A Criminology of Moral Order 9781529203790

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NEW HORIZONS IN CRIMINOLOGY

A CRIMINOLOGY OF MORAL ORDER

Hans Boutellier

NEW HORIZONS IN CRIMINOLOGY

A CRIMINOLOGY OF MORAL ORDER Hans Boutellier

First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Bristol University Press North America office: University of Bristol Bristol University Press 1-9 Old Park Hill c/o The University of Chicago Press Bristol 1427 East 60th Street BS2 8BB Chicago, IL 60637, USA UK t: +1 773 702 7700 t: +44 (0)117 954 5940 f: +1 773-702-9756 [email protected] [email protected] www.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk www.press.uchicago.edu © Bristol University Press 2019 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 978-1-5292-0375-2 hardcover ISBN 978-1-5292-0387-5 ePub ISBN 978-1-5292-0390-5 Mobi ISBN 978-1-5292-0379-0 ePdf The right of Hans Boutellier to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of Bristol University Press. The statements and opinions contained within this publication are solely those of the author and not of the University of Bristol or Bristol University Press. The University of Bristol and Bristol University Press disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any material published in this publication. Bristol University Press works to counter discrimination on grounds of gender, race, disability, age and sexuality. Cover design by Bristol University Press Front cover image: istock Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Bristol University Press uses environmentally responsible print partners

Contents About the author v Acknowledgements vi Preface by Professor Andrew Millie ix Author’s Preface xi Introduction one A conceptual exploration of moral space

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Part I: Complexity without direction two Social order in a network society three The radical secularization of moral space

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Part II: Security politics four Criminal law as a moral stronghold five Securitization in a safe new world

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Part III: Sex and identity six Sexual offences and mutual consent seven Diversity, radicalization and populism

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Conclusion eight Emerging morality

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Epilogue 151 References 153 Index 167

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About the author Hans Boutellier is a professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration in the Faculty of Social Sciences at Vrije Universiteit (VU Amsterdam) in the Netherlands. His field of study is security and resilience. He is also scientific director of the Verwey-Jonker Institute in Utrecht in the Netherlands. This is an independent social research institute, which works for national and local government and other research funders in the public sector. Boutellier is a specialist in themes such as social order, governance, security and safety, diversity and public morality. He has published hundreds of articles on these subjects, both scientifically and professionally. He has previously written four monographs. According to Dutch weekly Vrij Nederland (Free Netherlands), ‘Boutellier is a keen thinker on the paradoxes of our time’.

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Acknowledgements A famous painter of Chinese characters once said, after making some over a weekend, that it took all his life to finish them. Something like that could be said of this book. It took me a year to write it, but I needed some decades to develop the ideas and the competence to write them down. I have done a lot of theoretical studies and research projects during my career, and in this book I use all the insights I have gained during these years. My studies have resulted in hundreds of articles and reports (mostly in Dutch). I have previously brought them together in the form of four monographs, which in my view is still the most relevant and intellectually satisfying art of publication. This book is the English culmination of these publications, in which I bring my ideas a little further with the concept of ‘emerging morality’. Given this background, I have to thank a lot of people who inspired me during my career or who actually helped me in finishing this very publication. Let’s start with my wife Els, and my children Bas and Nikki, who have started their own careers now. My studies have been an infringement of our family life. I hope they will forgive me for being absent so often, physically and mentally, when I was practising my ‘Chinese characters’. I would also like to thank my colleagues at the Verwey-Jonker Institute in Utrecht, who have informed and inspired me with all the (action) research projects we have accomplished on various domains like security, safety, (health) care, social work, youth care and diversity; especially my colleague board member Majone Steketee, who has given me a lot of support in developing my intellectual ambitions. Next to that, I would like to thank my colleagues at the VU Amsterdam (Free University). My part-time professorship since 2004 at the Department of Political Science and Public Administration in the Faculty of Social Sciences has been extremely important for understanding concepts like governance, processes, networks and complexity. I am grateful to the Dean of the faculty, Professor Karen van Oudenhoven, and the former Head of the department, Professor Willem Trommel, for the confidence they have shown and the value they have attached to my work. Last but not least, I would like to mention Associate Professor Dr Ronald van Steden, with whom I have accomplished a lot of projects, articles, classes and debates on security, resilience, morality, values and citizenship.

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A criminology Acknowledgements of moral order

I should mention many more people than I will do here, but they are too many and I am afraid I will forget some. One person I will not forget is Professor Andrew Millie, who has invited me to write this volume in his ‘New Horizons in Criminology’ series. He has given me a lot of instruction, advice and support. Without him, this book would have wanted to be written, but it would not have succeeded.

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NEW HORIZONS IN CRIMINOLOGY Series editor: Professor Andrew Millie, Department of Law and Criminology, Edge Hill University, UK

Preface I have admired Hans Boutellier’s work on crime and morality for a number of years and was keen to ask him to contribute to the New Horizons in Criminology book series. Much of his work is published in Dutch and, whilst some has been translated into English, I believe it deserves a far wider audience. In 2014 I was invited to speak at the International Conference on Law Enforcement and Public Health, hosted by VU University in Amsterdam. By chance, at a conference dinner I was sat next to Hans and was able to discuss the idea of a new book. I am delighted that our informal discussion that night has now resulted in what I believe will be seen an important little book. A Criminology of Moral Order is the sixth title in the New Horizons in Criminology book series. The series is home for concise authoritative texts that are international in scope and reflect cutting-edge thought and theoretical developments in criminology. The books are written by leading authors in their fields and I was very pleased when Hans agreed to contribute. This book is the culmination of work that previously resulted in four books – three of which have been translated into English - Crime and Morality (2000), The Safety Utopia (2005) and The Improvising Society (2013); and one that, at the time of writing, is still only available in Dutch - The Secular Experiment (2015). For the current text, Boutellier developed the ideas put forward in these earlier publications resulting in a unique and insightful contribution to criminological understanding of both morality and order. Moral judgments are central to processes that result in actions or omissions being declared as harmful to others, or being labelled as crimes. And crimes and harms (and the labelling of harms and crimes) can have deleterious effects on the moral order of society – however defined. Yet, according to Boutellier, criminologists have often neglected issues of morality. In this book Boutellier skilfully explains how moral order is conceived within complex networked societies. He makes the point that in a secularized and networked society a common moral ground is difficult to find. He argues that – in a Western context

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at least – where societies were once ordered around religion or class, today there is a much looser, fragmented and individualized social order which he characterizes as ‘complexity without direction’. According to Boutellier, this results in moral spaces dominated by concerns for security and processes of securitization. The first part of the book considers the moral spaces of a networked society. Boutellier then examines the politics of securitization and the search for moral order. Specific examples are given, in particular focusing on changes in late twentieth and early twenty-first century sexual norms and offences. Boutellier also looks at the moral order of super diverse cities that have emerged across the West following increases in migration for safety and/or economic gain. According to Boutellier, the result is new challenges for security, new and competing claims of moral truth, and new forms of nationalist radicalism and populism. He takes the view that the contemporary period is not a kind of immoral era, but rather it is characterised by a ‘hyper-morality’ where there are “many judgements, but little consensus as to norms and values”. Boutellier concludes by considering an ‘emerging morality’ that comes from an improvising society. Taken together, Hans Boutellier offers the reader a better understanding of twenty-first century moral dynamics. As he writes in the acknowledgements, the book may have taken a year to write, but needed decades to develop the ideas that have informed it. This is clearly reflected in the quality of writing and argument. This is a book that needs to be read – not just by criminologists with specific interest in moral philosophy, but by a broad array of criminologists, legal and socio-legal scholars, and others interested in how we live with one another. References Boutellier, H. (2000) Crime and Morality: The Significance of Criminal Justice in Post-Modern Culture, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Boutellier, H. (2005) The Safety Utopia: Contemporary Discontent and Desire as to Crime and Punishment, Dordrecht: Klewer Academic Publishers. Boutellier, H. (2013) The Improvising Society: Social Order in a Boundless World, The Hague: Eleven Publishers. Boutellier, H. (2015) Het Seculiere Experiment: Hoe we van God los Gingen Samenleven, Amsterdam: Boom Filosofie.

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Author’s Preface I entered the field of criminology in 1980 as a master’s student in social psychology. My main subject was juvenile crime and rehabilitation. I studied criminological literature and did an internship in a prison reform centre for young men. It struck me there that nobody talked about the crimes they had committed, why these were wrong and what their own responsibility was. The atmosphere was in some sense morally neutral or, to put it another way, ‘not moral’. It was as if doing their time there was a given, and didn’t have any serious normative reason. It was in those years that the idea of ‘postmodernism’ found some resonance generally. Social arrangements were relatively solid until the 1960s, but by the 1980s they were no more. Traditional norms and values – of the church, family life and school – were heavily disrupted, and in Western societies, the crime problem was rising. In the penal system, there was still a lot of attention on social deprivation and psychological neglect. Punishment was on a penal-welfare basis, as David Garland would later write in his book The culture of control (2001). Crime was treated as an error or a mistake of a rather consensual society. The changes in society seemed to result in a kind of moral embarrassment in the prison centre. There was some uneasiness as to norms and values. My internship was the start of a career dedicated to ‘moral order’. Why is it that we reject crime, if there are no self-evident norms and values any more? Was the increase in crime related to the process of secularization? Are there any new moral mechanisms in educating children and maintaining public order? How about issues of violent radicalism or sexual harassment? There are actually no issues without a moral angle – these are eternal issues in ever-changing forms and appearances. As the British criminologist Anthony Bottoms (2002; cited by Millie, 2016) has written: ‘if they are true to their calling, all criminologists have to be interested in morality’. A lot has happened over the years. Due to the processes of globalization, digitalization and individualization, the social structure of society has completely changed. In half a century, the Western world has evolved into highly consumerist network societies with diverse multi-ethnic populations (at least in certain parts of the big cities). These developments generated all kinds of new crime problems, including new forms of human trafficking, cybercrime and terrorism. In societies with many different ethnic, religious and

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digital communities and identities, the issue of morality has become extremely important. The taboo on morality seems to be shifting to an overload of moral judgements, naming and shaming, and condemnation in social media. We see a kind of ‘hyper-morality’: desperately seeking fundamental answers. Our societies have to cope with moral fragmentation and cultural complexity. How does a network society organize its relations, and how does it realize some kind of social order? Are there any common values in such diverse circumstances? What is the role of safety and security? This book builds on my various studies over the last decades1 in order to present a criminology of moral order. The book has an international ambition, but my studies are oriented at the Western world, and they will be influenced by the Dutch environment in which I live. As the American-Dutch historian James Kennedy has argued (1995), many transformations are more radical and all-encompassing in the Netherlands than in other countries. The aim of this book is to explore the moral order of complex network societies. It will show that morality is at the heart of criminology. I hope that this book will improve the practices and mentalities that are inspired by criminology’s concepts, findings and theories. Hans Boutellier Walsoorden/Amsterdam, September 2018

This book contains themes on which I have elaborated in earlier work. I have taken them forward in proposing a criminology of moral order. See the Epilogue for my accountability of using earlier work. If I use parts that I did publish in English before, I refer to that in the text. 1

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Introduction

ONE

A conceptual exploration of moral space How a society organizes itself is a question that lies at the heart of social sciences and has its roots in (social) philosophy.2 Many theorists have searched for a unifying principle that underlies social order. There are several candidates that are held responsible – from God to science, and from the state to human nature. Thus, the question refers to a library of theories, philosophies and empirical studies, and seems too big to handle in a scientific way.3 The question of order might be better approached from a negative angle: what happens if social order is disturbed? What efforts are made to prevent these disturbances? Crime seems a more interesting way in to study the phenomenon of societal organization. Then the moral aspects of a certain social order come to the fore. Social organization always implies a certain moral order. But morality is a somewhat vague term. Talking about morals, people easily think of unctuous pastors or strict teachers. Moral judgements are also not easily accepted. It is generally not easy to speak openly about our own norms and values. We tend to think of our own motives and behaviour in positive terms. Yet we see a continuous flow of moral and ethical judgements about others in the public domain, as presented in talk shows on television or the bickering on Twitter and other social media. While many think that we live in a kind of immoral era, I see a kind hyper-morality: many judgements, but little consensus as to norms and values. This ambivalence says a lot about our time, or rather about the moral conditions of our time. The way we judge our own behaviour and that of others is crucial for the social organization of a society. We act according to our values​​ and norms, or at least we think that we are doing so. We also use them in retrospect to justify our actions. In this way, we anticipate our future actions or those of others.

Parts of this chapter are based on chapter 1 of The improvising society (Boutellier, 2013). 3 See Wrong (1995) for a comprehensive overview of the sociology of social order. 2

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A criminology of moral order

I regard morality as crucial for the organization of our society. Then it is about the social imaginaries (Taylor, 2007) that we make about a good society or a bad life, about the desired relationships between people in a community, about the world that we would like to live in. Crime refers to the moral boundaries that a society feels should be guarded. The debate and practices as to crime and security inform us about our moral space. In this opening chapter, I will elaborate a little further on the relation between social organization and morality.

Moral space Acknowledging the importance of morality to understand the ordering of a society goes back to Emile Durkheim (1893), who spoke of the ‘moral density’ of a people as an independent quality of social order (along with tangible forms such as contact, speech and action). The moral perspective points to the meaning that others have for us, based on notions of ourselves, on intuitions about the good life (the classic philosophical question), and on what we experience as evil. Morality might be defined as all the intuitions of people in a certain community on good and evil. The Polish sociologist Piotr Sztompka (2002: 63) uses the term ‘moral space’, and refers to ‘the prescriptions, prohibitions, permissions and preferences’ which determine the content of that space (derived from Merton, 1949). These intuitions differ historically and culturally, of course, and also between groups and individuals. Talking about morality is always related to a certain environment, situation or group of people. The transition from a rural to an industrialized society in the 19th and 20th centuries, for example, has been extensively documented and interpreted.4 These analyses have always been paired with a certain concern for the moral quality of the new era (Sztompka, 2002: 65). Some are afraid of the loss of social bonding (for example Putnam, 2000) or they worry about alienation or anomie (a loss of moral boundaries – Durkheim, 1893). The development of modernity has obviously always imparted a certain unease to the design and furnishing of the moral space. On the one hand, this leads us to a certain moral relativism: every era obviously generates its own moral conditions and issues. On the other hand, it is proof of the extraordinary importance of moral space; From community to society (Tönnies, 1887), from mechanical to organic solidarity (Durkheim, 1893) and from a sacred to a profane order (Becker and Barnes, 1961 – as described by Sztompka, 2002). 4

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A conceptual exploration of moral space

a moral order that is more or less accepted offers peace and security. It serves as a precondition for social interaction, political activity and collective action. The moral space needs to be organized, to make a society social. But how is that for our time? According to Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), we can in general choose between God and the community. If God is no longer the legitimizing force for social order, then the community serves as the necessary alternative (Durkheim, 1906). It seems as if the organizing power of religion has vanished (I will come back to that extensively). But if we also lose our faith in community, what alternatives are then still available? Is there another option possible? Perhaps we are overlooking something. We can adhere to what there once was (God or community) – that’s the conservative solution. We can also reconcile ourselves to a cosmopolitan chaos, which is the libertarian solution. Or we can try to find another principle of ordering. In this book, I explore that third option. The aim is to gain a better understanding of what the defining parameters are of today’s Western society – about our contemporary intuitions on good and evil, and how are they organized.

Institutional structure I approach the question of moral ordering from the perspective of the institutional design of a society. Here we are talking about the forms of groupings, organizations and institutions and the relations between and within them. All stable patterns of people’s behaviour can be understood through the involvement of institutions. They structure relations between people and organize their planning, acting and ideas. A common sociological understanding is in the difference between formal institutions, like a hospital or a university, and informal institutions like the family and all kind of cultural groupings. Institutions exist on many levels: micro, meso and macro. The institutional design of a society can thus be understood as the whole of relations, patterns and systems that organize the behaviour of groups or individuals. Countless elements contribute to the design of the social order: the family, the educational system, the nation state, public administration, religious organizations, the legal system, and so on. As structural elements, institutions have a form, a certain permanence, and they rise above individual desires and needs. We could also speak of a social morphology, as Manuel Castells does (2000a). Together, they form the structural foundation of a society. Social order

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can be conceived as the combination of morality as being the whole of intuitions on good and evil, and the institutional structure of society. I have noted already that the world we live in can be characterized as a network society (see also Chapter 2). Many traditional ideas about organization, hierarchy, leadership, management and governance are in discussion, or to put it another way: they have been exchanged for new terms, which seem to give a better fit to network dynamics. The keywords in the formula for today’s institutional complexity are: connectivity, cooperation, chains, links and networks. So if we speak of contemporary social order, we refer to a moral space in relation to the networked organization of society. The first part of this book is on exactly that. In the rest of the book, I write about criminal law and security, sexuality and migration as institutionally organized in a morally inspired way. I hope to give a better understanding of the moral dynamics of the 21st century.

A network society Social order is thus related to the concept of moral order. The social refers to relations among people, organizations and institutions, while the moral relates to the value of these relations. There is at least one social characteristic of today’s society that needs to be taken into account in an accurate theory of social order: its networked structure. Western societies consist nowadays of a structure that is more horizontally organized, more diversely composed and more interrelated than ever in history: connectivity is the keyword of our time. Thinking about order is directly linked to the nodal complexity of our social arrangements. A topical criminology of moral order has to deal with the new ‘social morphology’ of the information age (Castells, 2000a). There seems to be an overwhelming scientific consensus on the need ‘to think networks’ (Barabási, 2002). Manuel Castells related the idea of a network society directly to ‘the information age’. He did this in 1996, even before the major proliferation of the internet. Technological developments since then have created the conditions for a social structure of nodes and links, places and flows, which relay a societal structure of relatively coherent collectives. Although the idea of a network is a metaphor in itself, it is outwardly an adequate expression of today’s world of weak ties, digital communities, social media, cooperation and co-creation. The network society is connected directly to the concept of complexity – a word that stems from natural sciences and which has entered the field of social studies.

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The complexity of today’s network society brings with it new kinds of organizing and ordering principles. A better understanding of these principles is important for moral issues. This book shows how social organization in the network society is realized and affects moral issues. It uses the metaphor of improvisation to understand that complex networks result in social processes – contradictory to the planning and control of well-defined systems. Improvised music is both structured and spontaneous, it is organized freedom, so to speak.5 What we see in contemporary practices is a collision of networked ordering and institutional inflexibility. Morality should not be understood as a topdown mental superstructure, but rather as a bottom-up effect that emerges from networked social dynamics.

Radical secularization But there is another characteristic of today’s moral order: the qualitative shift from an ideologically driven society to an identity-oriented culture. From the 1960s onwards, we have witnessed in the Western world a speedy kind of secularization and, in its wake, the diminishing of organizing philosophies of life. The big stories have disappeared. The well-known sociologist Charles Taylor published in 2007 his magnum opus A secular age. In the book, he shows how the influence of Christian faith has developed over two millennia until today’s society, which is thoroughly secular in its ‘social imaginaries’. The public sphere, the market economy and democracy are the core images with which Western societies build their social organization. This secular condition has developed over ages, but it underwent a massive change from the 1960s. We now live in an era of authenticity, according to Taylor. A religiously organized or ideologically driven society evolved into a culture in which individual autonomy is the reference point for institutional practices. If there is one ideology left, than it is (neo) liberalism – with its ideas on a globalized free market and individual responsibility. For example, children learn ‘to become themselves’ more than to become members of a certain collective. This has had enormous consequences for moral order. The dominant discourse of the secularized condition is that of self-realization. Putting everything ‘into perspective’ became a virtuous competence of the ‘postmodern’ I have been inspired here by an interview in a Dutch magazine (Groene Amsterdammer, June 27 2008) with Benin guitarist Lionel Loneke, who characterized jazz improvisation as ‘organized freedom’. 5

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world. The strength of Western society is relativism but, at the same time, that is also its greatest weakness. Scepticism is the driving force behind many of our successes in science. As Max Weber (1918) once said, scientists are searching for truth, while hoping it will get outdated. This virtue of scepticism and relativism has become generalized to almost the whole of Western society. The significant outcome of the secularization process is not general atheism, but a culture which said goodbye to claims of truths. The readiness to doubt is at the heart of secular Western culture. Belief and faith have become individualized (see Chapter 3). The secularization of society brought an end to every kind of coherent philosophy of life. Philosophies of life, being of a religious or secular nature, are, like socialism, no longer dominant in defining and organizing collectives. This seems to have generated a kind of moral embarrassment and uncertainty among people, which – paradoxically – sometimes generates harsh opinions, especially in social media. Western societies are at the same time confronted with groups of immigrants who import new claims to truth, without a tradition of seeking compromise and ‘peaceful fighting’. This situation seems to lead to a certain radicalization in all directions. The domain of the obvious is challenged by new traditions – the longing for something to cling onto and radicalized responses – in which identity seems to function as the common denominator. Morality is a dynamic phenomenon depending on historical and cultural conditions. The context in Western societies has changed drastically over the last few decades. Western societies used to be organized in religious or class-related collectives and communities. Nowadays, societies are more loosely organized in networked relations between people, organizations and institutions. With digitalization and immigration as driving forces, we see a fragmented and individualized social order, which in this book is characterized as ‘complexity without direction’ (the title of Part I). I use it as a starting point to research the developments in criminal law and security.

Security and moral certainty The transformation from an ideologically structured modern society towards an identity-focused, network society has had enormous repercussions for today’s social relations. Networks are open, unpredictable and difficult to organize in a systematic, reassuring way. They generate feelings of unease, and demand cooperation or collaboration between public, private and civil parties. The outcomes

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are unpredictable and the goals are hard to set beforehand. Zygmunt Bauman (2000) has called this ‘liquid modernity’, a term which he has duplicated in five books in relation to love, life, fear and modern times. Against this background, security has gained dominance in defining moral space. Part II of this book contains analyses of the process of ‘securitization’ over the last few decades (see Chapter 5). Because religion and other philosophies of life no longer have organizing moral power, criminal law gained a more central position in the ordering processes of society. Crime became an important reference point in moral affairs. In particular, the victim of crime got legitimizing power in defining good and – especially – evil (Boutellier, 2000). Criminal law had to support the vanishing norms and values that were part and parcel of the Anglican, Protestant, Catholic, socialist, communist, and liberal philosophies of life. These no longer have the self-evident influence that they used to have. Morality became fragmented, privatized or individualized. As a consequence, I argue, there has been a shift of the criminal justice system from the periphery to the centre of society. The security discourse became the dominant way of coping with the problems that come along with complexity without direction. This dominance had a track record that started in the 1970s and 1980s. During the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century, criminal law gained an unprecedented moral stronghold (see Chapter 4). Gradually, it became the reference point for a preventative offensive that occupied moral space. In criminology, this is understood as a process of governing through crime (Simon, 2007) and securitization (for example Schuilenburg, 2015): all kinds of social problems are approached from a security perspective as a criminalization of social policy (see Hughes, 2007). Crime prevention strategies are occupying a moral space that used to be the domain of ideological moral parties (religious or political). The security discourse got a further boost through the development of a data-driven culture into a so-called ‘surveillance society’ (Lyon, 2001; see also Chapter 5).

Other moral issues Following on from crime and security issues in Part II, Part III of this book contains analyses of two exemplary issues under the heading ‘Sex and identity’. The first topic (Chapter 6) is sexual offences in relation to the development of sexual norms and values. A strong Christian sexual

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morality was overruled by the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s, as if external norms do not matter any more in developing sexual identity. The explicit external norms are redeemed by the liberal norm of ‘mutual consent’. This individualized moral point of departure became the defining norm for sexual affairs, which created a new context for sexual behaviour and experience. The important question is: what does that mean for sexual violence and harassment? The second issue is migration and integration (Chapter 7). Over a period of two generations, the population of Western countries has radically changed, at least in the big cities. This development creates new moral challenges – especially as Islam confronts Western societies with new claims of moral truth. The ‘receiving countries’ show new forms of nationalist radicalism and populism. This situation results in a growing polarization among ethnic or religious groups, and nationalistic populism in terms of identity. What kind of policies emerge in what is called a ‘super-diverse’ context (Vertovec, 2007), and what do they reveal about the moral status quo in Western countries? Western societies show a desperate seeking for moral certainty and civil peace.

The dominance of pragmatism Western societies have no wide-open perspectives, no grand designs, no epic narratives. The governance of society nowadays is characterized mainly by pragmatism. We preferably choose what seems to be ‘best’ thing to do: good practices, effective interventions, evidenced-based policy. Over the last decades, we have developed a (neoliberal) politics of risk and crisis management, of managerial problems and governance, of market forces and freedom of choice. Our politics is procedural, liberal and mediagenic, or at least it aspires to be so. There are not many decidedly substantive ideals. We do not live in times with a utopian ideal. As far as there is some utopian desire, it is on security – we are longing for a safety utopia (Boutellier, 2005b. We let ourselves be led by effectiveness and efficiency, preferably demonstrated through performance indicators, guided by supervision and control, and accompanied by a politics of spindoctors and sound bites. This ‘pragmacracy’ (referring to a way of governing through ‘what works best’ and not on the base of a philosophy of life) (see Chapter 8) stands in sharp contrast to the quest for values, meaning and inspiration that is also currently underway. Many people experience a void, or a feeling of loss for a world that may have existed. There is unease and

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A conceptual exploration of moral space

discontent. The number of opportunities available to us is historically unprecedented – although not equally distributed. This discontent (which has so often been observed and researched) might stem from the fact that we cannot be anything other than pragmatic. That is characteristic of the ambivalence in the Western world: the awareness that we are not succeeding in defining our societal aspirations, despite all the successes. There is no reassuring thought about who we are or could possibly be. What terms can we use to think about the ordering that shapes our liquid life projects (Bauman, 2005)? Among other things, I hope to show that ordering takes new forms, which have grown from both the historical actuality of institutions and from civilization. A keyword in my understanding of today’s moral order is emergence – the ordering patterns that arise more or less spontaneously from complex systems. Ordering can be contingent as well as structured. Sometimes there is a conscious intent to create order but, more often, we are not really aware of what is happening. This makes it difficult to distinguish between what is desirable or unavoidable. Changes occur in such a turbulent context that sometimes they are barely noticeable and do not set us thinking. Anyone who discovers a certain pattern of ordering in a complex society, who deciphers how it comes into being and can change it somewhat, is quite a wonder worker.

The role of social science We are witnessing continual attempts to create order within an apparently chaotic context. Some attempts take the form of an ordering offensive, for example in the area of security (see Chapter 5). That can be regarded as a ‘new social control’ or as a form of ‘social hypochondria’ that results in exclusion (for example Schinkel, 2008). This is certainly true, but these judgements are at the same time too general to be relevant. Some sort of social ordering is important for society, but the actual ordering process is too multifaceted and complex to get immediately totalitarian traits. It seems better to try to understand the ordering processes in the hope of being able to manage them in an inclusive way. To avoid any misunderstanding, this book is not meant to provide one overriding comforting thought, but instead it offers perhaps a few useful phrases when thinking about social order in relation to morality. My vocabulary is both descriptive and normative. To state my intentions even more strongly: I provide not only an analysis and a commentary, but also a glimmer of hope. By articulating the actual process of

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A criminology of moral order

social ordering, I also create a perspective that, in my opinion, fits the current context. I search for a viable position between David Hume’s famous concept of Sein und Sollen (how it is and how it ought to be) (Hume, 1740/1978). I try to describe the social development from a perspective of Das Können (so it could be). This is, in my opinion, the way in which social science can add to societal quality. In this book, I attempt to describe the moral ordering of our current society – or (to put it another way) the processes by which it is realized. In so doing, I become part of the pragmatism, but I do adopt a particular stance. Instead of asking the practical question ‘What works?,’ I ask the empirical-analytical question ‘What is at work here?’ In that sense, one can speak of meta-pragmatism. I examine the manner in which ordering occurs, relating the moral perspective to institutional organization. Understanding that process better is an alternative to the politics of angst and the alarming reactions to it. Attempts to create order are legitimate and necessary, and sometimes take on distorted forms. How can we interpret this in a way that gives some ideas for improvement – or even transformation?

A glimmer of hope In this chapter, I have introduced the topics of this book on the moral order of our times: a network society, the secular condition, superdiversity, individualized morality and the dominance of the security issue. Western societies can be characterized with three words: complexity without direction. With digitalization as a driving force, the social order of our times has completely changed compared to the ideologically organized world of some decades ago: ‘we don’t live in an era of transformations, we have to deal with the transformation of an era’ (Rotmans, 2017). It is quite ambitious, and pretentious also, to write a synthetic monograph on the moral order that comes with this new social ordering. But I think it is necessary to overcome some scientific shyness. I prefer trying to describe the societal landscape as a whole, rather than fixating on the individual shrubs, plants and flowers separately. The secular networked Western societies have trouble in determining their position in an altered context of complexity without direction. Have we evolved into hyper-consumerists in a neoliberal economy without much depth and inspiration at all? In Chapter 8, the concluding chapter, I try to get a deeper understanding of what it means to live in a ‘liquid society’ (Bauman, 2000). Is the obsession with security

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A conceptual exploration of moral space

and regulation the only answer to complexity without direction? Or is there another way to look at the moral order of a network society? Instead of combating the fear of chaos, we would do better to use the dynamic organizing forces of complex systems. In the emergence of ordering patterns – compare the flock of starlings on the cover of this book – there is a serious alternative way for the security obsession. I end the book with a rather normative and hopeful diagnosis of the state of the Western world in radical times. Morality is not a ‘natural’ given any more, but must be understood as emerging from the ethical and normative buzz that arises from an improvising society. This emerging morality is fuelled by inspiring stories, moments of ‘fullness’ (Taylor’s term for our moral or spiritual feelings; 2007: 6-7), and practices under the condition of the rule of law that respect human diversity and put clear boundaries on subversive actions. We do not need to wait for new grand narratives or comprehensive ideals. We can start today. There is a glimmer of hope in our daily practices, in which public morality appears as an effect of the interplay between private inspiration and public organizations.

13

PART I

Complexity without direction

TWO

Social order in a network society Several years ago, I attended a lecture by an expert in governance who had researched the systems and processes in a large city.6 He discussed the city’s multi-level governance structure, the collaboration between public and private agencies, and the hopeless tangle of projects and initiatives. There was no end to his descriptions of what was going on. We waited for the conclusion, which finally appeared on the last slide of his PowerPoint presentation. His diagnosis was splashed across the screen in capital letters: COMPLEXITY! The expert looked triumphantly around the hall after unveiling his ultimate finding, while the audience stared back at him somewhat dumbfounded. The simple truth is not always intrinsically convincing. Cynicism is not appropriate here. Due to technological revolutions and globalized economic success, Western societies are so complex that many politicians and officials in government and public institutions often seem to just muddle through. As Lindblom noted in 1959, there is an enormous amount of improvisation going on.7 This managerial impotence does not develop in a vacuum. It has its counterpart in a much wider area of social uncertainty. Many organizations have difficulty in defining their function, while their professional staff members are looking for normative guidance in their work. There are great aspirations and good intentions, but these are matched by insecurity and uncertainty. The question is: how does such a world without boundaries organize itself socially?

Dynamics and institutions This book is not just about order, but actually more about ordering. The process itself is important. The relatively coherent ideological order of a great deal of the 20th century – although ranging from extreme right to extreme left – has been replaced by less collective forms. How are we to understand these new forms, which are characterized This chapter is a development of parts of chapters 1, 6 and 8 of The improvising society (Boutellier, 2013). 7 This article by Lindblom (1959) has become one of the most cited articles in public administration studies. 6

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A criminology of moral order

by great complexity and a plethora of moral forms? A community of people cannot do without social ordering, in terms of organization and normative direction. In the past decades, the existing order has been seriously shaken up. Not many social structures are left standing. But that is not to say that there have been no replacements. Social reality is renewing itself. The question of social order needs to be understood using different vocabularies. In a world without boundaries, social order develops through a multitude of practices, relations and mentalities, and is characterized by the speed and vitality of the ordering processes. It is paired with strong emotions and social strife – both constructive and destructive. Social order is giving permanent form to relationships among people in ‘liquid’ conditions (Zygmunt Bauman’s term – Bauman, 2000). Yet a liquid society is not simply liquid. There are relatively solid institutions, such as law, business, education, the medical industry and the physical infrastructure. Schuyt (2009) speaks of ‘buttresses of the society’. These institutions are not inviolable, and even they are under pressure from the maelstrom of individualization, technological change and globalization. Yet they are still standing, sometimes because they have braced themselves, and sometimes because they go with the flow. The new ordering of society, in other words, develops around solid yet adaptive institutions. The popular image of a horizontal, nonhierarchical world needs to be expanded by those moments of ordering that call on power, authority or institutional gravitas. The image of a liquid society should be amended, by noting that the solidity of institutions has not disappeared, but has found new patterns in which to function.8 This is all about the ordering of nodes in a broader environment. Nodes (identities of different weights) point to other nodes (people, organizations, institutions), and together they form a three-dimensional fabric with centres of gravity that pull and give direction: a network society. New conditions require new forms of ordering. After the community, with its mechanical order, and society, with its organic order, we speak of a network, which realizes its social order via improvisation. A new form of society is developing within networked structures – a social ordering by nodes and the relations in between them. These can take on any imaginable shape, depending on the movements of the adjoining (horizontal and vertical) connections. Networks can be seen not as

For a better understanding of the ‘pattern-oriented approach to complexity’, see Pieters (2010). 8

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Social order in a network society

the cause, but as the solution to complexity, provided they are given normative direction from explicit identities. But what are the formal characteristics of this nodal universe? There are new global relations, new forms of production and consumption, and new social conditions, all of which are based on a new resource – information (after Castells, 2000a: 500). All these innovations, sociologically speaking, fall within the concept of the network society. Nodes and links are the seemingly intangible components of current society. The observation that we live in a network society is not particularly new; it could even be viewed as somewhat old-fashioned. ‘Network’ (the noun) has become a basic concept in the natural and social sciences, economics and politics. It is also playing an increasingly larger role in everyday life. ‘Networking’ (the verb) has morphed into a social skill. No matter how (un)fashionable ‘networking’ might seem, it points to a social reality that reaches far beyond cocktail parties and golf courses. Every internet user understands intuitively what it means. Social organizations understand the need to expand their ‘links’ to other ‘nodes’. Social ordering has now entered the era of the nodal universe. Complexity contains more order than we are inclined to think, but it requires a different sort of vocabulary. To that end, I call on network science and chaos theory, along with the science of complex systems. First, I look at the information age and its networking mindset, then I examine three tenets from the study of complex systems: structure, synchrony and stability.

The information age For an enlightening description of the ‘world without boundaries’, I begin with the work of the Catalan sociologist Manuel Castells. In the 1990s, he wrote three massive volumes on The information age (revised edns 2000a, 2000b, 2004), which are a major landmark in sociology. Castells analyzed the changes in the economy, politics, culture, and the relations between states, organizations and citizens, and he placed them convincingly within the Information Technology Paradigm. Castells was the author who analyzed in detail the comprehensive term ‘information age’. His analysis is still most relevant, because it informs us about the conditions of network society.

