S OLICITUD DE AUTORIZACIÓN PARA QUEMAS EN ZONAS DE MÁXIMO RIESGO

Two types of questions can be asked of any theory: what is its explanatory power and what is its appeal? We wish to remove ourselves from that comfortable school of thought which believes that theories compete with each other in some scholarly limbo, heuristic facility being the only test of survival. We need to explain why certain theories, despite their manifest inability to come to terms with their subject-matter, survive—and indeed, as in the case of positivism, flourish. In the last chapter we criticized the capacity of positivism to explain deviancy. In this chapter we will, first of all, discuss the appeal of positivism. What benefits does this manner of viewing the social universe have as an ideology for protecting the interests inherent in the status quo and distorting the information perceived by its adherents?

We intend, therefore, to elucidate the ideological strengths of the central aspects of positivist thought.

The consensus world view

To insist that there is a consensus in society obviates all discussion of the possibility of fundamental conflicts of value and interest. There is only one reality and deviancy is envisaged as a lack of socialization into it. It is a meaningless phenomenon, the only proper response to which can be therapeutic. In one stroke, ethical questions concerning the present order and the reaction against the deviant are removed, for the humanitarian task of the expert becomes that of bringing the miscreant back into the consensual fold.

The determinism of behaviour

To argue that there is a consensus in society and a determination of behaviour allows the positivist to present an absolute situation (uncomplicated by the exercise of choice) for both normals and

deviants. The ‘normal man in the street’ has no option but to conform, for he is, given his adequate socialization, impelled to do so and as there is only one monolithic reality, no ‘choices’ exist outside of the consensus. Similarly, the deviant does not choose an alternative mode of life: he is propelled by factors beyond his control. The possible attractiveness of deviant realities is thus subtly defused: for no one could possibly freely choose them. The inevitable deduction from this, that punishment is inappropriate, merely serves to fill the positivist with the sense of his own rationality and humanitarianism.

The science of society

The evocation of natural science presents the positivist with a powerful mode of argument. For the system of thought which produces miracles of technology and medicine is a prestigious banner under which to fight. It grants the positivist the gift of ‘objectivity’; it bestows on his pronouncements the mantle of ‘truth’; it endows his suggestions of therapy, however threatening to individual rights and dignity, with the air of the inevitable. Thus Eysenck counters criticisms that his behaviourist techniques smack of brainwashing, in the following fashion (1969, p. 690):

I think the major objection to the proposals I have outlined is that they smack of treating human beings as if they were nothing but biological organisms subject to strictly deterministic rules; this Pavlovian revolution, coming on top of the Copernican and Darwinian ones, is too much for the self-esteem of many people. Undesirable the fact may be, but that is not sufficient reason for rejecting it as a fact, one would need better reasons to change one’s scientific judgement. And where there is (1) a recognised social need, and (2) a recognised body of scientific knowledge which looks likely to be able to create a technology to cope with that need, it needs little in the way of precognitive ability to forecast that in the course society will use this knowledge and create this technology.

The meshing of interests

All three of these strands: consensus, determinism and scientism, give weight to positivist rhetoric. What is necessary, at this juncture, is to explain why this mode of thought is taken up by the positivist and how the interests of the practitioner and the politician mesh together. It is important, at the outset, to realize that at the simplest level the positivist, by placing himself in the middle of the posited consensus, defends the reality of his own world. For example, Dr R. Cockett

(Regional Psychologist to the Home Office Prison Department) writes of working-class drug-takers in the Ashford Remand Centre (1971, p. 142): ‘[they] were shown to be rather more suspicious and withdrawn than non-drugtakers, more emotionally tense and excitable, and more radical or less conservative in temperament, but to have relatively poor self-sentiment formation—persistence, will-power, social effectiveness and leadership’. This was coupled with: ‘less emotional maturity and tolerance of frustration’, ‘intrapunitiveness’ and ‘a tendency towards paranoid feeling’.

