Afterthought
By ALAN BRIEN IT is almost impossible to think of any common human activity which has not at some time some- where been classified as a crime-printing the Bible, freeing slaves, organising trades unions, playing bowls on Sundays, marry- ing your deceased wife's sister, reporting the pro- ceedings of Parliament, taking interest on loans, making graven images, wearing silks and satins, shaving, drinking alcoholic beverages, performing sexual inter- course in a lewd manner, using make-up. The list is endless. And it is equally difficult to find some crime here and now which was once not regarded somewhere as normal, even praise- worthy, practice-torturing heretics, bribing electors, baiting animals, executing petty thieves, press-ganging sailors, homosexuality, suicide, be- heading monarchs, sending children down the mines, public nudity, selling public officeS to the highest bidder, cannibalism, incest, drug addic- tion. Any one of us today, moved a few thousand miles east or west or a few hundred years back- wards or forwards in time, would be found to be breaking the law according to local custom. We are all criminals in someone's eyes-and we would be extraordinary criminals if we needed all the laws which we have passed at one time or another.
So long as there are laws, there will be those whose ambition is to be law-breakers. Laws are not made to define crimes which no one ever commits. So long as there are crimes, there will be those whose ambition is to be law-makers. Crimes only become crimes after a law has been passed to define them. It is a continual, mutually inter-penetrating process by which society seeks to analyse itself and find out what it regards as harmful and valuable among its practices.
No wonder every king about whom nothing else can be said to his credit is always praised by the chroniclers for codifying the laws. At the time, the vast majority of people cannot imagine life carrying on without the rules they have been brought up to respect. A century later, the vast majority cannot imagine how life could have been carried on with the rules they have learned to break. Time is the greatest of all reformers. New ideas rarely succeed by convincing their contem- poraries. It is only when the generation to whom they are new dies out, and a generation grows up to whom they are old, that they become the accepted commonplaces of their age.
The process does not always lead to the advan- tage of everyone. Indeed, it is scarcely imaginable that it ever could. One man's enlarged freedom is another man's diminished liberty. Freedom, said Marx, is the recognition of necessity but necessity, as Stalin showed, is the tyrant's plea. It is not easy to prove that any rule of behaviour can be universally applied in every period and every community. Even `do unto others as you would they should do unto you' is a dangerous and ambiguous maxim when implemented by sadists or masochists. People do not by any means invariably support those systems which are to their own best advantage-there have always been slaves who preferred slavery, Negroes who advocated apartheid, Jews who cherished anti- semitism, unemployed workers who admired capitalism, murderers who believed capital punishment was a deterrent, Popes who en- couraged religious tolerance.
Much of the law is the fossilised prejudice of dead top people. A good deal of crime is the embryo revenge of the rising underdog. The modern banker is the mediaeval usurer writ large. When property is theft, the thief is a kind of revolutionary. Not all crime seems criminal, nor all law legal, to the man-in-the-street. Especially when the bandit robs the rich without impoverish- ing the poor. There are very few moralists who would absolutely, in all circumstances, condemn the killing of another human being, whatever his threat to his fellows, or the expropriation of any property owner, however his goods were acquired. The law itself, representing the rulers of society, has been most reluctant to give up the power of i• death and of confiscation over those who defy it. As Nietzsche observed : 'the criminal is prevented, by the very witnessing of the legal process, from regarding his deed as intrinsically evil.'
Nevertheless (my favourite word) we more-or- less honest citizens are the first to shout for the police when a crime is committed against us. How is it that we still are so fascinated, and nowadays even admiring, of the Train-Robbers and their apprentices, the jewel-stealers? It is, I think, because we see no threat to ourselves in really efficient, scientific, ordered crime. Our meagre possessions would, we feel, not be worth their time and energy so we tend to resent the time and energy spent by the police on protecting banks and shops who can well afford to look after their own hoards. If we were asked to choose be- tween a country overrun with small-time, semi- amateur burglars and sneak-thieves, not to men- tion rapists and thugs and vandals inspired by motiveless hatreds, and a business community threatened, by well-planned, modern, comman- dos of crime-I think we would all choose the latter. If we must have crime, we prefer it to be organised.
Of course, no such choice exists in reality, but it hovers, like a mirage, a fantasy from a thriller movie, at the back of our minds. As we can see in the United States, organised crime not only attacks big business, it takes over big business. It not only challenges the forces of law and order, it infiltrates and controls them. Eventually, criminals become politicians and make the laws in many cities and even states. This is a nightmare picture-but even a nightmare has a therapeutic invigorating effect at times. What worries us, the ordinary suburban home owners, is that the criminals who occasionally prey on us are in- visible and unidentifiable. Now if they once set up shop in the High Street, and hired themselves a few Aldermen, we would know where to find them. We could go to the polls shouting 'Throw the Rascals Outl' Quite a few partisans of all parties shout that under their breath already. But they do not really believe it.
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