George Rebane
We are living in dangerous times. Among the countries that used to be known as the ‘free world’, America is the leading jailer and the world’s title holder as the country that imprisons the largest fraction of its citizens. The rate of criminalization and incarceration has been quietly mushrooming in the US, and is now at a level that attracts the attention of other countries, most notably our allies. How and why is that?
The 24jul10 issue of the Economist is focused on “Rough Justice: Too many laws, too many prisoners”. Our jails are loaded with about 2.4 million inmates, making one out of every hundred of our adults sit behind bars and one out of 31 adults being under some form of supervision ‘in the justice system’. Per 100,000 population the US has 748 behind bars, Russia is second with 600, in third place Brazil drops down to about 240, and then it goes way down from there. We win. Or do we?
In America you can be thrown into jail for the damndest things as we try to live our lives in an ever-growing spaghetti bowl of regulations. There are over 4,000 federal crimes, and many times more regulations that carry criminal penalties. Every day more human behaviors that were legal yesterday are becoming overnight criminalized. “(O)ver the last 40 years an unholy alliance of big-business-hating liberals and tough-on-crime conservatives has made criminalization the first line of attack” on most social problems.
And today with trillion dollar deficits, new trillion dollar social legislation, and trillion dollar regulatory injections or ‘stimulus’ packages raining down on our heads, the restrictions on our liberties are accelerating at a pace that makes child’s play of the alphabet soup programs in FDR’s National Recovery Act of the 1930s. In the last 18 months the Obama administration has brought into being five times as many regulation spewing federal agencies than did FDR in the eight years preceding WW2. And as some of us know, at the bottom of every stack of state regulations lies a government gun.
Why do we need so many rules to tell a supposedly free people in their own land how to behave? Why do we need so many pages of legal code that set down myriads of criminal behaviors, and why do these rules need to multiply beyond any sense, comprehension, or reason? Almost all of them are unknown to the people, and almost all of them are such that our natural instincts and cultural traditions are totally useless in advising us whether today this is right and that is wrong. And tomorrow these social tools will be of even less use.
In simpler days societies relied on the traditions and customs of culture to define, direct, and constrain normative behavior. For example, the shame that people then felt when they misbehaved served as an effective constraint on aberrant and socially destructive actions. This allowed some fairly large and complex communities to thrive and grow as nation-states. Visitors and minorities from different cultures knew how to deport themselves within dominant cultures. (My own immigrant family was a typical example of this in the mid-twentieth century.) Their choices ranged from assimilation to isolation into their own enclaves. In no way were these minorities allowed to openly challenge the dominant culture; change was evolutionary not revolutionary.
When two or more cultures in a sovereign nation-state achieve peerage or equal power, then history records very few cases where strife and trouble are not the result. In modern times peace in such polyglot societies has been kept by a strong central government claiming to be culturally neutral and fair to all. Such a strong central government is faced with a situation that can be explained with the help of the figure below.
Suppose the light blue rectangle represents the set of all human behaviors. Let a subset of such encouraged and proscribed behaviors for a specific culture be represented by one of the colored ellipses. Where such behaviors are common to two or more cultures, they are contained in the overlap or intersection of the ellipses. The figure shows a situation for a society or country that is comprised of six such differentiable cultures – C1 through C6.
The behaviors shared by all six cultures are in the blue intersection or common area in the center. Note how small such an intersection is when compared to the totality of behaviors that are prescribed/inhibited by the six cultures. That common area shrinks with the addition of every new culture. And as shown, there are, of course, other subsets of shared behaviors common to complex combinations of the participating cultures.
As social animals, we all know instinctively that we like dealing with people whose beneficient behavior we successfully predict and/or control. Being with people whose moves and reactions are unknown gives rise to stress and distrust. The standard response of both man and animal to another critter whose behavior cannot be predicted is to either fight or flee. Strong relationships and enduring societies could only be built upon mutual behaviors successfully predicted and reliably controlled. For ages those benefices were the direct result of productive cultures which laid down rules of conduct that allowed people to trustingly work together, build families, generate and distribute wealth, and pass on knowledge/property to succeeding generations. All this was relatively easy for people sharing a common culture.
The situation is different in a society made up of non-assimilative multiple cultures. Such a society needs rules and a code of conduct that covers needed behaviors not common to its participating cultures. These rules are put in place, communicated, and enforced by the governing state. Every participating culture subordinates some of its customs and freedoms, and is compelled to tolerate such others so as to keep the peace and allow a modicum of intercourse to take place in the population. Such state enforced rules are indicated by the encompassing red circle in the figure.
That some level of friction and stress still remains in such a multi-cultural society is evident by the behavioral sets of each culture that are not yet covered by the state’s laws and regulations – i.e. those outside the reach of the red circle. And imposition of additional frictions and constraints not inherent to any of the participating cultures is indicated by the areas in the red circle not included in any of the ‘culture ellipses’. This is the situation that has obtained in every country with multiple cultures each seeking to retain their heritage and prerogatives. America is there now.
The attempts to alleviate such residual frictions and bring more and more of the interactions among the people into ‘harmony’ are achieved by making ever more laws and regulations to cover and ‘solve’ problems that arise as time goes by. If we now introduce into this mix additional pressures to address issues such as social safety nets, unequal treatment of minorities, uniform social justice, and equalizing opportunity or achievements, then the generation of government dictates and strictures is accelerated. This means that the red circle of covered behaviors grows as shown in the figure below.
At this stage, the growth of government dictated conduct and behaviors consigned to criminality gains a life of its own. This is fueled by the demands of every aggrieved class or culture to maneuver for benefices paid for by someone else. Again, to the extent that we continue to promote non-assimilating cultures and invite the increase of such populations, we must increase the domain of common rules, i.e. government, into literally every aspect of our lives. Graphically this is indicated by the enlarging red circle finally overreaching the behavioral norms of every participating culture, and imposing on everyone something that has in the past been hailed as ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’.
In such a state of affairs liberty will have been sacrificed for equality at some putative common denominator level. The impossible lie of ‘liberte, egalite, fraternite’ then will give way to the truth of no liberty, government favored inequalities, and the total absence of mutual trust and the brotherhood it engenders. In full bloom it was last seen in the Balkans of the 1990s, and now we are living through its upheavals in Iraq.
We, on the other hand, seem to take great comfort in the firm belief that America will never be witness to such an endgame.
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