BEYOND THE OBVIOUS
Nils Christie
(October 10, 2013)
I was waiting for a bus the other day. A young woman, a student, unknown to me, knew my face and asked what I was to say here today. Between four bus stops I gave her a sort of synopsis:
To the first stop: We live in a good country, well off on most indicators as money, health, security, close to full employment, usually not killing each other, and a functioning welfare state. But just by these reasons, it might also be a society useful for raising question about problems in the footstep of the obvious successes. Something to be aware of for other societies on the same track?
Then to second stop: We are so rich. But money is a dangerous substance. Money dissolves. As a critical criminologist, I want us to have less of it in my country.
To third stop: Our households are emptied during daytime. All grown ups are out of home, in paid work. Kids are in institutions, called educational. Here, no one is to be left behind. But many are. They are mostly lower-class kids. Class differences are converted to educational differences.
As a critical criminologist, I want a school developed according to the first paragraph of the existing law for the schools of the country – a school based on values as respect for nature, human rights, equality and solidarity.
Then, just before bus-stop number four, the last one, I conveyed my major message to her: Maybe we should not encourage a further development of this society on the track we are on now, but instead attempt to bring us back to the rule of some basic values from past stages in history. May be a critical criminologist should oppose many forms of modernity, work for a reduction of social and geographic mobility, fight for small stable units with a maximum of internal social control in contrast to forms of life where experts on social control are dominant. Maybe there are parts of modernity we need to abolish.
At this bus stop, my first listener disappeared.
And now we are here. To bring us in touch with some core values of this society, I will seek assistance from Edvard Munch. He gave a gift to this university. He decorated the Aula, just now under rehabilitation, so we can’t be there. I am instead forced to describe, in words, not pictures, what I think is one of his major points: It is what is not there: No heroes. No Vikings with bloody swords, no kings, no queens, no bishops or holy people, no honoured professors, – not even a glimpse of Fridtjof Nansen. Several naked people, unsuited for categorization according to rank.
But all major categories of humans are here; females and males, young and old.
And then of particular importance in these gifts to our University: The reason for it all; On the one side of the hall the painting Alma Mater, and at the other side an old man conveying the story of the past to some children. Ordinary people, all of them.
The past in our backbones
We do all carry important parts of our histories in our bodies.
I had my early youth in this country during World War II. That was life in an occupied country. But it was a good life, – for me. None of those close to me were directly hit by war conditions, nor were they members of the Nazi party. It was a life under some shared hardship. Food was rationed, generally with the same amount to all, – but it helped of course to know farmers in the vicinity. Material poverty, but relatively equally distributed. Empty shops, no opportunities for conspicuous consumption, – ideal conditions for creating social systems based on mutual dependence. And in addition we had strong and hated enemies around; the occupants and their collaborators. Perfect.
For youths, there were in those days also other forms of richness. Many among us had an abundance of time to disposal. All radios were confiscated, most newspapers closed, all sport clubs dissolved, arrangements banned, and television and social media not yet invented. The evenings, for youngsters hanging out in the streets were wonderful. We were forced to communicate, directly. No streetlights, all windows covered.
A feeling of national community was strengthened. Much of the modern welfare thinking in Norway, brought to us by the labour movement in the 1920’s and 1930’s, were strengthened. Several among those that after World War II became leading politicians had been in prison or concentration camps. One of them, later a prime minister, was placed in the heap of the dead ones the day the Norwegians were brought out of the camp, rescued by a Swedish action. But someone observed that he moved a limb, and he was brought to one of the white buses by a fellow prisoner. Another prime minister also spent a long time in a concentration camp. I observed him once in a train in Norway. It was when he was a prime minister. Of course, he travelled third class.
Then came peace, oil, and wealth.
To see the other
The importance of being able to see the other has been a central theme in my life and work in criminology, – from studies of killers versus non-killers in concentration camps, and up to my latest book (2011) on “Small words for large questions”. It is my experience that the more we are brought in positions that enable us to see each other as full human beings, not only in simplified forms as evil, criminal, insane, or miserable, – the more we are influenced by that knowledge. By coming close to others, we might recognize similarities to ourselves, and are then sensitized to the whole set of norms ingrained in us throughout life on how to behave towards people of all sorts. To see the other is to be captured in the web of norms that makes us human.