Such ‘discoveries’ are commonplace in the literature of all forms of deviant behaviour. But behind the neutral language lies, in Cockett’s own words, ‘what is popularly understood by “inadequacy” and “weakness of character”’ (p. 144). It is a simple translation to interpret hedonistic and expressive subcultures as not cultures at all but merely as aggregates of inadequate individuals who are excitable, have a low tolerance of frustration, maturity, etc. Moreover, it is sleight of hand which can conjure what some would term repression into a ‘tendency towards paranoid feeling’. All of this reinforces the middle-class professional world of the expert; his stable employment and marriage, deferred gratification and planning are all indices of his own ‘strong’ personality and social ‘adequacy’. By making statements about the deviant he is, inevitably, making valuations about his own world.

Further, the social universe of the expert, like so many others in a complex industrial society, is extremely segregated. He is, therefore, blinkered from receiving information at odds with his world view. As one of the present authors put it (Young, 1971b, pp. 72–3):

The [experts] must explain what is perceived as unusual in terms of the values associated by their audience as usual. In this process, utilising the theoretical ploys listed, they circumscribe and negate the reality of values different from their own. They do not explain, they merely explain away. They are well-trained men, but the rigour of their training has enabled them to view the world only from the narrow-blinkered perspective of their own discipline. The fragmentation of knowledge concomitant with specialisation has encouraged the strict compartmentalisation of analysis…. As a result such experts can, from the vantage of their cloistered chauvinism, scarcely grasp the totality of the social world even in terms of their own values let alone take a critical stance outside of these values. We are producing what Lucien Goldmann has described as the specialist who is simultaneously illiterate and a graduate of a university.

But ideas do not exist in a vacuum; if there are retailers of ideas there are also buyers; and we must now examine the nexus existing between expert, bureaucrat and politician. The emergence of large-scale bureaucracies in every sphere of social activity has given rise to the demand for co-ordination and predictability within enterprises and the precise determination of consumer and public responses. The ‘normal’ man must be understood in terms of his roles as consumer and voter. At the same time the emergence of alternative realities outside of the official consensus must be defused of their potential to deny consciously, or unconsciously, the ends of the system they threaten to disrupt.1 _{The deviant himself is in a more powerful position in a tightly} co-ordinated system. Hans Eysenck recognizes this well, for in an article urging the greater need for social conditioning (1969, p. 688), he backs up his argument by noting a trend which is so ‘important and serious…that our whole future may rest on our ability to expedite it.’ Namely:

What seems to be happening is that society is getting more and more closely knitted together, due to our advancing technology: production is nearing the point where it is nation-wide,

particularly in consumer goods like motor cars and such like, and distribution too is getting organized in larger and larger complexes. In other words, there is greater and greater dependence on cooperation between very large groups of people—which do not need to be in close proximity to each other, or even to know of each other’s existence. Yet if even a small section within one of the coordinated complexes fails—the tally clerks at the docks, say, or the women sewing covers at Ford’s, the whole nexus breaks down, and far-reaching consequences are experienced over a wide area…. It is hardly necessary to belabour the main point here made; it is too obvious to require much documentation. The problem to be discussed is: how can we engineer a social consent which will make people behave in a socially adapted, law-abiding fashion, which will not lead to a break-down of the intricately interwoven fabric of social life? Clearly we are failing to do this: the ever-increasing number of unofficial strikes, the ever-increasing statistics of crime of all sorts, the general alienation on which so many writers have commented are voluble witnesses to this statement. The psychologist would answer that what was clearly required was a technology of consent—that is, a generally applicable method of inculcating suitable habits of socialised conduct into the citizens (and particularly the future citizens) of the country in question—or preferably the whole world.