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A criminology of moral order

A different space Information technology facilitates a process of increasing globalization and individualization. The importance of this process cannot be overestimated: ‘a third revolution’ after that of the steam engine and electricity (Castells, 1996/2000a). The information age opens up a new space; Castells calls this the ‘space of flows’. This space arises between nodal points that are connected to each other. This ‘space of flows’ differs from the ‘space of places’, which is constructed and experienced physically. Societies are increasingly organizing themselves in the flows between the nodes – flows of capital, information, technology, interaction among organizations, of images, sounds and symbols, and of people (Castells, 2000a: 442). The new modes of being that arise from this ‘virtual reality’ have major consequences for social bonds. In fact, they form a threat to traditional communities, cultures, neighbourhoods and families. Together these form the ‘space of places’ that offers people peace, security and shelter. There is a direct link between these bonds and physical places. These physical institutions have not disappeared, but are now part of a new world of (social) media, mobility and flexibility (see also Sennett, 1998). Identity formation, based on functions and community, has been replaced with more fluid forms of identity production. Networks organize themselves around the individual and his or her physical body. Consider, for example, the culture of the ‘designer body’ and the dominant role of sports – and its total opposite, the body-concealing burqa and niqab. The dismantling of old social structures does not happen without a struggle – the network society creates discontent and resistance. In The power of identity, Castells (1997/2004) describes the countermovements called forth by the network society. Many have organized themselves around ‘primary identities’, such as religion, ethnicity and nationality. This explains the fundamentalism among Christians in the United States, and among Muslims both in the West and in the Muslim world. It explains today’s identity politics in general. There are also new collective identities, such as the environmental movement. ‘Our societies are constituted by the interaction between the “net” and “the self ”’ (Castells, 1998/2000b: 383) – and by the collective institutions that arise from that, I would like to add. The most dramatic development, according to Castells (2004: 133ff.), is that which takes place around the nation state. Networks create forms of power outside the state – international networks of capital, production, communication, organized crime, multinational

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Social order in a network society

institutions, supranational military powers, non-governmental organizations, transnational religions, international opinion groups, terrorist groups, and other social movements. At the national level, we see a similar shift to local powers, introverted communities, new tribal bonds, cults and gangs. The state is ‘too small to handle global forces, yet too big to manage people’s lives’ (Castells, 2004: 337). No matter how, the modern state must relate to the complexity of global and local networks. A networked state, which can only survive when connected to other nodes, is emerging (Castells, 2004: 130). This impacts and changes the state’s legitimacy for intervention – from representation of the will of the people to the capacity to bring forth order out of complexity. Governments are only partially successful in these endeavours, and this undermines their political credibility. This can be seen daily in social media. The electorate is becoming increasingly unpredictable, there is more room for single-issue parties, and there is increasing scrutiny of politicians’ integrity. This does not, in my view, mean that government has become irrelevant; perhaps the opposite is the case. Although the state has lost its central position, it remains one of the last beacons in the storm of globalization. This fundamental contradiction defines the current state of politics – it must navigate between being impotent and enforcing, between giving space and creating order. We can see this happen in euroscepticism and the resulting Brexit. Saskia Sassen (2006), the globalization specialist, regards the state not as a victim of, but rather as a prerequisite for, globalization. Territory, legislation, economy, security, authority and membership are all national constructs on which the process of globalization takes place. Sassen (2006: 343) thinks that Castells’ macro-perspective has caused him to overlook the fact that globalization is a form of ‘denationalization’. This can be highly selective – it might, for example, affect only the financial sector – while there is also a policy of renationalization as related to the immigration issue. The national level has not been eliminated, but rather has acquired a different meaning. Sassen’s (2006: 379ff.) detailed analysis shows that the digital era offers the potential to act both globally and locally. The nation state continues to perform a key role but, simultaneously, that role is changing profoundly. Brexit can be judged as the result of the longing for a vital and protecting nation state. Other authors also emphasize the continuing importance of the state. It represents symbolic power and cultural authority. The state has the law as the source of its legitimacy; the government can coordinate and inform. If it comes to it, the state also has the power of the sword – the monopoly of violence in the police, the judicial system and the

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A criminology of moral order

military (as argued by Crawford, 2006; Loader and Walker, 2006). We could say that, along with Sassen and others, Castells should not exaggerate. Developments flow from the neighbourhood to the world and then back again. It is here that we encounter the grotesque word ‘glocalization’ (Robertson, 1992), in which nation states continue to play a complicated intermediary role between local and global interests. Living together in networks In his three-volume work, Castells sketches a radically changing world, but also one of local deterioration. He portrays impotent states and alienated citizens. The information age fragments, the network society is disordered, and the ensuing reactions are rigid and intolerant. Globalized individualization leads ultimately to chaos, which only the most cheerful of intellectuals regard as an inviting prospect. One might even ask if the world without boundaries can be understood in anything other than negative terms. Yet information technology, globalization and individualization create a different world, but not necessarily a chaotic society. What we have to do is learn how to perceive it and how to understand the new order. Let me explore this further, with the help of Jan van Dijk (2006), who criticized the ’one-dimensional’ character of Castells’ analyses, because it suggested that the network carriers – individuals, groups, organizations – are no longer important, almost as if they ceased to exist. An all-engulfing ‘space of flows’ is not a realistic representation, in van Dijk’s opinion. The essence of a network is connection; more specifically, connecting creates an opening. van Dijk regards this as ‘the secret of networking as an organizing principle’ (2006: 30). ‘Opening’ offers enormous potential for the organization of independent units. It creates possibilities for units to adapt to their environment, and this – which is important here – leads to the production of order. van Dijk chose an approach that begins with the elements or units (individuals, households, organizations), which are then connected. The network society is ‘a social formation with an infrastructure of social and media networks enabling its prime mode of organization at all levels’ (van Dijk, 2006: 20). In today’s culture, networks of individuals form the basis for societal organization. This is in contrast to ‘mass societies’, in which the collective organizes the individual. The historical uniqueness of this form of organization can possibly be contested – there have always been networks (see Ferguson, 2018). But the scale and size of cooperation

22

Social order in a network society

have grown enormously (van Dijk, 2006: 21-3). Mass society was characterized by a high degree of internal connectedness and limited openness to the outside world. The pillarization (that is the juxtaposed grouping of the people by denomination or ideology: catholic, protestant, socialist and so on) of Dutch society in the 20th century is a good example, like the class-based society in Great Britain. In contrast, the structure of the network society is less intensely collectivized; it is polycentric, not centralized. van Dijk rejects too radical ideas about the network society. It is not the ideal democratic society, but neither is it a world without social cohesion. He gives his view of the network society in a list of ten points (2006: 37ff.), which I synthesize later in this chapter. In the network society, relations between elements or units are increasingly important, but the elements themselves remain important too, even as they remain linked to their physical environment. The number of direct relations increases via both social and media networks. This creates a new social infrastructure, in which the media and the internet start to function as an independent entity. Interactions in the network society are multilateral and intensive, with new forms of organization that vary along such dimensions as central/decentral, open/closed, and scale magnification/reduction. These organizational forms can no longer be guided bureaucratically; instead, they are ‘infocratic’ (originally Zuurmond, 1994): governing by information. To reduce complexity, networks must be controlled and coded – the opposite of the much-desired informal decision making. This leads to increasing selectivity and the exclusion of units from access to networks. Think of the tendency to gather in ‘virtual social bubbles’. Relations in a network society are ultimately relatively uncertain; there is a high probability of ‘hypes’, political earthquakes and social eruptions. The network society is a reality. But just as Sassen (2006) emphasizes that the nation state continues to play an important role (albeit a different one), van Dijk asks us to focus on the continuing relevance of the physical nodes, be they individuals, households or organizations. Let me add to that the overarching level of the social institutions – the legal system, education, healthcare, business, and the like. Social order in a complex world without direction is still based on institutions, even though these institutions must function in a totally new context. van Dijk puts overblown expectations for the network society in perspective, and nor does he agree with the image of an all-devouring, all-fragmenting globalization.

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A criminology of moral order

Social consequences We should not make the world without boundaries seem newer than it is, yet the social consequences of the technologically driven development of the network society are nevertheless enormous. With the help of van Dijk, let me list a number of them. First, one speaks of an increasing integration of techniques into a sort of super-technology – ‘a fully integrated and all-embracing infrastructure of the network society’ (van Dijk, 2006: 43). This concerns information technology, communications technology, biotechnology and nanotechnology. This super-technology has advantages, but it also contributes to the growth of the ‘surveillance society’ (Lyon, 2001; see also Chapter 5). In economy, one talks of a new dimension – a faster one that is independent of time and place. The new economy based on information as resource has already taken off since the 1990s. The disadvantages of this need no elaboration, but the social aspects are relevant. Classical steering mechanisms (bureaucracy, physical infrastructure and mass communication) are less applicable. For a very long time, office work was slower and more expensive than manufacturing, but the era of Taylorism (Taylor, 1911) is long past.9 The office is now an information system, ‘generating, producing, collecting, processing, multiplying, distributing, storing, retrieving and interpreting data’ (van Dijk, 2006: 69). Politics and government are also re-forming themselves according to network logic. van Dijk makes an important point, when he proposes that the network society not only has horizontal but also vertical relations between nodes. The state is among the strongest (combination of) actors (2006: 101), yet the state’s organization has changed radically. The central characteristics of bureaucracy, such as hierarchy and central organization, are under pressure. In principle, van Dijk (2006: 125) thinks the state can go in one of two directions – towards a stronger state under the aegis of security and effectiveness (at the time of writing, think of Putin, Trump, Xi Jinping and Erdogan), or towards a weaker one that allows a great deal of room for the market and for civil society. The relation between the government and the individual citizen deserves special attention. This falls under the heading of privacy, a concept that can be defined in many ways. On the one hand, there is freedom from interference by the state; on the other hand, there is a right to a Taylorism is a way of production in which the working process is divided in small segments which can be standardized, named after F.W. Taylor (1911). 9

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Social order in a network society

private life (also in regard to fellow citizens). The essence of a network, however, is openness. More opportunities for using and misusing it keep emerging – tracking technology, data mining, profiling, and such like. This is not just a matter of state power, but also of commercial powers like Google (searching), Facebook (sharing) and Amazon (buying). It would seem that privacy should be one of the great worries of the network society, yet the opposite seems to be the case (see Chapter 5). With respect to social infrastructure, it is important to note that information technology not only leads to an expansion of the world, but there is also a contraction, a reduction of the time–space dimensions. This duality is apparent in the relationship between public space and the private domain. There is talk of the ‘privatization’ of public spaces, and at the same time of the ‘colonization’ of individual lives (van Dijk, 2006: 161). Intimidating behaviour by youths on the street leads to, for example, social workers coming to inspect what happens behind their closed doors (van Steden and Jones, 2008). The mobile phone may have given the individual the public space, but the internet has pushed right through to the bedroom. Although ‘blurring spheres of living’ are evident, talk of the community vanishing goes too far for van Dijk. Instead, we should think of a new form of community life, somewhat diffuse, virtual and on a small scale. In that sense, social networks form the opposite of individualization; they connect the smallest elements with each other – ‘being online may be fully social’ (van Dijk, 2006: 168). The new social capital seems to be just as educationally sensitive as many other forms: ‘more active offline ... more active online – and vice versa’ (Quan-Haase, cited by van Dijk, 2006: 169). In that regard, there seems to be a trichotomy rather than a dichotomy – an information elite, the participating majority, and the excluded (van Dijk, 2006: 185; also van Dijk, 2005). To sum up, the network society contains many ambivalences: • social expansion (the World Wide Web) versus reduction of relations (‘virtual social bubbles’); • colonization of private life versus privatization of the public space; • inclusion versus exclusion; • homogeneity of one’s own network versus heterogeneity among the clusters; • integration versus differentiation; • unity versus fragmentation.

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A criminology of moral order

It is important to acknowledge this duality of the network society, not just to temper exaggerated expectations, but also to avoid cultural pessimism. More information and more communication do not lead to a better or a worse world. They do, however, lead to a different world, one with its own social morphology.

The logic of networks In order to explore this other world further, let me make an excursion into the science of complex systems. Opinions vary about the legitimacy of such an exercise (Stewart, 2001), yet there are good reasons why the exchange of knowledge between the ‘hard’ and the ‘soft’ sciences should be encouraged (Urry, 2003: 16ff). To begin with, according to Nobel laureate and patriarch of the field Ilya Prigogine (Prigogine and Stengers, 1984), complex systems are valid for all populations showing statistical probability, and that includes humans. Next to that, there are many hybrid phenomena, in which a distinction between nature and culture is no longer relevant, for example health, environment, the internet, transportation and security. The study of complex systems offers the potential to better understand nodal reality. I will summarize three important qualities of complexity: structure, synchrony and stability. Structure The logic of networks is of increasing interest in biology, mathematics and the natural sciences, economics, sociology, and the study of organization and governance.10 In genetic engineering, for example, the C. elegans (a tiny nematode) has 20,000 genes; humans have 30,000. That does not seem to be much of a difference, until we realize that the difference is not really in the number of genes, but in the possible relations among them. In these relations, humans are 103,000 more complex than the minuscule worm (Barabási, 2002: 197). This complexity is not an arbitrary piece of data. Relationships within a network are not shared at random; they are decided by a network structure. The phenomenal speed at which computer viruses spread, for example, is only understandable because of how networks are ordered. Some nodes are more important than others, simply because they have more links to other nodes. These are hubs, or central nodes. This section draws on network scientist Albert-Lászlo Barabási’s book Linked (2002). 10

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Social order in a network society

Every individual (person or organization) is the ultimate central hub in its network. Some hubs are connected to other hubs. There are also connectors, which bind one cluster of nodes to another. Computer viruses spread rapidly via hubs and connectors. This network structure was also responsible for the rapid spread of HIV among homosexuals (through a certain number of ‘hubs’ with hundreds of sexual contacts). It also explains why we are connected, via six handshakes, with every other world citizen – the well-known ‘six degrees of separation’ (an idea started with the research of Milgram, 1967). Networks contain a hidden logic of logarithmic patterns. There are also ‘scale-free networks’, in which there are no underlying gradations. These networks could only be studied properly with the advent of the internet. According to Babarási, ‘complexity has a strict architecture ... networks’ (2002: 7), ‘in which the truly central position ... [is] reserved for those nodes that are simultaneously part of many large clusters’. These are found in all kinds of systems, from economics to human cells (Babarási, 2002: 55ff.). This is why every network has its own structure. Hub formation can only be understood through the phenomenon of ‘preferential attachments’. Every node acquires new links in proportion to its existing links. The more relations it has, the more it will gain. This logarithmic pattern explains how growing networks acquire structure. Other factors also play a role, for example the fitness of a node, or its ability to compete for links. There is competition in networks for links, because more links mean a greater chance of survival. This is also an accepted principle in business – external relations and careful reputation management are important. Connections between nodes can go in two directions, but usually they go in only one. This simple principle governs how directed networks are formed, which then ultimately develop into clusters, communities and continents. Network science is increasingly coming to understand networks as structured systems. One talks of stability as a combination of the dynamic behaviour and robustness of a network, tolerance of flaws in the network, and the effectiveness of attacks on it. A network’s robustness is based on hubs and connectors. The potential to switch off hubs selectively makes a network vulnerable. An attack on a terrorist network, for example, would target the hubs (key individuals) in an effort to bring it to a point where its survival is under critical threat. Another approach is to starve the hub of resources, so that a domino effect or ‘cascade of failures’ (Barabási, 2002: 119) occurs. Yet there is always the possibility that new networks will form. The most effective way to undermine a network is by offering competing connections that are more attractive and constructive (Barabási, 2002:

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A criminology of moral order

224). Networks seem to have an inherent structure that allows for a new way of thinking about ordering. Synchrony The structures discussed earlier, which have been discovered in the relatively young science of networks, are built on insights from chaos theory (especially Gleick 1991). Meteorologist and mathematician Ed Lorenz (1961) discovered that weather forecasts were missing linear causal connections when he entered two almost comparable conditions in his computer. He was shocked to get completely different results, caused by a minuscule difference in data. This led to many publications, and ultimately his famous lecture on ‘Predictability’, in which he stated that the movement of a butterfly’s wing in Brazil could lead to a tornado in Texas (Lorenz, 1979). Many tiny effects from previous events can lead to enormous consequences. Many disparate elements can, at a higher level, result in a change in ordering (for example, the grains of sand in a shifting sand dune). This was the beginning of chaos theory. A crucial part of chaos theory is the idea that ordering cannot be explained through the behaviour of individual elements, but only through their mutually simultaneous activity. This is called ‘synchrony’, or ‘sync’ for short (Strogatz, 2003). Why do fireflies light up at the same time and in the same rhythm? How does a flock of starlings move as a single entity? How are glaciers formed, and what are the dynamics of traffic flows? The phenomenon of synchrony points to oscillators, which can physically or chemically influence each other. Such synchronic activity is everywhere, from the cosmos to our muscles, for instance in the thousands of cells that keep the heart beating. ‘At the heart of the universe is a steady, insistent beat: the sound of cycles in sync’ (Strogatz, 2003: 1). Such systems are able to organize themselves (Strogatz, 2003: 21), and this can be simulated on a computer. A chaotic situation can synchronize and transition to order. This happens in a non-linear manner, so there is no single cause with a single effect. There is a multitude of connections, all acting on each other. This means that, in principle, ordering is unpredictable – there is only a thin line between chaos and order. Order is the result of many interactions that show ‘a glimpse of some kind of order’ (Pieters, 2010: 19) on an aggregate level. Between absolute certainty and complete chaos lies a vast area of complexity that can go in many directions. ‘Synchronized chaos brings us face-to-face with a dazzling new kind of order in the universe, or at least one never recognized before’ (Strogatz, 2003: 185).

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Social order in a network society

When one oscillator moves another over a critical threshold, they begin to vibrate in sync. This is also evident in human behaviour, for example in traffic patterns, on stock exchanges, at raves and riots, and with singing and clapping. Synchrony seems to be second nature to us (Strogatz, 2003: 108); we tend to move together (the wave in a football stadium), perhaps even in political landslides. Mark Granovetter (1978) postulated that riots occur when individual decisions are influenced by the behaviour of others. If the critical threshold of those present is distributed in series, then after a first vibration (which is always necessary), a person with a critical threshold of 1 joins in, followed by a person with a critical threshold of 2, and so on. This is how a single intention can lead to major consequences. After a sufficient number of connections there comes a tipping point,11 which can shift a system quickly. But if the compaction is too great, a second tipping point may be triggered and the phenomenon recedes quickly. An example of this is a fad or craze, which vanishes as quickly as it begins. Traffic flow also has optimal densities. At 35 cars per lane per mile, there is an ordered stream, but a density above or below that leads to a chaotic pattern (Strogatz, 2003: 269). This sort of human behaviour is relatively involuntary, but most human action is intentional. Free will is not really compatible with directed synchrony; this is why totalitarian regimes use synchrony (Strogatz, 2003: 273). A science of spontaneous order seems to fit the spirit of the times, as Strogatz suggests (2003: 230). ‘The propensity to change is the tendency of nature to produce order out of chaos’, according to van Dijk (2006: 30). The core idea of order from chaos is that at a certain moment – the critical point – all units in a system act as though they are communicating, although their interactions are strictly local (Watts, 2003). This critical point occurs when there are sufficient long-range connections with a large number of local units, which then organize themselves in clusters (groups, organizations, communities). Small worlds thus become connected to other small worlds. In this way, a small unit can set a certain change in motion, which in turn leads to a major transition. Stability Network theory has taught us how networks consist of nodes, and these nodes vary in their degrees of importance. Chaos theory has put us on the track of how major orderings or changes can result from 11

Popularized by Malcolm Gladwell (2000).

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small events, and how synchronization with adjacent elements is a decisive factor. Thus we have structure, and we understand how it can organize itself. To fully understand the social ordering in a network society, I regard a third phenomenon as also important. Why is it that structures are not in a permanent state of flux, switching back and forth between chaos and order? How does stability emerge on the edge of chaos? The concept of autopoiesis – or self-creation – is important in understanding this. In 1961, the Austrian cyberneticist Heinz von Voerster (with G. Pask) published ‘A predictive model for self-organizing systems’ (according to Veldman, 1995). This model introduced the notion that external disturbances can lead to a more orderly structure than before, or ‘order from noise’. It seems counterintuitive – we tend to think that disturbance always causes imbalance. The improved situation, however, emerges through ‘iterative loops’, in which a fixed operation is repeated until a better balance is achieved. This is how a living organism, which is composed of dying cells, is able to reproduce itself. The Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela (1980) called this phenomenon ‘autopoiesis’: operations within a system flow from a structure built by previous operations. We are speaking here of relatively closed systems – relative because (in contrast to inanimate matter) they react to the environment. To put it another way, they continue to adapt as long as their ‘self-referential mechanism’ is not impaired. In other words, the systems can change themselves under the influence of external stimuli, but the manner in which structure is determined does not change. Large systems form each other’s own conditions. They stimulate each other in a process of stable change. This involves what is called the thesis of parallelism (Veldman, 1995) – interaction is a synchronic rather than a serial process. The sociologist Niklas Luhmann (1990) has applied autopoiesis to social systems. Luhmann (1990) proposed that individuals tend to reduce complexity by use of expectations. These expectations select and coordinate communication with others. Good collaboration is when an optimal exchange of information about each other’s expectations occurs. Luhmann calls the totality of expectations on an aggregated level a social system of the first order (direct interaction between units). With increasing complexity, subsystems of the second order are formed, such as law, morality, religion, and many others. He regards all these subsystems as autopoietic, or self-reproducing. Each subsystem has its own parameter (modus operandi) for selecting and reconstructing information due to its expectations.

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In the political subsystem, the parameter is the distribution of power; the economy ‘thinks’ in terms of cost-benefit calculations; law is a binary system that makes distinctions between what is right and what is wrong. In this way, systems of social significance are selforganizing according to their core functions. External influences are reconstructed within the system’s own structure of meaning. Unless a system crashes completely because of external forces, it can only evolve in a limited sense. This notion can be applied at both the societal and the individual level – social and psychological autopoiesis, which we observe in interactions with the previously given internal references. Gunther Teubner (1993) worked out this idea for the legal system, which has an inherent logic that continually creates new rules of law – the renewal of the system is part of, or even the prerequisite for, its continuity.

Jazzy structures The information age reveals a very different design of social reality. Many phenomena in contemporary society can be explained by its networked character; I regard the formal attributes of network logic as important in expanding our understanding. They inspire new insights into the ordering possibilities of networks, including human variants. We now understand that networks are not unordered totalities of random links or connections between nodes, but that they are built of structures in which hubs play a central role. Shared systems, clusters, communities and continents all arise within complex systems. We have also gained some insight into the way changes can occur in network systems. A small oscillation or situational change can trigger a cascade of changes in an entire system via links with its immediate neighbours. This is how a network, via its hubs, undergoes a rapid and radical transformation. This form of change or ordering occurs at the edge of chaos. This is why I have also focused on the stabilizing principles of systems. A system is capable of a certain amount of change, due to its selective interaction with other systems. Stimuli from the outside lead to reordering and even strengthening of the system, but not to changes within the system’s parameters. The crucial point is that complex forms of ordering can occur because of the structure of networks, the synchrony of operations and the stability of systems. Let me emphasize that only a selection of concepts have been chosen from the library of complexity theory for discussion here. Furthermore, the insights as previously discussed are purely formal; they lack the moral implications

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that apply to human networks, and therein lies the distinction between natural and human systems. I am wary of too uncritical an application of natural phenomena to social systems, but at the same time, we have learned that chaos can be orderly, if we view it from a different perspective. In the previous section, we examined three attempts to organize complexity without direction: structure, synchrony and stability. I have shown that we may be dealing with a new morphology, which allows for a different idea about ordering. Social ordering can be viewed as a relatively autonomous process, as a kind of logic hiding in the clutter of today’s society. It appears when one speaks of the ‘urgency of problems’, the ‘necessity of dealing with them’ and ‘direction in cooperation’. But, the tenets of structure, synchrony and stability are not yet able to yield any insights into the moral design of human complexity. The new morphology should not make us blind to power struggles, the role of authority, and political opinions about equality and justice; these are important aspects of human society. I bring these together in the concept of an ‘improvising society’, to reflect and clarify the ordering process in this complexity without direction. ‘Improvising’ seems to capture the essence of how we organize our network relations. The combination of the words ‘improvisation’ and ‘organization’ seems to create an oxymoron. Improvisation seems to be synonymous with spontaneity; one thinks of the soloist freely conjuring music from an instrument as if by magic, yet this is a limited representation of what is actually happening in improvised music (for example Kernfield, 1995). The soloist’s spontaneity takes place within the context of his or her fellow musicians, the key in which the music is played, the theme, the motif, the progressions, the intro and the finish. The comparison between society and playing music has been made before, as has the comparison with jazz. It is often used in organization sciences (for example Barrett, 2012). But I would like to make a sociological claim here: that improvising is at the heart of a network society. The social institutions are still standing, but they must move with the times. Society no longer shapes itself around institutions; rather, the institutions must fold themselves around the events in an impulsive and fragmented society. They must adjust to what I call ‘complexity without direction’. There is great administrative pressure, there are complex cooperative relationships and there is competition, yet there are precious few communal ideals, shared norms or agreed courses of action. This leads to feelings of being adrift, insecure and abandoned.

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Our current society is not easily captured in a few brushstrokes. Of course, that was never the case, but the current fragmentation sharpens the contrast, as does the corresponding appeal for its repair. Yet it is this very concept of ‘one whole’ – a single entity – that severely hinders us. Our national societies are single entities to a certain extent, but they are not ‘all of a piece’. They are made up of many entities, which in turn can be parts of other entities. So, the whole of society is composed of various wholes, which also contain other parts and wholes. This is an unbounded and fragmented order. Jazzy structures can be difficult to grasp, given their myriad variations, but they are not lacking in organization or continuity.

The art of improvisation The concept of an ‘improvising society’ offers a new perspective on complexity without direction, while also hinting at an implied criticism. Call it ‘positive cultural criticism’, if you will. In the improvising society, one often has to row with whatever oars are available, to use a Dutch expression. Improvisation can even be an excuse for just messing around: “Oh, well. We live in a wing-it-asyou-go society anyway”. A clear narrative is missing, and this can make us indifferent to everything and everybody. Who cares? From that perspective, an improvising society can evoke frightening images of ‘every man for himself ’, with winners and losers. Yet I regard it as an image of organized freedom in jazzy structures, and especially one with the potential for order. When successful, it is perhaps the highest possible degree of human organization. Improvisation always happens within a certain context. Even the soloist must take into account the instruments, the acoustics, the stage setting, the public, as well as previous experiences, memories and aesthetic preferences (Cobussen, 2009). Improvisation cannot exist outside of context, and the same is true for other forms of music or art, or culture in general. Spontaneity and creative freedom are distinguishing characteristics of improvisation, yet at the same time improvisation is bound by the principles within which it occurs. Attempts to break free from all conventions or agreements are illusory. The music can be completely experimental, but not completely chaotic. By definition, the musician is bound by what music sounded like in the past. Improvised music is both freedom and organization – an analogy that also fits the organization of networks. Let us look at several idealtypical characteristics. The improvising society gives the individual

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room to excel, and that space is intentionally created and given by others who are supportive at that point in time. This collaboration involves fine-tuning through feedback mechanisms, which are usually based on agreed themes, repeating motifs and general principles. One needs to know what one is about. Trust and reciprocity are involved. If the investment is large, or the result unpredictable, then the need for control increases. The individual space then shrinks. There are good reasons for this, but a society that functions on a basis of distrust and control is not workable. It is also not habitable; it is a totalitarian state. An important characteristic of the improvising society is the assignment of roles. Just as the pianist is not expected to play the trumpet, social actors must know who they are and what others expect of them. Cooperation is hopeless if everyone tries to do the same thing. There must be a collective goal, but resources are not equally spread around. A productive collaboration is based on uniquely individual inputs, and those inputs should be positive. The participants must have something to offer: knowledge and experience, skills and ideas, ideals and opinions. Ideally, this characteristic keeps the improvising society from shifting into an ‘anything goes’ mode, which can happen on occasion. Role and capability come together to form what might be called identity, the idea of the uniqueness or singular nature or being of an individual (person, organization, society). The network society does not limit the formation of identity, but rather enhances it. Indeed, social media revolve around identity formation. Introducing spontaneity to a structure at just the right moment; creating identity in relation to tradition, knowledge and skills in order to excel; and repeating a motif or theme that resonates and thus creates a sense of community – these are all characteristics of the improvising society. There is one more characteristic that springs to mind. I call it leadership lite, as practised by the lead player, who sets the tone, harmony and direction for the band. That is a different kind of leadership from the ideologically inspired strong leaders of the 20th century. Although the yearning for such a leader still exists (the media logic demands vigour, for example), the practice of pragmatic governance is different. These characteristics seem quite idealistic and rather normative. Still, I am thinking of the empirical meaning that has to do with society’s actual organization – ‘this is how we live’. Our attempts at ordering our lives and practices are embedded in a larger framework. At the heart of the improvising society are feedback loops and strategies of alignment and fine-tuning. A successful improvisation comes into being through the alignment of all these factors in the environment, the experience and the consonance

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of playing together. Alignment implies structure, synchrony and selforganization. It creates ordering among identities, which I regard as the essence of the moral order. This insight makes it possible to reflect further, perhaps even speculatively, on social institutions and their politics.

The politics of an improvising society Given society’s institutional structure, which is based on its core functions, let me now return to the role of the government. Earlier in this chapter, I argued that the government’s prominence in the ordering process should not be underestimated. A meta-analysis of more than 800 scientific studies by Hill and Lynn (2005) also shows that hierarchical management by government remains dominant: the seemingly ‘paradigmatic’ shift away from hierarchical government toward horizontal governance (hence the increasing preference for ‘governance’ as an organizing concept) is less fundamental than it is tactical: new tools of administrative technologies are being added that facilitate public governance within a hierarchical system. (Hill and Lynn, 2005: 189) According to these authors, the state retains its central position, even though there are now new techniques and new relations between different actors. The state is expanding its sphere of influence, but is also losing its grip. ‘The King is dead, long live the extended royal family’ (Burris et al, 2008: 17). Political interest centres on the clout of this extended family, and its democratic control. Networks can lack politically legitimated ‘meta-governance’, as Sørenson called it (cited in van Steden, 2010). This should relate both to the new problems as well as the new opportunities contained in the improvising society. Problems and opportunities often have the same origin. An improvising society is concerned with three problem/opportunity dimensions. Excluding people versus opening networks The first problem/opportunity dimension is the risk of exclusion of other people because they do not fit in the value system of a network versus the possibility of being open to other people. We have seen from various

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perspectives that the network society creates a class of outsiders. Castells speaks of a ‘fourth world’ of people, who are not involved in the information society (2000b: 70-165). Luhmann (1990), whom we discussed earlier, also pointed out the danger of exclusion. This was in connection with the self-referential tendency of systems ‘to reconstruct external reality in conformity with the demands of internal coherence and cohesiveness’ (cited by Burris et al, 2008: 28). This is offset by the open character of the network society, which offers new possibilities for connecting with and embracing other people and their networks. The network society’s lack of boundaries in principle offers continual opportunities for making new contacts and connections, for example through social media. Nor should we underestimate the possibilities for the emergence of what have been called ‘lite’ communities, for example on the internet. At the same time, the improvising society does not mean the end of power relationships, inequality and injustice, and it can reproduce these in new forms. Hypercontrol versus diffusion of power and opportunities The second problem/opportunity dimension is hypercontrol versus diffusion of power and opportunities. Various authors (for example Wacquant, 2009) warn of a control society or the development of an authoritarian government. On the one hand, the dominance of the security discourse can, without doubt, take on more centralist and authoritarian features. On the other hand, permanent disruption is part of the improvising society’s complexity. In a world without boundaries, central control seems, by definition, to be impossible. The problem, however, is that a hybrid government often cannot act with sufficient decisiveness. This does not alter the fact that personal life is gradually being digitalized. This kind of ‘control’ is not so much the result of a totalitarian will to power (which has little chance in a complex democratic constitutional state) as the eager embrace of new technologies by administrators and citizens, either out of expediency or urgency. This kind of mechanism was described by Robert Reich (2007) in the rise of super-capitalism. Reich attributes this to the conflation of roles as citizen, employee, consumer and investor (for example in a pension fund), which makes opposition impossible. In an information state, the roles of citizen, consumer, potential victim and potential criminal all come together. This is Foucault’s dreaded culmination of the micro-physics of power (1977) or his concept of governmentality (1991).

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Fear of chaos versus trust in ordering The third problem/opportunity dimension concerns the fear of chaos versus trust in ordering. I have tried to defuse this fear, by pointing out the ordering processes that are at work, always and everywhere. As stated earlier, networks are not the source but the solution to complexity, even though they create a great deal of fuss and confusion. I specifically addressed the ambiguity in the emergence of order with the concept of improvisation. Processes of organization and disruption are continually on the agenda, and preferably lead (even if only temporarily) to fine-tuning processes that result in harmony, the feeling that ‘it is all right’. This popular phrase is a totally inadequate concept, yet I find it appropriate for describing how the fine-tuning of actors gives direction and creates momentum. I emphasize the importance of normative direction here, which I will examine in the next chapter.

Conclusion The term ‘improvising society’ contains numerous meanings; it is an ambivalent concept. There is the primary connotation of helping out – rowing with the oars we have, to use that Dutch expression again. New conditions compel us to action, first-aid fixes and managerial pressure; to an ad hoc policy, fumbling around, experimenting and overly hasty legislation. In that sense, improvisation is synonymous with makeshift, temporary and working with whatever is available. It refers to the impotence I discussed at the beginning of this book, which causes us to experience life as mainly chaotic. However, improvisation can also offer us a secondary perspective. I find it useful to regard improvisation as a metaphor for the social ordering of a world without boundaries. It is the human variant of complexity in nature. The improvising society thus refers to new social forms of processing alignment and fine-tuning. In both tightly structured and more fluid compositions, arrangements and spontaneous play produce a kaleidoscopic image of networks, clusters and subcultures. I think of the moments that we experience cooperation and collaboration in a positive sense. The improvising society reflects the new institutional relations. Institutions develop on the basis of tradition and renewal, and give society stability. The alignment of one actor (person, organization) with another actor, and vice versa, ad infinitum, is the ordering process of the current network society.

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The improvising society is governed in a hybrid combination of functional authority and synchronous movement. I regard improvisation as a metaphor, but one with a high degree of reality that can help us to understand the structure of moral space.

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THREE

The radical secularization of moral space Thinking about moral order means immediately also thinking about religion. Not that there are no moral viewpoints without reference to a God, but because historically and culturally religion dominates the moral space. All big cultures in history have had some kind of religious base, with many Gods or only one, with big narratives that are cruel and benign at the same time, with rituals, masses and services. I am talking about religion as giving direction, binding communities together in reference to a higher power. This dominance has changed over the last half-century, especially in European countries and in the former British colonies of Canada, Australia and New Zealand. For many people in the West, living in a society without a ruling God is self-evident. Most of the population does not attend a church, mosque, temple, synagogue or other place of worship. Religion plays a minor role in politics, and people’s religious experiences remain largely invisible. Nevertheless, many people consider themselves as more or less religious. ‘Spiritual’ is a commonly used word to describe one’s relation to higher matters, and that can have many sides. We see a lot of variance, for example around weddings, births and funerals. Sometimes the rituals are ancient. But in many cases, people give their own twist to their marriage or the departure of a beloved person. The sense of fullness (Taylor’s term for our moral or spiritual feelings; 2007: 6-7) seems to have gone underground and pops up only occasionally. We find it difficult to talk about religion. The Western farewell to God is surrounded by ambivalence, and so is its history.12 This history is long and has known many struggles. In a penetrating way, Nietzsche (1892) announced the death of God at the end of the 19th century. The social impact of the secularization process only really became visible in the 1960s. After the earlier separation of church and state, religion in the West also pulled back on a societal level. Historically and culturally that is quite a unique situation, about An interesting overview of positions in the sociology of religion is given in the first part of Turner (2011). 12

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which the last word has not yet been said. Many churches emptied, but attention to religion is everywhere. Is this because of Islam? How should we relate to religion and its new visibility? I consider secularization since the 1960s as a large-scale field experiment with morality. In this chapter, I try to get a grip on the moral conditions of secular society, by tracing its history. First I will sketch the importance of this topic.

Deep doubts Up to half a century ago, the set-up of moral space in Western countries was relatively clear. There was Christian dominance, split into various denominations. In addition, there were the large nonreligious movements such as socialism and liberalism, which were often organized according to the same model: great story, from top to bottom, strong local branching. Nowadays, Western culture knows a lot more variances: Catholicism, Protestantism, evangelism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Winti, Hare Krishna, old Christians and new Christians, Enlightenment fundamentalists and Muslim radicals; everything in between, inside or outside an organized place of worship, with or without God; religious or spiritual, ‘something’ or deeply faithful. That is perhaps the greatest characteristic of the secular condition: ‘faith’ is a kind of tangle nowadays. Much has been written about the background of the religioussecular state in the West. The usual starting point is the so-called secularization thesis, in which secularization is seen as the inescapable outcome of modernization. This thesis is a strong argument if we look at European history. In short, it reasons as follows. The Enlightenment (from the middle of the 17th century) made it mentally possible to think about man, nature and society next to God or without him. That huge thought jump was related to the great scientific discoveries in mathematics and physics, and the flourishing of the sciences that followed. They created the conditions for a massive welfare growth and the progressive ‘disenchantment’ of the world (a term of sociologist Max Weber). Secularization is an inevitable result of modernization. God became, in the words of Freud (1927), an illusion. As we will see later in this chapter, the secularization thesis is under attack. For now, I wish to note that the question of the consequences of the secularization process has become urgent, because Europe has to do with a relatively new religion. In the 1960s, when the West broke away from the organized Christian faith, the immigration of large

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groups of migrants also started, bringing with them their own religions. In particular, Islam grew in the West into an extensive ‘new’ religion. In the Netherlands, Islam has strived beyond Christianity as an active faith. More than 90% of the Dutch people of Turkish and Moroccan descent consider themselves to be Muslim, while mosque visits by the second generation are also increasing (Maliepaard and Gijsberts, 2012). Many of the new residents went along with the secular experiment (even though it is sometimes rather not publicly admitted). But an important part of that community stuck to the religious habit from their mother country or discovered it as a primary source of identity. Islam, like Christianity, is a house with many rooms. On religious, ethnic and cultural grounds a multitude of variants has developed. Religious conflict in Christianity has largely pacified; this is to a lesser extent true for Islam. Internationally, there are all kinds of struggles between interpretations of the Koran. Also, under Western Muslims we see the emergence of orthodox and radical variants, in which the claim to truth is a vital motive. Where the Western religious tangle was the outcome of saying goodbye to a claim to truth, for many Muslims the arguments are still fierce. Against this background, radical Islamic cells can develop, which direct themselves against the West. The West is confronted with (new) radical beliefs, which should have disappeared, according to the secularization thesis. The Western tolerance of faith – no matter what – is founded on a mentality of deep doubts, which resulted in the idea of postmodernism. We do not know what truth is and sometimes it is as if we do not want to know it any more. The Oxford English Dictionary chose ‘posttruth’ as the word of 2017. The Western attitude is pretty much: “Let everyone ‘in the name of God’ decide what she or he wants to believe in. But don’t bother me.” We can live without any claim to religious truth, although this often looks like a form of indifference. But how to respond to people who think differently? Many Muslims do not take it for granted that there is religious freedom as a result of a centuries-long secularization process. In this way, Islam shows the West that the death of God is not the obvious outcome of modernization. The populist reaction to this does not make things much better.