The ability to see the other is being threatened by four aspects in our modernity:
Affluence
Damage done to local communities
Apartheid – all children and young people in institutions called educational
Downgrading of workers status
Affluence
Bankruptcy is difficult to handle for any state. But so is also sudden and unexpected wealth. I think it had been better for our society if there had been no oil out there, even though the challenge was relatively well handled by our political establishment. Most of the surplus from the sale of oil has been placed in a huge fund for use when the oil comes to an end. Officially, it is called the Pension Fund for the State. It is mostly, but not totally for use abroad, not to destroy our internal economy. The size of the oil-fund is now 4700 milliard Norwegian Crones, (in US counting 4700 billions). I have troubles in understanding so large figures. But it is the largest such fund in the world, invested in all sorts of enterprises, from those kind to nature – to the most damaging ones.
But even with nearly all of this money kept outside our ordinary economy, we are hit by wealth. Up to four per cent of the Fund is used inland each year. Most families have an increased income every year. An exceptionally high amount of females are engaged in paid work outside the household. Those staying at home with kids are criticized and told they are needed for labour outside the household. The rate of unemployment – in the meaning of paid work - is exceptionally low, and immigration high. The many beggars you will see in the streets of Oslo are mostly from Romania. With free-floating money, we also get free-floating poverty. The extremely rich among us can be found in the glazed magazines. In international research, we are still rated as an egalitarian society, but this is about to change, with the usual consequences for the crime picture.
In this light, the book by Wilkinson and Pickett (2010) becomes meaningful. They call their book “The spirit level”. I prefer the title of the Norwegian translation (2011); “Ulikhetens pris”(“The costs of inequality”). Monetary capital kills important forms of mutual dependence, and trouble follows.
As a critical criminologist, one of my advices in this situation is a simple one; let us work for a reduction in our income-level. An annual five-percentage reduction in income for some years to come for all of us with income above the medium would help to restore central values.
My preference, illustrating my major point: We ought to get rid of the “oil-fund”. Give it away to causes and countries where the money will not damage by strengthening dictators and their collaborators, military industry, or big industrial developers hurting nature even more. Probably we would not find such a beautiful receiver.
In this situation – and here I can leave all hope of being seen as a responsible citizen – we might seek inspiration from the British art duo Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty. They had suddenly earned a million pounds sterling, converted it to paper money and burned the whole heap. What a relief.
Damage done to local communities
Local, cohesive neighbourhoods are in particular danger due to our affluence.
Money has an alienating potentiality. I have my money; – I am free! I can lead a life independent of those I once stood close to. And I can live where I want, I can pay me into a neighbourhood of my liking.
We call it gentrification when well-off people move into old lower-class districts, often fascinated by the social atmosphere; worn houses, small old-fashioned shops, brown pubs and lively, friendly chats in streets and parks and shops. Here the rich moves in, and out moves the community spirit. Later, little by little, comes the usual stock of professional helpers, those needed by people living an independent life. Money might have a dissolving effect, so well described by Robert Putnam (2000) in his book “Bowling alone”.
It is as we live and act according to a prescription on how to dissolve community ties. Neighbours become increasingly unimportant. We don’t see them, we don’t know them, and we don’t need them. Often it can be seen as a blessing; we leave old oppressive relations or neighbourhood, and enter new ones without the same oppressive elements. But at the same time, we have also lost much of our personal knowledgebase for evaluation of what happens. And then, inevitable: When mutual knowledge moves out of a neighbourhood, experts move in. They are supposed to know, and often they do. Under these conditions, it is obvious that many among us feel incompetent when matters go wrong. Better to hide in front of the TV and let the children and youth live their own lives, – with some assistance from behavioural experts and police.
I have the good luck of living in a neighbourhood with considerable stability. It is an old labour-class area close to the river that made industrialization of Oslo possible. Gentrified, but not totally so. And I happen to know some of its history. My mother was born in the street next to where we now live, and my grandmother run a shop there, it was from 1880, I think.
I grew up with the stories from olden times of this district. Particularly one dramatic story has fastened in my mind. It was when my grandmother asked my mother to run four blocks down the street and fetch something urgently needed for the household. By such a request, my mother thought her mother was out of her mind; four blocks down, that was the territory of the enemies. Down there ruled the Sagene-boys; a girl from Bjølsen, four blocks up, would be in deep danger on their territory.
