poverty. I don’t want to bore you with more statistics, but take my word for it: London is much more prosperous now than it was then, and prosperity is spread much wider.
Discounting the subversive thought that it’s not poverty but wealth that causes crime, we have to toss Marxist tomes into the bin and look for explanations elsewhere. And that’s explanations, plural, because it would be too simplistic to ascribe such a huge disparity to any one cause.
Doing so may brand one as what the Swiss thinker Jacob Burckhardt (d. 1897) called a “terrible simplifier”, and I don’t wish to add my name to the already extensive list of such intellectual charlatans. That’s why I’ll single out one cause not because I think there are no others, but because it’s perhaps the most telling and overarching of all.
Jurists used to distinguish between malum in se and malum prohibitum. The former reflects an immutable injunction against attacks on life, liberty and property going back to Biblical commandments. The latter encompasses transgressions like swearing in public or not wearing a seat belt, and the two types exist in a morally hierarchical relationship.
For example, stealing a car is a worse crime than parking it on a double yellow line, and beating one’s wife is more reprehensible than making love to her without permission. But no malum is really in se; evil and good are meaningless in the absence of a detached moral arbiter whose rulings can sometimes be interpreted but never questioned.
Take that arbiter away, and we’ve erased the absolute line of demarcation, making moral distinctions relative, which is to say inoperative. Indeed, we find ourselves beyond good and evil, in a space where things are distorted to a point at which malum prohibitum can be punished more surely and often more severely than malum in se.
When God died, and I didn’t mean to wax Nietzschean, law in the West suffered the fate of a clock smashed to pieces: all the bits are still there, but they don’t add up to much any longer. Gone is the fundamental premise of Western legality: the primacy of the individual derived from the ultimate primacy of God.
When there is no God, the secular state will enforce its own primacy, and the law will sooner or later become its pliant servant, rather than a martinet called upon to restrain its excesses. Without God, laws can fall prey either to evil design or to ill-conceived political expediency. Which is another way of saying that, without God, law is tyranny.
Western laws used to be obeyed because they were a reflection of higher laws, their secular expression. Western jurisprudence was put together by sage men over many generations, and its ability to protect both society and the individual was tested over time.
Whenever a law couldn’t pass such tests, the ruler and the ruled alike knew it was enforceable only by arbitrary force. When such a realisation sank in, the transgressor was in trouble sooner or later, and even Charles I couldn’t save Stafford.
Modern laws, by contrast, are tyrannical because our political state has usurped the power to decide which of the ancient laws should and which shouldn’t be enforced. The law has thus stopped being a complex bilateral agreement between the people and the state, becoming instead something the state can grant or withdraw at its discretion.
Most links between generations past and present have been severed, and the law no longer has the authority of millennia behind it. Intuitively aware of this, people treat laws as mere statements of intent, and break them without much fuss about morality. There is no morality in law any longer, only expediency as defined by the state.
The letter of the law hasn’t changed much but the spirit has largely evaporated. In its absence, the letter is but a collection of hieroglyphics.
By exempting themselves from obeying the spirit of the law, modern political states find it increasingly more difficult to make their subjects obey even the letter. Crime statistics in just about every major modern country bear this out, with a traditionally law-abiding Britain having overtaken even the United States in most crime categories. Britons no longer venerate laws because they know the state doesn’t.
Law enforcement becomes difficult in the absence of an absolute criterion with which to distinguish between malum prohibitum and malum in se. Without this distinction law becomes amoral and runs the risk of becoming arbitrary.
More important, when God’s law is no longer recognised as an authority superior to man’s regulations, the law loses its link with human nature, becoming instead an instrument of coercion. As a result, people treat it with fear but without respect, and fear alone isn’t a sufficient deterrent. That’s why a high crime rate is an automatic levy modernity imposes, and the more modern the society, the higher the crime rate.
This is the overarching cause of the huge disparity that caught my eye. But, as I mentioned earlier, it’s not the only one.
For example, Victorian London was ethnically and culturally homogeneous, while today’s London has relegated the same group to a minority status. Much as it pains me to admit this, diversity and crime rate exist in a symbiotic and directly proportionate relationship.
Another factor is illegitimate births, which term has itself become illegitimate. Yet whatever the terminology, if only between four and five per cent of all children were born out of wedlock in Victorian London, today that’s way over half – the same 10-fold difference as in the crime rates. That’s the kind of correlation that betokens causation.
Yet the cause I singled out, the disintegration of traditional order, is indeed overarching. All the others can be traced back to it without much difficulty. But do let’s leave that for another time, shall we?