There is a vast epistemic divide between those who experience decline, and those who don’t
Is London a terrifying post-apocalyptic city full of “no-go areas”, patrolled by violent ethnic gangs and raving drug addicts? Or is it a vibrant multicultural success story that is infinitely safer and nicer than the bleak city of the 1980s? This, in microcosm, is the argument playing out across the West over crime, migration and public space. Are things getting better, or are they getting worse?
On the one hand, as this example amply demonstrates, we are not able to have sensible conversations because of the levels of hysteria and ideological distortion involved. On the other, we struggle to articulate realities that can’t be captured by statistics, or haven’t yet been systematically researched.
These problems frequently intersect, as in the grooming gangs scandal, in which there were plenty of people seeing Paksitani rape gangs operating with their own two eyes, yet being dismissed because of essentially worthless data that was wheeled out by press and politicians. When it was looked into, those who had relied on instinct, anecdote and interviews were proven right.
This clash of two conflicting worldviews, and two contradictory senses of truth, seems to permeate so many of our debates. Populism is driven by an instinct and an experience of decline, fear and alienation. Liberal centrists, by contrast, tend to be those whose experience of life is more untrammelled and who feel that society has got better, not worse. There are many complexities here — there are individual lives and whole classes of person who are worse off even when things can be shown to have got better in aggregate. There’s no point invoking the latter reality given that none of us actually experience life in aggregate. Much of the battle between data and anecdote comes down to an inability to bridge individual experience with recorded trends. Yet scepticism towards experts and technocrats is more than the individually unfortunate, and reflects a sense that social scientific analysis is itself politicised to reflect the prejudices of those who fund and conduct it.
Even when statistics are accurate, they are not necessarily saying what we think they are. A classic example is Steven Pinker, who in the The Better Angels of Our Nature, suggests that we have made vast and objectively measurable progress on nearly every front and should be optimistic about modernity. He points to many factors, but especially the decline in violence. Yet even on this seemingly incontrovertible point, all is not as it seems. His assertion that medieval England was a wild west of ultraviolence relative to the modern West rests on a comparison of homicide rates. Yet one of the chief reasons for the great gulf in killings is the power of modern medicine — hospitals work miracles in pulling patients with gun and knife wounds back from the brink of death. Certainly this is a mark of progress, but it undermines the case that this is a change in human nature or a reduced capacity for violence.
Progress and peace are very relative terms indeed, and may depend on who you are, what you value and on what scale and timeline you are judging events
Allowing for this, we can still show a positive shift in violent crime in the longue durée, but the reduction of private violence has been caused by the massive expansion of state-organised violence. The horrors of the 20th century speak for themselves, and Pinker also ignores the now existential nature of modern violence. We may now, having narrowly averted a totalitarian world of Darwinian violence, restrain interstate conflict far more than before in human history, but this is again no moral triumph — it is the product of a nuclear detente that hangs like a sword of Damocles over the globe. And this is to say nothing of the incredible violence done to the natural world for the sake of human “progress”, which may end up causing violence and suffering as tremendous as anything that has come before.
All this is to say that progress and peace are very relative terms indeed, and may depend on who you are, what you value and on what scale and timeline you are judging events. There is no point saying that terrorism is statistically a negligible problem as compared to knife crime when speaking of a foe that could strike with great violence and at any time, and is capable of very sudden escalations in scale and severity. It only takes one 9/11 style attack to make the statistical risk of terrorism jump from negligible to the greatest likelihood of lethal violence we face. Cyclical predictable risk cannot be coherently weighed against calculated political violence or treated in the same way. Nor does the problem end with the narrow if extreme question of lethality.
Even if violent crime itself is down, there is a clear rise in low-level crime and social disorder, and worse, a correct perception that such behaviour is neither socially nor legally policed. The combination of rapid mass migration, with rising house prices and a general withdrawal of visible police officers has made many urban centres feel unsafe and unpleasant. There is no point in claiming that Birmingham or London are safer now than 30 years ago, if people feel more frightened to confront strangers or linger in public spaces.
Solving these dire problems will mean changing how we think about the world
In so many areas of life, it is exactly what is unmeasured or unmeasurable that has got drastically worse. Art and aesthetic sensibilities have decayed, the quantity and quality of social relationships has declined, and the sense of direction and meaning once derived from national culture, civil society and religious faith has dwindled away. Despite all of this being incredibly visible and clear to any intelligent observer, the danger has been dismissed by those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. These contemporary philistines are now having a rude awakening as the downstream effects of civilisational decadence become statistically visible. Individuals record fewer friendships, fewer romantic relationships, less marriage, below replacement fertility and worse mental health. All of these negative trends are concentrated amongst younger generations, who now also have poorer economic prospects and less faith in institutions and democracy.
Solving these dire problems will mean changing how we think about the world. The utilitarian experiment of governing society via selective statistics and scientific management has catastrophically failed, and has rendered otherwise intelligent men and women into a kind of wilful idiocy, unable to accept the evidence of their senses unless it can be translated into data. We are all, in a sense, living in a virtual world, having lost the old tools of grammar, logic and rhetoric that gave us a mental and linguistic handle on reality at a human scale. This problem is not academic, but sharply political, as it opens up deadly rifts between the experience of the common person, and an elite rendered complacent by its faith in a social scientific worldview.