Here we are confronted with a major dilemma of social control. It is the question; how tightly knit a society do we want to live in? To many, my mother’s experience exemplifies the extreme dangers of oppression in tightly knit neighbourhoods. Their view on the horrors of tight knit neighbourhoods can be illustrated from a postcard we once came across in Germany. The text is this:
Der Liebe Gott sieht alles –
und die Nachbarn noch viel mehr.
(God sees all, but the neighbours
see even more)
With a big relief they escape to a situation where nobody knows anybody and where formal police and social workers control life and death and deviance.
To others, life in neighbourhoods with a certain amount of relations between the inhabitants, the amount can be open for discussion, is the prototype of the good life. I am on their side.
Confronted with all the dissolving forces of modernity, it is essential to preserve local communities with some understanding among the inhabitants both of common interest and, roughly, who they are those that live there. The need is for societies where ordinary people get to know each other so well that they also to some extent can function as normative sources. When local knowledge and affinities go out of a society, police come in. That is inevitable. This does not mean that the state is not needed. Local abuses are a danger in isolated, tight knit societies. But it is continuously a question of balance between control through civil interaction, and control from those paid for it. When civil society is strongly weakened, a monster might appear.
* * *
Some steps to protect local neighbourhoods might be these:
First, power to local neighbourhoods – from blocks of flats to municipalities – so much that it becomes important to be there, and take part. Several political parties want to reduce the number of municipals in the country from the present 428 to 105. Large units are good for experts; they find their equals and can sharpen their knowledge and abilities to help. As a stubborn believer in the importance of close-knit relations, I would go the other way and increase the number of relatively independent municipals. And I would like to split up the few relatively large cities we have. A town like Oslo has 500 000 inhabitants. It ought to be split up to several small ones with a maximum of autonomy. By decreasing the size of units, we increase the size and importance of those living or working there, for good and bad.
Also police stations ought to be localized. As a reaction to slow police action on the terror of July 22, 2011, there are concrete plans to increase the centralization of the police. For certain functions this might be fine, maybe. But basically, also police ought to be a part of local neighbourhoods. In former days, our “lensmenn”, the local sheriffs, were obliged to live in their districts. The same goal ought to be raised for police in their local neighbourhoods of today. As recently formulated by a parliamentarian from one of our valleys: “The best sheriff-centres are those that report no crime”.
So also for social work. The trend is to centralize social workers in large offices for large districts, this is supposed to be good for the public as well as for the professional development of the social workers. I want their offices split up, make the social workers lonely, tempted to socialize with those they are there to help.
It is also important to tempt people to live their lives in their neighbourhoods. Local schools, youth clubs, libraries and cafés ought to be encouraged.
* * *
But here, we are confronted with one particularly serious question. In 1993 there arrived 3900 foreign workers in Norway, in 2012 there arrived 25 528. And more will come. Due to our ample natural resources, monetary affluence, highly developed welfare system and lack of unemployment, the country is an exceptionally tempting goal for immigration. And it is deeply unjust not to share, not to let all in. On the other hand: We are now five million inhabitants. We might in principle be able to increase our population to ten or fifteen millions within a few years. This would mean an end to the country as it now is. Personally, I would regret if the country were fundamentally changed, – most likely into a state much more dependent on police, prisons, and professionals of all sorts.
If our social system is to be preserved, in the form of today, this inevitably means a need for some sort of regulation of immigration, – of course acceptance of a quota of political refugees and persons coming for family bonds, as well as a quota of job-seekers. But then, for job-seekers, as a brook, not a flood that might make so many among us foreign to each other.
It takes time to integrate. A great number of individuals in the category of immigrants might certainly be carriers of qualifications much needed, and also of values often superior to those usually found in this country. (On the other hand, a very large number might threaten the abilities of local communities to function as local communities and heavily increase trends towards centralization of the country.)
In a referendum, Norway refused to become a member of EU. But we are members in the EEA (EØS in Norwegian), a group of 28 countries in Europe. It is a membership based on acceptance of “the four freedoms”, – free exchange of commodities, services, workers and capital. A major freedom that inevitably follows, but is not mentioned, is the freedom of free-floating poverty.
