SP International :: Publications

Chapter 7

A question of civilisation

We have lost touch with the village square, as much physically as psychologically. It has been demolished, and pitifully. The state is continually seeking to solve problems, rather than preventing them from arising. They demolish the village square and then complain about the degeneration of society. – M. Huibregtsen

The strongly idealistic line taken by political parties, and especially those of the left, during the 1970s, and the claims that were made as to what kind of society it was possible to build, were bound to provoke a reaction. That reaction came in the 1980s, when the pendulum swung to the other extreme. Instead of the widely accepted values that western European society had to a large extent maintained through the '70s, what became dominant was a sort of idea of `nihilism as the highest good'. Nothing is compulsory, everything is permitted. The process of the individualisation of society, which often led to an egotistic individualism, blew away many long-standing social institutions without providing anything to fill the resultant vacuum.
The `me' decade dawned. `Away with all the old ways and thoughts – I will decide for myself how I will live' was the widespread attitude. Commitment was attractive only if it could add something to your own wallet or your own status. An ordered society became an idea exclusively associated with the right, with conservatism. `Tolerance', preached wherever you went, would give everyone, or nearly everyone, maximum freedom. This was also the time of the rise of hedonism, of `living for today', and, in its wake, of consumerism, a sort of narrowing of the consciousness that leads people to believe that happiness is in direct proportion to one's level of consumption.
The Dutch liberals, the VVD, showed an exceptional nose for the zeitgeist with their early '80s slogan; "Simply be yourself". At the same time, however, they did not realise the full implications of calling for a society in which everyone strove merely for him- or herself, or just where such an attitude might lead.
The enormous popularity of these individualistic attitudes encouraged a widespread aversion to any idea of common standards or values. Society became both harder and more atomised. Most countries experienced a similar range of problems: an explosive growth of vandalism amongst the young, a rapid rise in the number of people in need of psychiatric help, an increase in the number of children with educational problems, and last but not least an epidemic of crime, with the rate of burglary, violent assault and car-theft rocketing throughout Europe.
As a reaction to all of this we now hear with increasing frequency and at ever-shriller volume calls for stiffer penalties, more police and more prison-cells. Yet it is a complete misapprehension to believe that antisocial and criminal behaviour can be fought only through legislation and repression. Much more than that is needed. Commenting on one aspect of this, the sociologist Cees Schuyt wrote:

If you are aware that from the crude estimate of five million `victim situations' per year a million crimes are reported to the police, from which one can estimate that 200,000 are solved, from which in turn half are dismissed or the charges dropped and at most 20% end in a prison sentence, then you have a good outline of the difficulties of the penal system.

The demand for more police on the street, as has long been raised by various parties, is all very well, but without the coöperation of the citizens and the political establishment anti-social and criminal behaviour will never be successfully addressed.
In his book Lof der Dwang (In Praise of Coercion), the sociologist Herman Vuijsje gave a lengthy description of the decay of his own neighbourhood, the Amsterdam Nieuwmarktbuurt. As a consequence of the presence of a number of extremely troublesome drug-users, an increasing number of alleyways were fenced off. The ticket sales point at the metro station disappeared, telephone boxes were removed and snack bars forced to close earlier in the evening: "And so the public domain was damaged, and far from being defended it was further abandoned. The state does not accept its responsibility, but shifts the blame on to others."
This problem is aggravated by the fact that many people regard public space as belonging not to them but to the state. They have withdrawn to the safe shelter of their own little kingdom, with the TV forming their window to the outside world. Yet public space is, as the term indicates, for us, for everyone. We must take it back, even if we should be entitled to count on the support of the state and its agencies, including the police.

