the suburbanist

bobbies

In 1751, Henry Fielding (of Tom Jones fame), then chief magistrate at Bow Street Court, published his Inquiry into the Late Increase of Robbers, criticising (among other things) the obsolete law-and-order system of the day.  It was a system largely unchanged since the Justice of the Peace act of 1361 – an act which had not improved much on the system that had existed since before the Normans arrived, back when ‘community policing’ involved your neighbours chasing each you down the street while shouting and blowing horns.  Back in Saxon times, this hue-and-cry approach seemed to have worked just fine, if Dr Johnson’s 1738 poem London is to be believed:

A single Jail, in Alfred's golden Reign,
Could half the Nation's Criminals contain;
Fair Justice then, without Constraint ador'd,
Sustain'd the Ballance, but resign'd the Sword

Johnson waxed less eulogistic about London in the 18^th Century:

Prepare for Death, if here at Night you roam,
And sign your Will before you sup from Home.

According to Horace Walpole, in London ‘one [was] forced to travel, even at noon, as if one were going to battle.’  The task of keeping order in this veritable Gomorrah fell to part-time constables, night-watchmen, and private bounty-hunters known as thief-takers.  Constables and watchmen (‘Charleys’, nicknamed during the reign of Charles II) were so poorly paid that only those too decrepit to gain alternative work applied for the job; most could barely swing a cutlass.  Thief-takers, meanwhile, were often as corrupt as the thieves they took.  Fielding appointed a group of six or seven men known as the Bow Street Runners to hunt down criminals and serve writs.  Six or seven men doth not exactly a police force make, but it was a start.  After Fielding’s retirement his blind half-brother John took over, establishing the Bow Street Horse Patrol, which effectively put an end to highway robberies around the metropolitan area.

Such were the beginnings of the modern, centrally administered police force in this country.  In 1829, Home Secretary Robert Peel carried a bill through Parliament ordering the dismantling of the old structures and the creation of The New Police.  Known in time as ‘Peelers’ or ‘Bobbies’, his recruits hit the streets of London in September of that year.  They were worked like huskies, assaulted by the public, and denied the vote.  On the plus side, they had less paperwork than their modern counterparts.

Bobbies were not popular.  For a start, they were funded by the taxpayer, a fact that did not escape the attention of taxpayers.  In addition, asking the public to cede its role in keeping order to an elite minority struck some as an infraction of civil liberties.  The potential for this new force to turn despotic loomed large in many minds.  J. P. Smith had already denounced a centralised police force as ‘a system of tyranny; an organized army of spies and informers, for the destruction of all public liberty, and the disturbance of all private happiness’ – and it appears he anticipated the public mood.  The newspapers praised the jury who acquitted the killers of the first Peeler to be violently vanquished in the line of duty.  Rumours spread that bobbies were being issued lethal bladed weapons.  There was talk of assassinating Peel - and the Prime Minister, Wellington, to boot.

Peel wrote to Wellington: ‘I want to teach people that liberty does not consist in having your house robbed by organised gangs of thieves, and in leaving the principal streets of London in the nightly possession of drunken women and vagabonds.’  By the ‘ready exercise of courtesy and good humour’ his police force would, Peel believed, win the trust and the acceptance of the populace.  But it took a long time for the cosy image of the local bobby to coagulate in public consciousness.

It is easy to forget how recently – in the grand scheme of our history – the maintenance of law and order has become the province of a specialised, centrally administered force.  The technological innovations that have made policing more than just a matter of Sherlock Holmesian ratiocination are even more recent.  The UK’s first fingerprint bureau was established at the beginning of the 20^th Century (though India had had one since 1897).  The widespread use of cars and bicycles, police boxes, and two-way wireless radio did not arrive until the century was decades old.  The invention of genetic fingerprinting and DNA testing methods were announced in the mid 1980s.  CCTV did not take off until the 1990s.

Our modern judiciary, too, stands on ancient foundations, but, as with the police system, its machinery has passed from public hands relatively recently.  Trial by combat was not abolished until 1818.  Seismic changes are still taking place: our judiciary only became fully independent of the government in 2006.

The public duty to apprehend criminals and drag them before a court, and the public right to seek private vengeance, then, are hardly ancient history.  Before the establishment of a well-equipped, organised, theoretically impartial police force, and a centralised, theoretically impartial judiciary, order was maintained by strategies whose implementation involved the whole community.  Unlike today, the job of dealing with infractions was not removed from the public sphere and passed to specialists.  The trouble is that a judicial system that does not bypass the public sphere will usually involve, to a greater or lesser degree, confrontation between wrongdoers and wronged – and under such circumstances, a system of law-and-order can easily degenerate into a bloody revenge tragedy, a widening circle of lynchings and repercussions.

