eight - Emerging morality

Summary

This criminology of moral order refers to the moral causes of crime and disorder, but also investigates the mechanisms of societal stability and resilience. A vital social balance seems under pressure in our super-diverse network societies that have to function without any explicit uniting philosophy of life. I have spoken of ‘complexity without direction’ to describe the background of the challenges of our times. Many people experience the contemporary world as insecure, while they do not have much trust in each other, in the institutions or in the future. This explains the dominance of the safety and security discourse in politics and among citizens. Security is the dominant concept in a ‘liquid’ world (as we know from Zygmunt Bauman, 2000; 2005).

Security has become a bigger term than the actual issue of crime. From the 1980s onwards, it has been on the front pages, on television and in social media time and time again. Crime policies of the 1980s changed into security politics of the 1990s, and there seems likely to be no end to that shift to security in the near future. Security is, for example, central in all manifestations of so-called populism. This book has explained how moral order has become more and more attached to the security issue, and why crime has become a central issue. In many domains, social problems are actually defined as crime problems (for example, how to raise children in terms of preventing them from wrongdoing). So, a criminology of moral order in the 21st century is about longing for security as an answer to complexity without direction.

This situation creates a society at risk. It might generate a disproportional politics of security and safety. It could also fuel the notion that ‘my safety and security’ is not guaranteed any more by the state or by state-related institutions. So black and minority ethnic people don't trust the police because of ethnic profiling; nationalists don't trust the state in protecting their achievements against foreign influences; and the general public don't trust each other any more.

Before ending with a too pessimistic Hobbesian picture of a society characterized by a general war of all against all, I will argue for a dialogue, in which mutual claims to existence are respected and directed to the actual will of people to live together in one society.