Criminality as a social problem

The police are there to catch crooks, and it is one of the tasks of government to prevent crime. To do this latter it is important to understand that antisocial and criminal behaviour often have social causes. People derive a great deal of their identity from their social status. If that status is exceedingly lowly and if there excists no prospect of improvement, then it sometimes can take only the smallest push to set someone off on the road to criminality. Having nothing to lose severs people from any idea of social responsibility or duty, and crime can offer the (financial) perspective missing from a drab everyday life.
Everywhere in the world the rise of neoliberalism is coupled with a hardening of social attitudes and of the criminal law. The number of prisons is rising, as is the number of prisoners. A major similarity between liberal office-holders and dictators, is their liking for locking up their fellow human beings. Asked how he thought the difference in success between the Japanese and American economies could be explained, Jesse Jackson replied, "In Japan they send their young people to school; in America we send them to prison." In recent years in the US there have been more young black men in prison than in college. For many young Americans prison has become a place to get together with their friends.
Of course, the US has always had a much harsher approach to the criminal law than have other western countries; but under the Republican presidents Reagan and Bush this law-and-order mentality reached new heights. Now country in the world has so many prisoners per head of the population as the land of the free. Between 1965 and 1990, the number of prisoners quadrupled. Yet this failed in any way to make America a safer place to live. While sentences grew longer and the death penalty returned, criminality increased, especially amongst the young. Between 1987 and 1991 the number of young people arrested for murder rose by 85%. Young people are responsible in total for 17% of all violent crime. They are, moreover, even more likely to be its victims. According to FBI figures, in 1991 2,200 minors were murdered, an average of six every day.
The explosion of violence can neither be blamed on a change in the genetic make-up of the average American, nor on a sudden growth in the number of mental defects. The rise in criminality can, on the contrary, be explained to a large extent by the hardening of the socio-economic climate in the 1980s and the consequent spread of hopelessness. Experts are agreed that widening social inequality, the destruction of any prospects for a better future, the decay of social order and the easy availability of weapons together form the ideal breeding-ground for criminality.
Many ghetto children fail to complete their high school education; for those that do complete it, there are often no jobs. These are children without a future. With the best will in the world they are unable to persuade themselves that it is worth the effort to struggle for a better future for themselves and, in turn, their own children. In the districts in which they live a violent atmosphere prevails, in which normal rules of social conduct have no relevance and there is hardly any room for what is elsewhere seen as normal behaviour. The traditional bonds – family, school and community – play an ever-diminishing role, so that children see themselves only through the mirror of their own peer group. Because of this they can fall easy prey to gangs and drug dealers and are thereby lured into criminal activities. Katie Buckland, a volunteer in a Los Angeles school, says of this, "These children no longer believe in the normal means of achieving success in life. Judged by their own standards, a child selling crack is more smart than stupid. These are the children who still have ambition. They use the only available ladder to climb higher, the ladder of gangs and drugs. It is the easiest and quickest way to more money."

The failure of the criminal law

A second important cause of rising violence in the United States is to be found in the penal system itself. Prisoners who consider their sentences much too severe in relation to the crime they have committed are much more likely to re-offend than those who see their punishment as more or less just. The bigger the grudge, the more violent the revenge, and if there is anything that American prisoners are capable of developing in the often inhumanly severe prison regime, then it is just this desire for revenge.
A growing number of people believe that we in Europe should emulate these methods. In most countries the number of prisoners is rising, sentences growing longer, new prisons being built. Yet hardly anyone believes that prisons achieve any kind of rehabilitation. Criminals generally come out more antisocial than they were when they went in, as well as better-educated in law-breaking. Prisons also cut people off from their normal social milieu and from society in general, which is one of the major reasons for the very high rates of recidivism.
Out of the total American prison population of almost a million, around 45,000 are in the hands of private firms. These companies offer their employees, the guards, minimal job security, lower salaries and almost no social provisions such as pensions. In some prisons inmates sleep in tents. In others `luxuries' such as coffee, a library, or sports facilities have been scrapped. Even the `good old' chain gang is back.
Locking an increasing number of prisoners in a cell has become the rule rather than the exception. In California in 1993 there were 113,000 prisoners, 88% more than there was actually space for. But where the need is pressing, the imagination can be creative. The state requisitioned a number of local gymnasiums. In these the prisoners could be `stored' in bunk beds, 250 to a room. No wonder that violent abuse, rape and murder has become commonplace. Yet despite the fact that there are 250 inmates to a cell, the shortage of space continues.
In both Europe and America a high proportion of prisoners is mentally disturbed. Their being in prison serves no purpose. In the interest of their fellow prisoners, guards and society as a whole they should of course be in psychiatric institutions. But these cost money, and cuts in provision internationally have created a serious shortage. Drug addicts are often imprisoned without any attempt being made to break their addiction. Indeed, a recent clampdown on the use of cannabis in English jails under the ex-Home Secretary, the hang 'em and flog 'em Tory Michael Howerd, merely served to create a huge new market for heroine, which is easier to smuggle and whose use is harder to detect. Of course, as long as someone is addicted to an illegal drug he will continue to shuffle back and forth between prison and the outside world.

