Bureaucracy and Religion
It is common now to see articles like this one from the New York Post.
“A shoplifter found a creative way to get past those pesky plastic security cases locking seemingly every product sold in Big Apple drug stores — by brazenly setting them ablaze, wild video shows.
“The burglar fired off a blowtorch to melt the plastic of the locked cases inside a Queens Walgreens Friday before grabbing several boxes and shoving them into his bag, according to footage making the rounds on social media.
“The alleged thief stole about $448 worth of skin care products from the East Elmhurst store, located at 93-12 Astoria Blvd., as other shoppers and employees stood by silently filming the wild act on their phones, according to cops and the video.
“The man, who wore a surgical mask and his hoodie over his head, calmly and causally lit the enclosed case on fire in the middle-of-the-day heist at about 2:35 p.m.”
Consider the elements. The theft took place in what they used to call “broad daylight” in the middle of the afternoon on a weekday. He “calmly and casually” proceeded to use a blowtorch to burn through plastic barriers that were put in place to discourage robbery. He did this in a working-class neighborhood in New York City. Nobody stops the thief. They are vigilant enough to record the event on video, presumably to pad their social media feeds.
The memory of a pre-Pandemic world in which one didn’t have to suffer the indignity of having their shopping needs broadcast in the call for an employee with a set of keys recedes. “Employee to women’s hygiene products, please.”
A few blocks from where I live, there is an ice cream shop called Blue Marble that has been robbed repeatedly by the same man. And other people.
We accept this as normal today.
What’s different?
People had self-control. There was a sense that this kind of behavior was unacceptable. There were norms. If someone aberrant did try to shoplift with a brazen sense of confidence in the way that we see it happen today, well, that person surely would have gone straight to jail.
I can hear the argument now. This is all about law enforcement. We’ve pulled back on policing since the Pandemic because of a heightened focus on social justice. Theft under $1,000 goes unprosecuted. The police don’t do much because they know that the prosecutors and the courts won’t do much. Surely, that explains part of it.
Even when the criminal justice system was interested in maintaining the rule of law, there is no way that they could handle the mass perpetration of petty crime. And that was before cops started quiet quitting and retiring out of frustration, exhausted by the stigmatization of their profession during the past several years. Now, lacking the will and the resources, crime is ascendant. It is nowhere more resurgent than in the worst-off environs. Crime is a tax on the poor.
What does it mean to say self-control? It indicates self-government.
Before the Pandemic, masses of people didn’t shoplift or engage in all kinds of petty crime (or not-so-petty crime). It wasn’t just the deterrent effect of the threat of incarceration. People stopped themselves from stealing. I’ll bet there are people stealing today who had never stolen a thing before the Pandemic.
There is a mental health crisis on the streets of our large cities, many of which are plagued by attendant homelessness and drug abuse. Much of the crime we see is driven by these problems. It is a tedious controversy to suggest that drug abuse, homelessness, and mental health are all deficits of self-control, albeit with other medical and social factors playing their part.
What explains this decline in self-control? It is the culture and the decline in religion. Religion once had a powerful influence over culture. This hasn’t been true in decades.
We have reverted to being well-fed sybaritic monkeys.
Here’s the abstract for an article in American Psychological Science:
“Researchers have proposed that the emergence of religion was a cultural adaptation necessary for promoting self-control. Self-control, in turn, may serve as a psychological pillar supporting a myriad of adaptive psychological and behavioral tendencies. If this proposal is true, then subtle reminders of religious concepts should result in higher levels of self-control. In a series of four experiments, we consistently found that when religious themes were made implicitly salient, people exercised greater self-control, which, in turn, augmented their ability to make decisions in a number of behavioral domains that are theoretically relevant to both major religions and humans' evolutionary success. Furthermore, when self-control resources were minimized, making it difficult for people to exercise restraint on future unrelated self-control tasks, we found that implicit reminders of religious concepts refueled people's ability to exercise self-control. Moreover, compared with morality-or death-related concepts, religion had a unique influence on self-control.”
Religion is an institution that provides individuals with tools that help them learn to live with one another sustainably. It is something that helps the individual govern themselves. It is a social construct (whatever that means) with positive intentions, predicated on the assumption that human beings are fallible. We make mistakes. We need to make an effort to keep our weakness in check, even as we aspire to behave in a virtuous manner. Virtue is universal. Don’t steal. Don’t kill. Don’t rape. Don’t lie. Don’t commit adultery. Don’t envy. Strive to improve yourself. Help your fellow man. Be brave.
Virtue knows neither race nor gender. It is our common human heritage.
Religion is the part of our social DNA that helps us deal with life’s unavoidable tradeoffs.
We have abandoned this legacy.
Let’s not forget that there were a great many religious institutions that provided aid to the mentally unwell and the destitute.
Church attendance is down. The elites pooh-pooh belief as evidence of intellectual inferiority. They prefer to replace self-control with arrogant self-indulgence, all justified by a sophist exegesis of their own voluptuary desires.
As Richard Feynman said, “The first principle is not to fool yourself – you are the easiest person to fool.”
Religion is just one of many institutions that have weakened in the post-war era. With it have gone the forces reminding us of the precepts for how to live well, wrapped as they were in religion.
Bureaucracy has filled the gap.
Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Did bureaucracy crowd out religion, superimposing its willingness to govern the individual? Or did religion collapse, creating a vacuum bureaucracy was only too happy to fill?