Almost a decade ago,
economist Steven Levitt pronounced he had solved the biggest mystery in
American criminology. Why had levels of violent steadily clime declined since
their peak in the early 1990’s? Because abortion was legalized – so fewer
unwanted babies, who would be more likely to become criminals, were born. It’s
an elegant theory, but there is a slight problem with it. It can’t be proven –
or refuted – through statistical analysis. Abortion is entangled countless
other social “variables,” so its “causal” impact on crime rates can be
established only within a crude abstract model – but this will tell us little
about its significance in the non-abstract world of living, breathing, and
killing or dying human beings. In fact, I am tempted to offer a different
theory which may seem fanciful –and wouldn’t be amenable to empirical
validation, either – but may well be more credible. Though someone with Levitt’s
unrelenting empirico-analytic bent, however, would typically be impervious to
dissuasion or self-doubt.
In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, at one point World
State Controller Mustapha Mond gives the following recipe for creating a
peaceful society: “You can't have
a lasting civilization without plenty of pleasant vices.” In the book, these include casual sex, drugs,
hyperstimulating entertainment and vicarious thrills, consumerism, etc. The
idea is to provide multiple outlets for satisfying trivial desires since thwarted
cravings can become pent up frustrations. As the famous
“frustration-aggression” hypothesis states, frustration breeds aggression – so the
lack of frustration smothers aggression in the crib. This is combined with a
narrowing down of the existential horizon even for the Alpha executives and
middle managers – achieved through the abolition of the family and strong
emotional attachments, introversion, art, history, true religion and science,
etc. Combined with the division of society into castes engineered to have
different intellectual aptitudes (so the members of each fit precisely their
social roles and are satisfied with these), the constant effortless
gratification of simple desires and the absence of deep attachments and resentments
guarantee historically unprecedented social placidity.
Does this picture look
vaguely familiar? Perhaps it does – not just the cultural shift toward
self-indulgence and self-expression-cum-empowerment, but also the increasing
stratification of society into a “cognitive elite” and a less cognitively fit mass – apparently caught somewhere between “Tea Party” delusion and
hopeless “Idiocracy.” Add to this mix the much more pervasive virtual overstimulation
facilitated by Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and a million
app-peddling start-ups, and perhaps the decline in violent crime will not look
so startling. Of course, no modern society has gone all the way toward the
universal peace and happiness projected by Huxley. But the advance so far has
been remarkable.
