Is society getting worse?

[Mugwump]

<Split from George Pell thread>

[think positive]

[Tannin]

[watt price tully]

^ Indeed Tannin. The fact that your distant relative purloined the Kings clothes made it tad hard though for a not guilty plea before the court.

The stats need to factor in intervening variables such as:

1. The reporting of crimes stats;
2. Definitions, and but not limited to
2. Population (growth) for the relative times.

Further, why the 1960's? One should compare this with say the 1900's, 1910's. 20's 30's all the way to now to make useful statistical comparisons rather than an arbitrary point in time.

This is where the sociologists have it over the psychologists: They explore this through criminology & the Institute of Criminology (or whatever the current incarnation is called) is a good starting place.

With respect to the wider issue at hand of crime & punishment, I suggest people read or re read Hughes magnum opus: "The Fatal Shore" a rollicking good read which should be mandatory reading in schools.

[Mugwump]

[pietillidie]

[Mugwump]

[HAL]

For real.

[pietillidie]

[Mugwump]

^ the relevant data series for the UK is as follows. Source :

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/historical-crime-data

It is worth producing a chart of the data for Murder, attempted murder and GBH, which are relatively comparably defined and reported across time. I do not know how to post an image (advice gratefully accepted on this), or I would post the chart from 1945 to 2002 based on these figures. This is truly astoundingly shocking and tragic.

There is a data series break from 2002-2016 and post 2003 this data does not seem to be available in a comparable format. The 1898-2002 series shows the 1960s effect. Those who say that liberalism does not support capital or corporal punishment might be technically right ; but it certainly watches over and licenses those punishments, insofar as they are inflicted by law-breakers on the bodies of innocent citizens.

Note that trauma surgery - as any NHS trauma surgeon will attest - has come on in leaps and bounds in the last 50 years and many GBH cases now would have been murder in the 1960s.

I have not seen comparable long series Australian statistics, but having lived in Australia in the 1960s and now, I am very confident they will be directionally the same. In my darker moments, I suspect that they are not available because those in charge of politics and police are liberal children of the 1960s revolution and they do not want the public to recall how ordered and safe a society they helped destroyed to feed their cheap, consumerist personal freedoms.

[David]

The idea that society is getting more violent seems a heavily contested one, and needs more than raw recorded crime statistics to demonstrate it (as the heading of that first graph in the above link states).

But let's say you're right, Mugwump, and violence has been getting progressively more commonplace. Your view is that it must be due to an increase in permissiveness and lack of respect for authority. But society has changed in many ways since the end of the Second World War, not least in its increasing atomisation, transitory living, loss of community and most notably increasing inequality and neo-liberalism. Much of that has to do with economics, not culture (although these things are inevitably intertwined).

Of course, it's dangerous to pinpoint one single cause in these trends; and I'm not sure that anyone's yet conclusively shown that there is a trend. But if there is, we must be careful to acknowledge a) that there may be many factors, and simultaneously b) that this doesn't mean that all correlations in cultural change are necessarily causal.

The question of whether our society is better or worse than it once was is a vastly complex one, and actual crime occurrence - let alone recorded crime rates - is but one aspect of many to consider. Some others: Is social mobility greater? Are inequalities less pervasive than they once were? Do more people have their basic needs met? Are people happier? As with many of these things, the most sensible answer seems to be 'yes and no'. In the meantime, declaring the social liberalism of the 1960s and after a failed experiment would seem to require a very rosy view of the past. Let's consider the actual topic of this thread to begin with: it wasn't liberalism that led to the widespread molestation of children and de facto tolerance of such acts in our churches and institutions. That was surely symptomatic of something very dysfunctional in the way our society was organised before the baby boomers came of age, and of course the further you go back the more insignificant and overlooked the well-being of those children seems to have been.

[Mugwump]

If you doubt that anyone has shown that there is a trend, I'd urge you to look at the data. I don't see how a trend (or rather, an explosion in murder and GBH taken together) can be seriously contested. Social science is, by its nature, political, and you will never prove anything beyond any doubt to people who have made up their mind already. But the data, which goes back into the 1920s and 1930s explodes the myth that inequality, of itself, causes crime. There has been far greater economic equality in the U.K. since 1945 (NHS, social housing, and the welfare net), yet crime took off with the rise of post-war liberalism, accelerating very quickly in the 1960s and more dramatically again in the 1980s. I'm yet to hear a coherent alternative explanation, encompassing the actual data, of why this happened.

<George Pell-related paragraph moved back into original thread.>

For the avoidance of doubt, I do not think that authority is itself a justification of anything. Any fool knows that authority needs scrutiny, audit and accountability. That is not the same thing as automatically showering all authority in disrespect and derision, as the media and the cod-sociologist Left do today (until they are in power, or unless the authority is a partisan darling). When you do that, you replace institutional solidity based on merit and historical proving with individual arrogance based on selfishness and the impulse of the moment (see one D Trump for an example). That seems to me the root of the sea of sorrow in those crime statistics.

Ps how do you post an image ????

[pietillidie]

[Mugwump]

^ I quoted some statistics to the effect that murder had risen 3.5x and GBH at least 8 times since 1960.
- Tannin doubted the data in passing, but he graciously accepted it and went on to make some useful points. I gave the source via Google and explained that it was Uk data.
- You then demanded I reference it more fully, seemingly being too lazy to look it up, while giving me a pompous lecture about my "responsibilities" to back up my claim. I gave the reference out of politeness.
- You now want to have a urinating contest about a different set of data which does not bear on my point.

Ho hum. Carry on.

[pietillidie]

^I was curious about the UK data myself.

Go and catch some bream; the Gippy Lakes are bream fishing paradise.