A history without God That we are living together without a common reference to God seems to be a feature of the last fifty years. But there is a long history which preceded it. This is, however, not uncontroversial – the historiography of secularization has many variants arguing about the depth of its roots

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and the scope of its consequences. We can go back to the previously mentioned Friedrich Nietzsche, who unmasked Christian morality as the hypocritical protection of weaklings. Or we can take the intellectual sources of the Enlightenment as a starting point of secularization. Through the successes of the sciences, people’s minds were primed for living together without God. We can go back even further, to the Renaissance, the period in which the classical texts of the Romans and the Greeks were rediscovered – people who lived without a monotheist faith. We can also focus on the Reformation from 1517. This made a direct relationship between man and God possible without the intervention of the (Roman) church. Gregory (2012) talks of ‘the unintended reformation’, claiming that the Protestant Reformation had unexpected outcomes. To understand the history of secularization better, I start with the controversial book Inventing the individual by the British-American political philosopher Larry Siedentop (2014). Siedentop, an outspoken liberal philosopher, considers secularization as the greatest achievement of European Christianity, as Christianity’s ‘gift to the world’ (Siedentop, 2014: 360). This view can be heard more often, but this author goes far back in his argument; he starts with Apostle Paul. He shows that the Middle Ages are unjustifiably seen as a dark period in European history. After the fall of the Roman Empire there was, in his opinion, a fierce battle on a decisive insight: the equality of every person as a child of God. This idea made every believer valuable, responsible and autonomous. In ancient thinking, inequality was a natural given: people were born inherently hierarchical. Christianity caused a total revolution. Around the figure of Jesus Christ a religion was developed, in which every human being was seen as a ‘child of God’: equal to each other and with a free will. That is, according to Siedentop (2014), the decisive jump in human heritage. Until then, this heritage was based on inequality and hierarchical relationships between and within families. For instance, the Greeks lived in a society of clans. That women and slaves did not participate in the polis13 was not an accidental side issue (as is often suggested), but was rooted in the foundations of the classic res publica.14 The majority of the population were simply not seen as human beings.

The Latin word for city, commonly used to refer to the democratic form of governance. 14 The Latin expression for public good – commonly used in relation to the state (republic). 13

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But in the Christian doctrine, every human being became part of God, and thus everyone is equal. In the Renaissance, there was a rediscovery of the classics, but this was – in Siedentop’s reasoning – combined with the Christian intuition of the equality of people. In his 2014 book, Siedentop puts a lot of effort into showing that in medieval monastery life, the equality before the law was prepared. In reference to this, the (Protestant) Reformation became possible, in which belief in God was proclaimed as an individual affair. The individual as the unit of the social – the characteristic of the Western lifestyle – was given with the New Testament, was treasured by the monks in the Middle Ages, combined with the classic insights in the Renaissance, underlined by the Reformation and illuminated by 17th-century thinkers. The Enlightenment showed comprehensive discoveries in science, art and politics. The French and American Revolutions led to the rise of nation states, in which secular power was separated from ecclesiastical power (also in the US). Western secular human rights are thus the result of a mix of Christian thinking and enlightened rationality. With this brief summary, I am doing insufficient justice to Siedentop’s passionate argument, and certainly to the complex history of Christianity and secularism. I especially want to show that the secularization of the last decades is not a whim, but can be traced back to early Christianity. The question is: why is that history important for contemporary times?

Radically secular Siedentop (2014) has a purpose with his analysis. By anchoring liberalism in early Christianity, he hopes to make liberalism ideologically more robust. Western culture is, in his opinion, insufficiently defended against attacks from the inside and from the outside (for instance from Islam). According to him, the argument for equality and autonomy is to be found in the Christian foundation of the secular individual: we are equals regardless of gender or social function. The Christian West created fundamental rights for the individual separate from the involuntary links of family, church, tribe or caste. Siedentop is concerned that we defend that liberalism in terms of the opponents, as if Western thought is empty and amoral, only driven by the economics of consumerism. Siedentop’s arguments are controversial. After all, the religion of Christianity is certainly associated with hierarchy and inequality. It is a well-known fact that Apostle Paul himself, and church Fathers like

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Augustine, saw women as naturally subordinate to men. The Catholic faith even now accepts no female priesthood. The notion of equality was not so strong that it could stop the Crusades against Muslims or the Inquisition against heretics. After the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine in the 4th century, Christian faith developed into a powerful papacy, in which individual responsibility had little meaning. Moin (2015) points out, in a review of Siedentop’s book, that equality to Paul was a promise of the afterlife that, in addition only, was reserved for those who believed in the Christian God. According to Moin, only subordination made God’s kingdom of heaven open to everyone. But do we really need to return to Apostle Paul to understand the Christian roots of secularization? Siedentop is not the only one who makes this link. We know several other arguments from different authors, including that: • the absolute power of God in monotheism made man increasingly more autonomous (Gauchet, 1985); • monotheism created the idea of truth, which founded the idea of rationality (De Kesel, 2010); • Thomas Aquinas saw rationality instead of God as a source of knowledge (Armstrong, 1993); • the Reformation led to a religious conscience, which led to different readings of the Bible, or its rejection (Gregory, 2012); • Protestantism created a breeding ground for capitalism that led to a disenchanted world (Weber, 1920); • Christian charity made it impossible to deny individual rights to dissenters (Vattimo, 1996). Perhaps the best overarching argument comes from Charles Taylor. In A secular age (2007), he shows that secularization is the outcome of a series of attempts to make Christian belief pure, to overcome the perversions that took possession of it time and again. Ultimately, the individual conscience became the way of relating to the sacred. That opened up the possibility that not everyone wanted a relationship to God any more. Individual responsibility in matters of faith is an achievement of the Christian history of Europe. Christianity and secularism are two sides of one coin, which eventually became the currency of the liberal-democratic constitutional state. To avoid any misunderstandings: this development has never been the outcome that the Christian Church had sought.

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The secularization process was a history of struggle under Christian conditions. According to Siedentop (2014: 333), liberalism is a biological child rather than a legitimate child of Christianity. Or in other words, Christianity was in fact not able to establish itself as a superpower. The Roman Church succeeded a little, but after the Reformation, it became completely impossible. Pessers (2014) shows that Europe was founded on Christian thought, but this was ultimately unable to conquer the hegemony. The importance of individual conscience with all the schisms as its consequence made Christianity inherently weak. Pessers describes Europe as a ‘successful failure’ of Christianity. Despite the Crusades and other heroic highlights, it created a continent of doubt, irony and skepticism. Europe became secular against its own will. So much for an overview of nearly two millennia before the secular experiment started. The 1960s were in fact the final blow to Christian faith as a public movement which organized society. It was the culmination of a history of growing doubt, confirmed in the scientific revolution in the Enlightenment, but the hit in the 1960s was so hard that what preceded it was inaudible in those days. It was experienced as a suddenly happening disruption from the year before. Meanwhile, we find ourselves under new conditions, and the question of the social meaning of religion can be asked again. It has received new impetus since the 2001 terrorist attacks of 9/11.

The secularization thesis In sociology, as in public opinion, there is always an assumption that modernization leads to the secularization of society. It is important to weigh up the sustainability of this so-called secularization thesis carefully, because it is also often used in the public debate on Islam. The idea is that Islam will ultimately go the same ‘Enlightened’ way as Christianity did. The Western hope is for an Islamic Reformation – or a Europeanisation of Islam. There are good arguments for this thesis, but more and more the question is raised as to whether it is still valid. The classical sociologist Emile Durkheim saw religion as the origin of social organization. Society is formed by the whole of religiously inspired bonds. If social relations can be arranged in another way, then religion may no longer be necessary. A so-called ‘collective consciousness’ is conceivable without a God. ‘Between God and the community we have to choose’, Durkheim stated in 1906. Another grand man of sociology, Max Weber, is famous among other things for his description of the ‘disenchantment’ of the world:

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technology and bureaucracy supplanted the belief in supernatural forces (1920). Weber saw Protestant ethics as the breeding ground for ‘the spirit of capitalism’, which in addition undermined Protestantism itself. Both these sociologists describe in their own specific ways how the development of science and technology led to a worldview in which people themselves are seen as the source of action. The successes of science and technology are obvious. Prosperity and security make religion less necessary for our material wellbeing – that’s for sure. In addition, the differentiation in institutions and organizations pushes religion away from public life. Social and economic processes are too complex and interdependent to leave them to God’s will. What is left is faith as a private matter: for people individually this is of great importance, but ‘for the affairs of the world’ this is without any meaning any more (Hobsbawm, 2013: 210). Many authors have followed this sociological train of thought, but there seems to be a hitch in this secularization thesis. It is not so obvious to expect a continuous process of secularization. An interesting author in this respect is sociologist of religion Peter Berger, who reasoned in 1967 that an overarching faith in God is not necessary in a modernizing world. ‘The sacred canopy’ (the title of his book) has become obsolete. About thirty years later, he reneged that position (Berger, 1996). On a global scale, he saw instead a trend of de-secularization. Berger points at Islam, but also at the success of Evangelical Protestantism, especially the Pentecostal Church. Cynically, he says that an international elite of enlightened social scientists deprived us from the sight of what was really going on: more instead of less religion. This elite was ‘anywhere a minority, but very influential’ (Berger, 2008). According to Berger, secular science has wrong-footed the world. There appear to be two arguments against the secularization thesis: that faith did not disappear but changed, becoming primarily an individual (private) matter; and that religion continues in all sorts of places in the world. According to many authors, religion underwent a social metamorphosis. Again, the topical religious landscape is a tangle; in fact, every ‘higher’ experience can be valued as religious as van den Brink (2012) has argued – it connects us with something bigger than ourselves. According to the privatization argument, religion has become an individual choice. Not so much the nature of faith, but the societal meaning of it has changed. In short: we no longer believe in the church, but find an individual way of coping with the eternal questions. Other authors emphasize the persistence of religion, especially from a

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global perspective. Think of the continuity of religion in the United States and the growth of Christianity and Islam in Africa and Asia. In the meantime, there is among ‘the enlightened elite’ of Berger a growing awareness that religion matters more than they had thought. Whether they actually believe in a God, again, is unclear; Terry Eagleton calls them ’would-be believers’ (2014: 203). Whatever that may be, more and more public intellectuals are speaking out in a positive way on the meaning of religion. Eagleton mentions Alain Badiou, Jürgen Habermas, Slavoj Žižek, Giorgio Agamben, Régis Debray, Roger Scruton, Jacques Derrida, George Steiner and Alain de Botton, I would add, Robert Putnam, Michael Sandel, Susan Neiman and Phillip Blond. They show increasing consideration of a possible shortfall in Western secular culture. They articulate an opinion that can also often be heard in daily conversations. Many people experience or assume a human or a social ‘need’ for faith. ‘I wish I could believe’ is a common pronunciation (longing for belief). Religion seems to be a kind of eternal affair, and the secularization thesis has different outcomes worldwide. Poland is more Catholic than it has ever been. In the United States, churches are still flourishing. Political scientist Mark Lilla (2007a) sees the US as a story on its own. The country is both faithful and tenacious regarding what he calls the ‘Great Separation’, the separation between church and state. Secularization in Western Europe is a special case rather than business as usual – an experiment, so to speak. It is anyhow no guaranteed scenario of the future. Peter Berger was wrong about secularization, and knew that relatively early. But in the 21st century – especially after 9/11 – more and more terms such as ’de-secularization’ or ‘resacralization’ can be heard.

Post-secularization The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas speaks in the same tone of post-secularization (2008), and points to the growing recognition that there is no end to religion. He has, however, yet another argument. The moral quality of Western society might be in decline without religious argumentation. We might forget the origin of liberal democracy and we have basically become indifferent to every faith. This makes the conversation with many people with a migrant background virtually impossible. In a lecture in 2008, Habermas claimed that religious traditions possess the power to convincingly articulate ‘moral sensitivities and solidaristic intuitions’. We see a

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growing moral embarrassment around the issues of today and how we have to talk about them. This argument can be heard more and more often. The rational secular discourse is ‘disenchanted’ itself, so to speak: we don’t believe in it anymore. You hear many noisy opinions, but there are very few signs of a convincing narrative of Western culture (Smith, 2010: 11). Our vocabulary seems too limited (especially in 140 characters or more extended tweets) to articulate the totality of values, intuitions, bonds, norms and beliefs. Concepts such as freedom, equality and reciprocity remain empty, if they are not fed with stories, connotations and common practices. The confidence that reason can lead us is fading away. Against this background, there seems to be a growing attention to religion – or a growing fear of it. This might be a temporary thing, but perhaps not, given the resilience of faith in most of the world, even in places where one can see the results of modernization.15 Habermas reserves the term ‘post-secularization’ for those countries where the secular experiment succeeded: Northern and Western Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. This is not because everyone is suddenly returning to the church, but because people realize that the secular countries are no vanguard any more. The secularization thesis seems to be a rather misunderstood ideal of the Enlightenment. But if there is a tendency towards post-secularization, what are the consequences? We are getting to the heart of the discussion. That religion plays an unexpectedly important role may be true, but what does that mean for the secular rule of law? Do religious arguments count in relation to politics, the law, policy making? Does religious argument hold in court? Can sharia come into play in Western democracies? Western countries have the separation of church and state, and that is more or less strongly maintained in different countries. In France, the separation is an end in itself, while in the United States it is a means of guaranteeing pluralism (Vanheeswijkck, 2014). A strictly liberal position assumes that only reason has a right to speak (Rawls, 1971); religion is just a private matter that cannot deliver any valuable arguments in the public sphere. That view can, for example, lead to a ban on headscarves. On the other hand, one viewpoint says that no distinction can be made between a rational and a religious argument. Who would have the defining power to differentiate? This position is known as The article by Norris and Inglehart (2004), based on the World Values Studies, has been important as the empirical evidence for the idea of post-secularization. 15

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‘integralism’. Habermas (2006) takes an intermediate position. Between public reason and private faith there are religious communities, which should be heard. There is, after all, fundamental equality, so religious citizens must be respected in their own choice – otherwise there would be discrimination. In addition, pluralism of society is leads to an enrichment of moral culture. In other words, the secular West gains from religious diversity. Nevertheless, Habermas makes one important caveat: religious terms do not belong in the law. They play a legitimate role in public deliberation, and secularists can be expected to be willing to listen. For Habermas, this is a major step in his thinking since his famous work on the public sphere (1989). But every citizen will have to accept that only secular arguments count within the democratic rule of law. Religious concepts must be ‘translated’ into secular speech, if they, for example, want to be heard in court. To Habermas, God does not fit into the law. Habermas stands for an inclusive society under secular conditions. This is, above all, about equal opportunities in education and the labour market, without prejudice and discrimination. So religious citizens and communities must also defer to constitutional order. Between atheists and believers a mutual learning process should develop, Habermas argues. This is a defensible position, which has actually become commonplace. But the real question is how sustainable this position is without generating conflicts. What does a secular translation actually mean? Steven Smith (2010, 32), a professor of law and religion in the US, points out that one religion could consider another religion as such: ‘your faith is not mine – it shouldn’t exist’. Do we need to consider Scientology as a religion? But in that respect also, the rule of law can be discussed in its universal pretentions: isn’t it a belief like all others? Or take the Mormons – there are few European people who take them seriously, but in the US they go for the presidency. At the moment, there are millions of Muslims living in Western countries who do not take the separation of church and state for granted. It is part of the doctrine of political Islam that there is no law above that of God. So when it comes to sensitive matters, there must be mutual respect and clear rules at the same time. Western countries must realize that, in general, ‘coping is the order of the day, not defending high principle’, according to Lilla (2007b). Lilla believes only in a development towards the separation of church and state as that which comes from within faith itself. Smith (2010) believes that the boundary between public and private, between secular and religious notions, between valid and non-valid

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arguments should not be drawn too strictly. The conversation in the post-secular era would fall silent, if we are not prepared for a little ‘smuggling’ between philosophies of life (Smith, 2010: 38).

A secular age yet In this chapter, I touch on the discussions that have emerged since the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York. In so doing, I need some further treatment of the work of Charles Taylor. This giant in social philosophy (and a practising Catholic) has written leading books, such as Sources of the self (1989), in which he examines human identity under modern conditions. In 2007, he published A secular age, a work of 874 pages. This book is received by some authors as an analysis of the secularization thesis, but it is much richer than that. It includes five parts, largely historical, of which the last part is on the last halfcentury. His analysis in this last part gives me – despite all deliberations on post-secularization – reason to stick to the special significance of the 1960s in the secularization process, and so for the actual conditions of moral order. Up until five hundred years ago, living together without common faith in God was inconceivable (Taylor speaks of the ancien régime). But according to Taylor, this changes from the Renaissance onwards. An ‘era of mobilization’ begins, which lasts until well into the 20th century. It means that people are getting more and more free of given positions, traditions and beliefs. Science and technology turn the world upside down: it can be discovered and developed without referring to God’s will. From the 1960s onwards, however, a new situation developed. Taylor speaks of an era of authenticity, of: … expressive individualism: that each one of us has his/her own way of realizing our humanity, and that it is important to find and live out one’s own, as against surrendering to conformity with a model imposed on us from outside, by society, or the previous generation, or religious or political authority. (Taylor, 2007: 475) The importance of the individual and their emotions was there already in the 18th and 19th centuries for the elite, but now it also became common for the masses. Today, television and social media show, day in, day out, an emotional deluge of ‘expressive individualism’. In 1981, Alasdair MacIntyre (also a Catholic) called the hidden philosophy behind it ‘emotivism’, and he was very pessimistic about it. Taylor

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is more hopeful, because under these new conditions, new forms of religiosity will emerge. For him, the secular age is real, but that does not mean that there is no spiritual inspiration. He assumes an existential predisposition to the experience of ’fullness’, the experience of being part of something bigger than ourselves. Taylor also believes in the secular society, but not because it would be anti-religious. The experience that the world is full of meaning, beauty and bonding might create new forms of fullness. ‘Making the idea and experience of transcendence sensible is one of Taylor’s central goals’ (Warner et al, 2010: 13). Secularization is the retreat of religion from different public domains, such as politics, science, the arts and the economy (Taylor calls this ‘secularization 1’). But it is also about the decline in the belief in God, both in individual devotion and in the practices around it, such as the communities of the church (which is ‘secularization 2’). Since the 1960s, however, there has also been ‘secularization 3’, namely a society in which belief has become an option. The secular experiment changed both believing and non-believing, both the religious and the non-religious institutions. It determines the way in which we understand ourselves and the world. Taylor does not use the word ‘post-secularization’, because our current, shared and daily imaginaries that make social life possible are too complex. Just as five hundred years ago a society without God was unthinkable, so a society with a God is now unimaginable for most Western citizens: the divide between state and church seems quite stable. Make no mistake: there is plenty of religiosity, but it seems impossible that this will become part of our ‘social imaginaries’. These are the images with which we realize the everyday practices of a society. Taylor considers the market, democracy and the public domain as the three dominant imaginaries. As argued in Chapter 2, there seems to be good reason to expand this list, with the network as a representation for today’s social order. The great invention of the West – as a result of Christianity – is our faith in an inherent order, regardless of whether there is a God (male/ female; singular/plural) behind it or not. Taylor must deliberately have chosen the title A secular age. The prefix ‘post’ gives the suggestion that there is a dichotomy between being religious or not, between public and private, between the sacred and the profane. Our society is thoroughly secular, but belief is omnipresent.

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New conditions An objection to Taylor’s thorough study has been that it is limited to Western societies (Mahmood, 2010). The well-known Muslim anthropologist Talal Asad (2001), for example, sees secularization in the West mainly as a form of disciplining of the (religious) subject. According to him, religion is not to be defined in general terms. Its practices should be understood from their own character. Religion refers to the use of symbols at a given time and in a particular place. The acts define the meaning of religion; that is the reality of faith. People are religious in the degree to which they actively belong to a tradition – they may preserve or develop it. According to Asad (2001), that is what it should be about. Western secularization considers everything that is not rational as superstitious, which creates a relation of power to faith. This is an interesting perspective, which gives an even deeper insight into a Western and an Islamist perspective. I nevertheless think that this comment does not affect the approach of Taylor. Taylor foresees no end to religion, but on the contrary a greater diversity. He does not think in terms of a secular power discourse, but points to a large range of possibilities, more and less religious. Believing in God is an option, and certainly not the easiest one. For that reason, Taylor introduces his third model of secularization, which has to do with the organization of a diversity of views and beliefs. The dominant secular regime serves to guarantee maximum freedom and equality of philosophies of life, as well as the ability to act accordingly. This is easier said than done. Principles may be contrary to each other: may a judge wear religious symbols? Are headscarves allowed in the classroom? May women wear burqas at work? Religious arguments cannot be shut out, but it gets tricky if they conflict with shared secular values or common practices. The academic debate about secularization is on an abstract level. But what we have to deal with in daily practices is the question of how to behave. We live under secular conditions, which give room for whatever faith we want to believe in. Everybody can choose their own God or may think of being God him- or herself. The debate on the existence of God seems to be pacified except for fundamentalists. The secularization process may be accepted, but did believers also accept the secular condition? The Dutch sociologist Vuijsje (2007: 12) speaks of the ‘blurring thesis’: God is not dead, but he has fewer clear contours. From the 1960s onwards, we witnessed a radical change, which made this blurring possible. God disappeared from the stage in

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a large part of the Western world, and retreated in the minds of the people. Before the 1960s, there were, of course, already philosophies of life without God. The other great movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, liberalism and socialism, were largely secular. These ideologies were already without faith in a higher power, but they were not without a story with a comparable organizing power. In the last decades, these other great stories have also disappeared. The activist sociologist Cornelius Castoriades called this the ‘second disenchantment’ (Oudenampsen, 2014). Liberalism has conquered hegemony in a philosophical sense, but its politics have resulted in an atrophied form, in which only economic arguments seem to count. Socialism survived in a perverted communist form (Cuba, North Korea), with China as a special combination of authoritarian state power and consumer capitalism. In Western countries, socialism transformed into social democracy, which has been diluted over the last two decades into a mild variant of neoliberalism. Where do we still believe in and what might give direction in a complex world as ours? At the end of this chapter, I focus on the substitutes for religion. From the Enlightenment onwards there have been repeated attempts to close the ‘God-shaped hole in human consciousness’, as Sartre called it (cited by Armstrong, 1993: 418). For my treatment of alternative foundations of morality, I have chosen Terry Eagleton. In his book Culture and the death of God (2014), this professor of English literature and high-profile intellectual gives an erudite overview of the historical attempts to replace God.

The great substitutions The seeds of secularization lay in Christianity itself. In the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the relationship of man with God was redefined over and over again. This relationship is getting ever purer, so to speak, designed by individual conscience (and until the 1960s mediated by the churches and their sacred officers). With the rise of scientific thinking in the late 17th century, believing in a personal God becomes very difficult. How about God’s will, if there are so many possibilities to understand? Many thinkers experienced some kind of duplicity: intellectually detached from God, they endorsed at the same time religious, practical or political meaning (Eagleton, 2014: 8). To break free of God was just as difficult as believing. When the first cracks opened up between secular and religious thinking, there was immediately the question of the social consequences.

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In the early Enlightenment, most intellectuals succeeded in uniting the new insights of science with the belief in God. Although the word ‘atheism’ was used for the first time, it was to refer to a position that would not be possible. Many Enlightenment philosophers solved their inner conflict by a form of Deism: God has created the world, but leaves the actual co-existence up to the people. In that frame of thought, the idea arose that religion has a function in creating communities. That was where political and moral concern about the quality of communal living without a God started. The Enlightened intellectuals could gradually manage to live without God, but what about the ordinary people? God was a barrier in the urge for scientific discovery; but for the masses, living without him would lead to disaster. Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant would have said – according to Heinrich Heine (1972) about his servant Martin Lampe: ‘Der alte Lampe muss einen Gott haben, sonst kann der arme Mensch nicht glücklich sein’ (‘Old Lampe needs a God, otherwise this poor man cannot be happy’). In a theoretical sense, God was unnecessary, but for the community he was indispensable. However, in the 19th century, the reverse critical position could be heard: religion represses the masses in collaboration with the profane powers. Religion was seen by Marx as the ‘opium of the people’ (Marx, 1976, originally 1844). Living without God was an opportunity for philosophers, a problem for the masses and really dangerous for rulers. Since the Enlightenment, there have been all kind of attempts to replace God. Eagleton (2014: 44) calls these respectively: ‘Reason, nature, Geist, culture, art, the sublime, the nation, the state, science, humanity, Being, society, the other, desire, the life force and personal relations: all of these have acted from time to time as forms of displaced divinity’. These are relevant today but, according to Eagleton, they cannot offer what God himself is offering. Secularization seems like a struggle with the Almighty himself. Eagleton treats these substitutes under two common denominators: that of the German idealists and that of Romanticism. The German idealists (Hegel to Wittgenstein) put spirit next to reason: the ‘higher’ was spared, but without recourse to a supernatural power. This idealism persevered in the forms of nationalism and Marxism (and found their all time lows in the holocaust and in Stalinism). Romanticism tried to save the community, by appealing to the aesthetic. Art, culture and emotion were supposed to fill the mental

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void after the departure of God. Romantics do understand that affection is at least as important as reason. In culture, there are all sorts of clues for a higher order: the priest became a poet and the sacrament changed into a symbol; holiness blended into wholeness, paradise became utopia, grace translated itself into inspiration, and the cardinal sin became ‘the nameless crime of existing’ (Eagleton, 2014: 116). There was always something great to think of, in order to rise above the daily grind. Faith in culture was, according to Eagleton, the most successful way of substituting God, but was ultimately not enough. The cultural substitute works to this day, with the observation that it is completely commodified and commercialized. The secular experiment is the product of reform in Christianity, which was always seeking to preserve the purity of faith. It led to the separation of the divine and the worldly, of the spiritual and the physical, of public morality and individual conscience and eventually to that of church and state. The desire for deep, absolute devotion also gave birth to its opposite: the denial of a personal God. In the 1960s in the West, an anti-religious attitude became commonplace. The secularization process also entered communities, classrooms and families. From that moment onwards, authentic experiences were central, embedded in an ‘exclusive humanism’: we live in our societies from the premise that people have the right to live their own life and to choose their own inspirations. The market, the public domain and democracy (and the network) are the secular imaginaries of society under the rule of law. Within that, everyone can choose whatever he or she wants to believe in, with or without God.

Conclusion We have come a long way in this chapter. It was necessary to pay great attention to the secular condition of our time. The moral space, in which religious or similar stories have dominated so strongly, is now occupied by a tangle of stories, views and opinions, with more and less consistency. The network society, with its improvising social forms, is characterized in a moral sense by an extreme volatility of values, norms, beliefs and opinions. It makes it understandable why conspiracy theories thrive and that an American president, even in 2019, can rely on ‘alternative facts’. If we do not really believe any more, we can believe in anything. We could add: we have to believe in something!

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Be that as it may, a world that I have characterized as ’complexity without direction’ calls, of course, for responses. In about the last fifty years, a relatively coherent structure with clear convictions has been replaced by a complex network structure with a radically diverse and pluriform reflectiveness. To avoid any misunderstanding: with this observation, I do not aim to revel in nostalgia. The opposite is true. I am expressly trying to determine how we can understand the moral order of this time. It might help to overcome our fears of – and obsessive reflection on – the system. The analysis of society in terms of complexity without direction makes it possible to better understand the ‘organizing forces’ which respond to that. In particular, the dominance of the security discourse seems directly related to a world that is experienced as cluttered. This is the central objective of the following section about security politics.

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PART II

Security politics

FOUR

Criminal law as a moral stronghold The conditions of a secular network society are by no means unproblematic.16 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 This chapter is an edited and updated compilation of parts of chapters 5, 6 and 7 of The safety utopia (Boutellier, 2005). 16

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in morality as a form of communication about intuitions – about what we see as a good life, and what we reject as evil. Moral points of view are an individual matter; the formulation of moral judgements is ‘subjectified’. We feel our moral views, but they are no longer socially legitimated by a common belief in a higher agency of whatever nature. Up until the 1960s, the moral points of departure for a good life, and thus of an evil life as well, were still part of a limited number of coherent life views with strong accompanying social institutions. As we saw in Chapter 3, there was a long history of individualization and secularization, before the situation was radicalized in the 1960s. The second half of the 20th century produced little more than a democratization of the ideas of the Enlightenment. The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the definitive end of this ideological era, and moral emotivism – emotions as guidelines for ethical principles) became the common attitude (see MacIntyre, 1981). This situation forces us to find communality in our intuitions on norms and values. In a liberal society, this communality is not easily to be found in ideas about the good life however, but rather in shared notions of what is evil. This is what I would like to call ‘the victimalization thesis’: that we morally organize our life around the idea of victimhood. According to American philosopher Richard Rorty (1989), the question ‘are you suffering?’ is decisive in an otherwise privatized morality. It is hard to get consensus about a positive ideal on what it is to be a community. It is easier to create a common rejection of cruelty, humiliation and suffering – that negative morality makes us communicate with each other about our lifestyles. Acknowledgment of differences between people, tolerance towards other lifestyles and respect for others subsequently constitute the virtues of a pluralistic culture. A comparable position is defended by Margalit, who notes in The decent society (1996) that striving for a decent society, where humiliation is combated, is a more realistic point of departure for public morality than a society dominated by a sense of justice. In such a situation, the victim unmistakably plays a major role. The victim – for example, the victim of a crime – creates an opportunity to generate moral consensus in a morally divided and fragmented world. The victim occupies a central position in public morality. He or she is the broker between private intuitions and public morality. There is a theoretical link here to John Stuart Mill’s ‘harm principle’: self-fulfilment is restricted by harm done to others. The state has the right to intervene if and when damage is wrongly done to others. This

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19th-century cornerstone of liberal philosophy became a sociological reality in the 20th century. In this morality, the victim is the prototypical figure. Liberals publicly no longer identify with God, the nation, the working class or the community. If they do, they can barely rely on anyone else being the slightest bit interested. But the offended other sets limits on this solitary moral life stance. The awareness of one another’s vulnerability supplies the emotional building blocks for an empathetic morality. That is what I would like to call ‘victimalization’: morality seen through the lens of victimhood. Perhaps for this reason we are seeing an incredible interest in ‘the empathy instinct’ (Bazalgette, 2017).17 Millie (2016) has made an argument for an empathetic criminology. The victim has become the caretaker of public morality after the ‘postmodern fall’. We can thank our lucky stars, wrote Richard Rorty in 1993, for our human rights culture resulting from the ideals of the Enlightenment, but we cannot give it a firm basis – that is the problem nowadays. All we can do is point out that in our culture, there are more terms for rejecting suffering and humiliation than in other cultures or periods. We can fight for ideals, but are simultaneously aware of how randomly they occur in history. In a liberal culture, the rejection of cruelty is ultimately the most convincing justification for acting.

Victimism or empathy Various authors in the 1990s described and criticized the finding that public morality has come to be dominated by the victim. I refer to the French sociologist Alain Slama (1993), the Australian art historian Robert Hughes (1993), the American social psychologist Charles Sykes (1992), the British sociologist Frank Furedi (1997) and the French philosopher Alain Finkelkraut (1996). Their criticism implicitly confirms the ‘victimalization’ thesis. These authors do not object to the diagnosis as such. What they are mainly against are its consequences for culture and the possibility of it being wrongly used by politicians. These authors in all variations especially target the unspecified character of victimhood. In our post-truth conditions, everyone can claim the status of victim. This leads to therapeutization (Sykes), sentimental political correctness (Hughes) and a hypocritical political stance (Finkelkraut). Although these are quite different arguments, the lines of criticism all lead to the question of whether it is permissible There are over 1,500 books on Amazon with ‘empathy’ in their title. A critical reaction to this is from Pail Bloom in his book Against empathy (2016). 17

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to make victimhood the moral or political criterion. Victimhood is apparently so comprehensive that it becomes meaningless and can be easily abused. There is indisputable empirical evidence to back the criticism of victimism: the idea that the victim unjustly got a dominant position in our world views. The (social) media devote ample attention to every conceivable form of victimhood. The cry for recognition as a victim is an appeal to everyone’s emotions that is heard every day. The strength and cynicism of the ‘victimalization’ process are both clear. The universal human nature of victimhood enables us to empathize with the victim and address others and ourselves about the cruelty and humiliation that are also part of human nature. But it can also be easily abused. In this sense, the question of who the real victim is can be an intimate question that only acquires political significance once it is the subject of efforts to form a consensus. For our purposes here – a criminology of moral order – it is irrelevant whether the moral borders around victimhood are drawn early or late, hysterically or compassionately. The important point is that the victim evidently activates the need for safety and security. The victim of sexual violence, for example, draws a boundary when it comes to the sexualization of culture. The sexually abused child can even count on unconditional empathy. Victimhood has become the stake in a cultural and political battle. In particular, the victims of crime can count on a great deal of sympathy in today’s culture. They are recognizable (anyone could be one) and good material for media attention. What is more, the source of their victimhood can be localized with a certain degree of precision: there are actual perpetrators, even if they are never brought to justice. As a result of the prominent role of victims, criminal offenders are also viewed in a different light. The drive to understand something that we ourselves have not done is the result of the Christian Humanist tradition of compassion. We try to put ourselves in someone else’s place, even if they behave atrociously. In a morality now devoid of ideology or philosophies of life, it is harder to find convincing terms to understand their criminal offences. In a moral sense, offenders are ‘emancipated’, to the extent that they are now held responsible for their own acts. In the 20th century, explaining what people do became the territory of the social sciences. Criminology became the branch for explaining malicious deviant behaviour. The social sciences claimed a kind of sole right to the option of gaining insight into human motivations. Yet it is precisely this expert judgement that is a matter of debate in today’s culture. The scientist no longer has the authority that was previously

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accorded in the framework of belief in progress. In today’s conditions, responsibility for our own behaviour is very much in the limelight. In keeping with Bauman’s (2000) analysis, individual responsibility has regained its dignity, with all the advantages and disadvantages that this entails. Just as the victim was increasingly able to become the master of his or her own fate, the offender is assumed to have done the same. Crime is no longer accepted as being an effect of circumstances, but is judged by the audience to be a choice. This is the bottom line of the attitude towards crime, in what I have called a ‘safety utopia’: the societal context in which the desire of for coinciding ultimate freedom and maximal protection dominates (Boutellier, 2005b). Scientific explanation has lost its status as grand narrative, and this certainly holds true for criminology, with its emotionally charged subject matter. An act of violence is perceived first and foremost as a way of overpowering someone. Disapproval of crime is one of the key elements of public morality in society, which can be characterized as ‘complexity without direction’.

