Philosophy
In his book on the sociological method, Emile Durkheim argues that while individual criminal acts may be pathological to social health, crime itself actually is good for society. At first glance, we think that eliminating all crime would be a positive ting, it would lead to a healthier, more productive, more progressive culture. But then he invites us to imagine a society with no crime. Such a place would not long remain because we criminalize acts that are abnormal. We start by tolerating small deviations from the norm in order to concentrate on those that are most deviant. If no one is committing those, he contends, society will then criminalize less and less abnormal behavior until it is enforcing an unhealthy degree of conformity. Smaller and smaller differences would be criminalized until there were no differences left and these differences are what produce the options that give rise to social change and progress. The existence of crime provides the space to keep healthy differences legal.
Further, he argues, it is only when a crime is committed that we have a chance to focus on a given law and think about whether or not it is a prohibition that helps or hurts the society. It takes a Dred Scott case, for example, to focus on and clearly enunciate what a law really says and that is a necessary step in social change. We would never critically consider a rule that was never broken. We need to see what it means to live in a way that violates a rule in order to have a standpoint from which to think about the value of the rule itself.
Is this argument for a seemingly bizarre conclusion cogent? Should we be glad for crime?
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Philosophy
Is Crime Healthy for Society?
In his book on the sociological method, Emile Durkheim argues that while individual criminal acts may be pathological to social health, crime itself actually is good for society. At first glance, we think that eliminating all crime would be a positive ting, it would lead to a healthier, more productive, more progressive culture. But then he invites us to imagine a society with no crime. Such a place would not long remain because we criminalize acts that are abnormal. We start by tolerating small deviations from the norm in order to concentrate on those that are most deviant. If no one is committing those, he contends, society will then criminalize less and less abnormal behavior until it is enforcing an unhealthy degree of conformity. Smaller and smaller differences would be criminalized until there were no differences left and these differences are what produce the options that give rise to social change and progress. The existence of crime provides the space to keep healthy differences legal.
Further, he argues, it is only when a crime is committed that we have a chance to focus on a given law and think about whether or not it is a prohibition that helps or hurts the society. It takes a Dred Scott case, for example, to focus on and clearly enunciate what a law really says and that is a necessary step in social change. We would never critically consider a rule that was never broken. We need to see what it means to live in a way that violates a rule in order to have a standpoint from which to think about the value of the rule itself.
Is this argument for a seemingly bizarre conclusion cogent? Should we be glad for crime?
- Is There Progress In Art? Society?
I'm working through Max Weber's methodological essays and one of the points he argues is that social progress is a myth. Across the ideological spectrum of founding fathers of sociology, from Marx's communist view to Spenser's free...
- Prison Rape
Yesterday was the sentencing of the young man who stabbed his ex-girlfriend at the school where I teach and I overheard someone saying, upon hearing the sentence and the facility in which he would be held, that he would surely become someone's bitch...
- The Purpose Of Punishment
Interesting conversation going on at Lawyers, Guns, and Money. It came from a Roman Polanski thread wherein some commenters argued that he should not be prosecuted because convicting and sentencing Polanski (i) holds no deterrence effect for the community...
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Sat in on a colleagues class yesterday and they were working on a piece by psychologist David Moshman called "Us and Them: Identity and Genocide" where Moshman argues that the traditional definition of genocide is too broad in that it only looks at the...
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There's an old sketch film called Amazon Women on the Moon and one of the bits is a parody of the old Leonard Nimoy show, "In Search Of..." called, "Bullshit or Not?" with the tagline "Bullshit or not? You decide." It's a line I like so much that...