The consequences of amoral education

An official government report of 1996 showed that the rate of criminality amongst Dutch children aged between seven and twelve is rising rapidly. As fire fighters always say, you can put out any fire with a cup of water if you get to it quickly enough. So it is with antisocial and criminal behaviour. Education is therefore of immense importance.
In his recent book "The End of Education", American sociologist Neil Postman calls for a reconsideration of the role of education in society. According to Postman, educators ask themselves far too rarely what purposes education should actually serve. Insofar as the question is posed at all, the answer is increasingly as follows: `to deliver useable labour power to the national economy.' Writing about this, Postman comments:

If we knew for example that all our students wished to be corporate executives, would we train them to be good readers of memos quarterly reports, and stock quotations, and not bother their heads with poetry, science and history? I think not. Everyone who thinks, thinks not. Specialised competence can only come through a more generalised competence, which is to say that economic utility is a by-product of a good education. Any education that is mainly about economic utility is far too limited to be useful, and in any case diminishes the world that it mocks one's humanity. At the very least, it diminishes the idea of what a good learner is.

The whole idea that the main purpose of education is to produce what the market requires, stands in contradiction to the tradition which began with Plato, and later through the humanistic education of the Enlightenment and then passed into public education via the ideas of classical liberalism and social democracy. In this tradition education for employment was always overshadowed in importance by education to become `a better person'. Knowledge of the Greek Tragedies and the philosophies of the Enlightenment may be of little use in the development of public telephones or faster computers, but it gives its recipient insights into the development of our culture. It familiarises him or her with the different ways in which, in other times and places, social, moral and other dilemmas were regarded.
It is to be welcomed that at present, in contrast to the 1980s, consideration is once again being given to the idea of schools as conveyers of moral education. After parents, teachers are generally the first pointers young people encounter in trying to find their way in society. That role is all about values, whether the neoliberal market gurus like it or not. How, for example, can the modern, economic idea of `intellectual property' have any meaning for someone who has never learnt the difference between `mine and thine'? Why should an environmental activist renounce the direct action of destroying polluting cars if he or she has never learned that reasoned arguments can be more powerful than the brute power of physical violence? And where, except in the home, is there more opportunity to teach children how to make such distinctions other than at school?
For the neoliberals this is a truly difficult problem. One of the dogmas of liberalism is that moral decisions belong to the private domain and that, in relation to morality the state has no legitimate role. This opinion springs directly from the idea that the free market knows no moral values, but only those of economics and finance. The decision by a clothing multinational to have its products made in Bangladesh rather than India because in Bangladesh wages are even lower, has a substantial moral dimension. The company's choice contains an implicit condemnation of decent pay for workers and an implicit approval of exploitation. It therefore carries with it a moral element, not so much in relation to the individual employer as to the economic system that forces him, out of the desire for self-preservation, to make such choices. In the struggle for survival that is the free market there is no place for moralising.
Little wonder that in the neoliberal view of education little value is accorded subjects such as civics and history. The neoliberal dogma of efficiency, moreover, has little time for the view that we should have smaller schools with smaller classes, instead of the present mega schools with too many pupils and not enough teachers, despite the fact that the former have been proved to produce better results. Pupils from small schools and small classes not only score higher academically, they are less often guilty of vandalism and criminality and are more likely to complete their school education. None of this counts for anything, however, when it comes up against the neoliberal dictate of economy.