The changing social meaning of crime Technological advances, globalization, migration and individualization constitute the dynamic context for an equally dynamic culture. Its morality is ambiguous. Moral judgements have largely become an individual matter, leading in turn to social discontent and identity politics. In this connection, I feel it is warranted to say that the implicit desire of contemporary culture can be described in terms of a safety utopia: a situation where vitality and safety can coincide (compare it to bungee jumping). The crime problem represents an articulation of the features of this utopian desire. Offenders and victims are the central figures, and moral consensus develops around them. In this section, I address the consequences of this in relation to criminal law. Moral discontent and utopian desire can easily be projected onto the crime problem. Clear victims and the accompanying offenders can be observed there, unambiguous normative limits are set, and remedies are conceivable, though not necessarily feasible. Yet it would be wrong to see this projection as the final word on the crime problem. The criminal act serves as a boundary stone to moral dynamics. Crime has unmistakably become a growing societal problem, especially during the 1970s and 1980s. Although we have seen a continuous decrease in community crimes in all Western countries over the last twenty years, we have also seen the development of new security problems in

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organized crime, radicalization, cybercrime and terrorism. As such, crime is part of a far more comprehensive safety issue. Besides the actual development of crime and security issues, there has been an increase in the sensitivity to crime or related conduct, such as nuisance, bullying and sexual harassment. The sensitivity to victimhood – and consequently to crime – can be assumed to have increased in a society that can be characterized as a safety utopia. Certain hitherto unseen behaviour, which can be classified as domestic or sexual violence, has now been criminalized. Higher standards have probably also been set as regards personal interaction, for example in terms of sexual intimidation. There is also less and less tolerance for bullying: even though it is not punishable by law, it is clearly recognized as conduct that precedes criminal behaviour. Greater sensitivity to certain behaviour seems to be indicative of a shift in the meaning of suffering and harm. Next to this higher sensitivity, there is the increased political significance of the issue of crime. Safety and security have traditionally been important justifications for the formation of the nation state (Van Crefeld, 1999). The 19th century witnessed the rise of security arrangements, where the state gave a certain guarantee of safety and initiated the necessary institutions, such as the police. In exchange, the people were willing to obey its laws. In the 20th century, notions of good and evil were embedded in the great ideological movements – liberalism, socialism, Christianity – which ultimately led to the emergence of the welfare state. Crime could be understood as a residual category of a successful social order and criminal justice as the ultimate remedy to deal with it. The relatively low crime rates during the development of the welfare state after the Second World War can perhaps best be explained by the combination of a society that was still relatively highly morally disciplined and a rise in prosperity. In this situation, criminal justice could still be used to correct the imperfect social control mechanisms. The natural ideological discipline related to criminal justice prohibitions has, however, disappeared. Criminal justice prohibitions are no longer embedded in a more or less unambiguous moral context that guarantees their legitimacy. The state is having a harder time guaranteeing a certain level of safety, which is why there is growing pressure on its legitimacy in the eyes of the people. For these reasons, crime has come to play a dominant symbolic role in the contemporary cultural and political consciousness. It is not my intention to further analyze the societal context here. It is important, though, to note that these three factors – the development in the crime problem itself, the increase in the sensitivity to crime, and the

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increased political significance – have led to a burden on the criminal justice system.

Opposite utopian views The question is what position criminal law and its institutions have in this altered context. To answer this question, first I would like to see what function they could serve. To examine the functions attributed in this connection to punishment and control, I take utopian thinking as my point of departure. Bellamy’s ‘Looking backward’ In the past, the year 2000 always had a special attraction for visionary thinkers. In 1887, for example, Edward Bellamy published the novel Looking backward 2000-1887. It was a bestseller in the United States in the 19th century, second only to Uncle Tom’s cabin in this respect. The book was translated into any number of languages and inspired an international movement that still has supporters today. In imagining the role of criminal law, I use this utopian description of a future that is now the present. In Bellamy’s novel, after being hypnotized in the cellar of his home, Julian West, the main character, falls into a deep sleep. For reasons that are unclear he wakes up in the year 2000. Dr Leete, who now lives in a new house on the same spot as West’s home, tells him all about the radically altered society of 2000. Dr Leete explains to West how people are now organized ‘in one big company’, where everyone harmoniously accepts the existing labour relations. There are no political parties, but there are also no ‘capitalists’. ‘The Nation’ has united all the interests in itself, and thus solved all the opposites. In the year 2000, the world is organized down to the very last detail. The society that Julian West finds himself in can perhaps best be described, in contemporary terms, as a perfectly organized consumer society. The nation is a carefully regulated, well-run machine where – and this is important for us – crime has become an anachronism. Let me illustrate this idea with the following dialogue: “Among the changes, too numerous to attempt to indicate, which mark the lapse of a century in that quarter, I particularly noted the total disappearance of the old state prison.

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‘That went before my day, but I remember hearing about it,’ said Dr. Leete, when I alluded to the fact at the breakfast table. ‘We have no jails nowadays. All cases of atavism are treated in the hospitals.’ ‘Of atavism!’ I exclaimed, staring. ‘Why, yes,’ replied Dr. Leete. ‘The idea of dealing punitively with those unfortunates was given up at least fifty years ago, and I think more.’” (Bellamy, 1887: 109) Given the features of the utopia and its imperative, collective nature, the question of what to do with deviant individuals plays an important role in utopian thinking. Bellamy’s depiction of the world in 2000 assumes a community will so compelling that virtually everyone adheres to it. In his view, criminal behaviour represents virtually extinct remains of a distant past. Control and punishment barely exist. In other utopias, there is far more evidence of the control and punishing task of the state. In More’s Utopia, published in 1516, for example, committing adultery for the second time is punishable by death. Bentham’s ‘Panopticon’ A widely discussed control institution in the utopian imagination is Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon (1843, originally 1791). From the centre of this domed prison (a panopticon), it is possible to supervise all the conduct of the prisoners in transparent rooms. The inspector in the middle is expected to be able to see everything via light force and always to be audible via a system of pipes. In Bentham’s view, the Panopticon is not simply a solution for deviant individuals, it is also crucial to the social order he envisions. In essence, it is the centre of his utopian world. Bentham even calls the Panopticon ‘a little utopia’. Bentham’s idea is to create a society mathematically according to the principle of the greatest happiness. Bentham is more aware than anyone that punishment is a necessary evil. According to Bentham, punishment should mainly have a preventative effect. As the ultimate deterrent, it should be focused on people who have not broken a law. This is why Bentham even feels it is feasible to populate the Panopticon with fictional prisoners, and it would suffice just to assume the presence of the inspector. His utilitarian dream can only be carried out by a deterrent institution that sets and enforces the norms in the community. Via this kind of institution, the community can achieve optimal happiness for as many people as

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possible (what Foucault, 1975, called ‘microphysics of power’). The panoptic penitentiary is the state-created centre of the community. Utopian system thinking In other words, control and punishment are necessary elements of utopian system thinking. A distinction can, however, be drawn as regards the function attributed to them. On the one hand, there is the utopian depiction of a community that is so successful that the whole criminal justice system is redundant. Bellamy views punishment as merely a residual product of a perfectly organized community. There is no crime in the world that he envisions, and consequently no criminal justice either. There are no lawyers, and even the science of law has virtually disappeared. The control function has been totally taken over by the closely organized community, where the deviant will of the individual has dissolved into the will of the community. In Bellamy’s view, crime is an atavism, an obsolete imperfection in the system that can be easily eliminated. On the other hand, Bentham accords punishment a central educational function. Here, punishment is not something that is over and done with; it is a vital and necessary component of the utopian order. It is the aim of criminal justice to make people afraid to exhibit even slightly deviant behaviour. Bentham calls the Panopticon his own utopia because, with a minimum of actual punishment and possibly even with fictional prisoners, it is able to implement maximum disciplining of the individual for the common good. The extent of punishment is determined by its effect on the rest of the population.

Two prototypes of criminal law Via these two utopian examples – Bellamy’s and Bentham’s – it is possible to distinguish two criminal justice positions with certain fundamental differences. The two positions can be viewed as ultimate criminal justice and urgent criminal justice. If the position is ultimate, there is a penal response as the last resort in the event of unexpected deviance. Ultimate criminal justice is indeed the last instance, and plays a role in correcting the last remains of individual disobedience. The community does the control work, which is preferably not perceived as such. This position can be illustrated by the utopian view of Bellamy, in which crime no longer exists. If the position is urgent, however, the penal response is a conditional instrument, to establish the general will. Urgent criminal justice is a

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necessary, permanent institution. It establishes the norm and should serve as enough of a deterrent to subordinate deviant citizens to the general will. This position is recognized in the Panopticon as developed by Bentham, which gained a lot of attention after Michel Foucault (1975) used it as a metaphor for the disciplinary power structures of modernity. Table 1 shows the characteristics of the two criminal law positions. Table 1: Features of ultimate and urgent criminal justice

Ultimate criminal law Strong community Special prevention Individual resocialization Maximal enforcement Principle of legality

Urgent criminal law Dominant state General prevention Community deterrence Selective enforcement Principle of expediency

In an effort to describe the meaning of criminal law in the safety utopia, I have listed the features of both forms of criminal justice. In the case of ultimate criminal justice, there is a strong community, which uses its close ties and its social control over its members’ behaviour to regulate and maintain the social order. The community is characterized by natural mutual understanding shared by all the members. In exceptional circumstances, criminal justice serves to confirm the norms held in the community. It is from this perspective that Durkheim (1893) understands a criminal trial as a kind of celebration of morality. When an offender is sentenced and convicted, this confirms that the community is morally right. The penal goal in keeping with ultimate criminal justice is special prevention. The sanction should correct the incidentally deviant individual and preferably resocialize him. Its only task is to monitor and improve anyone who is lacking in natural understanding. If the community does its job well, there is little need for criminal law. This is indeed the case in Bellamy’s view of the future. Criminal law has become redundant, because the community functions optimally and its members automatically adhere to its conditions; the understanding is there. In principle, the aspiration to prosecute all appropriate cases is in keeping with this type of ultimate criminal justice. So it functions maximally, be it only incidentally, on the basis of the principle of legality. If too many people deviate from the rules, the system is in trouble.

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There is a totally different context and function in the case of urgent criminal justice. First, it operates on behalf of a dominant state. Criminal justice is not an addendum to a coherent community, where there is an automatic sense of communality; criminal justice plays a central role in the normative construction of the community. This type of criminal justice is more suitable for a complex society of individuals, organizations and institutions with their own motivations, goals and interests. The communality in this type of society is permanently under construction. Its unity has to be fought for, if necessary by force, and to this end, a punishing agency is called for. In this context, the purpose of criminal justice is not to confirm an existing communality, but to construct a community that does not yet exist, or never has, or never will. It serves not so much as a control as an explicit steering function. It does not adhere to the norms; it sets them. The penal goals of urgent criminal justice are general prevention and deterrence. The central goal is not to correct the individual, but to monitor the population. The system does not aspire to the prosecution of all deviants, even if it were feasible. The aim of urgent criminal justice is to efficiently and effectively set the norms, and it is thus far more apt to be selective in its enforcement. Urgent criminal justice operates from the perspective of expediency. It intervenes at the places where – and in the moments when – the norm most emphatically needs to be set.

A shifted position The utopian worldviews of Bellamy and Bentham envision two forms of criminal justice, neither of which actually exists as such. Depending on the climate relating to crime and punishment, real-life criminal justice practice steers a middle course between the two positions. I have not listed retribution (the most prominent penal goal) separately under either of the prototypes. In itself, this penal goal does not have the utilitarian function that is so important to utopian thinking. In addition to retribution, punishment always implies a certain degree of hope, even if it is viewed as a necessary evil. The distinction between ultimate and urgent criminal justice can help to make the numerous implicit ideas about them more explicit. Although various tendencies can be discerned in contemporary criminal justice thinking, the hypothesis seems to be justified that the dominance of the safety issue has led to a shift in expectations as regards criminal justice. It was gradually more and more widely perceived as an urgent agency for establishing social order, or even the social

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organization of society. David Garland thoroughly elaborated on this argument in The culture of control (2001). A number of related empirical points of reference can be given for this shift. Criminal justice was marginal as a public issue until the beginning of the 1980s. The administration of criminal justice was something for specialists and the system’s own officials. Starting in the mid-1980s, there was a drastic change in this situation. In view of the present-day media interest in investigation, prosecution, sentencing and crime itself, a great deal of importance is attached to criminal justice intervention. The performance of the criminal justice apparatus is carefully observed, and is criticized if it fails to meet with public expectations. In this sense, the normative function of the criminal justice system is vast. Criminal justice has become the people’s business. The shift to a remedy that is perceived as urgent is also evident in the proactive view of criminal law institutions. A striking example of this is predictive policing, in which police patrols and interventions are started on the base of data-mining strategies. There has generally been a shift in the criminal justice approach over recent decades. The criminal justice system has become more proactive, and its influence is likely to continue to be exerted in the future. The increasingly selective aspect of criminal justice is evident from the very idea of criminal justice policy. Criminal justice is no longer viewed as the logical last resort, but policy choices are made strategically. The priorities have to do with feasibility (which cases are likely to be the most successful) and public opinion (which cases appeal most to the public’s sense of justice). Especially in prevention policy, it is clear that normative demands on the social order are made along criminal justice lines. This policy is focused on enabling other agencies to work in such a way that punishable acts can be prevented. In schools, in the community, in social work agencies and in municipal policy, the desire for safety has come to play an increasingly dominant role. Safety is no longer presented as a self-evident effect of social policy. Instead, social policy is defined in accordance with the norms as they are stipulated in criminal law. The norms defined in the law books constitute the source and the guidelines for the normative design of a number of social and societal institutions. The administration of criminal justice has been steadily developing into an instrumental function of the state. It is dominantly in evidence as such – and in its derivatives – in the design of society. Its sphere of influence has unmistakably grown as a result of the control of its own organizations, its influence on the definition of social problems, and the greater physical exposure in the media and in the public domain. One might speak of a socialization of criminal justice. Other institutions

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are appearing in the area for which the police and justice agencies were traditionally responsible. There is, for example, the growing influence of administrative law in the field of prevention or in the enforcement of criminal justice norms. Other prevention and enforcement agencies (from stewards in the stadium to city watches on the streets) that serve a monitoring, but not a sanctioning, function have come to the assistance, as it were, of criminal justice institutions. Criminal justice is placed in an urgent position, and is surrounded by numerous other control institutions.

The criminal justice paradox After this analysis that the position of the criminal justice system has shifted towards an urgent, social organizing one, its functioning in contemporary society can be determined with greater precision. I think there is good reason to speak here of a criminal justice paradox. A societal climate has developed, in which the significance attributed to criminal justice in general – and punishment in particular – cannot be realized. In a quantitative sense, the call for more safety in society has had certain ramifications. In absolute figures, there was a sharp rise in recorded crime from 1960 to the mid- to late 1990s in all Western jurisdictions (Huls et al, 2001: 854ff). Despite this growth, the total reach of criminal justice remained limited. Nowadays we have a different situation, with decreasing crime figures. At the same time, there seems (at least in the Netherlands) to be no improvement in the clear-up rates (Van Tulder et al, 2017). The significance of criminal law is also restricted in a qualitative sense. The response often comes too late and the system is extremely slow. Qualitatively speaking, the criminal justice system is an admission of weakness, be it a necessary way out, that is preferably only used if all else has failed. In actual practice, the moral claim that plays such a prominent role in justifying punishment is not very effective. Garland (1990) speaks of the ‘tragic quality of punishment’. Since punishment implies a moral condemnation, but usually fails to generate any moral involvement on the part of offenders, there is a good chance that condemned offenders will be alienated from the moral consensus, rather than drawn to it. Garland holds that punishment produces exclusion rather than integration. This takes us to a theoretical reason for speaking of a criminal justice paradox. Criminal justice has developed as a last resort that could be avoided because of the disciplinary powers of communities. Historically, it is a product of the political will to restrict the power of the state vis-

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à-vis the people, which is why criminal justice scholars focused on the safeguards for the suspect that are embedded in the interventions. In that respect, criminal law has an imminent dogmatic restraint to fight crime in the way a part of the public would like to see. In the shadow of the perceived urgency regarding the security issue, there has been a sharp rise in the demand for criminal justice. In fact, more is expected of criminal justice than it can ever deliver. In a quantitative sense, there is no way it can even come close to meeting the demand; in a qualitative sense, criminal justice is in the unsatisfying position of never being able to fulfil the hope that prospective offenders will mend their ways. In a dogmatic sense, the system has not been set up as an institution that can create order. The criminal justice urgency perceived in a safety utopia is thus diametrically opposed to a relatively weak position in an instrumental sense.

How crime serves as a moral argument The assertion that every society gets the crime it deserves can be viewed as one of the clichés of criminology. It says everything and nothing at the same time. Nowadays, diverse and fragmented culture is apparently accompanied by a serious safety issue. Many explanations have been suggested in criminology, all of which contain a grain of truth. We are familiar with the sociological discourses on the dichotomy in society, the consumerism, the migration problems, the undisciplined way children are brought up nowadays, the open borders, the problems related to drugs and alcohol, the culture of masculinity, and so on. It is characteristic of criminological explanations, which do bear a certain relevance to policy issues, that criminal behaviour is interpreted on the basis of factors outside the individual will. Insofar as the individual subject plays a role in the explanations, the individual appears as a rational actor, who chooses the most obvious option on the basis of an internal analysis of the costs and benefits. Under some circumstances, this will be criminal behaviour. In this criminological thinking, the individual as the moral subject is essentially declared to be legally incompetent. In a sense, this is diametrically opposed to what is, in principle, the underlying assumption of the criminal justice process: that the offender or suspect acts of his or her own free will. Although a criminal court judge will be willing to take the offender’s personal circumstances into consideration, it is mainly the moral responsibility of the individual as the legal subject who is addressed: You did it, so you wanted to do it! This, I feel, is an important point of departure for the dominant view on criminal behaviour today. Perhaps

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criminal behaviour can be explained by any number of factors, but this does not help to understand its moral significance. Criminal behaviour is primarily understood as a moral act. If the offender is taken seriously as a person who is morally competent, we can only assume that there were other choices open to him or her. Offenders themselves also often disapprove of their own conduct. Perhaps they are hoping for some measure of understanding from other people, but they are surprised when their evil acts are simply explained away. In the explanation, their internal motivation is essentially repudiated. If their guilt is disclaimed, the punishment might seem unreasonable to them. There is some evidence that the offender will be more affected by the sanction, if he has the feeling that he has been fairly judged and sentenced (see, for example, Tyler, 1990; Sherman, 1993). In essence, a determination of their offences does mean that they had no say in what they did. But most people want to be the authors of their own behaviour. Acknowledging the moral subject’s own responsibility can be viewed as an important legacy of the humanist tradition. If there is no longer the ideological belief that individuals can be shaped, we should be aware of what might be an extreme consequence. The liberal freedom to choose the good life for ourselves – instead of being determined by a strong community’s religion or ideology – means the bad life is also viewed as a life project, be it a wrong one. Nowadays ‘victimalized morality’ – ‘victimalization’ as the central argument – makes crime something that is interpreted as an authentic moral act and can therefore be rejected. Criminal behaviour is then not so much a deviation from the norm enforced from above as a denial of a fundamental principle of a humanist culture, the recognition of the other and of the other’s freedom. The criminal court judge points us towards a central assumption of contemporary culture: that we ourselves are responsible for our own life project. The urgent role that is currently attributed to criminal law acquires a deeper significance, if we bear in mind this much more fundamental function underlying it. The call for more criminal justice is inspired by the normative simplicity of criminal law. After all, criminal justice represents the condemnation of behaviour that causes harm to other people, or makes the norms of the community secondary to the fulfilment of one’s own goals. This is why crime has become a central argument in moral debates, with the victim as the normative prosecutor. Norms defined in criminal justice terms inform us of the vulnerability of moral positions, of other people’s and our own moral ambivalence.

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Conclusion The meaning and, related to that, the significance of criminal law has changed completely in the development of a secular, networked, improvising society. In relatively coherent circumstances, criminal law was a state institution that could function on the periphery of society. Prosecutors were, together with the police, the guardians of moral space, which was furnished by religiously and ideologically inspired moral values and norms. But in a fragmented and divided society, criminal law became a moral stronghold. It got a central position, which I have called ‘urgent’, inspired by the Panopticon, ‘the little utopia’ of Jeremy Bentham. This resulted in an inversion of morality and penal law: crime became a defining factor of the furnishing of moral space. A crucial factor in this was the position of the victim. If we see today’s morality as the whole of intuitions on good and evil, than we might understand that the definition of ‘the good life’ is highly personalized and diversified. But on the evil side of our intuitions there seems to be some consensus now and then. In particular, the victim of crime can count on a lot of empathy and respect. For the same reason, the offender cannot count on understanding of his reasons and circumstances. We can understand why ‘victimhood’ has become a political issue. Right or left, white or black – there is a tendency to claim the truth in terms of being violated or harassed. The decisive argument in many political debates is about who can legitimately claim the status of being a victim. That is where the attention for criminal law comes from and why the expectations of its outcome have increased. However, this position of criminal law has severe consequences for the development of the security industry, as discussed in Chapter 5.

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FIVE

Securitization in a safe new world From time to time, I track the number of minutes devoted to securityrelated topics on the national news.18 Often it amounts to more than half of the broadcast time available. There was an attempted terrorist attack somewhere, someone has escaped from an asylum, or a suspected dealer in child pornography is being extradited. But this kind of daily research soon gets tangled up in definitions. Should I include accidents – perhaps those caused by carelessness? Or disasters – a guilty party is soon found, or possibly the aid workers arrived too late? Or, take the discussion about norms and values: it is easy to argue that they are related to questions of security. Not to mention food safety or – something totally different – the social security net provided by the government (unemployment benefits, for example). Security, in other words, deals with anything and everything – and hence nothing, according to current opinion. Yet I dare to doubt that last. The fact that all these subjects can be placed within the framework of security says a great deal about the organization of our society. One way or another, security always seems to be the solution. We address a lot of problems when we use it as an argument – surveillance cameras, child records, number plate recognition, body scans. The security concept has become a semantic dragnet in a liquid society. Words such as ‘crime and punishment’ sound almost old-fashioned – just as the motto ‘law and order’ seemed outdated in the 1970s, and ‘guilt and penance’ smacks of Moscow in the 19th century. Old-fashioned and yet timeless, crime, punishment, law, order, guilt and penance have obviously not disappeared from the conceptual stage. But these words no longer define thought and action in the area of ‘what is wrong and what you can do about it’. Crime became a risk, and punishment has become one option within a much larger arsenal of instruments of control. The criminal justice paradox forced the system to reach out for other, preventative measures to control behaviour. The discourse about criminality has moved from ‘crime and punishment’ to ‘risk and control’, and sometimes to the even vaguer ‘insecurity

The first five sections of this chapter are an edited version of part of chapter 4 of The improvising society (Boutellier, 2013). 18

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and precaution’. Security has taken conceptual control of the moral space and has thus taken on an ordering quality.

A new mission for criminal justice As argued in Chapter 4, the criminal justice system enjoys a great deal of attention. Over recent decades, there developed a large conglomerate of critical researchers, television producers and journalists holding public prosecutors and judges to account. This attention has a paradoxical cause – expectations are highly charged, and this promotes mistrust. One is worried about both the effectiveness of criminal law (many citizens want more and stronger sentences) and the reliability of the verdicts. Indignation over lenient sentences alternates with protests about judgments in dubious cases. Among others, the criminologist David Garland (2001) regarded the renewed appreciation for the (prison) sentence at the end of the 1990s as one of the hallmarks of a ‘culture of control’. What is the nature of this ‘new faith’ in the criminal justice system, which is, as we have seen, determined more by its pretensions than its actual performance (the criminal justice paradox)? The function of criminal justice is regarded in general as a channelling of revenge into a proportionally acceptable retribution for the deed. Utilitarian goals are also added to the punishment, such as compensation, deterrence, prevention and rehabilitation. Restrained punishments – and trying to make the best of them – could be an official ‘civilizing mission statement’ for criminal law. There is also a psychological tendency to punish. Adam Smith spoke of spontaneous resentment, Nietzsche of a primal human impulse, Durkheim of spontaneous indignation, and Garland of ‘penality’ (a concept that also includes the emotional aspects of punishment). This punitive drive has been rediscovered in recent decades, or perhaps I should say that it has found a renewed appreciation. In fact, it is a deliberately conscious choice for punishment that I would describe as a counter to forbearance towards criminal behaviour. It is about a deliberate rejection of the punishable behaviour and an express will to make the offender suffer. It is not just about a need for retribution, but also about the belief that society needs such a ‘normative justice’. This ‘rationality’ in the punitive motive is a reaction to the long stretch of history in which the avenging motive was kept in abeyance. For several centuries, the perpetrator could count on increasing compassion. In his extensive study of two hundred years of Dutch prison life, Herman Franke (1996) explains this through the growing

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power of suffering: ‘From contemptible, almost bestial creatures who died of hunger and misery in poorly heated, unhygienic hovels and underground holes, Dutch prisoners have become reasonably wellhoused detainees’ (Franke, 1996: 4). He points to the growing distaste for physical violence and cruelty, and describes this tendency, inspired by the work of Norbert Elias (1994), as the result of a historical civilizing process. That same aversion was occurring throughout Western societies. The rise of the nation states and the growth of their interdependence led to a different psychological mindset, in which the role of physical violence became marginalized. Up to the beginning of the 19th century, many criminals were hanged, drawn and quartered, with loud encouragement from the populace. Then punishment began to lose its sharper edges, alternatives were found, reintegration programmes were introduced, and there was more tolerance and exoneration. The power of suffering grew so strong that, apparently, it compromised another motive – the will to punish. Gradually, the offender was also seen as a victim of too harsh punishment. The criminal justice system tacks back and forth between the two emotional impulses of vengeance and compassion. The system should be well balanced with regard to the punitive impulse, as well as the tendency to lenience. One needs little evidence that currently the second impulse dominates, namely in an instrumental sense – we punish to keep society orderly. Since the nineties ‘the emancipation of prisoners’ has come to an end.

From criminality to insecurity Renewed faith in punishment, inspired by the central role of the crime victim, is a crucial step in reconstructing the process by which security grew into a programme for ordering. In a pluralistic culture, a crime is increasingly regarded as a choice for which one should be held accountable (see Chapter 4). In a complex world, criminal law now functions as an orientation point, and that changes the meaning of punishment. During the 1990s, the number of judgments increased, punishments became more severe, and in general the approach to dealing with criminality, nuisances and anti-social behaviour became tougher. But this is only a part of the story. Attention to crime prevention has also grown. In general, there are two strategies for tackling problems: reacting and preventing. This also applies to problems of criminality. In the first instance, there is a legal reaction (repression); in the second, steps

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are taken to avoid offensive behaviour (prevention). Yet the contrast between repression and prevention in practice is not as sharp as is often thought. Punishment is composed of various goals, including the goal of preventing offensive behaviour in the future. So, vice versa, a prevention policy also entails some form of correction. It seems to me that the attempt to bring both under one label – ‘security’ – contributed to the rise in popularity of that concept. It facilitated the link between punitive and preventative strategies on crime reduction. By redefining criminality as insecurity, three ‘bridges’ are created – from factual offence to the risk thereof; from enforcement of criminal law to other measures; and from objective events to their subjective experience. From fact to risk The first bridge – from factual offence to the risk thereof – brings crime into the category of risk, along with many other risks, for example fires, disasters, terrorism and major accidents with hazardous materials. One hoped, with an integrated and comprehensive safety policy, to bring more consistency into local approaches to safety problems. More important than the actual connection of various forms of security, however, was the shift in thinking in terms of risk analysis and risk management. Crime became potentially a negative effect, so it got onto the agenda of the risk society. That is an important fact. Risk is regarded by various authors as the keyword of the 21st century. Ulrich Beck coined the term ‘risk society’ in 1986 with regard to technological developments (for example nuclear power and genetic engineering), but the idea’s penetration into other fields has proved to be even more important. Furedi (1997 (updated in 2002): xii), for example, shows that use of the word ‘risk’ in papers published in English rose from 2,037 in 1994 to 18,003 in 2000. At that same time (2001), actuarial researcher Francois Ewald described risk as ‘the single point upon which contemporary societies question themselves, analyze themselves, seek their values and perhaps recognize their limits’ (quoted by Ericson, 2007: 6). According to audit expert Michael Power (2007), risk is the organizing concept in an uncertain world. This shift in meaning fits perfectly with the tendency to try to avoid criminality (instead of waiting until suffering has occurred). By redefining crime as ‘risk’, all kinds of new techniques became possible, which were developed in the insurance industry, among others. This is why Feeley and Simon (1994) speak of ‘actuarial justice’.

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At present, one notes that preventive thinking is being assimilated into the emerging concept of ‘precaution’. This concept, which drifted over from environmental law, is about not waiting for scientific certainty before taking action in the event of potentially serious damage (Fischer, 2001, quoted in Ericson, 2007: 21). The chance of damage is sufficient justification, even in the absence of calculable risk. It is tempting to characterize security thinking in this vein as precautionary politics (Ericson, 2007, tends in this direction). I will return to this later in this chapter, but for now it will suffice to refer to the semantic shift from criminal fact to risk of damage. From reaction to regulation The second bridge – between criminal law and administrative regulation – makes municipalities and other organizations coresponsible for security problems. Crime is defined in the penal code, and the government, the police and the judicial system have the legal responsibility to fight it. For the police, this judicial task is supplemented with maintaining order locally and helping in crisis situations. When this task is defined as a security problem, with an emphasis on risk analysis and risk management, then many more parties can become involved in prevention and repression, as well as remediation. Garland (1996; 2001) has described this process, in which other parties are made responsible for security issues, as responsibilization. Municipalities, schools and housing corporations have their own initiatives regarding security issues. As a result, the field of security has expanded enormously, and this has led to a new problem – the need for all involved to coordinate and collaborate. The talk now is of safety networks. It was in reference to this that I proposed, for governance reasons in the security field, a ‘line’ model – as in soccer – in which the various societal functions of the community are presented in terms of defense (repression), centre field (norms) and forward line (vitality) (Boutellier and van Steden, 2010). The judiciary and the police have traditionally played a peripheral role in maintaining social order. In their current urgent position (see Chapter 4), their normative function gives direction to other social institutions. This is one reason why Simon (2007), for example, speaks of ‘governing through crime’. According to Simon (2007: 4ff.), there are three strategies at work here: crime-fighting per se (in the first decade of the 21st century, 3% of adults in the United States were in some form of detention or under supervision); using crime to legitimize other goals (for example dealing with ‘asocial families’); the influence

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of technologies, narratives and metaphors about crime in other public institutions (for example school safety). From facts to feelings The third bridge is between the objective crime and the subjective experience of the situation. In the case of a criminal event, something has happened: there is a concrete experience, and one reacts to that. ‘Safe’ or ‘unsafe’, however, refers to a feeling, which is relatively independent of the actual situation. For that reason alone, the concept of safety cannot be defined in an objective sense (Zedner, 2009). When can one talk about actual safety? Yet ‘how the citizen feels’ does legitimize the idea of security. Even if a given citizen has never been the victim of a crime, feelings of insecurity can still exist. In turn, even though no criminal is caught, it can feel safer if, for example, there is more surveillance. The subjective experience of security is a remarkably complicated business. There is a big difference between the fear of actually becoming a victim of crime and the general discontent with today’s society. Spithoven (2017) showed in extensive research that residents in problem areas regard ‘unsafety’ as a synonym for social problems. Fear of crime mainly means societal discontent. It is also possible to view these negative factors from a more positive angle. Trust and social cohesion are also shown to be determinants in perceived safety. These subjective factors appeared to be just as influential as experiences of having been a victim (Boers et al, 2008). Etymologically, the Dutch word for ‘security’ – veiligheid – also encompasses shelter, intimacy, safety and comfort (van Zuijlen, 2004). As such, the ‘pursuit of security’ (a term of Zedner, 2009) can be seen as a synonym for social policy that is all-encompassing.

The moral inversion Viewed from the concept of security, the crime problem thus becomes broader in a material sense, more diverse in an administrative sense, and deeper in a psychological sense. This has resulted in a larger movement, with more resources, more strategies and methods, and more relevant actors. The new civilizing mission of the criminal justice system – no tolerance for anti-social behaviour – has spread into other policy areas, thanks to the broadening concept of security. This has had major consequences for the nature of government intervention.

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As we saw in Chapter 4, the criminal justice system in the classical paradigm is in the last instance, the last instance. This idea presupposes a strong civil community that achieves social ordering through socialization, inculcation of norms and values, and social control. In the event that civil discipline is insufficient, or to put it another way if the world is too complex, the sanctioning system moves from the periphery to the centre of society. It occupies the moral space, but, being a judicial instrument, it cannot fill it. The concept of ‘security’ offers relief. It reverses the relationship between the social order and the criminal justice system, which no longer simply guards the borders of the moral space, but also lays claim to its internal arrangement. This is not a matter of normative broadening, but rather a reversal. I would call it a moral inversion. An enlightening illustration is the approach to anti-social behaviour in England and Wales in the last two decades. Frank Field, a former Labour Member of Parliament, describes the need for a ‘politics of behaviour’ in his chillingly titled book Neighbours from hell (2003). Field’s opinion is that a certain degree of respect and civility is necessary for a well-functioning society. To that end, good behaviour should be encouraged and bad behaviour rejected. The old disciplinary structures for doing that, however, have eroded. Faith (in this case religion) has changed into permanent doubt, and a pervasive relativism has permeated institutions such as the family and the education system: ‘my view of the world is just as good as yours’ (Field, 2003: 3). Field wants to see action on the part of the government: ‘the use of the law has to be backed up by a strategy to teach again all of those social virtues’ (Field, 2003: 23). In his view, the most important virtues are courtesy, consideration and sensitivity to others. Addressing antisocial behaviour is therefore important, because it is the frequency of the disturbance that is the decisive factor – it makes the rancour understandable. Criminal justice falls short in this regard – it takes too long, there are too few funds, and ‘the law favours the perpetrator’ (Field, 2003: 35ff.). Field regards a rigorous approach by the government as legitimate, because politics is about more than managing the market. The question ‘what kind of people do we want to be’ is also political (Field, 2003: 50). Because of this conviction, he sees the police as a surrogate parent for youths who have gone astray, and he wants the social sector to function more as a ‘teacher’ for young families. This political barb has had a great impact on security policies in England and Wales. This is amply described and analyzed by Andrew Millie (2009a; 2009b). Millie (and also Crawford, 2009a, 2009b) regarded the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and the Anti-Social

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Behaviour Act 2003 as new forms of behaviour regulation (Anti-Social Behaviour Orders – or ASBOs – have been replaced under the AntiSocial Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014): [An] ASBO can be imposed by local authorities, and violations can be legally penalized. If someone who has been ordered to stay away from a certain street violates that order, then jail time can be imposed. The ASBO lowers the threshold of intervention, formalizes informal reactions, and intensifies possible sanctions. (Crawford, 2009a: 813) Crawford is also of the opinion that the ASBO undermined traditional forms of judicial protection – due process, proportionality and protection of the rights of juveniles. Because general social policy is less successful, Crawford thinks there is a tendency towards individually oriented interventions: ‘prevention in a context of uncertainty’ leads to ‘steering, monitoring and correcting people’s lifestyles’ (2009a: 815). Crawford counted a grand total of 18 instruments of regulation in England and Wales, ranging from the Drug Intervention Order, the Parenting Contract, and Housing Benefit Sanctions, to Drinking Banning Orders and Crack House Closure (2009b: 8). Blurring the border between a punishment and a preventative measure may seem like a solution to local authorities, but for many lawyers it is a horror (Ashworth and Zedner, 2008). The complaints, the powers of imposition, and the sanctions all contain arbitrary elements. Criminal law is not suitable for dealing with a social problem, which is why one seeks refuge in what I like to call ‘quasi-criminal law’ – hence the moral inversion. For Simester and von Hirsch this made the ASBO a ‘two-step prohibition’ (2006, cited in Millie, 2009a). Thus, behaviour that was non-criminal to the rest of society was treated as criminal for the individual on the ASBO. The difference in insight between Field and these critical authors leads us to the heart of the political-moral discussion about security that is being held in almost all Western nations. Does one adopt a proactive behavioural approach, or a restrained criminal justice reaction? On the one hand, it is crystal clear that ‘neighbours from hell’ and intimidating and disturbing behaviour are unpleasant for those who live nearby. It is very problematic, especially from a political standpoint, when government cannot find answers to such situations. On the other hand, citizens’ rights to freedom from government intervention have been built up carefully over the centuries and could possibly be destroyed, albeit unintentionally.

