Moral foundations in collapse.

The Strange Death of Moral Britain by Christie Davies, New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2004. xxiii + 264 pp.

ALTHOUGH FOCUSED ON BRITAIN, Christie Davies's well-documented social-historical study addresses several of the major problems and perplexities of the Western world in our times, preeminently the impact of secularization on moral standards and social order. More specifically this is an inquiry into the spectacular decline of religious beliefs and institutions in Great Britain, their capacity to regulate personal behavior, and the simultaneous rise of moral relativism and social determinism responsible for the spread of social pathologies. At least by implication, the book raises two other questions: Can a system of secular moral values effectively support social order? And secondly, can there be social order and cohesion without strong, shared moral beliefs?

This study also illuminates the changing conceptions of human nature and their impact on social controls and policies, in particular the shift from a morally autonomous conception that entails free choice and individual responsibility, to the narrowly determinist one that the author calls "causalist." The difficulty is that human nature and choices are neither wholly determined nor entirely undetermined, but a blend of both, making it difficult to delineate the boundary between freely chosen and socially (or culturally or situationally) determined actions. In any event, Professor Davies believes (with Emile Durkheim) that "lack of constraints on human desire," encouraged by modern, secular, individualistic societies, leads to trouble.

Another issue that preoccupies the author is mainly of British Interest: the compatibility of British historical, political, and cultural traditions with the growing integration of the United Kingdom into the European Union. The gist of the argument proposed at the outset is as follows:

  During the last half of the 20th century, the British people, who had
  long been remarkable for their honesty, peaceableness, propriety, and
  sobriety ceased to be distinguished by these qualities. Britain at the
  beginning of the 21st century is characterized by levels of
  dishonesty, violence, illegitimacy, and drug and alcohol abuse that
  would truly shock an imaginary time traveler ... time travelers would
  be shocked not only at the magnitude of changes ... but at finding
  such changes in a society that enjoyed a far higher standard of living
  and lower levels of deprivation than they had ever known.

This statement will surprise many American readers long under the impression that their own society is far more criminal than the European societies and especially the British. In fact, the rate of property crimes is higher in Britain, although violence and homicide remain substantially lower. What is strange about these social pathologies in Britain is not that there are more of them today, but that they were preceded by a steep decline during the second half of the nineteenth century that endured, well into the twentieth. The "moral Britain" of the title was one "in which the value of duty, religion and patriotism was taken for granted ... a world that assumed that individuals were autonomous moral agents responsible for their behavior.... Envy, desire, access were all there in 1900 but fewer people became thieves than is the case today or had been in the more distant past."

Secularization has eroded the moral foundations of British society and encouraged the proliferation of crime, alcoholism, drug taking, illegitimacy and divorce. It has also led to the abolition of the death penalty, the legalization of abortion, and the removal of laws against homosexuality and making divorce easier. Davies is not necessarily opposed to these changes of the law, nor does he argue that contemporary Britain cannot survive the decline of "respectability." He is not an alarmist, unlike other commentators on moral decline. He soberly points out that "we have no reason to suppose that the high levels of deviancy in contemporary Britain are unprecedented and we should settle for the modest claim that they were far higher at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th. The British do not live in a uniquely amoral and dissolute age." At the same time Davies also declares:

  The death of religion, the decay of commitment to a nation and its
  traditions, and the breakdown of families mean the removal of the most
  important foci of particular loyalties that in the past sustained such
  moral traits as duty, service, sacrifice, loyalty and fortitude. What
  is left is not an amoral or immoral society but one that can make only
  limited moral demands on its members.

This study should help to put to rest the prevailing conventional wisdom among social scientists, opinion-makers, and many of the educated public in contemporary Western societies, which holds that most social pathologies, especially crime, are caused by poverty. Davies points out that "... the fastest rise in the incidence of crime overall in England and Wales occurred in the late 1950s and in the 1960s, a time of rapidly rising incomes, negligible unemployment, and a narrowing of the gap between rich and poor...."

While poverty is a dubious explanation of property crimes, relative deprivation cannot be dismissed easily, as Davies seems to, especially in light of the influence of the mass media and culture. The latter stimulate a sense of deprivation by endlessly offering lavish portraits of people over-indulging themselves in consumer culture and seeking to establish (or bolster) their sense of identity by amassing material objects. Susceptibility to relative deprivation is further stimulated by the sense of entitlement that affluent, egalitarian societies inculcate. It could be further argued that the mass media and popular culture make a distinct contribution to moral decay by encouraging moral relativity and anti-elitist, anti-judgmental attitudes, a phenomenon Richard Hoggart documented half a century ago in his classic The Uses of Literacy (1957).

Much of this volume consists of a meticulous and detailed examination of the social problems and pathologies based on a wide variety and an impressive amount of historical, legal-historical, statistical and social scientific sources. "The massive and qualitative change"--the "clear and definite turning point in the social and moral history of British society"--occurred in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Secularization has influenced social behavior in two ways. First of all, there has been a growing reluctance to be judgmental (or punitive) on the part of the governing elites that make the laws. Secondly, and more importantly, internalized moral values ceased to regulate behavior effectively by restraining antisocial impulses. This has been in sharp contrast with the past, or at any rate the second half of the nineteenth century up to the 1920s:

  At the core of the respectable Britain ... were the moral qualities of
  self-control and self-restraint, of probity and prudence, decency and
  sobriety....