The open labour-market might be good for economic development and growth, but is dangerous for social cohesion. Sometimes, on travel in the USA, I permit myself to think that it might have been good for many purposes if the “U” in the name of USA had not been there.
* * *
An additional problem is created by our acceptance of the Schengen-agreement. Again in the interest of free trade and movement, visitors from a great number of European countries can today cross borders without passport. Great Britain abstained from this part of the agreement. I agree with Britain at this point. Why should a state not be able to know who enters the country, and refuse renewed access to individuals earlier sentenced for breaking the law?
I turn to another topic, to a mystery in modernity:
Where have all the children gone?
They are in institutions. Where else could they be? Gone are the days when children and youngsters were essential for survival.
In 1871, a school commission had this proposal for the length of the school weeks:
For children under 10 years: 24 hours of instruction.
For children between 10 and 12: 18 hours of instruction.
For pupils above age 12: 8 hours of instruction. Two of these eight hours might take place on Sundays. (Dokka 1967, p.289).
Children were needed; school should not be at the expense of too many working hours. Today we are in the opposite situation. To create and preserve our type society we have pushed children and young people outside the main activities for most people, and instead placed them in institutions called educational.
With the non-usefulness of children, and also the great amount of females in paid work in Norway, one might have expected a decrease in birth rates in the country. But the opposite is the case, probably to some extent due to a system with good economic support during and after pregnancy. Some of this money goes to the father so he can take months off to care for the newcomer. If he does not use his part of it, the couple lose the money for his period. In my local neighbourhood, I sometimes meet flocks of these fathers, pushing baby-carriers and discussing baby diets.
But at the age of one, it is over.
At present 90 percent of preschool children in Norway go to some form of daycare or kindergarten. Well, to say that they go, in the meaning of walking, is a bit of a misnomer. Many of the youngest are not yet able walk. Children have a right to a place in kindergarten from age one. I hate to observe it. It must be wrong to break off their primary relations at that age.
And they don’t stay for just a few hours. A new kind of kindergarten is in the process of being established: the extended-hours kindergarten. One of them reports that “here the children are given a bath and put to bed just as they would be at home. Then they are carried, soundly asleep, out to the car when their parents come to pick them up...”
The degradation of labour
Then school follows. From age six to sixteen there are ten obligatory years in basic school. In addition comes three to four years in various forms of additional education. Attendance here is not obligatory, but more than 95% of all in the age 17-18 years of age give it a try. Many fail. In some lines, the failure and drop-out rate is at the 50-percentage level.
And who are the dropouts?
The usual ones. Mostly pupils with non-academic background. Many have been failures throughout the ten years of basic school. And now it all continues at the next stage, where they have the right to leave. Of course they leave, often to unemployment. And often with a great hatred of schools. As criminologists, we know we will soon meet them.
To counteract this type of injustice in our relatively egalitarian-minded society, a popular slogan was launched some years back. It is, in Norwegian:
“Alle må med”,
Or, in English: “Nobody shall be left behind!”
And the slogan is taken seriously. Much is done to help as many as possible to pass. But the slogan is also a dangerous one. If so much is done to prevent anybody from being left behind, then the failure is not so easily seen as a system failure, but as a personal failure.
50-60 years back, there were possibilities for many of the youngsters with the same background as the present dropouts to see themselves as labour class members fighting for equal rights in society. Growing up in that period at the lower end of the class ladder, they got a gift, free of charge – a class identity. Misery at the bottom was a result of class oppression. Nothing wrong with you. Someone up there ate your cake. You had to join others in the same position to get your bite.
Today chances are great that such persons will be seen and see themselves as dumb, born to lose.
Without much attention, a fundamental new class-divide has developed in our societies. Class has close to evaporated as a term, but re-appeared as educational differences. Identity as a worker has been converted to identity as a loser. Bourdieu, as so many others, has shown us how the educational system by and large is biased in favour of those with academic background or parents with motivation and resources to help. The dropouts have not read Bourdieu. They just experience the consequences.
A further problem with the slogan ”Nobody shall be left behind” is its hidden message: “To be left behind”, it sounds as a threat – a terrible destiny, one of remaining back there as some sort of manual worker – for life!