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The security of everything In addition to ‘the moral inversion’ of criminal law and social norms, security became the big concept in the organization of the social world. The concept of crime prevention turned into a risk-oriented kind of policy making and policing. The introduction in the UK of the ASBO was one of the more remarkable expressions of so-called securitization. But there were other measures in other European countries and in the US which confirm that security became the new programme for social order. The 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 were not the start, but generated a further magnification of ‘the safety utopia’: the cultural desire for the coincidence of maximal freedom and maximal protection and safety. This utopian desire is characteristic of a neoliberal consumerist anything-goes culture, which goes hand in hand with an ever-dominating security and safety discourse. In criminology, this translated into the ‘routine activity approach’, in which crime is understood as a rational reaction to given circumstances, which need better control (Felson, 1998). Based on the moral inversion described earlier, there is an increasing tendency towards ‘securitization of society’ (originally Waever, 1995; Schuilenburg, 2015). In government buildings, the receptionists of old have been replaced with security guards. Football fans are now physically searched before matches, and one can also be asked to show identification on a train platform. Security is functioning more and more like a lens through which to examine social problems. Crime is normal, as is its prevention. This delineates the exceptional consequences of the moral inversion. The law begins to function more as a form of congealed morality than as a set of norms. It gives direction to public morals, which define ‘the good life’ according to the degree of compliance. Not the content of the norms, but their effectiveness – even better, their enforceability – becomes the goal of the security approach. The norm becomes an (insurable) risk, its transgression an opportunity, and prevention a question of control. Zedner (2007) speaks in this context of a ‘precrime’ logic that translates itself into new technologies and regulations. So we have seen the development of: situational crime prevention – regulations around risk situations and risk citizens (Reiner, 2006); community safety and numerous neighbourhood security initiatives (Crawford, 2003); individual risk assessment; insurance technologies (Feeley and Simon, 1994); registries of offenders and other forms of preventive measures and monitoring (the previously mentioned system of ‘quasi-criminal law’); and preventive detention. According to

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Zedner (2007), these new approaches are at odds with the procedural guarantees of the criminal justice process. Special attention requires the growth of surveillance technology – from cameras to body scans (see the next section). ‘Pre-crime’ logic has no boundaries. Before there is even a mention of a definable or calculable risk, there is the possibility of a risk developing. Power writes of ‘an increasing demand for governance of the unknowable’ (quoted by Zedner, 2007: 85). In this context, one hears the previously mentioned word ‘precaution’, which goes further than ‘risk law’ when applied to the field of criminal activity. Here a relationship with strategies from international security arises, for example pre-emptive strikes, anticipatory self-defence and rapidfire justice. A quote about this from former American Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld speaks volumes: There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we don’t know we don’t know. (2002, quoted in Zedner, 2009: 126) Here we find ourselves facing a paradoxical development. We view criminal activity as ‘a routine activity’. Yet this normalization leads to a permanent sense of being threatened. It means that normal people can strike at any time. The normalization of ‘evil’ leads to the fear that it can pop up anywhere. This fundamental distrust opens the door to an unrestrained security offensive, supported by the technological possibilities. According to Koops et al (2009), the modern citizen is becoming a transmitter surrounded by a digital cloud of information. A variety of personalized tracking systems are around him or her in relation to security, for example electronic medical files, children’s files, student tracking systems, social security numbers, number plate registration, surveillance cameras, internet usage records, electronic pay cards for tolls and fares, GPS usage records, and credit scores – not to mention the commercially driven data-cloud. Each of these has its own objective, yet they all have a more or less explicit security component: certainly should the need arise. In the event of serious crimes, no one objects to these sources being used in the investigation, and that rapidly becomes the case with less serious offences. DNA sampling is a good example. It has been successively permitted on a voluntary basis for serious crimes, then for less serious

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offences, and then even without permission and with the possibility that it will be subsequently stored for all citizens in a data bank. This seems to be an application of ‘salami tactics’ – realizing one’s goal with many small steps that obscure the big picture. The word ‘tactics’ presupposes a conscious and deliberate strategy, yet this process of securitization probably takes place rather innocently. The small step seems the most rational one at that given moment, and also proportionate to the desired goal. Who could possibly be opposed to it? New technological delights with implanted chips are on the increase. It might soon even be possible to stop behaviour by monitoring thought processes – far more effective than using leg irons. Besides increasing angst, there are other negative aspects in terms of equality and protection of rights, trust, freedom and vitality. I will come to the issue of surveillance later in this chapter.

The political meaning of securitization So far, I have sketched a series of shifts of meaning in the arena of criminal law, criminality, safety, precaution and securitization. This description is obviously open to discussion, especially with regard to empirical research. It is a conceptual history that unfolds against the backdrop of the problem of complexity without direction, as discussed in Part I. The security offensive can be understood as an attempt to create order in this complexity. Security gives normative direction via criminal law and reduces complexity. This can have an additional effect – fear. Sociologists and criminologists tend to regard today’s society as ‘fear-driven’ (for example Furedi, 1997). Often, politics is credited with sowing fear among the citizenry, or using it to affirm the state’s power and to further the interests of the elite. We have encountered this approach in various forms: governing through crime, risk, punishment, uncertainty, anti-social behaviour and through security (O’Malley, 2004; Simon, 2007; Ericson, 2007; Crawford, 2009a, 2009b; Wacquant, 2009; Zedner, 2009). Crisis situations, it is also argued, are manipulated or even created to push through decisions (Wolf, 2007). All these authors agree that this is an undesirable development. Public morality increasingly coincides with (criminal) law and its compliance and enforcement. This, combined with the burgeoning technological possibilities, can take on totalitarian aspects. Let me make a secondary observation about this. Citizens’ understanding of ‘privacy’ has changed dramatically. Many control measures are not experienced as undermining privacy, but rather as

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offering reassurance. In the era of reality TV shows and the internet, revealing one’s intimate life no longer carries the shame it would have done in the 1970s, when newly won freedoms made privacy a highly sensitive issue. Technological transparency has normalized these freedoms. The social unease that feeds securitization derives more from a sense of being unprotected than from being overly controlled. For many decades, the Second World War was a reference point for moral deliberation; 11 September 2001 shifted the mental focus to terrorism. This meant a move away from guilt to fear, from the past to the future, from being suspicious of the state to distrusting other citizens (Beck, 2002). Under these conditions, a control state could develop without too much protest. It is striking that many security measures are put in place for concrete reasons and a perceived need that something must be done. Usually there is a direct sense of urgency – a dance party that got out of hand, a child molester being let out of prison, a foiled attack. People feel that such things must be prevented, no matter what the price. That does give direction, but the complexity remains. Clearly, this also applies to security practices. In practice, securitization requires professionals to work together in complicated relationships. I am even tempted to say that security organizes itself not because there are political interests with totalitarian needs behind it, but rather because it propagates itself naturally throughout society. Social securitization takes place without totalitarian intentions, which makes its development appear innocent, but it is also more treacherous. Security gives direction in a normative sense, by preventing crime, anti-social behaviour and serious threats, but it has developed into a large-scale offensive for social order. Correcting it demands more intelligence than simply being against it. ‘Stop securitization’ is the slogan of many civil rights activists, politicians and intellectuals. Various researchers have spoken out against the constrictions of the risk society. Some argue in favour of accepting the ambiguity that is part of current society and Bernstein (1998) even celebrates living with risk. Yet this hope for a less obsessive desire for security seems somewhat in vain. Zedner (2009, Chapter 7) argues for that reason (and others) in favour of an overarching ‘authority for security’ that would promote public debate, ethical monitoring, and responsibility and liability in the implementation. The process of securitization seems to be unstoppable, but maybe it can be contained.

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From security to surveillance Although public attention towards common crime seems to have diminished a little, the focus on violent radicalization and terror has intensified – and not without reason. Terrorism is the new reference point in the organization of social order. This development is accompanied by a technological restructuring of security politics, for which the concept of surveillance has come into vogue. David Lyon wrote some key publications on the ‘surveillance society‘ (1994; 2001; 2007). He defines surveillance as ‘focused, systematic and routine attention to personal details for purposes or influence, management, protection or direction’ (Lyon, 2007: 14). It is always about personal information, while the purposes for collection may differ. Modern societies cannot actually exist without surveillance techniques (Lyon, 2007: 14). Lyon emphasizes repeatedly that surveillance is not intrinsically a bad thing. People do benefit from it, for example for their safety or health. Surveillance is actually an interactive process between the ‘watched’ and the ‘watcher’, and that has certainly been the case since the explosive growth of social media. That is why the discussion about surveillance seems so complicated. Surveillance is not restricted to the state; there are areas where the state is not at stake at all. The same goes for the worlds of work and consumption (in addition to the army, the police and public administration, where the state is decisive). Companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon have large interests in systematically and routinely searching for personal details; the commercial possibilities are huge. The actions of such big companies however are otherwise motivated than those of the National Security Agency (the American security service) or other intelligence services. The rise of a surveillance society lies in the possibility of assemblies – in the combination of data by which deep information about people is created. Surveillance techniques have long existed, in the sense of following individuals in order to affect them, but, over the last decades, they have become the organizational basis of our society. Virtually all our actions leave digital traces, which can be used without too much control. The previously discussed ‘safety utopia’ has been transformed into a more comprehensive system of seeing and being seen. This includes coordinates of time and place, but also bio-information (iris scans, DNA), images (cameras on the street, pictures) and personal expressions (social media). A more appropriate term would actually be ‘dataveillance’, according to Lyon (2007: 18). On the basis of data mining, a complete picture of a person can be built up, or rather a

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virtual reflection of them (so called data doubles . In addition to our outward representation and our inner state of mind, we have a third, digitally composed self. The rise of the surveillance society is usually explained by technological development and the modernization of bureaucracy and capitalism. These are the obvious explanations. The digitalization of information made it possible to look everywhere and always to be watched. Whether we like it or not, we create a field of data around us. These data can be picked up and processed by companies and state institutions. There is a thick, global blanket of data over us, which cannot easily be used – as the difficulties of intelligence agencies in preventing terrorist attacks show. But the possibility of data assembly on individuals means both commercial profit as well as political power. Lyon (2007: 101) speaks of ‘social sorting’, the process in which virtual people are selected and categorized. Resistance to the comprehensiveness of the ‘data society’ (to use another term) seems to be quite limited, however. We tend to accept its presence. According to Murakami Wood and Webster (2009), we have four reasons to do so: the feeling that there is at least something being done for our safety; the application for healthcare purposes; the realization that we are all part of it; the idea that the elusive becomes visible. In opinion polls, respondents say that they worry, but not too much (Best, 2010). People think that the information collected about themselves will be correct. In addition, people do not realize what impact the combination of data systems may have. The significance of privacy seems to have changed over the last few decades. It was relevant in the 1970s, when new openness arose, that there was so much that people would rather remained hidden. Meanwhile, public intimacy is so commonplace that privacy sometimes seems to be an atavism (something from the past). The commotion related to so-called ‘revenge pornography’ shows, however, that people do object to misuse of their digital appearance. It is, after all, a form of loss of control over one’s own life. The real problem of data collection is, according to Lyon (2007: 176), not privacy as such, but the possible abuse of personal information. We could refer to the Panopticon of Jeremy Bentham, discussed in Chapter 4. The Panopticon has long served as a metaphor for the safety culture, where the whole world is under control from one viewpoint. But this is no longer the right metaphor for the surveillance society. Surveillance takes place on all sorts of levels and with various motives. There is no central point, but rather a chaotic data tangle, sorted out

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by different powerful parties. The Norwegian sociologist Thomas Mathiesen introduced the word ‘synopticon’ – meaning we are watched from every angle (cited in Lyon, 2007: 59 and 140). According to Bigo (2005, quoted by Lyon, 2007: 65), because of the process of sorting people out in order to exclude them from facilities or public services, we might better speak of a ‘ban-opticum’. Whatever we call it, one of the more striking issues of the surveillance society is that we accept it – and even like it in several aspects. Commercial parties are even more advanced in the sorting of the data tangle than the state, and they support our daily decision making. Everybody is part of it and happily cooperates in generating and using data. Surveillance is even a form of entertainment (such as Facebook). Lyon (2007: 81) speaks of a curious dialectic of identification by ourselves and by others. That is perhaps the most extraordinary feature of the surveillance society: the power strategies that are used emerge from the experience of freedom. People love the facilities which are controlling them.

Surveillance as a transcendent reality In his last lectures, Foucault (around 1980, published in 1991) developed the concept of gouvernementalité to describe a new form of governance that is both disciplining and rewarding. Citizens are controlled by their own inner self – a form that fits perfectly with the neoliberal economy, in which free choice is the basis of the market. For Foucault, it is a new variant of administrative power, aiming for an ever more sophisticated control of individuals. I will not go into the details of this approach, but note that the surveillance society develops in accordance with Foucault’s understanding. In the development of a safety culture into a surveillance society, a new digital providence has been created, in which people want to blend voluntarily. The securitization that followed secularization has developed into a new omnipotence. The secular network society (complexity without direction) serves as a breeding ground for a massive development of surveillance techniques. With e-technology as a driving power, fuelled by fear of crime and terror, a surveillance society emerges, in which not only the state, but also big international companies gain ever more advanced insight into our personal lives and collective patterns. There is remarkably little resistance to this development, as if surveillance serves as a new collective providence, giving a sense of security comparable to that of

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religion (see also Stoddart, 2011, who gives a theological analysis of the surveillance society). Religion and surveillance match in a number of characteristics: the influence and power of a higher order; the idea of always being seen and followed; the notion that anyone (regardless of their status) is part of a greater whole; the comprehensiveness of knowledge about all domains of life; the notion of control and protection by a higher authority; the universal nature of providence. Of course, there are also differences. So is surveillance a human-made phenomenon? But isn’t religion ultimately that too? In accordance with the relationship between God and man is the information in the surveillance society provided by the citizens themselves. Government and industry collect and analyze this information – there is little religion here. But there is something else. It seems as if the human mind has become public through digitalization. The World Wide Web has enabled us to flaunt all our thoughts, fantasies and emotions, good or evil; conversely, algorithmics penetrate our minds and try to forecast what we like, what we need and what we desire. The police are developing systems that can even predict our behaviour. We can well live with this, if only because we also maintain our personal relationships through cyberspace. How intrusive this can be, seems to be underestimated. Each of us has secrets, and they turn out to be useful, even psychologically (Wismeijer, 2011). The ease with which we submit ourselves to the efficacy of the data analysts is striking, and might only be understood in terms of awe and submission. The religious potential of people seems to be a good precondition for the surveillance society. According to the Dutch historian of terrorism Bob de Graaff (2014), 9/11 in 2001 was the game changer in intelligence work. The usual intelligence had failed, and therefore it was from that moment onwards, that everything was permitted. ‘Why would a Supreme being be accountable for his believers?’, de Graaff asks rhetorically. People want to be seen and heard by a mysterious body that watches over them. A digital omnipotent power, which everyone is part of, has taken the place of a divine almighty. There is a strong temptation to believe in him, because of the promise of protection: ’I have nothing to hide’. The intelligence systems have created a substitute God, with which we apparently feel free to live.

Conclusion In recent decades, we have seen a gradual securitization that has merged into a greater technological development of digitalization

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and data analysis. The secularization process initially contributed to the increase in crimes in the 1970s, but this was stopped in the 1990s because of all kinds of preventative security arrangements (Boutellier, 2015, Chapter 3). But it also contributed to the fear of crime, through the loss of certainty which coherent philosophies of life can offer. The experience of feeling unsafe was a crucial factor in security politics. More and more pragmatic instruments were deployed to prevent crime and to counter the fear of crime. Security became a societal project, in which everyone got involved. There are overarching and elusive forms of surveillance in the security field – new technologies and digitalization – that exhibit a new omnipotence, to which we are happy to subordinate ourselves. In Chapter 2, referring to Eagleton (2014), I discussed various substitutes for the abolition of religion as an organizing social power. One was the nation state, which in the 19th century managed to enthuse large masses in Europe. The developments as to security give the nation state a very strong position again. Security even has a number of features enabling it to function as a substitute for religion. Security unites (who doesn’t want to be safe?), security brings stability and order, and it connects the elite and the masses. Security carries the promise of social order and moral clarity. But security is a concept without a final stage – it is difficult to define in a positive way: what is really safe? For that reason, it even gets metaphysical connotations: an infinite desire for safety and certainty. The moral function of religion seems to be replaced by a security programme without precedent. In its elusive nature, it has characteristics of a higher good, for which we are always longing. I have characterized today’s Western world as ‘complexity without direction’. I have argued that there are two main forces behind this development: the rise of a network society and the secularization process of many Western countries. This has created a unique situation, which seems to relate to a lot of distrust and discontent, fear and anger. Against this background, the security discourse underwent an enormous transformation – from criminal prosecution to crime control to crime prevention, to securitization to surveillance strategies. The discourse on crime shifted to the centre of moral space and became dominating in the way we value our relations to other people – not only in a physical sense of moral discipline, but also in a virtual sense of data governance, which intrudes into our minds. In order to gain a more precise picture of our moral adventures, Part III describes and analyzes developments in two policy issues: sex and identity.

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Sex and identity

SIX

Sexual offences and mutual consent Central to the morality of any culture are its norms and values on gender, especially on sexual affairs and personal relations.19 In most Western societies over the last half-century, there has emerged, for example, a wide acceptance of homosexual relations. There is also agreement on the absolute right of self-determination for women. Although there might be a discrepancy between values and reality, this constitutional equality is absent in other parts of the world. Nor has it always been the case in the West. In this chapter, I focus on the changing views on sexual violence and harassment – especially over the last half-century – and the consequences for sexual violence. Studying historical development in sexuality reveals a lot about the morality of a culture. Central to these analyses is the shift from external norms to the idea of mutual consent. It is the only criterion that fits in a secular and liberal context, in which people are autonomous and self-determining. Moral standards in sexuality seem to be the effect of how relations are experienced from within, instead of a result of how relations are defined from the outside. This is at the same time liberating and insecure. According to Dutch studies, over 50% of young women have experienced sexual behaviour against their will (Dukers-Muijrers et al, 2015). Although sexual violence is a phenomenon common to all ages, it is also very much an issue of contemporary life.

Bringing sex into the open A headline on 13 December 2014 in the Dutch quality newspaper NRC Handelsblad read, ‘British protest for face sitting’. The press report is about a ‘porn protest’ against an announced ban on ten acts that were no longer allowed to be portrayed in adult films, such as female ejaculation, strangulation, golden shower, and all that jazz. The protesters point out that in these actions, women are dominant: ‘face sitting is liberating’. This press report is remarkable in several ways. First, we are talking about a first-class quality newspaper – it reports about pornography 19

Parts of this chapter are based on chapter 3 of The safety utopia (Boutellier, 2005b).

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without trepidation. Second, the intention of the British Board of Film Classification to bring in these restrictions seems unachievable. On the internet, pornography is everywhere, in terms of both production and consumption. Now, it might have been the announcement of internet censorship, as in some authoritarian states, but that seems nearly impossible in a liberal democracy. But there is another special feature in this press report. The protest evokes memories of the late 1970s actions against pornography. These protests were the opposite of this pro-porn demonstration. Although the concern is not completely gone, this contemporary protest is typical of the current situation: pornography is everywhere and is tacitly accepted. The ‘liberating’ character of face sitting can, however, be regarded as the wildest argument for women’s liberation since Emmeline Pankhurst unleashed the first feminist wave. What has happened since the sexual revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s? Sex is a given as a biological faculty, but culturally speaking it is apparently a ‘many possibilities thing’. In her book Erotic Wars (1990), Lilian Rubin gives a nice account of how sexuality evolved in the 20th century. She does so based on interviews with thousands of heterosexuals of all ages. The experiences of her respondents document a spectacular change in how sex was perceived and experienced over a period of about fifty years. The stories confirm the common sense notion that sex has expanded from a secretive and painful affair into a prominent everyday matter. Compared to earlier generations, today people start having sex at a younger age, with more partners and in more varied forms. These changes, according to Rubin, hold true more for girls than for boys. The most striking thing about the stories Rubin recorded is perhaps the openness of her respondents. Sex has become something people can talk about quite openly. One might even say that, if they are asked, and the circumstances feel safe, people like talking about their own sexuality. It is as if there is a psychological need to reflect on and talk about sexual experiences and ideas. Indeed, sex is of vital importance to the respondents.

Sexuality and the self The relationship between the self and sexuality is central to the book The transformation of intimacy: Sexuality, love and eroticism in modern society by Anthony Giddens (1992), which is still a leading analysis. It follows partly the same lines as Foucault’s writings on sexuality (1976) and elaborates on Giddens’ own work on the consequences of modernity

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as regards the image of the self (Giddens, 1990, 1991). In a world where traditions are increasingly relegated to the background, we make permanent choices about what we want to do with our lives, who we want to be and how. One might speak in this connection of life politics or identity politics. Giddens describes how the modern era, with its roots in the Enlightenment, has evolved into a reflexive modernity, where thinking and speaking about the self is a core issue. Our personal lives have become an open project, which is accompanied by new expectations, demands and fears. This is the reason why Charles Taylor (2007) speaks of the era of authenticity. In his book on intimacy, Giddens analyses how sexuality increasingly became a key to identity politics in the course of the 20th century. Especially in the last few decades, a veritable revolution has unfolded in this sense, because of what he calls plastic sexuality, a rather moralizing term that refers to sexuality no longer linked in any way to reproduction: ‘Plastic sexuality can be moulded into a personality trait and is intrinsically connected in this way to the self ’ (Giddens, 1992: 2). Sex just for the sake of sex has become a legitimate option since the 1960s – each individual has to take a stand in one way or another and at various stages of their life without being steered by traditional views. Contemporary people not only are sexual beings, but they also have a sexual view. Giddens notes that homosexuals were trendsetters in this respect. They were by far the first to choose a sexual lifestyle of their own. Homosexual identity politics not only set the trend because it had no tradition and no possibility or risk of reproduction; but, more importantly, a sexual lifestyle was also developed between equals. With no biological risks, cultural traditions or gender differences, a sexual reflexiveness grew that was later adopted by heterosexuals as well. ‘Sexuality functions as a flexible characteristic of the self, a primary link between the body, self-identity and social norms’ (Giddens, 1992: 15). But where did this transformation come from? For this question we turn to The history of sexuality by Michel Foucault, the first volume of which was published in 1976. In line with his earlier (1975) work on the genesis of the prison (and the field of criminology) and the mental hospital (and the field of psychiatry), Foucault sees the emergence of sexual identity as a moment in the refinement of power structures. He notes that the origin of sexual identity – the definition of one’s own subjectivity in terms of sexual nature as in the case of the homosexual – goes back to the 18th century. It is already a product of the modern era, more specifically of the advent of the science of sexuality.

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The prison and the mental hospital, according to Foucault, are physical manifestations of the production of ever more detailed knowledge and ever more refined control over the conditions and behaviour of individuals. He refers in this connection to the ‘microphysics of power’. In The history of sexuality (1976), Foucault concentrates on the identity politics of modernity. Giddens summarizes Foucault’s position thus: ‘The subject is invited to produce a truth discourse on his sexuality that is in a position to affect the subject himself ’ (Giddens, 1992: 20). Erotic pleasure becomes sexuality, and sexual variations are linked to identities, a truth emerges about sexual conduct, where first there was only a reality, which was acknowledged in a moral and not in a scientific sense. At the end of the 19th century, sexuality became a source of concern, a form of conduct that required solutions and around which power discourses were constructed as regards women, homosexuals and children. The discovery of sexual identity, according to Foucault, was crucial to the formation and consolidation of modern social institutions such as the nuclear family, the school and regulated labour. Identity politics vis-à-vis sexual conduct becomes all the more cogent if we compare it to the Ancient Greek care of self, which has more to do with asceticism and eating habits.20 Until well into the 20th century, belief in God and the struggle around it was a central theme in the identity experience. The sexual core of the modern conception of the self has a direct relation to the secularization of morality.

Intimacy and eroticism Reading Foucault gives a lot of understanding of the roots of the idea of a ‘sexual identity’. But the ‘microphysics of power’ barely do justice to the reality of today’s sexual morality and experiences and the relatively recent changes from the 1960s onwards. This is especially visible in the stories recorded by Rubin (1990), where the experiences of these sexual identities play a central role. How people perceive and experience their needs, codes and norms all goes towards a mentality that is increasingly focused on sexuality. Giddens (1992) also refutes the suggestion of a direct line running from the Victorian era to the present. A lot has happened in between. In the course of the 19th century, marriage changed from a primarily economic tie into a romantic relationship. Conjugal rights and obligations acquired a mental enhancement of mutual desires and 20

This is the subject of Foucault, 1984.

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expectations that were mainly to the benefit of the woman’s position. More virtue was required of men,21 and women were gradually released from the reproduction compulsion of the traditional marriage. This romantic ideal of a relationship focused on the partner is now commonly accepted (as a mental representation). This ideal presumes the existence of intimacy, which is not the same thing as lust or sexual passion. ‘It presumes mental communication, a meeting of the souls that is restorative’ (Giddens, 1992: 45). Romantic love is focused on a future and implies stories about the self and the other, with all the problems this entails. Romantic love differs in this sense from passionate love, which Giddens feels can be viewed as a more or less universal phenomenon and that was – for example in aristocratic circles – not connected to the arranged marriage. The ars amatoria (the art of loving) – was then by men extramaritally with prostitutes, concubines or mistresses. Romantic love created the mentality within which the quest of self-identity could unfold. It is based on a self-image derived from the quality of the relationship, with sexuality playing a derivative role. The rise of family planning and birth control at the beginning of the 20th century made it possible to separate the sexual experience from reproduction. The introduction of the contraceptive pill in the 1960s made this separation virtually universal. It enabled women in particular to claim their own sexuality, which was no longer confined by matters of reproduction, tradition and male dominance. This is why Giddens feels relations between the sexes have entered a new stage. Our present-day sexual mentality is characterized by ambivalence as to the romantic ideal. ‘In contemporary times, the ideals of romantic love tend towards fragmentation under the pressure of female sexual emancipation and autonomy’ (Giddens, 1992: 61). Following on naturally from romantic intimacy, a new special relationship developed that Giddens calls ‘confluent love’. In this new relationship between potentially equal partners, intimacy merges with ars amatoria, but without the notion of remaining faithful for life that characterizes the romantic marriage. Together with the romantic ideal, the sexual experience comes to the fore, accompanied by psychotherapy, sexual education, popular magazines and the mass media. The relationship is represented as complete – encompassing all aspects of relationships. Of course, it entails certain problems. The expectations are huge, as are the disappointments that this confluent

This is illustrated by a motto of the first wave of the English women’s movement: ‘Votes for Women, Chastity for Men’. 21

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love can lead to. ‘If this kind of love is not attained, the individual is ready to pack up and leave’ (Giddens, 1992: 84). The ‘total relationship’ is under the permanent threat of possible termination; it presumes a permanent process of innovation and evaluation. The normalization of separating and divorcing (at least one out of three marriages ends in divorce) is an effect rather than a cause of the rise of confluent love (Giddens, 1992: 61). The radical change in intimacy is ‘about sex and gender, but is not limited to them’ (1992: 96). It also pertains to the ethics of personal life, the field where people reflect on and argue and negotiate about their choices and decisions. It also affects relations between parents and children, where authority has become more evenly distributed and children now have a voice of their own. ‘People have to invent how to treat and construct their relatives, and thus a new ethics of daily life’ (Giddens, 1992: 98). This pressure has the greatest consequences for men, whose advantageous traditional conventions – male dominance, the double standard, the right to a male nature – simply went up in smoke. In particular, the male experience of sexuality acquires problematic and often compulsive aspects in this context. The loss of the traditional framework leads to an isolated and paradoxical sexual experience as regards lust objects whose behaviour is so autonomous. In the past, sexual violence was mainly prevalent in the margins of social life, for example in households between masters and maids or in wartime. It is true that, in itself, sexual conduct generated by male dominance can be viewed as violent, but in the moral context at the time, it was not felt to be violating any norms. In the past, the power of men was regulated in terms of rights, property and limited obligations. Centuries ago, rape could be punished as a crime against the husband’s property. These obligations were in the realm of courtesy and protection. One might speak of a patriarchally determined equilibrium, which is ultimately to the advantage of men. But it nonetheless provided, to a certain extent, protection for women. Violent sexuality was a violation against a balance between the sexes that might have been unequal but still had very clear norms. The contemporary equality of women in public, on the labour market, in marriage and in sexual interaction provides a totally different context for sexual violence. This is no longer an excess in what were basically unequal relations between the sexes. Instead, it is a departure from a sexual morality based on equality. Sexual violence signifies a ruthless rejection of female autonomy, an intrusion of power in a context of equality, and a male inability to achieve intimacy. From this

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perspective, there is the paradoxical situation where female autonomy is creating its own form of violent subservience.

The pornographic context The radical shift in the Western sexual mentality has unfolded in the context of growing equality in personal relationships and the resulting high demands now being made of, and on, both partners. There is greater openness, more variation in how people experience lust, and more promiscuity. In this new situation, perverse forms of sexuality have come to be viewed as merely other variations. This has been a gradual trend. Freud (1905) still spoke of perversions, even though he viewed these inclinations as part of the normal human predisposition (he referred to the polymorphous perversity of human desire). Later Havelock Ellis, author of a seven-volume Studies in the psychology of sex (1897-1928), referred to sexual deviance instead of perversion, which was of particular importance to the gay movement. But the matter was settled once and for all at the time of the sexual revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, when perversions became variations. In this decline of perversion, pornography emerged in the 1970s as a welcome confirmation of sexual multiformity. The production of pornography surged in on the waves of the sexual revolution in the 1970s. It was simultaneously a liberation from conventions, an exploration of sexual multiformity, and a confirmation of the sexual core of modern identity. It is one of the most striking manifestations of moral order in a liberal society. Although the rise of the pornography industry was initially linked to social protest, it goes way beyond it. Nowadays, pornography is available everywhere and in every conceivable variation. In retrospect, the first female nude appeared on Dutch television in 1968. The technological revolution and the free market are two obvious factors in the massification of pornography. The connection between the two made pornography an everyday matter. Three arguments have always played a role in the debate on pornography: decency, dignity and protection. Decency The decency argument holds that sexual drives are an intimate matter that has no place in public. In accordance with this argument, Hollywood in the 1920s had strict regulations about exactly how long a kiss could be shown on screen. Sexuality was associated with shame and guilt; it was a very private matter that was no one else’s business.

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This decency norm was no match for the hypocrisy reproach. At the time of the sexual revolution, pornography was perceived as the emancipation of lust. Naked women on television were the final refutation of the decency argument. Open sexuality became synonymous with a striving for freedom. Pornography became a form of freedom of expression. Dignity The human dignity argument is strongly connected to a religious worldview linking sexuality first and foremost to reproduction. Sexual lust is viewed as a necessary biological drive that essentially undermines human dignity. Its purpose is to serve the procreation of the human species, and church doctrine holds that it is permissible if and when it reinforces the conjugal state. This argument is still used, but it has lost ground to the argument about a person’s right to self-fulfilment. The secularization process and introduction of the birth control pill helped put an end to this limited conception of sexuality. The individual is now uppermost, and his or her uninhibited pursuit of pleasure is the ultimate good. Protection The protection argument was used by the women’s movement as a reaction to the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. Pornography turns women into passive prey, or so its feminist opponents argue. It is not an argument that is often used any more, especially now that feminists are increasingly interested in allowing women to freely pursue their own pleasure without being patronized in any way. Instead of asking for protection, they prefer to help make women more articulate. The implicit argument is now that if articulate women want pornography, whether as producers or as consumers, they have a perfect right to it. A line is drawn, though, where children are concerned. Although even this line was almost crossed at the time of the sexual revolution, the victimhood of children as regards their role in pornography is so glaringly evident that even the ‘regular’ pornography world draws the line here. In a mere three decades, pornography has grown from a nice educational sex film that did away with some taboos into an omnipresent phenomenon that almost knows no boundaries. The traditional

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arguments against pornography – decency, dignity, protection – seem no longer to be valid, unless in the case of violence or coercion.

Pornography and sexual violence The turbulent mushrooming of the pornography industry and mass consumption of its products in the past few decades can be viewed as a merging of technological possibilities and commercial motivations. But how about the consequences for the experience of love and sexuality? The implicit message of pornography is extremely complex. In the first place, there is still the underlying promise of liberation from conventions and sexual repression. In a liberal culture, with all its acquired freedom and tolerance, pornography permanently explores the boundaries. Particularly in a culture like the American one, which might seem in the first instance to be so puritanical, the pornography producer can continue to use the hypocrisy argument and boast of its own avant-garde role. Second, pornography has a strong effect on the consumer. It is hard to resist this appeal to our baser feelings. A hard pornography film evokes ambivalent emotions, ranging from excitement to aversion, and from a need for more to a sense of saturation. The power of this pornographic appeal is so strong that any resistance is quick to be interpreted as hypocrisy. How can you resist images that are so exciting? Isn’t resistance more a sign of narrowminded prudishness or of a patronizing attitude, rather than sincere reservations about the content of the film? In addition, the actors in the film apparently chose to perform in pornography films as their way of earning a living. If it is something people want to do, is it the consumer’s place to say it is wrong? Third, and with a more substantial meaning within the sexual mentality described earlier, pornography serves as a counterpoint, as it were, to the modern relationship, where sexuality is experienced in line with the ideal of equality. Pornography presents a paradoxical argument with respect to the female autonomy that was relatively recently acquired. Though it confirms the liberation of the female libido, it also often denies it. This is why feminist pornography researcher Diana Russell (1998: 3) describes pornography as ‘material that combines sex and/or the exhibition of the genitals with humiliation in an effort to reinforce, excuse or encourage this behaviour’. In this description, Russell presumes the existence of some relationship between pornography and sexual violence. It is difficult to say categorically to what extent

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pornography is the theory and rape the practice, as Russell claims. Although this hypothesis does seem plausible, methodological problems and definitional issues nonetheless make it difficult to confirm. I think this is a too complex and actually not very productive issue, comparable with the relationship between violence on screen and in reality. The question is how important this is, since every offence has its own context. In general, we note that sexual violence does occur in a context with an ample supply of pornographic material. It would also seem justified to say that some pornography shows the humiliation and subservience of women, which can stimulate or legitimate sexual violence for some men. As argued earlier, sexual violence has a specific meaning in contemporary times. This form of violence occurs in a sexualized culture, where the sexual mentality enables people to freely experience lust. Equality in relationships is the norm, and eroticism is expected to be accompanied by intimacy. In the absence of self-evident conventions though, this norm is permanently under pressure. This leads to the paradoxical condition whereby erotic lust can be freely experienced within a situation that makes increasing demands on our self-control. It is only in pornography that the lust object is still available in a selfevident way. In the consumption of pornography, sexual power is at least experienced and enjoyed in the imagination.

Some opposition to pornography Feminist opposition like that of Russell (1998) seems to have faded out. Pornography thus seems to be more or less an accepted reality. Three quarters of men in the Netherlands look at pornography, compared to a third of women (de Graaf, 2012). Pornography is a consumer good, although there remains a certain unease around it, just as with prostitution: it is just work, but you’d rather not have your own children in that business. With the development of the internet, something particular has happened. Overt sexuality comes so close that embarrassment diminishes, provided that people are in control of their own behaviour. In what I call ’selfie-sex’, some people don’t hesitate to expose themselves digitally. The ideal of the intimate, equivalent relationship goes hand in hand with a ubiquitous pornographic temptation. Nevertheless, every now and then a cry goes up against ‘pornofication’ (the omnipresence of explicit and commercial sexuality). From a philosophical perspective, for example, Roger Scruton published his Sexual desire in 1986. Scruton chooses explicitly a traditional morality,

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ratified by marriage and a monogamous relationship; not because of decency, but because of the dignity of the other person. He denounces the normalization of perversions. Sex is only justified if surrounded with care and intimacy. A similar denunciation against sexualized culture comes from the Belgian professor of ethics and the philosophy of law Koen Raes (2002). He makes a connection with the Christian repression of sexuality. The sexual revolution led to the opposite: the ‘degeneracy’ of sexuality. The Christian morality of obedience is turned into an ethics of lust gratification with no boundaries. Raes is speaking of domestic violence, trafficking, prostitution, sexual abuse and other sexual violence, and especially of the demystification of the female body. Sexual liberation has, according to Raes, degenerated into: ‘the vulgar, the uncivil and the obscene’. The pleasant side of eroticism was always denied in Christianity; sex was connected to punishment. But the sexual revolution turned this around: sex was the ultimate reward. Christianity placed the body outside culture. When it was released, it got perverted. With postmodernism there was admittedly a revaluation of the body, but especially of its overindulgence. Raes advocates the revaluation of the ars amatoria as, for example, described in the Oriental philosophy of the Kama Sutra: neither more nor less sex, but better sex. Regardless of these kinds of moral appeal against ‘pornofication’, the contrast between freely available pornography and the requirements of prudence in daily social interaction leads to an extremely complicated moral situation. This kind of two-track morality – freedom of sexual fantasy and experience, but reticence in active practice – presumes a meticulous initiation that is not an option for everyone, nor is it apt to be appreciated by everyone. The ideal of an integral relationship is accompanied by an omnipresent pornographic appeal. In this context, men’s sexual violence is a desperate attempt to obtain a sexual identity at the expense of women – and children. It seems as if the #MeToo movement that started in 2017 is trying to redraw the line between the liberation of sexuality and the protection of people, especially women. Dutch research on sexual violence Let us have a look at some figures on sexual violence. The research project Sex under 25 finds alarming figures: 21% of boys and 41% of girls have experienced one or more sexual acts against their will (de Graaf, 2012; see also Dukers-Muijrers et al, 2015). This report was on a representative survey of approximately 10,000 Dutch people aged

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12–25 years. Six forms of unwanted sexual experiences were surveyed: sexual assault through the hand, kissing or sexual touches; rape by anal, oral or vaginal sex. In respondents aged 22–24, the percentage who had had unwanted sexual experiences was higher at 26% of boys and 53% of girls. One in five girls and one in 20 boys reported rape. The researchers found a connection with risky sexual behaviour, drug use, a lower level of education and internet sex. There was usually one perpetrator, mostly a friend of the victim. Although the researchers cannot say whether or not this was a rise in numbers, they consider the numbers worrying. An interesting survey carried out on behalf of a Dutch Commission investigated sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church (CommissieDeetman, 2011). The Commission wanted to know if abuse in the Catholic Church departed from the overall picture in wider Dutch society. Dutch people aged over 40 were asked to report on the period before their eighteenth birthday. Almost one in ten reported having been sexually approached by an adult non-family member. In the case of Catholic education, it was higher (12.4%), and if educated in children’s homes and institutions it was twice as high. These figures are quite high, but below the recent ones. Sexual violence has always gone on, but is also very much an issue today. This kind of research is often much more nuanced and complicated than I can show here, but the figures indicate a relatively big problem. Could these figures be related to the pornographic arena within which young people have to go through their sexual development? It is difficult to say.