  Once the allocation of blame ceases to be the governing principle in
  that large area of social life where large institutions impinge on the
  individual, it is inevitable that it should also decline in importance
  as a factor in the assessment of the conduct of individuals.... In a
  causalist world dominated by large institutions it becomes difficult
  to make simple moral judgements because the line between the harm that
  is the result of miscalculation and accident and that which is
  maliciously inflicted is blurred. The chain of causality is too
  long ... [and] the decline of moralism and of the corresponding
  willingness to be judgemental has meant that those who are delinquent
  are no longer subjected to the powerful and certain scorn and
  disapproval of others....

Davies makes a strong case for the link between the growth of social pathologies and the decline of informal social controls embodied in the judgment of the respectable majority whose notions of right and wrong are based on strongly held moral values. However he says relatively little about how or why this state of affairs came about. The word or concept of "modernity" or "modernization" barely appears in the volume, and nothing is said about the historical fact that Britain was the first industrial society and that industrialization and modernity are linked. This linkage would help to explain why secularization made so much headway in Britain, although it fails to explain the puzzling rise of moral behavior in the second half of the nineteenth century. It is not clear what did arrest or temporarily retard the ravages of industrialization, how and why Victorian respectability came about and succeeded in imposing behavioral controls rooted in moral precepts.

The only general explanation of these trends that is suggested--casually, rather than fully developed--is the growth of the size of institutions and the bureaucratization and impersonality of life. After World War II, the rise of the welfare state played an important part. Two other more specific institutional explanations are proposed, but they stimulate additional questions as to why they emerged. One is the rise and decline of Sunday Schools, powerful in the nineteenth century but virtually non-existent or without influence in the last forty years of the twentieth century, a period during which "every single index of Christian activity, adherence and religiosity demonstrates collapse." Sunday Schools were influential and popular, "created by ordinary people, their teachers drawn from the respectable working and lower middle classes.... They inculcated self-restraint, orderliness and respectability." Another important institution fortifying and reflecting moral Britain and the sense of community in the nineteenth century was the mutual aid societies later replaced by the welfare state. These societies "were based on personal contact, trust and mutuality and there was an absence of the kind of individual dependence upon and exploitation of the state welfare that has characterized the last half of the 20th century." They were also "character-building" associations. Correspondingly, "In the 19th century, welfare institutions tended to moralize the population, whereas in the last half of the 20th century they have had a demoralizing effect."

Inflation although clearly a sociological factor, a "social fact" (external to the individual and shaping behavior, exactly what Durkheim had in mind) is rarely mentioned by sociologists and criminologists as a contributor to long-term trends in property crime. Davies introduces it as an important explanatory factor:

  ... prices like crime, had been falling in the latter part of the 19th
  century. Then from the late 1930s there was sustained inflation and a
  sustained exponential increase in the incidence of property crime....
  [I]nflation ... a form of theft that steals from savers and
  particularly the poorer ones ... [it] is corrosive of some of the
  virtues that in the latter 19th century acted as a preventative of
  crime.... Inflation arbitrarily transfers money from the prudent to
  those who live by deliberate indebtedness....

Missing from this instructive study is any reference to the changing ethnic composition of Britain as a possible variable helping to account for the phenomena dealt with. This is all the more surprising since the increase of problematic social behavior here dealt with was paralleled by the substantial postwar immigration from the former British colonies. This writer is under the impression that members of some of these groups. West Indians in particular, are significantly over-represented among criminal offenders in Britain, as are corresponding ethnic groups in the United States. It is widely disputed why these groups disproportionately contribute to certain social pathologies, but the contribution cannot be ignored. It may be explained, at least in part, by patterns of socialization and impulse control, the decline of traditional communities, "the culture of poverty" or "culture conflict"--none of which are incompatible with the larger themes of this book.

In the concluding chapter there are references to and comparisons with the social problems and pathologies in Sweden and in the United States. While the author repeatedly observes the far greater weight and influence of religious institutions and values in American society he does not pause to comment on the fact that these factors in American society have not, as a whole, reduced social pathologies. To be sure, it might be argued, and there might be data supporting the argument, that deeply religious individuals (whatever measurable indicators of such religiosity are used) engage in significantly less deviant or criminal behavior. Nevertheless, there are not enough people of such persuasion to effect the overall levels of social pathologies in American society.

While this book is a convincing demonstration of the importance and the influence of moral factors in criminal and other anti-social conduct in Great Britain, Davies may want in his future work to give fuller consideration to the broader historical, social, and cultural forces that, by undermining religion, also undermined morality and in turn the moral regulation of individual behavior.

PAUL HOLLANDER is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. A prolific author, his forthcoming book is From the Gulag to the Killing Fields: Personal Accounts of Political Violence and Repression in Communist States (ISI Books).