Given these conditions, it is not enough for a community to wait for acts of violence or criminality to happen and then leap into action.  Once a criminal act has been committed, the prospect of spiralling reprisals is already a live danger.  So in order to prevent conflicts and dangerous misunderstandings, and to maintain cohesion, human societies have always developed rigidly circumscribed codes governing interpersonal relationships and personal behaviour.  Flouting these customs has been met with disapproval, censure and in extreme cases ostracisation.  There is little room for wild individualism in such societies - because their cultural codes are not kept separate from the system of maintaining order: the codes are necessarily integral to the system.  Flout convention and you are already on the slimy slope to criminality.

           In other words, culture – in almost all societies throughout history, including (until recently) ours – has seldom been viewed as just a colourful backdrop to life, except in classes privileged enough to enjoy insulation from criminality.  Nor were social customs viewed as arbitrary, negotiable.  The world’s cultures developed, essentially, to minimise the amount of conflict within social groups.

The rules that most societies impose on their members, then, aren’t restricted to bans on directly antisocial activities.  Their aim is broader: to impose uniformity of behaviour and thus minimise the potential for friction.  Rules also demarcate as taboo those features of human existence that appear to provoke sudden violence (see, for example, Rene Girard’s analysis of the menstruation taboo in Violence and the Sacred).  Only when a centralised police force and judiciary emerges as an alternative to public vengeance can the scope of social rules be safely reduced.

To the extent that a society with a centralised judiciary and police force doesn’t need its culture to perform the task of maintaining order, its members can begin to view culture as something arbitrary, and to equate culture with entertainment and creative self-expression.  Such a society ceases to treat culture as something deadly serious, sacrosanct.  As a result, members of such a society – and ours is one such society – might overlook the power that culture has to promote order. 

Fixed and fluid cultures

In cultures without centralised judiciaries, norm follows function – the main functions being the establishing of behavioural regularity and the demarcation of taboos.  One major side-effect of having a centralised police force and judiciary is the emergence of cultural norms that don’t necessarily promote order.  A separation of norm and function makes possible the evolution of cultures in which individuals are more or less free to choose (albeit usually from a set of rival ‘fashions’) how they want to express their personalities in terms of dress, musical preferences, bonding rituals and so on.  Additionally, individuals become free to change their personal styles, or to blend different elements of styles, as they see fit.

Of course, different subcultures within these societies will have their own apparently ‘tribal’ fashions.  But in even the most closed subculture, there is scope for evolution to take place on an aesthetic (rather than functional) level.  Such diversity of behaviour, cultural individualism, and changeability would appear as dangerous frivolity to, say, a tribal group whose rigid customs are passed down through the generations and held as sacrosanct.

Let’s draw a distinction between those societies whose cultural norms have to be non-negotiable because they are integral to the maintenance of order, and those whose don’t.  Let’s say that the first kind of society has a fixed culture, and the second has a fluid culture.  A fixed culture has customs.  A fluid culture has changeable fashions - although these fashions sometimes look very much like tribal customs.  Both kinds of culture can be rich and colourful.  But a fixed culture does not change its customs unless it has to, because the customs help keep order.  A fluid culture invents and recycles fashions endlessly (market forces are of course among the key fuels of creativity in capitalist fluid cultures: fashions sell).

Pluralism and Multiculturalism

Our culture in England cannot be described as either definitively fluid or fixed, because our society doesn’t have just one culture.  Ours is a pluralistic society, containing lots of cultures.  Some are more fluid than others.  Generally speaking, ‘religious’ cultures, which sacralise tradition, will be more fixed than secular cultures.  A powerful centralised police force and an impartial, centralised judiciary are not the only conditions that allow for fluid culture; it seems that a certain level of secularism, or at least the absence of a theocratic government, is another.

Many (perhaps most) people who espouse ‘multiculturalism’ fail to understand that culture is not, for many social groups, just a lively, fluid backdrop to everyday life; for many cultural groups, the culture serves to promote cohesion, minimise conflict and demarcate taboos within a community.  To ask various cultures to integrate within one society, therefore, is to ask members of those cultures to view their own cultural codes (some of which are viewed as sacred and inviolable) as relative and more or less arbitrary.  But relativism and arbitrariness are features of fluid fashion rather than fixed customs.  If fixed cultures exist to maintain harmony, then to expect different cultures to co-exist harmoniously as a matter of principle is to force a fluid-culture framework onto a fixed-culture dynamic.

Given that fluid cultures arise in the kind of conditions associated with Western democracy, and that they usually accompany a high degree of secularisation, it seems to me that some multicultural models actually represent, in this respect, forms of cultural imperialism. 

Of all the possible solutions to the perennial problem of how humans are supposed to get along, the ‘integrationist’ multicultural model is the most insidiously dangerous, on account of its hidden assumptions – that is, its hegemonic content.  It is dangerous in the same way that an iceberg is dangerous to a ship: the bulk of it is submerged, invisible, and the visible bit looks harmless.