The new ’normal’ The figures reported in the previous section do not lie. People, especially young people, are experiencing unwanted sexual intrusiveness. Before the 1960s there was also a lot of (hidden) sexual violence, but child pornography and trafficking of women seem to be relatively new phenomena, which have to do with new opportunities in technology and commerce. Each norm violation has its own specific meaning within a specific context. That is certainly true in the area of sexuality. Contemporary sexual identity has to develop between boundless pornography and the risk of sexual assault or worse. What does that sexual learning process of teenagers look like in practice? Holla (2013) showed in a qualitative research project that external standards or abstract stories hardly play a role any more. Determining one’s sexual identity is through doing.

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Teens experiment by flirting, kissing and close dancing, and compare their own actions to the behaviour of others. It is a very personal process, in which teens define themselves as ‘normal’ within a sexual hierarchy of sluts, players, popular kids and nerds. The body is central in ‘discovering’ and ‘expressing’ their (sexual) self (Holla, 2013: 314). This is a style that fits well within a pornographic context. Pornography is everywhere, including for young people, and they put their own body (as the just norm) in the middle of all the options. But that is not without risk: apart from the risk of reputational damage, there is also the chance of unwanted sexual acts. Young people come to their self-image by experiencing and comparing – they enact their sexual identity. The body has the defining social power. Despite the ‘pornofication’, young people develop their own form of what seems to be ‘correct’. There is a second process of normalization, however, after the sexual revolution, involving societal views on what is supposed to be normal. A study on the Dutch education course ‘Growing up with love’ (van den Berg, 2013) is informative in that respect. This course is intended for parents with a migrant background. On the course, there are clear messages about what ’normal’ is: that love and sex are connected; that children are both innocent and sexual (information is therefore needed); and that homosexuality is allowed (because it looks like heterosexuality). During the course, there is a lot of discussion with migrant parents who hold another view. The outcome is always the same: that sex should be discussed. That’s the process standard: ‘we need to talk about it’. van den Berg notes that this is a Western middle-class idea, which is systematically propagated by teachers in a style of ‘egalitarian authority’. They do not explain, but they do promote a dialogue on what is ‘normal’. This ‘social normal’ forms the context of the ‘personal normal’ of the experimenting young people. It is the secular-sexual ideal that has developed since the 1960s: discover yourself (and what you like to consent with) in an atmosphere of ‘talking about it’. This can collide with other views, such as those of Orthodox Christians and Muslims. Between 2000 and 2011, there were at least 14 Dutch studies on differences between immigrants and native Dutch people. According to Krebbekx and colleagues (2013), in all these studies the Netherlands are viewed as enlightened and progressive, freed from sexual repression and of gender inequality, while Muslims are seen as lagging behind or are on their way to enlightened ideals. In 2011, sexual diversity became a compulsory topic in primary school education in

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the Netherlands, while gay rights became an expression of Western superiority (Mepschen et al, 2010). From additional qualitative research in the Sex under 25 research project discussed earlier, there appear indeed to be significant differences between migrant and native Dutch young people, for example in sexual experience. For young people with a migrant background, ’standards of home’ play a much larger role. They navigate between autonomy and loyalty – more than the native young people with their free-spirited parents, who have the secular-sexual revolution in their cultural armoury. In Islam, unlike traditional Christianity, it is permitted to enjoy sex but strictly within marriage. Adultery is punished and temptation should be avoided (Buitelaar, 2002). The image of paradise is (at least for men) strongly sexualized: a perpetual erection, orgasms that persist for 24 years and many virgins available. These are perhaps stereotypical images, but the difference with the stereotypes of Christianity is remarkable. Compare, for example, the virility of Muhammad with that of Jesus Christ. In the actual sexual behaviour of young people, there is, of course, huge variation. There is always a very personal mix of preferences and limitations (Cense and van Dijk, 2012). Given the variation, however, there has also been a process of new forms of normalization. In the Netherlands, a new sexual morality has developed: close to the body, not without risks, in a pornographic context, based on mutual consent, and accompanied by the credo of ‘talking about it’. But that is not multiculturally commonplace. The secular-sexual revolution, which broke out since the 1970s in the Netherlands, has turned into an ethnic battleground, where homosexuality, gender equality and openness are at stake (see also Cense, 2013). The new normal is evidently not common yet.

Conclusion Perhaps the biggest difference between the eras before and after the sexual revolution is that obedience to an external authority has given way to a large degree of autonomy. Taylor (2007) calls it ’authenticity’, Giddens (1990) speaks of the ‘reflexive self ’. That transition took place in only ten years, with the tipping point around 1970. Facilitated by technology, liberated ideas took a turn in the decades that followed, in which equal relations and sexual violence became two sides of the same coin. Nowadays this ambiguous status of sexual norms has been embedded in a pornographic context, in

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which (young) people have to develop their own ‘normal’. Consent is something that has to be learned. This is not a straightforward process. It seems plausible that there is more sexual violence than there used to be, in the form of pimping by young men, prostitution, revenge pornography, grooming (secret sexual contact via an internet search), trafficking of women, sexting (sending sex photos via a smartphone), stalking and child pornography. Four out of ten young people in the Netherlands (twice as many girls as boys) have experienced unwanted sexual acts. It is all part of the central position of one’s own body in the development of sexual identity. Meanwhile, free sexual morals have merged into a new phase. Sex is again a commitment to struggle and reconciliation, now against the background of migration. Where sexual liberation seemed to be a fact, it also feeds repulsion against Western culture.

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SEVEN

Diversity, radicalization and populism One of the more important developments over the last few decades has been the immigration of people from all over the world to European countries. In many European countries, 10–20% of the population entered the country in which they live in recent years, or their parents did. This has had a tremendous effect on city life, political development, crime and fear of crime, and social tensions among people and their communities. The cultural anthropologist Steven Vertovec (2007) introduced the concept of ‘super-diversity’ to clarify the situation in London, with 179 nationalities speaking some 300 languages. Many big European cities underwent comparable developments and became so-called ‘majorityminority cities’, with more than 50% immigrants and their children. This situation has generated a debate in European countries on nationality, cultural identity and immigration politics. The rise of populism is the outcome of a combination of two worries of people and their accompanying discourses: crime and security; and immigration and nationality. The growing tension between communities is fuelled by Islamist terrorism with a geopolitical background. This chapter deals with the issue of migration and integration of minorities, because it is directly related to the issue of moral order. I sketch the Dutch situation on this issue, including some facts and the public debate. I use this case study to discuss the governance of a super-diverse society. The chapter then goes into detail on violent radicalization of Islamic youngsters and of nationalist groups.

Dutch development The start of ‘the cultural revolution’ in the mid-1960s happened to coincide with the recruitment of foreign workers in many Western European countries, especially from Morocco and Turkey. It was the beginning of an immigration flow of varying composition, which will undoubtedly continue for a while. It occurs against the background of the globalization of the economy and an accompanying mobility. People now come from all over the world, with different motives and

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aspirations (economy, war, trade or love). The composition of the population in Western European countries has changed drastically. This development is independent of the social processes that have led to the secular network society, but has major implications for it. The radicalization of some Muslim youngsters, for example, places tension on the relation between ‘religion’ and ’integration’. Since 9/11, the Western world has come to realise that things can really go wrong in the name of God. With the rise of the nation state in the 19th century, the centuries-long Christian religious strife was brought under control. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, only faith in (neo)liberal democracy was left – there was, at least, no alternative imaginable. That secular peace, however, seems to be gone. Although there was some terror in the 20th century (for example the Red Army Faction in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, republican and loyalist terrorism in Northern Ireland, the Moluccan actions in the Netherlands), these could be considered marginal. The new Muslim terror, however, is connected with international movements and operates in the name of a world religion, even if terrorism is an aberration. Attacks are incidents, but the incidents are structural, with a major impact on the mental state of the public. Terrorism is the most extreme form of the collision of worldviews. There are also less heavy forms of conflict, such as around wearing burqas, racial discrimination, or the construction of mosques with minarets and the protests against them. They are all reasons for emotional debates on religion, culture and participation. To a large extent they determine the debate on ‘integration’ and thereby hide the successes that are achieved. Integration is a precarious matter. It is somewhat understandable that emotions run high, but it seems rather unproductive and unrealistic. The issue of ‘integration’ focuses increasingly on how a pluralistic, partly fragmented society can also be vital and stable, including the question of whether ‘integration’ is still a good concept. In the Netherlands in 2013, there were almost 2 million non-Western and 1.5 million Western immigrants, next to 13.25 million ’natives’ (CBS Statline, 2014). I give these figures with some hesitation, because the terms ‘natives’ and ’immigrants’, just like ’integration’, lose their meaning.22 Statistics Netherlands (the government office on national statistics) projects the figures to 2060 (CBS Statline, 2014). In that year, it will have been a century since the first ‘guest workers’ came to the Netherlands. 22

I use these words regularly, for want of better.

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So what are we talking about then? It is clear that the ratios in ethnic and religious background of the Dutch population are expected to shift. Here are a few more figures for a better view on this important issue. In 2014, 49.2% of the Dutch population were, according to their own opinion, not related to any church or religion; 24.4% were Catholic, 15.8% were Protestant, 4.9% were Muslim and 5.7% had another denomination. Five years earlier, in 2009, 4.5% were Muslim. The religion of Islam was growing, while the number of Christians had declined a few percentage points. In addition, in the 2014 survey, 39% of Muslims were visiting a mosque regularly, whereas only 29.5% of Protestants and 17.5% of Catholics were regularly attending their churches. Adherents of other denominations were also taking part more often in religious services (58% regularly). Among ‘natives’, secularization continues; among Muslims and other believers this is hardly the case. In Amsterdam (and The Hague), Islam is the largest religion (CBS Statline, 2014).

A dizzying perspective The three biggest cities in the Netherlands (Rotterdam, Amsterdam and The Hague) have become ‘majority-minority cities’: a majority of minorities live there. More than half of the Amsterdam population has a migrant background from as many as 176 countries. According to sociologist Maurice Crul and others (2013), never before have so many people in such a short time from so many different parts of the world came to Western European cities. As noted earlier, the anthropologist Steven Vertovec (2007) counted 179 nationalities and some 300 languages for London. It is a mind-boggling achievement that these cities, in the period of two generations, could include so many immigrants. It is just as incredible as the speed of the secularization process. How special it is that those two developments coincided! Related to these new conditions, Vertovec introduced the concept of ’super-diversity’ (see also Geldof, 2013). That concept offers a totally different perspective on ’integration’. The idea is that, if there is no majority ethnic group any more, everyone will have to adjust themselves to everyone else. Diversity is the new standard, not only in types of minorities, but also within minorities – in residence status, living situation, faith, social position, contacts with the motherland, and so on. In addition, there are more and more people who live crossing national borders continuously (so-called ‘transnationalism’). There

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arise ‘world families’ of people living here with family over there, and vice versa – including financial transnational relations. This is what the sociologists Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2011) called Fernliebe – living place, nationality and family no longer naturally coincide in one location. This goes even further. International trade with the motherland, international digital friendships, Westerners hibernating in southern Europe, global tourism, ‘semigration’ (living alternately in two countries), internet and satellite connections, the nanny industry, expats: there is physically and mentally a lot of commuting back and forth between different countries. This all has special consequences: living in Western Europe at the bottom of the social ladder, for example, can go hand in hand with great prestige in the motherland. Another consequence is multilingualism. Half of the inhabitants of Brussels under 25 years old, for example, speak two languages or are multilingual. The number of languages in Brussels increased from 72 in 2000 to 104 in 2011 (Geldof, 2013: 129).23 In a super-diverse context, the language of ‘the country of arrival’ thus becomes paradoxically more important than one’s native language. With 170 different languages, speaking Dutch in Amsterdam seems the most practical, with English as a world language in the background. This creates a dizzying perspective that is in line with the image of complexity without direction. In a network society’ there are no unambiguous collectivities any more. Technology makes it possible to be mentally in multiple places, and we can easily join several networks that selectively absorb our attention. Take the media: a newspaper title stands for a certain unit, quality and style, which is shared with hundreds of thousands of other people. But media use is becoming more and more tailored to individual taste. Using a newspaper has become just one option for getting informed. In this context, the terms ‘multiple’ or ‘relational identities’ are often used. A super-diverse network society is thus a kaleidoscopic set of identities, relationships, languages and Gods in a context of permeable geographical areas.

An end to a controversy? A concept like a ’super-diverse society’ seems able to end the haggling about cultural identity. The increasing diversification of populations In Brussels there exists a ‘language barometer’, a continuous measurement of languages spoken, because of the linguistic conflict. 23

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might be the starting point of migration and integration policies. Maurice Crul and colleagues (2013) foresee a future metropolitan scenario of empowerment and hope, instead of pessimism, with regard to integration. Their international study shows that as children of migrants get opportunities, they take the lead in the emancipation process. Highly educated young people propagate equality between men and women and the individual right to self-determination with regard to sexuality in their own community. Emancipation is not the result of forced adaptation, but of social mobility within one’s own group. One in five young people of the second-generation immigrants in Europe participate in higher education – so integration seems to be only a matter of time, as long as investment in education continues (Crul et al, 2013). Thinking in terms of super-diversity transcends thinking about the integration of minorities. This is in line with the image of a network society, simultaneously showing fragmentation and cohesion. In Chapter 2 on social order, I showed that the complexity of rapid, unpredictable systems leads to emergent phenomena: patterns can develop that are not reducible to their constituent elements. A commonly used example is that of a flock of starlings, whose patterns can be understood only from the micro-interactions of the tens of thousands of elements that respond to their immediate neighbours. For human society, this gives the image of social ordering that is not imposed from above, but which develops as a dynamic process. The notion of super-diversity strengthens the networked complexity. Related to that is the impossibility of governing this systematically and integrally from above. It also breaks through the dominant ‘them and us’ rhetoric; society is much more complicated than that. There are dozens of ‘us’ and ‘them’, or hundreds or thousands – depending on the diversity and variation at the time and place. Super-diversity, then, refers to the management of differences rather than to the organizing of what we have in common, which is implied in most political thinking. There is still a very strong desire to form one single culture. It is a longing for a kind of ‘civil’ citizenship (Boutellier, 2007), in which consensus of norms and values, habits and customs is guaranteed. The concept of super-diversity implies that differences are recognized, with the important caveat that the problems have still not been resolved. There are large parts of the native population that are not so fast on the super-diverse track. As to migration and diversity, there are two speeds or more. There are differences between regions and cities, but also within cities and even within neighbourhoods. A second problem is that not all migrants and their children are necessarily cosmopolitan

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global citizens, to use an understatement. There are phenomena like unwanted peer pressure, religious coercion, honour killings, forced isolation and narrow-minded fundamentalism. Against this backdrop, the cheers for the blessings of the concept of super-diversity sometimes seem a little too loud. I would like to stress another sociological perspective here apart from the individualizing super-diversity concept: a society is more than the sum of its (super-diverse) elements. For a human society, self-organizing processes occur, given the institutional structures, organizations and traditions. Then we are talking about the rule of law and the education system, about national broadcasting and public holidays, about mental health institutions and transport systems, not forgetting the economic structure of enterprises and markets. Institutions and organizations have a certain gravity and slowness. They will not easily adjust themselves to claims of diversity. An inclusive kind of functioning of the institutions must often be fought for – but sometimes rather not! There are Western achievements that cannot be corroded, because that would undermine its own principles (the separation of religion and state, for example). This is often what the discussion is about; integration is not just about accepting each other as human beings, but also a matter of institutions finding a new balance in a superdiversified world. Finally, people talk rather easily nowadays about multiple identities. Not so long ago, this was only known as a psychiatric disorder. In fact, radicalizing young people often appear to be having trouble with precisely the combination of the different facets of their life (Gielen, 2008). There is such a thing as a psychological need for coherence and continuity (the ‘reflexive self ’ by Anthony Giddens (1990)), and otherwise there are always others who call, seduce or even force us to behave like a person with a single coherent identity. It is also ethically important that one can be called to account in relation to one’s norms or behaviour. The image of super-diversity can replace the idea of unity that has to integrate in a forced way, but it does not reduce or solve the problems. They are still just as complicated as the society is diverse.

Governing diversity The development of super-diverse, large cities is a fact that is hard to argue against. But how does that relate to the conditions of the secular West? The ‘logic’ of some principles that were the outcome of the secular experiment is gone. About homosexuality, for example, it is struggle again – unbelievable but true. Overt female physicality is also at odds with the idea of sexual availability for the husband only.

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Cartoons about Mohammed are no longer just a matter of taste, but are considered unacceptable by many Muslims. Or take the burqa, which from a Western perspective appears to be a prison, but by the woman concerned can be experienced as a liberation. Who has the right opinion here? Does the woman not know that she is not free, or do Westerners not understand any more what faith and devotion really mean? These are emotive questions, to which no absolute answers exist. In a super-diverse society, they are the subject of confusion and struggle. The secular doubt of the West, which seemingly became the end of Christianity, collides with a holy faith in one’s own position. It tells us something about the implicit claims behind Western faith. Although the word ‘truth’ seems not to be applicable here, it is right to doubt what is the fundamental achievement of Western history. The West is opposed to any fundamentalism, precisely because it also dares to doubt itself. Fundamentalist thinking is authoritarian at its core – it chooses isolation and glorifies a true faith, to which other people have to conform. This is the view of the former American president (and faithful Christian) Jimmy Carter, who in 2005 wrote a fierce defence of the separation of church and state, in which he runs through all American controversies, from gay marriage to the death penalty. Carter regularly does not agree with the views expressed, but defends democratic decision making. Perhaps American politics may not become a playing field for Christian fundamentalists. With respect to the diversity issue, I would like to refer to the notion of general interest, which can be defined as the dynamic continuity of society (see Chapter 8). Each system aims at the continuation of itself in the future. In doing so, it will constantly adapt to changes in the environment. I must admit that, in the end, evolutionary considerations on human living are often a little unsatisfactory. You can argue, for example, about the different ways in which social continuity can be guaranteed. Nevertheless, this (implicit) premise can be found in almost any political position, regardless of the subject. In relation to integration policies, we see it explicitly in the concept of ‘social stability’, which is quite often used in Dutch policy making. This policy concept has everything to do with the context of superdiversity. The term ‘social stability’ comes up in relation to problems such as the over-representation of Moroccan Dutch people in crime, the desire for a heartland among indigenous Dutch people, growing tensions between groups in diverse neighbourhoods, forms of so-called parallel cultures, and radicalization of some young people. Against this background, social stability is introduced as a political, ethnic and religiously neutral understanding. The policy claim in one of the

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Dutch government’s White Papers is ambitious: ‘living together in freedom and responsibility, with a view to the future’ (Ministerie van BZK, 2011). The views on freedom and responsibility, however, can vary widely. Is specific ‘integration policy’ needed to build one future? Specific attention to immigrants will soon be seen as a policy of prioritizing migrant groups. But the idea of a general integrative policy, independent of cultural groups, is not that simple either. What, then, is the actual aim? Does general policy aim for equal treatment without respect for individuals, or for equal opportunities for everyone having an equal social starting position? Or are we talking about normalization and obligations on certain principles of citizenship and desired behaviours (Dagevos et al, 2013)? General policy intentions seem to result in different practices for different groups. The consequence is that there are still specific measures to be taken, to create a form of equality. In youth services, for example, a common problem is finding and keeping in touch with parents and children with a migrant background. They do not speak each other’s language; problems are defined differently, or there is mutual distrust about educational views and competences (Pels, 2010). For that reason, connections are created between informal migrants’ initiatives in childcare and the regular institutions (Ponzoni, 2016). That does not refer to generic policies, but to specific challenges and integrating efforts. The very idea of living together with all kinds of cultural and ethnic groups, the basis of super-diversity, presupposes a style of governance that reasons from the perspective of a common future. At the same time, the problems cannot be ignored. Governing diversity occurs in a fraught area of polarized feelings, in which forms of injustice are experienced. Approximately 85% of the Islamic young people in the Netherlands subscribe to the statement that Muslims are discriminated against (Gielen and van Wonderen, 2013). They think that they are less likely to find a job. What is striking, however, is that about 25% of native young people think that Muslims are preferred. Governing diversity does, in practice, mean that one has to differentiate between problems and groups.

Divided citizenship In a super-diverse society, we cannot presuppose that we share a common cultural nationality. Dutch courses on social integration, for example, are quite patronizing, are expensive for students and the exams are quite tough – so there are fewer and fewer participants (Menkhorst, 2013). In public opinion, the emotion of difference

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dominates over the idea of having something in common: in attitudes, in treatment, in values systems and in interests. If people or groups face few restrictions, then there is a natural process of differentiation. It is the doctrine of plurality in a modern society. Diversity becomes a problem, however, if there are conflicting views and mutual exclusion. Persistent discrimination may also result in self-exclusion, if one turns one’s back on society. The idea of social stability refers to the continuity of society. That can be seen as the general interest that should make it possible to organize a super-diverse society without a patronizing and unproductive ‘integration model’. It is a governance model of keeping problems small, of improvising and, where necessary, muddling through with different values, norms and rules. Social tensions in areas, for example, are often to do with differences in lifestyle: the cleaning of the local area, porches and communal staircases, the way people meet each other (greetings in the elevator), hassle between tenants and homeowners, or differences in education and income levels. On the one hand, if citizens feel able to speak to others, they experience less tension. On the other hand, if the negative experiences are bottled up, they cause anger and isolation, categorically excluding the other (Boutellier et al, 2012). If such a process of distancing has started, then groups tend to see each other more and more as strange, deviant and inferior (RMO, 2009: 43). Then it can swiftly escalate: by escalation of a conflict, by creating images of the enemy, by intentionally offending and hurting, up to violent threats and the actual carrying out of these threats (De Dreu, quoted in RMO, 2009). In the research project A stranger in my own country (De Gruijter et al, 2010), we described what the resulting anger can look like. This anger is directed against migrants and the government, but could quite often be reduced to concrete sources of irritation, such as noise pollution, degradation of public space, nuisance from loitering and confrontations in traffic. These are important issues for the everyday quality of life of residents, but not impossible to act upon as a local government. Sometimes, however, it seems to be too late to keep cultural tensions small and manageable. The growth of nationalist parties in several European countries and ‘Trumpism’ in the United States show an increasing anti-integration sentiment. Some groups of natives actually don’t want ‘integration’ of immigrants at all, because they see themselves as victims of sharing spaces. Conversely, some immigrant young people do not believe in a decent future in Western countries any more, and are turning away from a shared future.

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From the perspective of social continuity, this is a very undesirable situation, which could undermine social stability. It may not be resolved, however, by simply saying that it should not be this way. Calling for ‘shared citizenship’ or common norms and values is too unspecific and may even be counterproductive. It makes no sense to search for common standards and values in a climate of polarization. The Western world nowadays is, culturally speaking, simply too diverse to proclaim one single unity. A more pragmatic approach is needed: the approach to small, manageable problems in a credible way, and striving for moments of an ’us experience’. The idea of social stability might be fruitful, but it cannot be realized in terms of cultural dominance or overpowering. Western societies have to be realistic and have to aim for a policy of reciprocity between citizens of all cultures, colours and backgrounds. What counts above all is that a society needs to continue – it is the ultimate pragmatic goal of social sustainability, which can appeal to all different kinds of people living on the same land. It is the strongest motive in the resolution of conflicts and exploiting opportunities. That motive will – or must – be vital and credible for all involved. In practice, we see pragmatic forms of ‘integration policies’, depending on the specific problems.

Diversity in three domains I would like to differentiate between three areas: the rule of law; economy and education; and culture and identity. These three domains show different policies that go beyond the very idea of ‘integration’. The concept of integration breaks down further into three other concepts, which might be more fruitful and which are implicitly already included in the practices of integration policy: acceptance, participation and freedom. The rule of law Acceptance is expected with regard to the rule of law. In a liberal democracy, pluralism of society is protected. Acceptance of the rule of law means recognition of everybody’s rights and obligations. There are no exceptions in treatment, as there is no tolerance for violations of the law. In a cultural sense, it means freedom of expression, tolerance of dissenters and a certain degree of empathy. Everyone can be asked to endorse these principles, at least in their behaviour. The democratic rule of law has constitutional virtually

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non-negotiable principles for society (virtually, because we realize that these are the result of a long history). Change is possible in principle, but only on the basis of broad and long-lasting agreement. There is a relation here to the principle of the separation of church and state. More importantly, the government is entitled to act against violation of these principles, for example by addressing active hostility in cases of terror, violence and/or religious coercion. At the same time, the legal system must be impartial and independent. Even the appearance of discrimination or ‘ethnic profiling’ in the enforcement of the law should be avoided (Çankaya, 2012). The starting point for the democratic rule of law is the insurance of the existential safety of everybody within the limits of the law. The rule of law is the first domain of ‘integration’ and it works on the basis of reciprocity. The price for protection by the law is accepting its principles. Economy and education The second domain is the economy and education. The key concept here is participation. The general interest – the continuity of society – assumes that everyone participates according to his or her capacities. A nation’s economy calls for the greatest possible active population. If too many people are unable to provide for their own living, that is a threat to the level of prosperity of the society as a whole. At the same time, the state has to do its best to give citizens the opportunity to participate in the economy. Providing access to education is, for example, a crucial condition for participation. So is actively combating discrimination in the labour market. We are also talking here about the accessibility of facilities, and the development of measures for specific target groups who have difficulties in entering the labour market. All residents of a country can, with common facilities, be expected to participate. This has cultural consequences. People preferably speak the same language (unless this is not necessary for the labour situation, like the employment of expats). It also can be assumed that people are willing to conform, to a certain degree, to the rules and standards of the workplace and in school. Wearing a burqa in the Western world, for example, means that people explicitly do not conform to the standards of usual communication in the workplace and in education. A criminal ban on the burqa is difficult to argue (because of the rule of law), but from the point of view of participation in the labour market, exclusion of the social security net seems justifiable.

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This starting point thus has a twofold, reciprocal character. The country of arrival is committed to creating the conditions for participation, and all its inhabitants show a willingness to do so. Culture and identity Finally, there is the right for everyone to have their own God, culture and identity. This is the third domain, in which the concept of freedom should dominate. It is the right of everyone to live his or her own life, as long as they do not harm others. In the current climate, the psychological importance of the private domain in which we can decide who we are or want to be can be easily ignored. Changing culture, religion or identity is not very easy, and if people are pushed to do so, it will probably be counterproductive. Identities are not interchangeable. Walzer (2004) argues that in a modern society, people assume that relationships and identities are ‘voluntary’, and that one could easily give them up. In contrast to that, he speaks of ‘passionate identities’, which also play a role in the political and social arenas. It is important to recognize these passionate identities, without tolerating the dangerous forms. A pluralist society also has an eye for traditions, customs and manners, as long as they are not contrary to the requirements of the rule of law and to participation in education and labour. One’s own identity is free, under the condition that one does accept the rule of law and is prepared to contribute to the economy.

An avenging God According to Eagleton (2014: 198), the ‘end of history’ created radical Islam. Radical secularization, as sketched in Chapter 3, opened up moral space for the war on terror. The world is divided between those who believe too much and those who believe too little. It is a very dark picture that Eagleton paints. Secular Western capitalism has called for an avenging God, which no longer agrees with his marginal role in only some specific areas. While three large narratives – religion, socialism and culture – have diminished in importance, metaphysics comes back in the form of radicalism. This line of thought does have some resemblance to that of fundamentalist Christians, who see the hand of God in disasters as his revenge for all that is evil in their eyes: abortion, homosexuality and working women. Eagleton nevertheless puts his finger on the painful observation that we are dealing with

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passionate religious radicalism under a secular condition. This condition is undeniably a good counterpoint for radicalization. Social science literature gives a range of possible causes of radicalization (for example Victoroff, 2005). There are three main categorizations: • First, causes can be differentiated according to different stages in the process. Radical views may primarily arise against a background of poverty and discrimination, but can only really be expressed in a second phase, when there is a relationship with a recruiting network. • A second categorization is causality: causes are different from catalysts. A cause can be a permanent feeling of humiliation. An event in the Middle East or in one’s own environment can trigger this general feeling. • Third, there is the categorization in level: societal, social and individual factors may play a role. Economic backwardness on a macro level can lead to feelings of deprivation on an individual level, which may be triggered by a hate preacher operating in a network on a meso level. The large number of factors involved in radicalization is reminiscent of the criminological discussion on the causes of crime. These also vary from social inequality to child neglect, and from intellectual disability to poor street lighting. In other words, all of the factors may be relevant, but every criminal event has its own confluence of factors. This is recognized in models of risk and protective factors, with the assumption that the combination of factors in someone’s life determines the chance of norm violation. Comparably, each case of radicalization will have its own specific combination of factors. In the end, the outcome in behaviour is what counts. The importance of behaviour (rather than ideas or other factors) is highlighted by Tore Bjørgo (2009), an expert in de-radicalization. At the shedding of radical thought, there are all kinds of preparing behaviours, such as breaking free from a group of schoolfriends or quitting a job. How ideas and behaviours can become entwined with each other is described by the Dutch cultural anthropologist Martijn de Koning (2009), who himself basked in the fundamentalist Salafi movement. According to him, Salafism must – like the Pentecostal movement, for example – be seen as ‘a modern social movement with a utopian slant, aiming for the monitoring of the identity and integrity of one’s own group in a world full of seduction and repression’ (Price et al, quoted by De Koning, 2009: 378). These movements try to connect ideas,

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practices and meanings. Participants learn how to behave, how to talk and what they should look like. In this way, a moral community of like-minded people is created. The Salafists claim that they represent true Islam, and force themselves through everyday practices to self-identification with that claim. This quote from a veiled Salafist woman is meaningful in this respect: ‘… every woman is beautiful in her own way just as God created all people differently. The feeling that you get when you are wearing it [the veil], that’s just indescribable. At that moment, you think of nothing else than how satisfied the Lord will be because you’re covered because of him.’ (de Koning, 2009: 384) de Koning also points out that there is no crystallized thought before joining Salafism. Accession just means gaining access to new ideas about good and evil, about what is forbidden and what is commanded – it often happens after a period in which faith is hardly practised at all. The mosques, imams and preachers enter into this process as moral guardians. The movement has moral meaning for those who join it and they find coherence of identity within it. Criminological theories which distinguish separate risk and protective factors tend to overlook the complexity of this combination of ideas, practice and signification. From a pragmatic point of view, it is understandable, because these factors are targets for change. But public and political thinking are completely different from criminological theory. Public debate focuses on the ideological meaning of radicalization and terrorism. In addition, talking in terms of risk and protective factors does not, to some extent, do justice to what motivates the people involved. In this way, the ideological (or better, the moral) sting is drawn from the conflict. Slavoj Žižek (2015) argues that there can be all kinds of causes for terrorist acts, but that in the end it is a political-ideological project, which should be evaluated and rejected at that level. Radicalization seems typically to be a topic for this double perspective: ’tough on radicalism, tough on the causes of radicalism’.24

To paraphrase Tony Blair, who said this about fighting crime in a high-profile speech at the Labour Party Conference in Brighton, 1995. 24

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Populism and radicalization As we saw in Chapter 4, the very idea of security unites the political elite and the people, regardless of the extent to which their interests may differ. The political meaning of security is clearest in the growing populism of recent decades. Without exception, populist parties are tough on crime. Security has always been one of their core themes. They like to argue for stricter punishments, minimum sentences or the death penalty, whether or not in relation to crime by immigrants. The issue of radicalization and terror has poured oil on the fire. The emphasis on security goes hand in hand with an aversion to the elite. In addition, there is the idea of being one people, and there is always a longing for charismatic leadership. Taggart (2000) speaks of the desire for a ’heartland’, a country that is dear to you. Populism unites emotions of fear, passion and anger. There is a tendency to see this mix as an anti-democratic expression of resentment. But this does not, in my view, fully understand the meaning of populism. If there is any resentment, purely economic motives should play a key role: one demands a larger share of the pot. Populism is not critical of capitalism, however (Oudenampsen, 2014). It includes, above all, criticism against the elite and seems rather to be a kind of political cry to be heard. In a world that is getting bigger (globalization), more indifferent (individualization) and more unequal (neoliberalism), it is not so much antidemocratic but rather a poorly articulated worldview. According to Mabel Berezin (2009), it is a politics of enmity, without, in a positive sense, a story that it stands for – except for safety and security and fewer immigrants. Berezin relates the rise of populism to the erosion of the nation state. She shows how the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 had a decisive influence on the growth of French populism. At the centre of her analysis is security politics. The nation state has a reassuring function for many of its inhabitants. It is tied entirely to a ‘familial meaning’ (Berezin, 2009: 253). The desire for a Heimat (or heartland) is not as irrational as is often suggested. People need continuity and sustainability: ‘the expectation of continuity is rational because it is emotionally satisfying’ (William James (1879), cited by Berezin, 2009: 54). Safety, quietness and security in the public sphere determine ‘the national experience’. European unification disadvantaged those who depend on the nation state: the elderly, the poorly educated, the self-employed and lower officials – the target groups of populism. The nation state has a suitable size for a secure democracy. For those with only ‘national

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capital’, Europe is a threat. The development of European ambitions led to a break in the empathy that people can muster for unknowns. ‘A World of Security’ is needed to counter populism, according to Berezin (2009: 258). Writing in 2009, she gives the nation state ultimately a greater chance of survival than the European Union. Berezin’s analysis underlines the importance of fear of crime and general discontent for politics. That she attaches importance to the nation state is plausible, given the anti-European attitude of populist parties. But the situation is even more complicated than that. The notion of familiarity is also at odds with the migration movements of the last few decades. The populist appeal to a ‘heartland’ is not only connected with security, but also to sentiments about migration, and its perverse outliers: radicalization and home-grown terrorism. The desire for security, safety and certainty occurs within a world without borders, both geographical and normative. Populist parties speculate specifically on the subversive potential of this desire. They can do that quite easily, by using immigrants as scapegoats. Other politicians can be easily shamed if they do not have any convincing answers to the immigration and crime problem. Subtleties between other politicians can be easily played off by populist parties, helped by the media. This leads to the peculiar paradox that populist thinking is both directed against the government and also directed in favour of a strict performance of that very same administration. This inherent tension leads irrevocably to an authoritarian tendency in government policy: it will never be good enough.