A case of theft
What I here say can also be given a different focus. The story can be seen as a grave case of theft. It is a case where we, the academicians, mostly with upper and middle class background, stole the knowledge base of workers, abstracted the principles, put them in books and claimed that no work of value could be done by persons who had not first proved that they could master these abstractions.
But the thieves did not succeed with Stradivarius (1644-1737).
As told by Sennett (2010) in his book on craftsmen and craftswomen, nobody was ever able to describe how Stradivarius and his co-workers in his craft-shop were able to create these masterpieces of violins. As other able workers, Stradivarius had probably much of his knowledge in his body, in his fingertips, in his way of moving around in his workshop to encourage, inspire or correct his assistants. All good craftswomen and men have such body knowledge, writers also. Much thinking takes place in fingers.
Observers were not able to watch Stradivarius carefully, study all his moves in minute details, write it down, convert it to productive machines, and make the recipe parts of the obligatory curriculum in high schools for violinmakers. It has been easier to tap into carpenter’s experience, and convert it to curriculum in schools of architecture, or use social work practice or nursing practice in the same way. And to reproduce it in tidy textbooks presented in courses available to those who had not dropped out of school.
My thoughts go to a repair-shop for bikes I visited this spring. It was a very old-fashioned one. Happily, my bike was not ready yet, so I had time to hang around. The master was continuously in the middle of it all, giving small hints to some four or five younger workers. There was a spirit of inventiveness, and also joy and accomplishment in the room. If necessary, they kept on to midnight, they told me. To my sorrow, my bike became perfect already at nine o’clock that evening.
Return the stolen property
If we really want to prevent the degradations and drop out situation for working class kids in school, we also ought to move as much as possible of what needs to be known for performing the jobs out of schools and academia and into places of concrete work. Much instruction can be transferred from teachers in school to workers on jobs. If impossible to arrange, some teachers might leave their castles, the school buildings, and join as instructors at their places of work. Foreign languages might be easier to learn in the workshop than in the classroom. The best training of social workers, nurses and all sorts of helpers might also come out of instructions from those that work, and not from those that teach. It would make the instruction directly relevant, and also upgrade the instructors. It would not be necessary for nurses to leave the patient to gain teachers status. One could remain at the bedside as a nurse, and as an instructor. Some courses or seminars might be necessary in addition to what could be explained in the ordinary work processes.
Nothing new in this. It is the ancient way, the young person close to grown up family- members, learning their ways. Or maybe it was a master somewhere, a master in the old system of apprenticeship. To move education for work out of schools and back to places of work would be to restore respect for the work-process and for the master workers. That knowledge has to be respected wherever found, as among carpenters or plumbers, or bakers, mothers or writers. Some of the old masons wore evening dress with tails at work, just as conductors in music halls today. A reminiscence of this can be found in the high black hat still used by some chimneysweepers. They knew something of importance.
Back in time, I met an old man. He had been a dockworker his whole life. And he told me about their sick insurance at the pier. It was a small wooden box. Each week they put a part of their salaries down in the box. You should be very, very sick before you took money out of the box, he added.
Those damaged universities
The degradation of the status of workers and craftsmen does of course create a great incentive attaining some sort of higher education, to reach the supposedly more respectable status of becoming an academician.
This is a threat to the Universities and high schools. They might lose themselves.
Under the pressure of the great number of applicants, these institutions become more and more like ordinary schools. Short courses, obligatory attendance, lack of time and space for floating around with sufficient time, endless time, for finding out how life or science is constructed.
When I came to The University of Oslo, we were 6000 students, now there are more than 27 000. In the country as a whole, there are 261 000 students. Institutes are to some extent paid according to production level. Many students processed fast, makes money. Perfect are short courses on well-defined topics suitable for the travelling youngster, in accordance with what the Bologna model demands of us. From being an institution for practising various crafts, it has become an industrialized unit suitable adapted to new public management.
* * *
I feel a sort of melancholy watching this development.
I was a very bad pupil in school. Not wild and noisy, I just sat there, daydreaming. I barely passed. Today, I would never have been admitted to this University. But I remember, vividly, my first years here. A sort of awakening. Here it was we, the students, who raised the questions and also attempted to find the answers. We had no teachers the first years of my studies, which was a blessing. We could select our questions and keep on as long as we wished with attempts to find answers. And nearly no exams. We were there to find out. Not to be tested to find out if we could reproduce what teachers had told. There was one introductory exam for all new students; this was in philosophy, and then a final exam, six years later. Today, a master in criminology has to pass 20 exams. A master in sociology has to pass 24 exams. We have transformed our institutions from universities to schools with teachers rated according to production level, that is the number of publications in supposedly respectable journals, or active attendance in conferences like this one.