The necessary return of public morality

When a number of prominent members of VVD, the Dutch Liberal Party, recently tried to provoke a discussion about the place of morality or values in their party's principles, they were shouted down. Standards and values, the prevailing wisdom had it, are different for every individual. Because individual freedom is, in liberal eyes, the highest good, it is undesirable for a liberal party to speak out on moral questions – and mutatis mutandis that must also go for the state. Moralism is anathema.
Yet parties in the centre-right tradition of European liberalism are often the first to call for stiffer penalties for crimes such as vandalism, and the VVD is no exception. This is, of course, a purely moralistic position. Not that there is anything wrong with that, in itself. A state or government without morality has no right to exist. Anyone who thinks that moral values are private matters, and not for society as a whole, is advocating leaving the social order to the jungle law of the survival of the strongest. Nature is amoral, as the Darwinians correctly argue. There is no `evil' in the wolf who devours the caribou calf, nor good in the mother seal's caring for her cubs. Both are directed towards the perpetuation of their own species and in this sense are value-free.
In the same manner, as the neoliberals always say, the market is amoral. In the current political-economic set-up this is indeed the case. The supermarket-entrepreneur forces the corner grocer out of business not out of malice, just as the firm's senior managers are not paid generous salaries out of love. Both are directed at the survival and prosperity of the enterprise. Yet humanity is distinguished from the natural world which surrounds us by our capacity to make moral choices. No one regards ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia as simply a successful attempt by the Serbs to safeguard their own kind at the expense of the Muslims. And there is surely nobody who regards the fact that 358 billionaires command more wealth than the poorest 45% of the world's population as the logical outcome of the struggle for existence – although it is to be feared that this is quite approved of in neoliberal circles.
The market mechanism is indeed amoral, just as are the laws of atomic physics. Yet whoever refuses to assess the consequences of such an economy is immoral, just as is the atomic physicist who takes no interest in the moral implications of the atomic bomb. That the preachers of the neoliberal gospel nevertheless close their eyes to the amorality of the free market can only be explained by the fact that they themselves belong to the winners. An army that wins the war never feels the need to comment on its immoral actions. Yet even the most successful of neoliberals must surely, under the pressure of hard reality, recognise that a society without the cement of common standards and values, without a social frame of reference in the form of a collective conscience, will end in savagery, criminality and chaos. This dark side of individualism reveals itself to liberals as much as to the rest of us: criminality makes no distinction between the political preferences of its victims.
Here we have arrived at the ultimate liberal dilemma: what moral demands can a state place on its citizens, if morality is no business of the state? And how can a political philosophy which rejects every form of solidarity, which says, with Mrs Thatcher, that there "is no such thing as society" demand anything from citizens other than they follow at all times their own selfish interests? How can the promoters of a set of ideas that has led to the relentless cutting back of collective provision demand any sort of collective spirit from these same citizens?
Liberals set the state against the citizen, instead of at his or her side. They see the state only as the creator of the conditions for an optimum functioning of their liberal system, including their liberal economy with its tradition of `the survival of the fittest'. Liberals cannot present themselves as believing that the state should act as the guardian of the people's interests. Such a role does not sit happily with the liberal idea that the prime source of social order lies in `self-regulating, spontaneous processes'.
Values and moral standards are not given to us by a higher power. They are abstracted from real answers to existing problems. Their origin lies in the permanent struggle between humanity and nature and the ongoing quest for ways in which people can best live together. So regarded they form an unwritten code, or a path along which we can proceed towards making a humane society a reality.

Towards a new morality for the state

The state at all times, through its laws and practices, concerns itself with morality. The state is also capable of acting as a guiding light, and if the light moves to left or right, then this has enormous consequences for society and for the meaning that
moral standards and values have in people's lives.
Yet this influence of the state on people's thought, this link between public morality and the way in which individuals give content to their own values, is denied by liberals. In their view the state's place is, and should be, to follow. This impotent, fatalistic approach traps us in a vicious circle; because if the state must confine its authority to formal democracy and politics does not seek to give that authority a moral basis, then every attempt to steer society in the direction of good is doomed to fail. Liberal society makes the expression homo homini lupus – man as wolf – true. A state that offers no opposition to this but instead works with it will be in no position to complain later about a shortage of good citizenship, deteriorating standards of behaviour or increasing criminality. If you trot a horse, don't be amazed if he breaks into a gallop.
So where can we look for our values? In my view there are three more important than others: firstly, human dignity, the right of each individual to a decent existence in which this dignity can be achieved. Secondly, the idea of the fundamental equality of all people; and thirdly, solidarity, because although we are of equal value we are not all endowed with equal capacities or equal luck. These three values, which have crystallised through more than 2,000 years of European history, have proved their usefulness for both the individual and society. They will continue to do so in the future, provided the neoliberal, value-free trend is stopped and the relationship between the state and public morality is understood. In the meantime, we find people in power who no longer feel the need to trouble themselves about the antisocial consequences of their policies.

---

“Enough” Contents:

• Index
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The wondrous rebirth of liberalism
• Chapter 2 The death of social democracy
• Chapter 3 The disempowerment of the people
• Chapter 4 Poverty in the midst of plenty
• Chapter 5 The assault of the market
• Chapter 6 The unbearable lightness of commerce
• Chapter 7 A question of civilisation
• Chapter 8 The United States of Europe
• Chapter 9 The spectre of the world market
• Chapter 10 The inevitability of an alternative
• Preface to the 2006 - updated edition
• Chapter 11 Ten years later, in the Netherlands
• Chapter 12 2006: Another world is possible
• Chapter 13 New optimism