“SEDUCTIONSAND REPULSIONS OF CRIME”

Jack Katz (1988)

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MORAL EMOTIONS AND CRIME

The closer one looks at crime, at least at the varieties examined here, the more vividly relevant become the moral emotions.  Follow vandals and amateur shoplifters as they duck into alleys and dressing rooms and you will be moved by their delight in deviance; observe them under arrest and you may be stunned by their shame.  Watch their strutting street display and you will be struck by the awesome fascination that symbols of evil hold for the young men who are linked in the groups we often call gangs.  If we specify the opening moves in muggings and stickups, we describe an array of ‘games’ or tricks that turn victims into fools before their pockets are turned out.  The careers of persistent robbers show us, not the increasingly precise calculations and hedged risks of ‘professionals’, but men for whom gambling and other vices are a way of life, who are ‘wise’ in the cynical sense of the term, and who take pride in a defiant reputation as ‘bad’.  And if we examine the lived sensuality behind events of cold-blooded ‘senseless’ murder, we are compelled to acknowledge the power that may still be created in the modern world through the sensualities of defilement, spiritual chaos, and the apprehension of vengeance.

                Running across these experiences of criminality is a process juxtaposed in one manner or another against humiliation.  In committing a righteous slaughter, the impassioned assailant takes humiliation and turns it into rage; through laying claim to a moral sense of transcendent significance, he tries to burn humiliation up.  The badass, with searing purposiveness, tries to scare humiliation off; as one ex-punk explained to me, after years of adolescent anxiety about the ugliness of his complexion and the stupidity of his every word, he found a wonderful calm in making ‘them’ anxious about his perceptions and understandings.  Young vandals and shoplifters innovate games with the risks of humiliation, running along the edge of shame for its exciting reverberations.  Fashioned as street elites, young men square off against the increasingly humiliating social restrictions of childhood by mythologizing differences with other groups of young men who might be their mirror image.  Against the historical background of a collective existence on the moral non-existence of their people, ‘bad niggers’ exploit ethnically unique possibilities for celebrating assertive conduct as ‘bad’.

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REPULSIONS OF DEVIANCE

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Putting aside differences in the practical means that social position makes available and the different degrees and forms of moral stereotype and prejudice that are attached to social position, there may be a fundamental similarity in the dynamics that people create to seduce themselves toward deviance.  Although the means differ, white middle-class youths may as self-destructively pursue spatial mobility, through reckless driving, as do ghetto youths in gang wars.  The attractions of sneaky thrills may not disappear with age, but instead may migrate from shoplifting to adultery and embezzlement.  And even the bump that the egocentric badass, strutting arrogantly outside his own neighbourhood, arranges as an ‘accident’ compelling him to battle, is not without its analogies to the incidents that have been arranged by ethnocentric nations, provocatively sailing in foreign waters, to escalate wars.

                It would appear that, with respect to the moral-emotional dynamics of deviance, we have grounds to pursue a parallel across the social hierarchy.  Consider two strong candidates for the status of most awful street and white-collar crimes: the killing of defenceless victims to sustain a career of robberies and the deception of democratic publics to support government-sponsored killings of defenceless foreigners.  In both the street and the high-government cases, both the Left and the Right have their favoured materialist-background explanations and accusations: poverty and lack of economic opportunity versus a liberal judiciary, ‘handcuffed’ police, and inadequate deterrents; the value to capitalists of maintaining power in foreign economic spheres versus the need to use military force against non-Russians to maintain a deterrent strength vis-à-vis the ever-menacing Soviet Union.  For the most part, public discussion of both these lowly and exalted social problems proceeds as a ritualized exchange between two politically opposed materialist interpretations.

                But in both forms of deviance the actors are engaged in a transcendent project to exploit the ultimate symbolic value of force to show that one ‘means it’.  Those who persist in stickups use violence when it is not justified on cost-benefit grounds because not to use violence would be to raise chaotic questions about their purpose in life.  They understand that to limit their violence by materialist concerns would weaken them in conflicts with other hardmen and would raise a series of questions about their commitment to their careers than is more intimidating than is the prospect of prison.  Just because materialist motivations do not control the drive toward doing stickups, the events are rife with foolish risks and fatal bungles.

                It is a fair question whether the foreign exercises of Western governments in legally undeclared, surreptitiously instigated, and secretly aided military conflicts less often bungle into pathetic results – the shooting of innocent fishermen, the kidnapping of CIA chiefs, the mechanical surprises from helicopters and explosive devices, the failures to make ‘operational’ defences against sea mines and air attacks, the lapses in security that allow massive military casualties from terrorist tactics, and the like.  What is more remarkable still, is that utilitarian evaluations of success and failure do not dominate the public discussions of such interventions, any more than they dominate the career considerations for persistent robbers.  In public debates, symbolic displays of national will, like the cultural style of the hardman, give cost-benefit analysis a cowardly overtone.