I think we all are overrated. University-teachers ought to be made highly ordinary, in rank and pay. Hopefully, if university education were no ladder to particular status and income, then motivation for higher education would diminish. We might be left with those particularly interested in that type of craftsmanship. But then because of the craft, not the prestige or money.
But this might hamper the material and economic development. Again fine, both for us and for the Globe.
Back to basic
I am not unaware of the amount of vested interests I am confronting here. But what I am talking about is large-scale crime prevention. Not of that type that is so easily embraced by everybody, the one on increased street lighting and more uniformed police in certain quarters. I am back to basics:
If we create a society where the most important rewards are supposed to be available to all, but this is a fake, then that society comes in trouble. If we make these rewards for those few more and more valuable, and visible, then the system comes into even more trouble. If we create a society without responsible tasks for many of those living there, chances are great that relatively many among those without responsibility will answer with irresponsible behaviour. As critical criminologists, I think it is our obligation to expose these crime-producing structures.
Against development
Maybe the future is somewhere behind us?
It was at a train home from Germany, early in the 1950’ies. At the bench just across me a young Norwegian sat down. He had been abroad half a year as a sailor. Now he was on his way home to mother somewhere at the coast, but only for a short vacation, until the next boat out. Maybe he was 15. Age limits protecting young workers from entering the labour marked were not so strict at that time. Today he would have been a pupil somewhere, maybe, with his activity level, in danger of being diagnosed with ADHD – Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder. Their number increases steadily. Sometimes I wonder how they in the old days had managed to get youngsters to climb the mast and reef the topsails in stormy weather with crews where the hyperactive were screened out and calmed down with drugs before they left harbor.
Instead of protecting youth, I would again suggest to go in the opposite direction: Let us abolish youth, - convert them to be seen and see themselves as responsible young adults eligible for paid work. If necessary, limit hours of paid work for most people, so that these young adults also gain access.
* * *
In January 1949 president Harry Truman was installed as president in the US. In his program-talk at the occasion he said:
“… we must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvements and growth of underdeveloped areas.”
This was the point when underdevelopment was invented, was the dry comment from Gustavo Esteva (in Sachs, 1992, p.7). And he continued: “On that day, two billion people became underdeveloped. In a real sense, from that time on, they ceased being what they were, in all their diversity, and were transmogrified into an inverted mirror of others’ reality: a mirror that belittles them and sends them off to the end of the queue.”
* * *
If I had been a bit younger, I would have established a new political party here in Norway. We have already one with the name “Fremskrittspartiet”, the party for walking forward. My party would have the name “Tilbakeskrittspartiet”, the party for walking back, back to an existence where money stood less central, where experts ruled less, where mobility was seen as less essential, and where people knew more out of their own experience of life with other people. Or, as suggested by a colleague, may be I ought to call it “The Renaissance Party”, the party for the caretaking of old, important values.
* * *
I thank you for your attention and let you free to gain your own experiences of this country.
Literature
Christie, Nils (1975). Hvor tett et samfunn? Christian Ejlers Forlag, Copenhagen and Universitetsforlaget Oslo.
Christie, Nils (2009): Små ord for store spørsmål. (Small Words for large Questions) Only available in Norwegian, Danish and Russian) Universitetsforlaget, Oslo.
Dokka, Hans-Jørgen(1967): Fra allmueskole til folkeskole. Universitetsforlaget, Oslo.
Putnam, Robert D. (2000): Bowling alone. Simon and Schuster. New York.
Sachs, Wolfgang (1992): The Development Dictionary. A Guide to Knowledge as Power. Zed books Ltd. London and New Jersey.
Sennet, Richard (2010): The Craftsman. Yale University Press, New Haven and London.
Wilkinson,Richard and Kate Picket (2010): The spirit Level. Why Equality is Better for Everyone. Penguin, London. Norwegian edition (2011): Ulikhetens Pris. Res Publica, Oslo.