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Entry: Primal Moments Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/primal_moments1#9554 Post contents: Jame Q. Wilson, perhaps our best criminologist, has demonstrated that the 1950s had the lowest crime rate in American history. The statistics were low for all classes and ethnic groups. I myself remember in my childhood how many householders wouldn’t lock their front doors, and how it was safe for a man to walk in every quarter of city. Since the early 60s, the crime rate soared to its highest rate in American history. Wilson went on to name the cause, a moral cause: A culture focused on self and self-satisfaction instead of living for others will have high crime. True, he said, impoverishment (and hyper-affluence) plays a role, but only when a social order sings “songs of myself”. Thus has American society changed Real Conservatives (Burke of the <i>Reflections</i>) have something to add to this doubtless correct moral argument. Consider these other causes: 1. <i>Déracinément</i>”: "uprootedness" and anomie. Real Conservatives know that people are held together -- also morally -- by history, habit, custom, tradition, class, ceremony and religion – reinforced by a sense of beholden-ness. Take these away, and the upper classes become decadent, the lower classes violent, and everyone simian. Liberal (in the European sense)and Social Democratic Gesellschaft might better protect individual rights; conservative Gemeinschaft produce deeper, broader, stabler more interesting, and less criminal personalities. (Note that by using <i>déracinément</i>, I am not supporting necessarily Maurice Barrès’ version of nationalism. In fact, it could be argued that he was a regionalist.) 2. Revenge, the licence a victim assumes. “I’ve been treated badly, so I may treat others badly”: Cultural Marxism in a nutshell. At best, this is to argue badly. 3. The triumph in popular culture and high culture of the anti-bourgeois tradition. Granted, the bourgeois wasn’t heroic. But he didn’t go down the street ripping jewelry off others and siring children out of marriage. Neither did Gregor Samsa. We Real Conservatives need to point out to the bourgeois that his own denigration of the noble tradition did not improve matters. Don Giovanni is more myth than fact. Burke pointed this out. The chivalric class, as one writebacker has pointed out, knew that a weapon should be given only to a gentleman, or that those who have weapons should be under the command of a gentleman. Social classes in a good social order are the reservoir of certain virtues which all may drink from. 4. Richard Sennett’s Fall of Public Man. In the big cities of the 18th Century, it was possible to go up to strangers of all social classes and both sexes, and talk to them without any sense of embarrassment . Another fruit of the worst disaster in Western history, the French Revolution, was our estrangement from contact with strangers, and “re-tribalization”: “I’m decent to members of my tribe, and treat other tribes as trash": The “Far-Right” in a nutshell. 5. One cause of high crime since the 60s is one Roger Scruton knows well: the celebration of the brutal in art, especially in architecture. Assault people in their eye and ear, I would argue, and they will because assaulters themselves. Social scholars often overlook the aesthetic element. (Scruton’s <i>The Aesthetics of Architecture</i> may be the best Real Conservative book written in our time.) 6. The degradation of the feminine: From Beatrice and Elizabeth Bennett to the Happy Hooker and mud wrestling. 7. Secularization, and not just de-Christianization. Folk with Muslim, Shinto, Confucian, Hindu, Buddhist ethics also have less crime. In Italy, I am told, the Japanese are the most popular targets of pickpockets; the Japanese can’t imagine why someone would wish to rob someone and thus disgrace his family and ancestors. All these things, or the lack of them, might help determine whether we check the bad, or let it loose. Sent at: 2008 10 13