Conclusion In the integration debate, many motives, emotions and interests come together. The secularization of society led to a process of liberalization of philosophies and lifestyles. At the same time, there were unprecedented flows of intercontinental immigration. Especially in Europe, the influx of a relatively new kind of religion (Islam) – with a long history of animosity towards the Christian faith, and with home-grown terrorist incidents – confronted Western countries with the conditions of its own culture in terms of civil rights, intellectual doubting as a virtue and cultural relativism. These are the pillars of a pragmatic kind of politics that is governed by the mantra ‘what works’ and what is feasible. This leads to a tension between the extremes: a pluriform and ideologically fragmented culture and radical movements against it, be

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it from a Muslim or of a native origin. To its horror, the West has a religious enemy again, in the form of radicalized Islam. At the same time migrants and their children, and even their grandchildren, are confronted with indifference, discrimination and insults on a daily basis. In itself, there is no reason to be scared of a hearty debate on how we want to relate to each other in all our diversity. Between violence and indifference there is a gigantic area of struggle and reconciliation without weapons, which we could call ‘peaceful fighting’ (Achterhuis and Koning, 2014). Maurice Crul and colleagues (2013) have pleaded for a dynamic policy on the second domain of integration discussed in this chapter: that of education and economy. That seems to be the most productive approach to super-diverse cohabitation. However, we cannot turn a blind eye to the other two domains: the rule of law; and culture and identity. We are very diverse – at least in the cities – but we are also a society with legal institutions and cultural traditions. Collisions are inevitable. The resilience of society is highly dependent on the governance of diversity, in all its values, norms, cultures and identities, within the limits of an economically vital jurisdiction where the rule of law reigns. Social continuity depends above all on the resilience of societal institutions. The inclusiveness of their practices ultimately determines the credibility of the rule of liberal democracy. That is the public interest of a super-diverse networked society, without parties who claim to own the truth. Any country that can make its diversity productive seems to be the best qualified for a good future.

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EIGHT

Emerging morality 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 superdiverse 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. The conclusions will transcend the actual problems that I have described

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earlier in this book. But let me start with a summary of the chapters so far.

Recapitulation I note that moral space has completely changed in the last few decades. That is materially true if we look at developments in crime, security and surveillance, the relationship between the sexes in love, lust and sexual violence, and the composition of the population due to migration processes. The network society offers other conditions for the economy, for mobility, for relationships, for safety, for science. The complexity of human society, which by our reflexive consciousness is already so much bigger than that of other natural phenomena, has exploded due to digitalization. Despite the stabilization of (or even decrease in) the crime figures, there seem to exist no limits to the measures against crime, terror and risks in general. Criminal law became a central point of reference in moral space. Instead of the church, criminal law became the institution which proclaimed our moral guidelines. This moral inversion started a development in which security could become the key concept in the organization of the new social order. Anxiety about chaos was the catalyst for this development, in which a craving for moral clarity and certainty could be heard. As an indefinable concept, security takes on metaphysical proportions, where it is embedded in the surveillance strategies of data mining, data analysis and algorithmic patterning. By using our technological devices, we create a global blanket of data, which has all kinds of advantages for the state, for businesses and for ourselves. This secured dataïsm (Harare, 2015/2016) offers convenience, relationships and even identity. Paradoxically, we undergo these ubiquitous forms of control with a sense of freedom. Surveillance has some traits that can be understood in religious terms. It becomes a new Providence that monitors us, protects us and knows our secrets. It appeals to the religious faculty of human consciousness. On the development of sexual morality, it can be concluded that sex has come completely into the open. Whoever wants to can witness, within seconds, the most debauched images and movies. From previously being a hidden secret, sex has become a public issue in all its facets, for young and old alike. Whether this really matters, we do not really know. Our own taste, preference and motivation can now lead our sexual behaviour, on the understanding that the other people involved (if there are any) agree with that.

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The sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s has also meant the emancipation of women and especially of sexual diversity. The development of identity is via sexual experimentation directly linked to the body. That is not unproblematic, as is shown by the relatively high rates of sexual violence and unwanted digital intrusiveness. Moreover, through cultural diversity some accepted results of the sexual revolution (homosexuality and the sexual equality of women) are under pressure. The sexual domain has become a battleground again for the question of what is actually supposed to be normal. The shift towards a secular network society was accompanied by a steady influx of migrants. This applies to all Western countries (but not only there), due to a range of developments like the global flows of refugees. Of course, there have always been migrants, anytime and anywhere. But the high speed, and especially the increasing diversity, of groups make the current situation relatively unique. Many large cities have a majority of minorities and have a ’super-diverse’ population. In addition, more and more people live and work across boundaries. Integration policy has therefore developed in terms of social stability. Governing diversity can be divided into three areas: the rule of law; education and economy; and culture and identity. In the first domain, ‘acceptance’ is the keyword; in the second domain, the keyword is ‘participation’; and in the third domain it is ‘freedom’. With radical Islam, we are faced with an avenging God. The Western attitude of being prepared to doubt everything is challenged, and the West learns to understand its own hidden truth claims (such as freedom of expression and equality between men and women). We have a completely different constellation for answering the eternal questions about who we are, what we want, and why we behave as we do. The technology-driven, secular network society has, as it were, dissolved into a process of ever more complexity, with unpredictable outcomes.

A ‘pragmacracy’ Did our era of complexity without direction lead to chaos and unhappiness? The short answer is: no. It is not a ‘tangle’, so to speak. A lot of new dynamics have developed in what I have called an ‘improvising society’. These developments have positive and negative sides. We have highly developed societies with unprecedented prosperity, although prosperity is very unevenly distributed. There is even a growing inequality, unless the claim of Western democracies that equality is the point of departure. There is also a lot of freedom, self-determination and vitality in the networked communities.

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But at the same time we see the emergence of a security obsession, uncontrollable surveillance techniques, (violent) sexualization of society and controversial issues related to society’s (super-) diversity. What seems to be common in many of the current issues is that there is a lack of grand narratives. The political and public debate often sounds hollow, or is – to formulate it positively – above all, very practical. In this context, I have been speaking of radical secularization, in which each ideology or philosophy of life has lost its meaning. What we mainly see is pragmatism – political pragmatism – which is led by the manner in which an issue arises. We act on what works, or seems to work – again, an improvising society. With that attitude, huge successes have been created, but there is also a risk of drifting away on the paths that are available or are chosen already. Looking at the security issue (and the associated surveillance society), it seems as if it completely follows its own dynamics. It is hard to find the ideological considerations on alternatives or to understand that measures could be counter-productive. In economics, it is called ‘path dependency’: decisions in the past determine what will be decided in the future. Within a radical-secular network society, it is difficult to determine what we stand for. We live in what I have termed a ‘pragmacracy’ (referring to a way governing through ‘what works best’ and not on the base of a philosophy of life) with, at the edges, radical positions of Islam haters, jihadists, convinced hedonists, Enlightenment fundamentalists and all kind of poseurs. These radical sounds can be heard particularly in social media, not filtered by feelings of shame or second thoughts or moments of modesty, which arise in face-to-face-contact. The more access we have to virtual public space, the louder we have to shout to be heard. The political divisions focus on cultural affairs. What stands out is that a critical mass movement against growing economic inequality is missing. Even the economic crisis from 2008 to 2014 did not cause a counter-movement. Populist resistance rails even more against the government than against inequality. The politician (male/female) has lost their self-evident authority, in addition to the priest and the minister, the police officer, the bus driver, the paramedic and the teacher. Making everybody’s life a little better is the highest political ideal. We cannot even blame the politician. Without any ideological narrative, the politician has a tragic position. He or she must get their inspiration completely from themselves, but their options are limited. The politician is not taken very seriously, but should not act according to that – he or she must show credibility. What, then, is the potency of our society? In the pragmatic reality of today, I would like to differentiate between three quite successful

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perspectives, with which it seems possible to give some direction to our society: 1. dynamic continuity as today’s form of general interest; 2. the normative foundations of pragmatism; 3. the aesthetics of practices. Perspective 1: dynamic continuity Society no longer functions on the basis of religion and ideology, but is fundamentally guided by principles of pragmatism. The resilience of people and their social bonds on the basis of that pragmatic attitude turns out to be huge. The mutual dynamics around concrete tasks, projects and programmes determine the quality of living together. The secular network society takes shape in permanent processes of alignment of varying actors: it is an improvising society. In this permanent (re)alignment, society is organized in networks at various levels and of various sizes. In the place of an ideologically controlled, systematic policy, we see a politics of signification to fast and partly unpredictable processes. But do these thousand flowers blooming have sufficient power to keep a society together, to continue a mutual conversation, to keep each other involved and participating? Is such a society strong enough to resist hostile forces? What is in the public interest of such an improvising muddle? Every statement about the ‘common interest’ will get, sooner or later, the meaning of private interest or of a biased choice. Is there an overarching idea that is conceivable? Given the fluidity of the network society and the need for constant adjustment, common interest has to do with stability, or better: continuity. Or maybe even better: sustainability! In Chapter 7, I argued for the relevance of this starting point, when it comes to governing super-diversity. In each organic system, there is an inherent tendency to survive or to continue. We also see this notion in the work of Giddens (1990), when he speaks of the importance of ontological security; that is, confidence in the continuity of one’s own identity and of the social and material environment. That is a point of departure for any society, but in an ideologically stripped down society, it’s the last totem pole still standing upright. Continuity is something other than sticking to the status quo. In fact, insufficient adaptation to new circumstances undermines the power of a system. Sustainability is in adaptive or dynamic continuity: there must be constant adjustment, tuning and renewal to keep a

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community going. It even gives some clue as to what freedom can be and where the boundaries have to be drawn. On the one hand, it is in promoting opportunities for sustainable development and fighting against undermining tendencies of continuity. Traditional ideological politics are based on planning, governing and controlling. Network politics, on the other hand, stimulates positive developments and limits negative developments, and in this way gives meaning to social dynamics. In that role, the politician is the representative of the public interest. In a ‘passionate’ network society, there are numerous initiatives that are difficult to categorize in a given system or narrative. Instead of getting control of unpredictable dynamics, today’s politician must have the courage to let it work, and then to respond, to intervene or to get over it with targeted action or an inspiring story. Politicians like to do ‘something new’. That might be a nice and inevitable desire, but in a complex society without direction, it will only have any value or power if it is connected to dynamics that are already there. It is impossible to build a system over the ongoing dynamics. Governance is only possible when reasoning from complexity (and its inherent order). Reasoning from the existing dynamics has one major drawback: the problem of path dependency, which I discussed earlier. The growing economic inequality will not easily be debated from the perspective of social continuity. There is a need here for a clear break, by way of derogation from the master model. Common interest taken as dynamic continuity has an inherently conservative bent. The only remedy is alertness and openness for disruptive and demonstrative signals. The greatest vice here is complacency, and the best argument for change is that of the importance of radical dynamism. A good politician is able to connect to the impulses from his or her environment and to give these a political meaning. In responsive politics, dynamic continuity and sustainability emerge as the inevitable logics of common interest. Perspective 2: normative foundations Continuity is the most basic form of public interest: we want to continue. But continuing is not yet a guiding principle; it is rather a motif. It is not an insignificant motif, because it gives us a criterion to determine what is – and what is not – desirable. We encourage and endorse what strengthens continuity and we restrict what undermines dynamic continuity. Opinions on this subject can differ widely, of course. In which direction do we want to continue? The radical secular person is

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especially – based on their individual views – a very practical person: he or she crafts society in concrete practices. Pragmatism has become a form of existence, of being human, and that is not without success. The American philosopher Hilary Putnam (2001) even speaks of the third Enlightenment, after those of ancient times and of the 17th century. Good and evil are not the leading concepts, but better and worse – a thought that can also be found in the work of influential intellectuals such as Avishai Margalit (1996) and Amartya Sen (2009). But there are normative structures that support this pragmatic governance. They offer a procedural ethics for pragmatic decision making and are decisive for success. They organize the relations between people and between organizations, without the need for repeated discussion. I would like to differentiate in succession: the rule of law; social regulation; and social reciprocity. The legal system has evolved over centuries into an unlikely powerful stronghold of regulation. In relation to the radical secularization, its significance has even increased. I have shown that in Chapter 4, for example, in the function of the criminal law. That had a peripheral position in an ideologically driven society, but today it is situated in the centre of the moral space. Criminal law has been given a kind of monopoly on statements about what is right and wrong. It is a logical (but not necessarily desirable) development within a complex society without direction. The second normative foundation of pragmatic decision making is social regulation. This is the whole of settlements that is not legally codified, but has developed in the shadow of the rule of law, such as contracts, covenants, and written and oral agreements. This is a procedural form of giving direction. Such arrangements are especially important if people don’t keep their promises. A good example of more substantive regulation is the disciplinary law that in certain professions regulates the quality of work of the professional. Other examples include canon law or sharia law, which regulate religious relations and obligations apart from the state. These are legitimated because of the voluntary submission to certain arrangements that are valid for a particular group. But they are subordinated to the law. The third direction giving foundation is social reciprocity, a concept that comes from cultural anthropology. Its basic principle is the idea of giving, receiving, and giving back or passing to the next person. The gift also assumes in principle that there is a ‘counterpart’: a gift back or solidarity in the longer term, or love and adherence. Reciprocity also plays a role in keeping the equal relationships in which confluent love has be realized (see Chapter 6). It was discovered in so-called

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‘primitive communities’, but it seems as if it is more relevant than ever in network relations, which are no longer vertical or hierarchical. In the open relationships in networks, the unpredictability of other nodes (individuals or organizations) is relatively large, which makes the reliability of mutual relationships crucial. These are no longer the obvious result of strong ties or organic solidarity. The importance of weak ties has increased dramatically (Granovetter, 1973), but these relationships are arranged by reciprocal arrangements. Reciprocity is the basic moral notion that, in relation to my efforts there will be those of others. It’s the tit-for-tat principle, but in a more sophisticated way. Reciprocity is rooted in the awareness that what I bring in matters, because eventually I guarantee the part that must come from the other parties involved. Preferably, reciprocity is a matter of trust, but sometimes a more controlled form is needed, by using some form of regulation. Housing associations, for example, provide good homes for reasonable prices, but they might ask the residents in return to be responsible for the quality of life and the security of the district. Thinking and acting in terms of reciprocity creates flexibility in pragmatism that takes place on the basis of the legal system and other forms of social regulation. Perspective 3: the aesthetics of practices In an ideologically driven society, a model of planning and control is applied. A network society works differently: in the permanent alignment of actors, patterns are formed (emergence). The trigger for such a process of alignment can be an incident or an individual action. We see that, for example, in riots, where a single event can dramatically change the situation completely. Also, incidents or individual initiatives in organizations can give impulses for a new dynamic development. For society as a whole, such spontaneous patterns based on incidents and individual actions would, however, fall short. Institutions and organizations – public, private and civil – function as kinds of centres of gravity in a rapidly changing environment. In sociological literature, this is often rather laconically talked about as a ‘liquid’ or ‘horizontal’ society (respectively Zygmunt Bauman, 2000 and Thomas Friedman, 2007). But that a society could organize itself is a misleading representation. Institutional organization is an empirical fact; it is necessary for a functioning society. These institutions operate indeed in a different context. Therefore, many (civil) organizations are confused about their position nowadays. How do they find direction in such a rapid and unpredictable environment? The answer seems to be

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rather obvious: by understanding their own societal function. A credible contribution to society is based on their substantive existence, the core function of the institutions. This determines the actual practices of the organization. I lean for this view on the ideas of the conservative (Catholic) philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. In his book After virtue (1981), MacIntyre argues for a morality which is contained in human practices. A practice has a ‘natural’ substantive direction, given the function of the institution. A chess player aims to a higher level within the rules of the game; such a ’command’ is inherent in the game, otherwise it loses its ‘meaning’. In other words, the good is, to some extent, in the nature of a particular practice. This inherent meaning is not God given, but has developed in long traditions and historicity. Each practice has its own canon, as it were. Practising according to this inherent meaning, as well as one can, seems in a network society to be a workable, pragmatic criterion for what is right or wrong. That is, in fact, an aesthetic criterion, making a certain practice as beautiful, efficient, elegant, inspiring and effective as possible to give expression to the given ‘good’ of that very same practice. According to the organization scientists McKenzie and James (2004), aesthetics is also the only way of dealing with the complex problems of our time. The more complex a practice or an issue, the greater the importance of intuition or gut feeling. A craftsman or a jazz musician is looking for elegance, balance, energy, rhythm and harmony, or chooses an unexpected turn or a blue note – these are aesthetic criteria. Intuition plays a role, which arises from experience and training in a certain practice. This approach is in line with a classical concept of aesthetics as the expression of ‘the Idea’. The inherent meaning of a practice expresses itself in aesthetic quality. The inherent importance of education, for example, consists of transfer, that is, the transfer of knowledge and life experience from one generation to another. This determines the curriculum, but also implies a distinction between ages, a positive learning climate and mutual respect between teacher and student. The command is to give shape to transfer in a motivating and inspiring way. Of course, one can argue about what the inherent sense of practices actually is or should be. Many teachers and experts in education, for example, would attach more importance to students flourishing than to transfer of knowledge, skills and values. Practices, however, have – and need – a certain historical stability. The core function gives identity and direction, and also to the field around it.

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All’s well that ends well? The successes of ‘pragmacracy’ can, in my view, be traced back to these three perspectives: continuity as a shared interest, normative foundations in law and mores, and an aesthetic design of practices. They give a huge resilience to society, but with one important caveat: they work by the grace of the individual enthusiasm of the people who form it. It needs bottom-up inspiration from people, living with or without God, touched by the classics, the Bible, the Koran; by movies or sports or by their parents. The radical secular network society assumes that people are willing and able to bring out the best in themselves. It is a form of inspiration that often does its job invisibly, but determines the successes of the ‘pragmacracy’ as I have just described. It’s almost too good to be true. But there at least two problems in this moral quality of what I have termed earlier ‘the improvising society’. First, there are, of course, contradictions – passionate contradictions even. Living together is full of conflicts of interests and power relations. There is ignorance, indifference and intolerance, and there are rock-hard contrasting views. That is what politics is all about. But in radically secular times, it is politics without a larger idea, or without a really critical position in terms of an alternative. Inspiration must come and is attached only to concrete projects and practices, and is motivated by its own spirit. It applies to any enterprise or initiative: we want to be as good as possible, given the practices we care about. That offers great opportunities, but also has its downsides. The deep doubt underlying the secular condition creates constructive diversity, but also radical positions without any counterweight. There is no shared inspiring story, and I don’t have any illusion that that will come. The success of the secular condition lies in the diversity and pluralism, where, at the same time, the feeling of discomfort is coming from. That is the core of the Western crisis. This brings me to the second problem of the ‘pragmacracy’, as sketched: it is hard to believe in. It gives no reason to live (or to die) for it. When Fukuyama (1992) published his interesting essay on the end of history in book form, he added a chapter about ‘the last man’. It is a Nietzschean-inspired story that generally gets little attention, but sheds an entirely different light on Fukuyama’s historical claim. Fukuyama outlines in that chapter the image of man who has achieved everything and has nothing more to fight for. The last man is a bored man, who can barely take moral issues seriously. He stops putting all his energy into sports and cooking and shopping and dancing and enjoying, and trying to get rich. He has achieved everything, but is

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not really happy. He lacks something to fight for. That is the Achilles heel of liberal democracy: we count our blessings, but we don’t have anything left to aim for: much to lose, but nothing to fight for. Our time is one of diversity: in colours, tastes, preferences, connections, networks, collectives, communities, cities and religions. We go for this or that – with little grip and certainty, but with some individual enthusiasm and rather unfocused conflicts. The disappearance of God as omnipotence has generated centrifugal forces, with radical consequences for our practices and ways of life. It is risky and exciting at the same time. We live in a complex time, in which ‘alternative facts’ have a legitimate position. The truth that the Vatican website proclaims has to compete with a buzz of digital claims to truth (De Kesel, 2010: 123). If we doubt everything, we can believe in anything – that is the context in which we find ourselves. The big question on the very existence of God has been dissolved in a polyphonic context, in which the dichotomous distinction between secular and religious slowly seems to disappear. Yet we are often scared by the non-binding circumstances, the void of the (neo)liberal view of human beings, the hyper-consumerism, of just living without anything more than that. It makes us feel insecure and vulnerable. Westerners have developed a new regulatory system in which we – fairly successfully – know how to guarantee continuity in a pragmatic and aesthetically satisfying way. But it provides no bigger story larger than a neoliberal trade-off between success and failure. The successes of the welfare state are in contrast with the injustice of their distribution, and we set the desire for security against the loss of privacy. But something special is happening here. In that procedural search for balance, we come across a new quality of emptiness: we need to have an opinion! We have to believe in something! Our lives in deep doubt force us, time and again, to take a position, in whatever we undertake or practise. What are my values? What do I find important? What do I actually believe in? In the apparently desolate moral landscape, there are countless implicit and explicit opinions and beliefs – private moralities, so to speak. It is believing in something beyond the truth claims of religions, ideologies, even of the science and the rule of law – it is believing beyond sacred statements. It is the need to believe in something, exactly because we have to do without any claims to truth.

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A tragic position A world in which deep secular doubt has become commonplace, paradoxically forces us to find something to believe in. That could be anything. We let ourselves be inspired by the stories of yesteryear and of today; those are the narrative parameters with which we determine what we believe – from Greek myths to Danish police series, from Christian virtues to scientific texts, and from Nelson Mandela to Oprah Winfrey. Within that, there is always also the inevitable question of transcendent truth, if only because others passionately put it so. That is perhaps the most unsettling aspect of ‘the religious tangle’ (Chapter 3): there are rock-hard positions adopted by fundamentalists, atheists and radicals. We are forced into taking a position, even if we don’t want to. According to the Dutch ethicist Paul van Tongeren (2012: 41),25 ethics is all about querying each other on the accuracy of our opinions and about the moral quality of what we do and see and experience. Well, that’s exactly what we do, all day along! Our time is not an immoral or amoral one. It is one of self-examination indeed, but not only in the sense of who we are (Giddens, 1992), but also of what we want to believe in. What do we find important? That is not so much about facts and knowledge, but about the meaning we attach to experiences, events and situations. These are, by definition, not objective. In each case, we must try to convince others. We can write about it and talk, and make pictures of it, or policies; that is about meaning and appreciation. We are never finished with that – temporarily maybe or at most within a certain agreed framework, or as a fundamentalist. That is the tragic position of living in an era of ‘poly-truth’: we are seeking answers, while we know that we will not find them. It is a life of extreme relativism, equally exhausting as it is motivating. In any politics, and in every practice, hides that implicit inquiry of the motif, the value or the alternative. That is why I speak of hyper-morality as a source for some hope, maybe we should make more of that. Socrates believed that a life that does not examine itself is not a human life (van Tongeren, 2012: 99). The classical ethics of virtues assumes that self-examination makes us better in who we actually are: improving ourselves. Aristotle could thus come to his four cardinal virtues: understanding, courage, justice and modesty. They make take human nature from good to better. We also encounter this approach 25

This section is based on van Tongeren (2012).

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in current philosophies of self-fulfilment, or Lebenskunst (Schmid, 2012), which add a new virtue, that of autonomy or authenticity (Taylor, 2007). The command of our time seems to be that we understand our own life as a project, as a work of art even. This can also be heard in contemporary spiritual approaches that transcend the tragic position in a holistic truth. It is the hope of the peace of mind of the selfrealization: I become who I am. The Christian tradition introduced a kind of ethics, in which the good is not seen as the better self (the Aristotalian view), but as the opposite of evil It led to the inner battle between willing to be good, knowing that we cannot be virtuous anytime. The will has no substantive good, according to Saint Augustine, it can take us all over the place, we do not have the virtue in our own hands. We need a force from outside to rein the will. This has led to the idea of divinely inspired virtues as faith, hope and love, which got a practical form in the works of mercy (such as visiting prisoners and hosting foreigners, and also admonishing sinners and comforting sad people).26 These virtues are still vital to today, in voluntary work and everyday helping behaviour.27 Where the Greek virtues protect against fanaticism, the Christian virtues call for charity. Friedrich Nietzsche, the herald of radical secularism, undermined the schools of thought in terms of virtues. Yet according to van Tongeren (2012: 186), he is not incompatible with the ethics of virtues. Nietzsche actually added one other virtue, that of truthfulness (‘the youngest among the virtues’). In truthfulness, the reflective person recognizes their will to power and their power to want something. Nietzsche’s immoral experiment is not a call to indulgence, but an appeal for the courage to shape one’s own life, without any help from the outside (see also Eagleton’s interpretation of Nietzsche in Chapter 3). It is about the art of counterbalancing inner forces without destroying them, like taming a horse. This is how van Tongeren understands how the virtues shift their function from disciplining the will to making the will to express itself. The hyper-morality of today creates an opening to authentic choices for the good. But that is something we have to want. Or are we in need for someone or something to support our choices for the good.

There are 14 works by Saint Augustine: seven material and seven spiritual. For an interesting example of this, see Van Steden (2018) on the work of so-called street pastors in England and Wales. 26 27

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On the razor’s edge The world rests on us, even though we have no firm ground under our feet. The Flemish philosopher Marc De Kesel (2010: 139) speaks of the Munchausen condition, referring to the story of Baron Munchausen, who pulls himself out of the swamp. It is an unattainable challenge. Therefore, this most extreme form of religious freedom creates the breeding ground for fundamentalism. Bin Laden (or ISIS) is, according to De Kesel, not in the tradition of Islam, but he chooses – a very modern approach – in freedom, what he would like to call a ‘pure form’ of Islam. In that way, Bin Laden shows the tragic inability to come to terms with freedom (De Kesel, 2010: 56). If De Kesel is right, then it means that murderous radicalism is an expression of the fear of getting lost in the kaleidoscopic world without a centre – fear of freedom, so to speak. The gods’ twilight is evidently difficult to endure. ‘If God is hiding, we will recover him by force’, as the violent radicals seem to reason. Voilà, there is the radical split of the post-secular, super-diverse network society. On the one hand, we have the imperative to believe in something, because we no longer believe in anything and therefore can believe in everything. On the other hand, there is the fear of people who do that without the deep doubt that leaves room for other faiths. We are scared to death that they will force us to follow them, violently or not. There is good reason for this fear. That’s the feeling that Habermas, Taylor and Smith and all those would-be believers (the description is by Eagleton, see Chapter 3) like Badiou, Žižek, Agamben, Debray, Scruton, Derrida, Steiner and De Botton, Putnam, Sandel, Neiman and Blond unite as they find the secular discourse too lean, in opposition to the tireless Islamic believers. Hence the argument of Siedentop (2014), who attributes the secular condition to Paul, because he ‘invented’ the individual. That would make the West ideologically stronger: it is thoroughly Christian-secular. It is the paradox par excellence: infidels should believe more in their Christian-secular values, so that true believers will have some more doubts in their religion. It is an understandable desire. Religious diversity and cultural fragmentation may lead to parallel structures and social enclaves that undermine the security of society. At the same time, we should realize that religion generally gets entwined with new insights according to its context. Also, religion modernizes. In this context, terms like ’post-institutional religion’ (Ter Borg, 2007) or low-intensity ‘religion’ (Turner, 2011: 149-150) are used. On a global scale, there seem to be fewer demands of the partisans, and religion also

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gets more consumerist forms. Even current Pope Francis goes a little in that direction. Fundamentalist movements are not anti-modern, given their use of modern means of communication. Fundamentalists are failed postmodernists rather than frustrated traditionalists. We should speak to each other without referring to clashing claims to truth – that is the challenge of the ‘secular super-diverse networked moral order’ (sorry for that one). Now this view is too optional in relation to the violent Islamism, which creates a concrete threat to Western society. Direct, real danger demands a tough answer (compare violent crime). We must realize, however, that religions, historically speaking, do not deliver a set of principles for eternity, although the orthodox will make that claim. They are generally in a process of syncretism or hybridization. They mingle, especially in a globalizing context (Turner, 2011: 205). Modern Muslim communities in the West are creating new forms of religion. Turner pleas for looking at the concrete practices of religious groups, which often aim to adapt to the environment (Turner, 2011: 293) – a call for pragmatism, so to speak, in which Western society must be open to criticism of its decadent excesses. Freedom of expression, for example, is not a synonym for freedom of insult, wrote Ian Buruma following the attacks in Paris by January 2015.28 The right to insult and torment is not the genuine achievement of Western civilization. Real achievements are the equality of all people and freedoms that are anchored in the rule of law. Western culture has similarly not to stand for pornography and prostitution, as such, but the freedom and security of (sexual) identity is sacral in relation to the secular liberal democracy, as we remember again because of 2017’s #MeToo campaign. That shows the power of Western culture, which can only be convincing if it applies to everyone. It is indeed precisely the strategy that the West has developed so successfully in its secular ‘pragmacracy’: with an eye for the aesthetic quality of practices, addressing concrete problems on the basis of law, regulation and reciprocity in the context of the dynamic continuity of society. But we have to believe in it and we have to convince other people of it. It is, according to British philosopher John Gray (2007), a misconception to think that people ‘naturally’ opt for peace, security and prosperity, as Fukuyama suggests. A just, liberal democratic rule of law is something to fight for in relation to the future.

28

In the Dutch newspaper NRC-Handelsblad, 17 January 2015.

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A pantheon of gods We have no shared faith, but a shared fate – no common belief, but a common destiny. It is a fundamental reversal of tradition to future. This began in the Enlightenment, but it was in the last half-century that this became the actual condition for society. That means that we define general interest more and more in terms of the future: continuity, stability, sustainability, resilience – on the basis of adaptation and innovation. It is for this reason that we experience so little grip on our lives (liquid indeed), and that we have to learn how to live with uncertainty and unpredictability. That’s why we need social sciences, to think of a future and why we try to keep the risks manageable. But is it enough? In our complex society without direction we have, against the odds, managed to find procedures for living together without making a ‘mess’ of it. Not unproblematic, not without injustice, not without conflicts, but a common God – and even many of his substitutes are not needed to create a relatively harmonious society. We reap the rewards of a separation of church and state (developed over centuries) and of the constitutional institutions that were derived from it. Religion became a private matter. The inspiration is in the practices we extract from ourselves. Under radical secularized conditions this holds for all big stories; they have become private ‘presuppositions’. Whether it’s science, justice or the rule of law, they are narrative elements, which – without ideological embedding – are loose, and to which we attach more or less value depending on our positions and preferences. For many they are holy, but not necessarily for everyone. The pragmatism uses all kind of moralities with which we determine ourselves. We must ourselves seek coherence in what we are and what we believe. That is both liberation and tragedy: we are free to determine what we want, but we have to find something without knowing what we are looking for. However, it would be nonsensical to see this as a completely individualized process. The digitalized network society creates a context in which the individual is using not an inherent source but an outward-looking radar. We are permanently expressing ourselves in relation to the expressions of others. Hence the huge attention to the person behind the politician or to the celebrities, who do not differ from us, but are created through the media. Reality TV and individualized YouTube channels are the latest forms of radicalsecular identity construction. A constructed self-image on the hunt for a better I: it directs our inner compass. We construct ourselves not as projects from scratch, but in relation to others. That in itself is not so

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special, unless we bear in mind the kaleidoscopic network structures within which we do that. Giving meaning is becoming more and more a matter of a search for coherence in relation to the context, the behaviour of others and ourselves, in relation to all other identities. Meaning is not found in depth, but in the combination of impressions, experiences, expressions and images – in short, in patterns. I borrow this idea from the Italian philosopher Alessandro Baricco (2006), who wrote a newspaper column on the superficiality of this time. He speaks of the ‘barbarians’ who do not know the value of anything any more. Gradually, however, he arrives at an amazing discovery. I regard this as very relevant in this context and paraphrase his text about this (2006: 108-13). There is a mutation going on in the way we have our experiences. For barbarians they are the result of a chain, a series, a sequence, a movement that strings points in reality together in a sequence – a flash. Experiencing something means that you continue until you get a new shove in whatever direction again. Seeking depth means losing time, a useless deadlock that breaks the fluidity of the movement. The barbarians do not find meaning in depth, but in the image, the sketch, the pattern of associations. It is a new localization of meaning, a new form of survival, a new civilization. Flashes of insight, call it ‘sense’ or ’fullness’, the term Taylor (2007) uses as the starting point of any religious experience. Also, the self has become a practice, whose inherent meaning comes into being, in the drawing of impressions along aesthetic lines. That sounds beautiful, but is also vague, if we look at the concrete differences and conflicts in a super-diverse society, in which claims to truth are violently made, by the faithful or faithless. God also means war, in the variants of faith that accept no other treatises on truth. The utopian desire of a super-diverse society is that of a world in which everyone chooses his or her own God and can even decide to see oneself as God, as long as that does not thwart the possibility of others. In such an imaginary kingdom of gods, it no longer matters whether God is a human projection or not.

Emerging morality Under radical secular conditions, finding or believing or thinking something is necessary, because we no longer believe in anything, and we so can believe in everything. My choices have just as much right to be made as yours, and vice versa. But we need to keep talking about it; that is the only truth that holds.

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This creates our flashes of insight and meaning, our transcendent moments. Think, for example, of the national mourning around the victims of the MH17 flight that was shot down over Ukraine in 2014 (a big event in the Netherlands as there were 193 Dutch victims), or of the processes of reconciliation in South Africa and Northern Ireland, or perhaps an episode of the BBC series Planet Earth. Examples are risky because they are always ambivalent – they can rapidly divide opinions. The faith and hope in such transcending moments, however, keeps the conversation going. For many people God is a source for a meaningful life, but, under the radical secular condition, for society as a whole meaning is an effect. The given transcendent God has socially faded away. What we hear is a cacophony of sounds, a buzz, in which we find each other every now and then. We could call this meaningful effect an ‘emergent God’ – an irreducible appearance. We do not talk about the meaning of life because we necessarily believe in God, but because we always have to believe in something (even in 140+ characters in our tweets), and this has emergent effects. We might not know the truth, but we are inclined to search for it. Our ‘pragmacracy’ may contain procedural ethics, but this is not necessarily a sterile matter. It generates now and then a pattern in which we can find reconciliation, or meaning or fulfilment. Some see there their own God; for others, these are moments of being-present in a meaningful way – again and again, always different, sometimes successfully, and sometimes in enmity. Some things are holy, for the one or for the other - they are not negotiable. But at other times we are willing to talk about it or to smuggle a little between two opinions. Sometimes we will have to fight hard for what we believe in, the rule of law for example. The fragile practices of the improvising society are based on a plurality of private values. That is, not just one of freedom, equality and community. Or maybe better: that is it also. Just like the virtues of Aristotle and of Christianity, and the tamed will of Nietzsche, and the Koran or the love of Mother Teresa will be brought in – depending on who is speaking. The ‘fullness’ of Charles Taylor (2007) is the starting point for conversation about what we believe, because we no longer believe in anything and so can believe in everything. It creates a heaven or sometimes a hell full of noise, in which occasional flashes and patterns emerge around issues that we all – if only for a moment – want to believe in. Perhaps in terms of love, equality, justice, inclusiveness – terms which are able to transcend violence and struggle. We can use such moments or stories or happenings in a critical perspective

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on our daily practices. Thus we know how to appeal to each other meaningfully. In the moral buzz, a figure or a pattern appears at times, about which we maybe sometimes or partially agree. That is an important good in itself, but it has an important political premise. To create the heavenly emergent cacophony in which such a figure can appear, ‘faith’ in the rule of law – in short, fundamental equality – is an important condition. That faith recognizes above all the right of existence of all other faiths, and is even willing to protect them. In this sense, belief in the rule of law can be seen and legitimized as a faith above any other. It has a sacred secular status. It is even willing to question itself, if there are more inclusive alternatives. In principle, the deep Western doubt has yielded a world that is open to any kind of faith, if it accepts that it is subordinated to the right of existence of other faiths also. This creates the open condition for common moments, inspiring stories or communal practices, which make us talk to each other.

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Epilogue It was a great pleasure to work on this book. It gave me the opportunity to combine earlier work and new ideas into the design of a criminology of moral order. It is the culmination of work that had previously resulted in four books. I have used parts of earlier translations of The safety utopia (2005b) and The improvising society (2011/2013). I have leant heavily on my last research project on the secular conditions of Western societies, which was only published in Dutch: The secular experiment (2015). Selected pieces from earlier publications are combined, rewritten and edited, and have resulted in this new publication. As the reader will have noticed, this criminology of moral order is related to crime and security, but it is rather a theory on the contemporary organization of human relations. Morality is at the heart of every interaction, and crime is a disturbance of how a society wants to understand, define and regulate these interactions. That goes for every society in every era – also for our diversified, network society without any obvious general philosophies of life. The challenge of our time is to formulate and reformulate our sentiments, ideas and beliefs, day in and day out, to keep each other on the right track. We don’t do that, of course, without any notion of norms and values. We have our habits and traditions – albeit that these are faded out a little or even unknown, for example by new inhabitants of the West. Indeed, we relate to our traditions, instead of being a product of them. Of course, we have the law as the result of an era of deliberation and struggle. Criminal law can even be understood as a canon of morality. It shifted to the middle of the moral space, and became a centre of gravity in organizing our ‘postmodern’ social relations. But it falls short, because it is too little too late in relation to the big moral space it has to regulate. What is more, criminal law has to adapt to cyberspace with its very own conditions and parameters of regulation and social ordering. In the book, I have only sometimes referred to the virtual world that has become so important for our relations today. It asks for another volume in this series, for ‘a criminology of cyberspace’. I hope that such a criminology can build on the idea of morality emerging out of complexity – emerging morality that should be understood as the result of our deliberations, disagreements and conflicts, and which is created in moments of fullness, meaningful stories and daily practices. These function as centres of gravity in the morality buzz that emerges from an improvising society. We do not have a society of grand views

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or big stories; ours is one of incidents in liquid and volatile processes. Moral space has its institutions and organizations, but these have to relate to speedy and liquid processes, both physical and digital, in which they cannot stick to old habits and procedures. Complexity without direction asks for instant moral composition of social order. In that process, we should be aware of how important our debates and actions actually are. We can tell the stories, or use the old ones from the Bible, the Koran or secular sources. We can create the moments in which we enjoy our communities and collectivities. We can organize the practices that bring people together or that transcend our individual lives. That is a different position than thinking in terms of universal principles and golden standards. Each of us can use these concepts, but they can never serve as the last word. We have to accept that a diverse, networked and globalized world can only function if it succeeds in mobilizing the vital will of living together. It is an abstract translation of how actual processes occur. At least I hope that I have convinced the reader that it is useful to understand the moral issues of our time in these terms. In articulating the hidden mechanisms of social order, I have tried to give some handhold in how to act in reality. Social science, as noted in Chapter 1, can be conceived of as the discipline of Das Können (so it could be), the effort in researching how it could be in reference to how it is and how it should be; it is positioned between Hume’s Sein und Sollen (how it is and how it ought to be). It shows the possibilities of social development. This, at least, is how I try to work in the field of security and resilience. I have worked on a criminology that is hopefully inspiring for the practices in crime and security, and for all the other challenges related to the moral order of our society.

