four - Criminal law as a moral stronghold

Summary

The conditions of a secular network society are by no means unproblematic. Zygmunt Bauman (2000) speaks of ‘liquid modernity’ to refer to the contemporary speed in processes, and the volatility in memories and aspirations. A liquid society is above all a consumerist society, in which safety and security become the central concepts in operation. Bauman gives a rather hopeless picture of today's world. I prefer the term ‘complexity without direction’ to characterize contemporary Western society, and I consider how moral space is furnished in new ways and with new categories of direction. Crime and security have become the number one topics since the 1980s. This dominance refers to criminal problems and social tensions in reality, but also to the overheated reactions to crime and (in)security – and the world of security management and practices that is built around them.

To understand the dominance of the security discourse, this chapter analyses the position of criminal law. In a morally coherent community, criminal law functions as a last resort – an ultimum remedium. This was the case until the 1970s. Due to rising crime figures and societal unease, the position of criminal law shifted from a legal practice on the periphery to a central institution of moral order.

I would like to discuss here a switch in the relationship between morality and criminal law. Criminal law after the 1970s was no longer the result of consensus on moral issues, but it was the other way round: criminal law became the defining authority in the design of moral space. It is the moral stronghold in a liquid society, an anchor in a complex world without direction. This chapter will show how ‘the victim’ was the key in this ‘inversion’ of morality and criminal law.

‘Victimalization’

Since the ‘postmodern fall’ from the 1970s onwards, morality has become individualized. Due to radical secularization (see Chapter 3) it is the subject of individual or subcultural life projects, and no longer part of grand life discourses and pretensions. This condition has resulted in morality as a form of communication about intuitions – about what we see as a good life, and what we reject as evil.