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165

Index 9/11 45, 47, 50, 83, 86, 90, 112 1960s, importance of 45, 50, 52–3, 60, 96, 99, 101–2, 133

A acceptance 120–1, 133 Achterhuis, H. 127 actuarial justice 78 adaptation to environment 22, 117, 135–6, 145 administrative law 71, 79–80 aesthetics 54–5, 138–9, 141, 145 Agamben, Giorgio 47, 144 alienation 4, 22, 71 alignment 34–5 alternative facts 55, 141 Amazon 25, 87 ancien régime 50 Ancient Greece 42, 98, 142–3 anomie 4 Anti- Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014 82 anti-democratic sentiments 125 anti-integration sentiments 119 anti-religious attitudes 51, 55 anti-social behaviour 25, 77, 80, 81, 82, 83, 119 Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003 81–2 Aquinas, Thomas 44 arbitrariness 82 Aristotle 142–3, 148 Armstrong, K. 44, 53 ars amatoria 99, 105 Asad, Talal 52 ASBOs 82, 83 atheism 54, 142 Augustine, Saint 143 authenticity, era of 7, 50, 97, 108, 143 authoritarianism 36, 96, 117, 126 authority 134–5 autonomy 7, 42–4, 95, 99, 100–1, 103, 108, 143 autopoiesis 30–1

B bad life/evil life 4, 60, 73 Badiou, Alain 47, 144 Barabási, Albert-Lászlo 6, 26, 27 Baricco, Alessandro 147

Bauman, Zygmunt 9, 11, 12, 18, 59, 63, 131, 138 Bazalgette, P. 61 Beck, Ulrich 78, 114 Beck-Gernsheim, E. 114 Bellamy, Edward 65–6, 67 Bentham, Jeremy 66–7, 68, 74, 88 Berezin, Mabel 125–6 Berger, Peter 46, 47 Berlin Wall, fall of 60, 112 Bernstein, P. 86 Best, K. 88 Bin Laden, Osama 144 bio-information 87 biotechnology 24 birth control 99, 102 Bjørgo, Tore 123 Blond, Phillip 47, 144 Bloom, Pail 61n17 blurring thesis 52 body in network society 20 and the self 20, 97–8 and sexuality 105, 107, 108, 133 Boers, J. 80 Bottoms, Anthony xi Boutellier, Hans 9, 10, 63, 79, 91, 119 Brexit 21 bubbles 23 Buitelaar, M. 108 bullying 64 bureaucracy 24, 46, 88 burqas 20, 112, 117, 121 Burris, S. 35 Buruma, Ian 145

C Çankaya, S. 121 canon law 137 capabilities 34 capitalism and an avenging God 122 China 53 flows of capital 20 and populism 125 and Protestantism 44, 46 super-capitalism 36 and the surveillance society 88 see also neoliberalism care of self 98

167

A criminology of moral order Carter, Jimmy 117 cascade of failures 27 Castells, Manuel 5, 6, 19–26, 36 Castoriades, Cornelius 53 Catholic Church 9, 40, 44, 47, 50, 106, 113, 139 causes of crime 123, 131 celebrity culture 146 Cense, M. 108 censorship 96 centralized organization 24 certainty, moral 8–9 chaos 11, 13, 22, 31, 32, 37, 132 chaos theory 28–9 charity 44, 143 children abuse of 62 migrants 118 and pornography 102, 109 protection of rights of 82 and sexuality 107 China 53 chip implantations 85 Christian Humanism 62 Christianity continued growth of 47 ethics 143 fundamentalism 20 historical dominance of 40 human beings in 42–3 and secularization 7, 40, 41–5, 51, 53 and sexuality 105, 106, 107, 108 substitutions 55 values and norms 148 church-state separation 39, 43, 47, 48, 49, 51, 117, 121, 146 citizenship 24–5, 36, 49, 82, 115–16, 118–20 civil behaviour 81 civil citizenship 115 civil rights 86 civil society and the networked society 24 civilizing processes 77 class-based societies 23 class-related collectives 8 clear-up rates 71 Cobussen, M. 33 coherence 36, 116, 146, 147 cohesion 23, 36, 80, 115 collaboration and exchange of expectations 30–1 and the improvising society 34 and role-assignment 34 collective consciousness 45 collective identities 20 collectivization 23

colonization of individual lives 25 commercialization 55, 88, 89, 104–5 commodification 55 common God 146 common interest 135 see also general interest communality of norms and values 60 communism 9, 53 community as alternative to God 5 and the improvising society 34 and the information age 20, 21, 25 ‘lite’ communities 36 and the networked society 18–19 and religion 39, 45, 54 role in criminal justice 67–8, 69, 71 and security 81 and victimalization 60 compassion 62, 76 compensation 76 complexity and emergence 11 logic of networks 26–31 and morality 6–9, 12–13, 17, 32, 132 network politics 136 and social ordering 18 structure of networks 27 complexity without direction x, 8–9, 12–13, 32, 56, 59, 63, 114, 131, 133, 137 conditional instrument, criminal justice as 67–8 confluent love 99–100, 137–8 connectivity 6, 22, 23, 27, 28–9, 46 conscience 44–5, 46, 53, 55 consent 10, 95, 108 conservatism 5 conspiracy theories 55 constitutional order 49 consumerism 43, 53, 59, 83, 104, 145 contraception 99, 102 correction 68, 69, 78 cosmopolitanism 5, 115–16 cost-benefit calculations 72 Crawford, A. 22, 81, 82, 83, 85 crime, changing social meaning of 63–5 Crime and Disorder Act 1998 81 crime as moral argument 72–3 crime as reference point in moral affairs 9 crime rates 71, 91, 132 criminal justice system at centre of society 9, 81, 131 history of 64, 70 as last resort 59, 67, 71, 81 media interest 70, 76

168

Index paradox of 71–2, 76 proactivity 70 quasi-criminal law 82, 83, 137 securitization 76–7 socialization of criminal justice 70–1 ultimate versus urgent 67–9 urgent criminal justice 67–9, 73, 74, 86 utopianism 64–7 criminal law 9, 59–74, 132, 137 criminal trial as celebration of morality 68 criminality 77–80 criminology 9, 62–3, 72, 123, 124, 131, 152 crisis management 10 critical thresholds 29 Crul, Maurice 113, 115, 127 cults 21 culture body outside of 105 commercialization 55 common cultural nationality 118 cultural identity 111, 114, 122 cultural power 21 cultural revolution 111–12 cultural tensions 119 desire to form a single 115 identity-oriented culture 7–8, 20 and participation 121 Romanticism 54–5 see also super-diversity culture of control 76 cybercrime 64 cyberspace criminology 151

and the networked society 21, 23 and the ‘pragmacracy’ 145 and religion 49, 51 and secularization 7 see also liberal-democratic states de-nationalization 21 de-radicalization 123 Derrida, Jacques 47, 144 de-secularization 47 deterrence effects 66, 68, 76 digital selves 88 digitalization 8, 12, 36, 84, 88, 90, 132, 146 dignity 102, 105 discontent 10–11, 20, 63, 80, 91, 126 discrimination 121 disenchantment of the world 40, 45–6, 48 diversity 111–24, 140, 141 see also super-diversity divorce 100 DNA sampling 84–5, 87 domestic violence 64, 105 doubt 41, 45, 133, 141, 142, 149 due process 82 Dukers-Muijrers, N.H.T.M. 95, 105–6 Durkheim, Emile 4, 5, 45, 68, 76 dynamic continuity of society 117, 135–6, 145

E

D Dagevos, J. 118 data doubles 88 data mining 25, 70, 87–8, 132 data profiling 25, 87–8 data society 88 data-driven culture 9, 84, 88 dataïsm, secured 132 dataveillance 87 De Botton, Alain 47, 144 de Graaf, Bob 90, 104, 105–6 de Gruijter, M. 119 De Kesel, M. 44, 141, 144 de Koning, Martijn 123, 124 Debray, Régis 47, 144 decency 60, 101–2 Deism 54 democracy diffusion versus hypercontrol of power 36 and the improvising society 35

Eagleton, Terry 47, 53, 54, 55, 91, 122, 143, 144 economics autopoiesis 31 and diversity 121–2 as governing principle 10 information economics 24 mass movements against inequality 134 and pornography 101 and religion 51 and secularization 7 and surveillance 89 and a weaker state 24 education 81, 115, 118, 121–2, 133, 139 effectiveness and efficiency goals 10 Elias, Norbert 77 elites 25, 46, 125 Ellis, Havelock 101 emergence 11, 115, 131–49 emerging morality 147–9 emotions as guide for moral principles 50, 59–60

169

A criminology of moral order and punishment 76 and security 80 emotivism 50, 60 empathic morality 61 empathy 61–3, 74, 120 empathy instinct 61 enforcement agencies 71, 83 see also criminal justice system; police Enlightenment 40, 42, 43, 45, 48, 53, 54, 60, 61, 97, 137, 146 environmental movement 20 equal opportunities 49, 118 equality 42–4, 48, 49, 97, 100–1, 103, 104, 115, 118, 133, 145, 148 era of authenticity 7, 50, 97, 108, 143 Erdogan, Recep Tayyip 24 Ericson, R. 79, 85 eroticism 98–101, 104, 105 ethics of personal life 100 ethnic profiling 121, 131 ethnicity 10, 20, 41, 108, 113, 117 Evangelical Protestantism 46 ‘every man for himself ’ 33 evil/bad life 4, 60, 73 evil/good 9, 60, 64, 73, 74, 84, 137, 139, 143 Ewald, Francois 78 exclusion 25, 35–6, 71, 119 expectations 30–1, 76 expediency principle 68, 69

F Facebook 25, 87, 89 fads/crazes 29 fairness 73 faith 40, 41, 44–8, 50–2, 55, 117, 141–9 see also ‘fullness’; religion; secularization fear of chaos 37 fear of crime 80, 89, 91 fear of freedom 144 fear-driven society 85 feasibility principle 70 feedback mechanisms 34 Feely, M. 78, 83 Felson, M. 83 feminism 96, 103, 104 Ferguson, N. 22 Fernliebe 114 Field, Frank 81, 82 fine-tuning 34–5, 37 Finkelkraut, Alain 61 flows between nodes 20 Foucault, Michel 36, 67, 68, 89, 96, 97–8 ‘fourth world’ people 36

fragmentation 8, 9, 22, 23, 33, 99, 112, 115 Franke, Herman 76–7 free markets and diversity 121–2 as governing principle 10 mass movements against inequality 134 and pornography 101 and religion 51 and secularization 7 and surveillance 89 and a weaker state 24 free will 29, 42, 72 freedom 7, 33, 48, 52, 63, 83, 122, 133, 144, 145 freedom of choice 10, 72–3, 77, 89 freedom of expression 102, 120, 133, 145 Freud, Sigmund 40, 101 Friedman, Thomas 138 Fukuyama, F. 140, 145 ‘fullness’ 13, 39, 51, 147, 148 fundamentalism 20, 52, 116, 117, 122, 142, 144, 145 Furedi, Frank 61, 78, 85

G gangs 21 Garland, David xi, 70, 71, 76, 79 Gauchet, M. 44 Geldof, D. 113, 114 gender norms 95, 99, 100, 102 general interest 117, 119, 121, 135, 146 geopolitics 111 German idealism 54 Giddens, Anthony 96–7, 98, 99–100, 108, 116, 135, 142 Gielen, A.-J. 116 Gijsberts, M. 41 Gladwell, Malcolm 29n11 Gleick, J. 28 global citizenship 116 global tourism 114 globalization 7, 18, 20, 21, 23, 114, 125, 145 glocalization 22 God an avenging God 122–4, 133 common God 146 emergent God 148 finding a common 146 and identity politics 98 and the law 49 and a meaningful life 148 and moral space 5

170

Index omnipotence 89, 90, 91, 141 replacements for 53–5 and secularization 39, 40, 41–3, 45, 46, 50, 52 and surveillance 90 good life 4, 8, 60, 73, 74, 83 good/evil 9, 60, 64, 73, 74, 84, 137, 139, 143 Google 25, 87 gouvernementalité 89 governing through crime 9, 79 governmentality 36, 89 governments and diversity 121 and the improvising society 35–7 meta-governance 35 and the networked society 21, 24 and populism 125–6 and privacy 24–5 and security 80–1 see also nation states grand narratives 13, 63, 134 Granovetter, Mark 29, 138 Gray, John 145 Gregory, B. 42, 44

H Habermas, Jürgen 47, 48, 49, 144 Harare, Y. 132 harm, definition of 64 harm principle 60–1 heartland 125, 126 Heine, Heinrich 54 hierarchical structures 24, 35, 42, 43 Hill, C. 35 Hobsbawm, Eric 46 Holla, S. 106 holocaust 54 homosexuality 95, 97, 108 horizontal society 6, 18, 24, 35, 138 hubs 27, 31 Hughes, G. 9 Hughes, Robert 61 Huls, F. 71 human rights 43 humanism 55, 62, 73 Hume, David 12, 152 humiliation 60, 61, 62, 103–4, 123 hyper-consumerism 12, 141 hyper-control 36 hyper-morality xii, 142, 143

I identity coherence of 116, 124 collective identities 20

cultural identity 111, 114, 122 and data 132 identity-oriented culture 7–8, 20 and the media 146 multiple/relational identities 114, 116 passionate identities 122 role and capability 34 self-identity 99 sexual identity 97–8, 101, 105, 106–7, 109, 133, 145 identity politics 10, 20, 63, 97, 98 immigration 8, 10, 107–8, 111–24 implanted chips 85 improvisation 7, 17, 32–7, 119, 133–4, 135, 140, 148 individualism 7, 55 individualization of belief and faith 8, 42, 44–6, 48, 50–1, 55, 144, 146 of conscience 44–5, 46 of crime 62–3, 72–3, 77 expressive individualism 50 and the improvising society 33–4 information age 20, 22 and institutional structure 18 of moral judgements 9, 63 and the networked society 25 and populism 125 of responsibility for crime 62–3 and super-diversity 116 industrialization 4 inequality 36, 42, 43–4, 125, 133, 134, 136 infocratic organization 23 information age 6, 19–26, 36 information state 36 Inglehart, R. 48n15 inherent order 51 injustice 36, 118, 141, 146 insecurity 77–80, 131, 141 institutions and the aesthetics of practices 138–9 criminal justice system 70–1 and diversity 116 and moral space 5–6 multinational institutions 20–1, 25, 87 and the networked society 17–19, 20, 23 and secularization 46 and security 64, 131 and sexuality 98 instrumentalism 70, 72 insurance 83 integralism 49 integration 10, 112–13, 115, 116, 118, 119–24, 127

171

A criminology of moral order intelligence services 87, 88, 90 international opinion groups 21 international security 84 international trade 114 internet and the networked society 23 and pornography 96, 104 and sexual violence 106 and social infrastructure 25 and transnational living 114 see also digitalization; social media intimacy 88, 96–7, 98–101, 104, 105 intuitions 4, 5, 43, 47, 60, 74, 139 ISIS 144 Islam and church-state separation 49 discrimination 118 diversity 111 fundamentalism 144 and the information age 20 and moral space 10, 133 in the Netherlands 113 new forms of 145 and the ‘pragmacracy’ 134 and radicalization 112, 122, 126–7 Salafi movement 123–4 and secularization 40, 41, 45, 46, 52 sexual norms and values 107, 108 iterative loops 30

J James, K. 139 James, William 125 jazzy structures 31–3 Jones, T. 25 judicial system as means to enforce state legitimacy 21 and religion 48 and social ordering 79 justice, sense of 60, 148

K Kant, Immanuel 54 Kennedy, James xii Kernfield, B. 32 Koning, N. 127 Koops, B.-J. 84 Krebbekx, W. 107

L labour market participation 121–2 languages 114, 118 last man 140

last resort, criminal law as 59, 67, 71, 81 law administrative law 71, 79–80 autopoiesis 31 belief in 141 criminal law 9, 59–74, 81, 132, 137 as defining authority on morality 59–60 and diversity 120–1, 133 and faith 149 and freedom 145 and moral inversion 83 and the ‘pragmacracy’ 137 and religion 48, 49 sharia law 48, 137 and social problems 82 social regulation 137 as source of state legitimacy 21 leadership lite 34 Lebenskunst 143 liberal-democratic states and censorship 96 and diversity 120–1, 127 lack of something to aim for 141 populism 125–6 and secularization 44 liberalism and Christianity 44–5 harm principle 61 and moral space 7, 9, 10 and pornography 103 and religion 48 and secularization 40, 43, 53 see also neoliberalism libertarianism 5 life politics 97 Lilla, Mark 47, 49 Lindblom, C. 17 line model 79 liquid modernity 9, 11, 12, 18, 59, 131, 138, 146 Loader, I. 22 logarithmic structures 27 longing for belief 47 Looking Backward 2000-1887 (Bellamy, 1887) 65–6 Lorenz, Ed 28 love 99–100, 107, 132, 137, 143, 148 loyalty 108 Luhmann, Niklas 30–1, 36 Lynn, E. 35 Lyon, D. 9, 24, 87, 88, 89

M Maastricht Treaty 125 MacIntyre, Alasdair 50, 60, 139

172

Index Mahmood, S. 52 majority-minority cities 111, 113 male norms 100 Maliepaard, M. 41 managerialism 10 Margalit, Avishai 60, 137 market economy and diversity 121–2 as governing principle 10 mass movements against inequality 134 and pornography 101 and religion 51 and secularization 7 and surveillance 89 and a weaker state 24 marriage 98–100, 105 Marx, Karl 54 Marxism 54 mass societies 22–3 massification 24, 50, 89, 101 Mathiesen, Thomas 89 Maturana, Humberto 30 McKenzie, C. 139 meaningfulness 51, 139, 147, 148 media celebrity culture 146 interest in the criminal justice system 70, 76 and the networked society 23 personal tailoring 114 and victimhood 62 see also social media Menkhorst, R. 118 mental hospitals 97–8 Mepschen, P. 108 Merton, R. 4 meta-governance 35 metaphysics 91, 122, 132 meta-pragmatism 12 #MeToo 105, 145 micro-physics of power 36, 67, 98 migration 10, 47, 107–8, 111–24, 132 Milgram, Stanley 27 military 22 Mill, John Stuart 60–1 Millie, Andrew xi, 61, 81, 82 mobilization, era of 50 modernity 4, 97, 98 see also postmodernism modernization 40, 45–6, 48 Moin, S. 44 monitoring functions 71 moral certainty 8–9 moral density 4 moral inversion 80–2 moral order 6 moral relativism 4, 8

moral responsibility 72–3 morality 3–13 motivation for crime 72–3 multilateral interactions 23 multilingualism 114 multinational institutions 20–1, 25, 87 Munchausen condition 144 Murakami Wood, D. 88 mutual consent 10, 95, 108

N nanotechnology 24 nation states church-state separation 39, 43, 47, 48, 49, 51, 117, 121, 146 and the improvising society 35–7 and the information age 20–1 legitimacy 21 and the networked society 24 and populism 125–6 and punishment 77 and religious strife 112 religious-secular state 40 rise of 43 and security 64, 91 state power 20–2 surveillance society 87 and urgent criminal justice 69 National Security Agency 87 nationalism 10, 54, 119, 131 nationality 20, 111 negative morality 60 neighbourhood security initiatives 83 Neiman, Susan 47, 144 neoliberalism 7, 10, 53, 83, 89, 112, 125, 141 network politics 136 network society 6–7, 17–38 and emerging morality 132 hubs 27, 31 information age 19–26 jazzy structures 31–3 logic of networks 26–31 and migration 112, 115, 133 nodes 18–19, 20, 24, 26–7, 138 openings (in networks) 22, 35–6 organization/ordering 22 passionate network society 122, 136 pragmacracy 133–9 reciprocity 137–8 stability of networks 29–31 structure of networks 26–8 and super-diversity 114 synchrony of networks 28–9, 30 NGOs (non-governmental organizations) 21

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A criminology of moral order Nietzsche, Friedrich 39, 42, 76, 140, 143, 148 9/11 45, 47, 50, 83, 86, 90, 112 1960s, importance of 45, 50, 52–3, 60, 96, 99, 101–2, 133 nodes 18–19, 20, 24, 26–7, 138 non-linearity 28 normalization 84, 86, 100, 105, 107, 108, 118 normative justice 76 norm-setting 69, 73, 79, 83, 107, 119, 120 Norris, P. 48n15 nuisance 64, 77, 82, 119

O offender registers 83 O’Malley, P. 85 omnipotence 89, 90, 91, 141 openings (in networks) 22, 35–6 openness 25, 35–6, 88, 96, 101, 102, 108, 132 order from noise 30 ordering, trust in 37 ordering versus order 17–18 organized crime 20, 64 Oudenampsen, M. 53, 125 outsiders 36

P Panopticon (Bentham, 1791) 66–7, 68, 74, 88 parallel cultures 117 parallelism, thesis of 30 participation 121–2, 133 Pask, G. 30 passionate network society 122, 136 path dependency 134, 136 patriarchy 100 patterns 5, 11, 13, 18, 27, 29, 115, 138, 147, 148, 149 Paul, Apostle 42, 43–4, 144 Pels, T. 118 Pentecostal Church 46, 123 perpetrators 62 personal data 87–9 perversions 101, 105 Pessers, L. 45 philosophy and moral space 3, 4 philosophies of life 7–10, 50, 52, 53, 59, 62, 91, 131, 134, 151 and religion 54 and secularization 7 physical body 20 physical nodes 23

Pieters, K. 18n8, 28 pillarization 23 plastic sexuality 97 pluralism 48, 49, 60, 77, 112–13, 119, 120, 122, 140 police as means to enforce state legitimacy 21 predictive policing 70, 90 and security 79 and social ordering 79 socialization of criminal justice 71 as surrogate parents 81 policy making 70, 117–18, 126 polis 42 politics authority of 134–5 autopoiesis 31 and the improvising society 35–7 network politics 136 and the networked society 21, 24 political significance of crime 64 and religion 48 and securitization 85–6 and security 81–2 polycentric societies 23 poly-truth era 142 Ponzoni, E. 118 populism 10, 41, 125–6, 131 pornofication 104–5, 107 pornography 95–6, 101–6, 107, 108–9, 145 postmodernism xi, 7–8, 41, 59, 61, 105, 145, 151 post-secularization 47–50, 51, 144 post-truth 41, 61 power and criminal justice 67, 68 diffusion versus hypercontrol 36 elites 25, 46, 125 and faith 52 hierarchical structures 24, 35, 42, 43 and the improvising society 36 micro-physics of power 36, 67, 98 and pornography 104 and sexual violence 100–1 and sexuality 98 and supranational networks 20–1 and surveillance 89 Power, Michael 78 practices, aesthetic 138–9, 147 pragmacracy 10, 133–9, 140, 141, 145, 148 pragmatism 10–11 precautionary principle 79, 84 pre-crime logic 83–4 predictive policing 70, 90 pre-emptive strikes 84

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Index preferential attachments 27 prevention administrative law 71 blurring with punishment 82 in context of uncertainty 82 growth in attention to 77–8 as normality 83 policies 70 and precaution 79 and punishment as deterrence 66, 68–9 quasi-criminal law 82, 83 versus repression 78 and security 9, 83 Prigogine, Ilya 26 prisons 66–7, 97–8 privacy 24–5, 85–6, 88–9, 101 private moralities 141 privatization of faith 8, 42, 44–6, 48, 50–1, 55, 144, 146 see also individualization privatization of morality 60 privatization of public spaces 25 proactivity 82 proportionality 82 prosperity 46, 64, 121 prostitution 104, 105, 109, 145 protective factors 123, 124 Protestantism 9, 23, 40, 42, 43, 44, 46, 113 public opinion 70, 88, 118–19 public versus private space 25 punishment deterrence effects 66, 68–9, 76 and exclusion 71 and fair judgement 73 necessity of 66 prevention measures 78, 82 psychological tendency for 76–7 rationality 76 retributive goals of 69, 76 and sexuality 105 tragic quality of 71 Putin, Vladimir 24 Putnam, Hilary 137 Putnam, Robert 4, 47, 144

Q quasi-criminal law 82, 83, 137

R radical secularization 7–8, 39–56, 59, 134, 143, 146 radicalization 10, 64, 87, 112, 116, 117, 122–6, 134, 142, 144 Raes, Koen 105

rape 100, 104, 106 rates of crime 71, 91, 132 rationality 43, 44, 48, 52, 72, 76, 83 Rawls, John 48 reciprocity 34, 48, 121, 122, 137–8, 145 reflexive self 97, 108, 116 Reformation 42, 43, 44, 45 regulation 79–80, 82, 116–17, 137, 138, 145 see also law rehabilitation 76 Reich, Robert 36 Reiner, R. 83 relativism 4, 8, 81, 142 religion and the 1960s 45, 50, 52–3 church-state separation 39, 43, 47, 48, 49, 51, 117, 121, 146 continued importance of 47 and diversity 112, 122, 141 flashes of insight 147 ‘fullness’ 13, 39, 51, 147, 148 fundamentalism 20 information age 20 and modernization 45–6, 144–5 and moral space 5 in the Netherlands 113 new forms of 145 non-Western contexts 52–3 post-secularization 47–50 radical secularization 7–8, 39–56, 59, 134, 143, 146 religious diversity 49, 52 replacements for 53–5 re-sacralization 47 and sexuality 9–10, 98, 102, 105 and surveillance 90, 132 values and norms 9 religiosity 51 religious-secular state 40 Renaissance 42, 43, 50, 53 res publica 42 re-sacralization 47 resilience 127, 131, 135, 140, 152 resocialization of offenders 68 respect 49, 60, 74, 81, 131 responsabilization 79 responsibility 7, 44, 62, 63, 72–3, 77, 118 retribution 69, 76–7 revenge pornography 88, 109 riots 29, 138 risk 10, 75, 78–9, 83, 84, 86, 123, 124 risk society 78 Robertson, R. 22 role conflation 36 role-assignment 34

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A criminology of moral order Roman Empire 42 romantic love 99 Romanticism 54–5 Rorty, Richard 60, 61 Rotmans, J. 12 routine activity approach 83 Rubin, Lilian 96, 98 Rumsfeld, Donald 84 Russell, Diana 103–4

S safety, feelings of 80 safety networks 79 safety utopia discourse 63–4, 68, 70, 71, 72, 83, 87, 131 Salafi movement 123–4 salami tactics 85 Sandel, Michael 47, 144 Sartre, Jean-Paul 53 Sassen, Saskia 21, 22, 23 scale-free networks 27 scepticism 8 Schmid, W. 143 Schuilenburg, M. 83 Schuyt, K. 18 science and the criminal justice system 62–3 and religion 40, 45, 46, 50, 54 and secularization 8, 141 and sexuality 98 Scruton, Roger 47, 104–5, 144 secularization and emerging morality 132, 133, 134, 140, 142–3, 146 in non-Western contexts 52–3 radical secularization 7–8, 39–56 secularization thesis 40, 45–7 and sexuality 102, 107 and super-diversity 113, 117 secular-sexual revolution 107–8 secured dataïsm 132 securitization 9, 75–91 security 8–9, 11, 24, 36, 59–74, 75, 125, 131 see also safety utopia discourse security guards 83 self care of self 98 digital selves 88 as a practice 147 and sexuality 96–8 self-creation 30–1 self-defence 84 self-determination 95, 115, 133 self-exclusion 119 self-fulfilment 60, 102, 143, 146, 148 self-identity 99

selfie-sex 104 self-organizing systems 28, 30 self-realization discourses 7–8, 143 semigration 114 Sen, Amartya 137 Sennett, R. 20 sensitivity to crime 64 sentencing 68, 70, 73, 76, 125 sexual deviance 101 sexual harassment 10, 64, 95, 105 sexual liberation 96, 101, 103, 105, 109 sexual offences 95–109 sexual revolution 10, 96, 101–2, 105, 107, 108, 133 sexual violence 10, 64, 95–109, 132 sexuality 9–10, 132 shame 101 see also humiliation shared citizenship 120 sharia law 48, 137 Siedentop, Larry 42, 43, 45, 144 Simester, A.P. 82 Simon, J. 9, 78, 79, 83, 85 six degrees of separation 27 Slama, Alain 61 Smith, Adam 76, 144 Smith, D. 48 Smith, Steven 49–50 social bonding 4, 20 social capital 25 social cohesion 23, 36, 80, 115 social consequences 24–6, 53–4 social continuity 31, 116, 117, 120, 127, 135–6, 145 social control 64, 68, 71, 75, 83, 86 social democracy 53 social hypochondria 11 social imaginaries 4, 7, 51, 55, 147 social infrastructure 25 social media and identity formation 34 and the networked society 21, 36 and radicalization 134 and social infrastructure 25 surveillance society 87 and victimhood 62 social mobility 115 social morphology 5–6 social order and criminal justice 69–70, 72 fragmentation 8 improvisation 32–7 and institutional structure 5–6, 17–19, 23 and moral order 6 ordering versus order 17–18, 115 and securitization 79

176

Index and security 86 social organization and the criminal justice system 71 and morality 4–13 and the networked society 7 and religion 45 social policy 9, 70, 80, 81–2 social reciprocity 137–8 social regulation 137 social resilience 127, 131 social science, role of 11–12, 26, 62–3, 123, 152 social sorting 88 social stability 117, 119, 133, 135 social uncertainty 17 social virtues 81 socialism 40, 53, 122 socialization of criminal justice 70–1 society, composition of a 116 Socrates 142 space of flows 20, 22 space of places 20 spirituality 39, 40, 51, 54, 55, 143, 147 Spithoven, R. 80 spontaneity 7, 11, 29, 32, 33, 34 stability of networks 29–31 Stalinism 54 states see nation states Steiner, George 47, 144 Stengers, I. 26 Stewart, P. 26 Stoddart, E. 90 Strogatz, S. 28, 29 subjectivity 60, 80, 97, 142 subsystems 30–1 suffering 60, 61, 64, 77, 78 super-capitalism 36 super-diversity 10, 111–27, 133, 135, 144, 145, 147 superstition 52 super-technology 24 supranational networks 20–1 surveillance 9, 24, 84, 87–90, 132 sustainability 135–6 Sykes, Charles 61 symbolic power 21 synchrony of networks 28–9, 30 synopticon 89 Sztompka, Piotr 4

T Taggart, P. 125 Taylor, Charles 4, 7, 13, 39, 44, 50–1, 52, 97, 108, 143, 144, 147, 148 Taylor, F.W. 24 Taylorism 24

technology and complexity 133 disenchantment of the world 46 information age 19–26 and institutional structure 18 and the networked society 6 and pornography 101, 103 and privacy 86 and religion 50 and security 80 and sexual violence 106 and sexuality 108 and super-diversity 114 surveillance 84, 88 Ter Borg, M. 144 terrorism 21, 27, 45, 64, 83, 86–9, 111, 112–13, 122, 124, 125 Teubner, Gunther 31 thought process monitoring 85 threat, permanent sense of 84 time-space dimensions, contraction of 25 tipping points 29 tolerance 60, 77, 120 totalitarianism 29, 34, 36, 85, 86 totality of expectations 30–1 tracking 25, 84, 87–8 trafficking 105, 106, 109 transcendence 51, 89–90, 142, 148 transnational religions 21 transnationalism 113–14, 133 tribalism 21 Trump, Donald 24, 55, 119 trust 34, 37, 80, 84, 86, 131, 138 truth claims 8, 10, 41, 44, 74, 98, 117, 133, 141, 142, 145, 147, 148 truthfulness 143 Turner, B. 39n12, 144, 145 two-step prohibition 82

U ultimate criminal justice 67–9 ultimum remedium 59 uncertainty 23 unexamined life 142–3 urgent criminal justice 67–9, 73, 74, 86 Urry, J. 26 utilitarianism 69, 76 utopianism 10, 63, 64–7, 147

V values and norms 60, 141, 148, 151 Van Creveld, M. 64 van den Berg, M. 107 van den Brink, G. 46

177

A criminology of moral order van Dijk, Jan 22, 23, 24, 25, 29, 108 van Steden, R. 25, 35, 79, 143n27 van Tongeren, Paul 142, 143 van Tulder, F. 71 van Zuijlen, R. 80 Vanheeswijkck, G. 48 Varela, Francisco 30 Vattimo, G. 44 Veldman, A. 30 vengeance see retribution Vertovec, Steven 10, 111, 113 victimalization 59–63, 73, 74 victimism 61–3 victims of crime as definers of crime 9, 59–61 Victoroff, J. 123 violence and diversity 119 as means to enforce state legitimacy 21 as punishment 77 and radicalism 144 sexual violence 10, 64, 95–109, 100, 132 virtual reality 20 virtual social bubbles 23, 25 virtue 99, 142–3 voluntary work 143 von Hirsch, A. 82 von Voerster, Heinz 30 Vuijsje, H. 52

X Xi Jinping 24

Z Zedner, L. 80, 83, 84, 85 Žižek, Slavoj 47, 124, 144 Zuurmond, A. 23

W Wacquant, L. 36, 85 Waever, O. 83 Walker, N. 22 Walzer, M. 122 war on terror 122 Warner, M. 51 Watts, D.J. 29 weak ties 138 Weber, Max 8, 40, 45–6 Webster, C.W.R. 88 welfare state 64, 141 what works? approaches 10, 12, 134 Wismeijer, A.A.J. 90 Wolf, N. 85 women and gender norms 95, 99, 100, 102 women’s liberation 96, 99, 102, 103, 105, 133 world families 114 World Values Studies 48n15

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NEW HORIZONS IN CRIMINOLOGY Moral order is disturbed by criminal events. However, in a secularized and networked society a common moral ground is increasingly hard to find.

NEW HORIZONS IN CRIMINOLOGY

People feel confused about the bigger issues of our time such as crime, anti-social behaviour, Islamist radicalism, sexual harassment and populism. Traditionally, issues around morality have been neglected by criminologists.

CLIMATE CHANGE CRIMINOLOGY

Through theory, case studies and discussion, this book sheds a new and topical light on these concerns. Using the moral perspective, Boutellier bridges the gap between people’s emotional opinions on crime, and criminologists’ rationalized answers to questions of crime and security.

Rob White

NEW HORIZONS IN CRIMINOLOGY

SPORTS CRIMINOLOGY A critical criminology of sport and games

Nic Groombridge

NEW HORIZONS IN CRIMINOLOGY

NEW HORIZONS IN CRIMINOLOGY INDIGENOUS CRIMINOLOGY Chris Cunneen and Juan Tauri

New Horizons in Criminology provides high quality and authoritative texts which reflect cutting edge thought and theoretical development in criminology. The books are international in scope, accessible and concise.

NEW HORIZONS IN CRIMINOLOGY

Series Editor: Andrew Millie, Professor of Criminology, Edge Hill University, UK.

PHILOSOPHICAL CRIMINOLOGY

Andrew Millie

“Over the past 35 years Hans Boutellier has become a leading diagnostician of Dutch society and beyond. His moral approach to crime is unique as well as provocative, and has transformed him into a new Durkheim for our liquid modern times. A Criminology of Moral Order will be the book that introduces his work to a truly global readership.” Tom Daems, Leuven Institute of Criminology

A CRIMINOLOGY OF MORAL ORDER

Hans Boutellier is a leading social scientist in the Netherlands and Professor in Security, Safety and Resilience at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

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