For the politician and the planner, positivism provides a model of human nature which, in its consensual aspects, allows the world ‘as it is’ to remain unquestioned and, in its determinist notion of human action, offers the possibility of rational planning and control. Thus Jack Douglas (1970b, p. 269) writes:

Positivistic social science provides the administrator of the official organisations with a completely deterministic

metaphysics of man and his actions in society. If he chooses to practise the willing suspension of disbelief—to have faith—in the specific theories of this positivistic social science, it also provides him with specific explanations of behaviour which, in combination with deterministic metaphysics, give him a belief that he can control the public responses which will be used to judge his own adequacy as an official. At the same time, use of the positivistic social sciences, which always make maximum use of the very prestigious mathematical forms of the natural sciences, provides the official with the very powerful rhetoric of science in justifying his complex ways to the suspicious public. And, if the ‘right’ effects are not forthcoming from the

operations of his agency, he will be well covered by the ‘scientific’ justifications for the actions with such unfortunate consequences.

The expertise of the positivist comes to be used as scientific justification for political and commercial action and he himself, in line with his own edicts, is bereft of any role in questioning the aims of such activities (Douglas, 1970b, p. 267):

Insofar as social scientists do not initiate and become personally involved in the practical action aimed at solving problems but, rather, await the summons to involvement from men of practical affairs, they not only allow but force the men of practical affairs to define the problems, define the relevance of the social scientists, define which social scientists are to be consulted, define the structure of the advising situation, and then, most importantly, force them to pick and choose from that advice those parts which they can interpret in some way which ‘helps’ them, as they see it, to construct their intended course of practical action. Because of this, it is actually the metaphysics of everyday life or practical affairs which determines most of the impact of the social sciences on everyday life. What has normally happened so far, and what threatens to become even more prevalent, is that the men of practical affairs make use through this consulting process of the prestige of expert

scientific knowledge in our society to achieve the goals which they set by the means which they determine: they use the social sciences as a front which helps them to control public opinions and, hence, public responses to what they intend to do.

In other words, during the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, positivism has become institutionalized. Alex Comfort (1967) has pointed out how the growth of the medical profession has been accompanied by intervention in moral and personal spheres which are beyond the jurisdiction of the medical practitioner. C.Wright Mills (1943) has shown how the growth of the social work profession, sustained and infused with the terminology of psychoanalysis and other deterministic ideologies, has resulted in the translation of public issues into private problems. It is of no small significance that psychoanalysis, one of the major ideologies of an institutionalized positivism, was produced as a direct outgrowth of the medical profession, specifically as a result of the dissatisfaction of thinkers trained in the medical tradition (like Freud himself): since psychoanalysis, for all that it is a break with simple medical thought, remains impregnated with biological and physiological assumptions.

Thus, Freud’s aim was to reduce explanations of pathology to explanations of neurophysiology. He believed, for instance, that schizophrenia was genetically determined; whilst even the more radical Reich, who combined his medical and psychoanalytical training with some grounding in a Marxist humanism, refused to treat homosexuals on similar grounds. Gouldner, in a recent attack on ‘welfare state sociology’ (1968), has argued that American sociology—whether traditionally positivist or ‘sceptical’—serves the important social and political function of displacing, in the process of making amenable for research and policy, the structures of power, domination and control.

The positivist’s epistemological split between facts and values thus corresponds to his institutional role in society (cf. I.Taylor and Walton, 1970). In this his interests are well served, for, as Dennis Chapman astutely notes (1968, p. 23), to challenge the consensual definitions of crime and deviancy is to invite heavy penalties…. ‘The penalties are: To be isolated from the mainstream of professional activity, to be denied resources for research, and to be denied official patronage with its rewards in material and status.’

Yet if such a philosophy has its uses for the politicians, this does not mean it is accepted wholeheartedly by them. Rather, it is used to back up arguments and proposals, it is selected for quotation at the appropriate, strategic time and place. For there is a fundamental conflict between the free will classicist’s models held to by the legal profession and the determinist notions of the psychiatrist and the social worker. Total determinism palpably contradicts the ‘feel’ of human

existence. More importantly, from the perspective of those in control, it is in contradiction with democratic ideology—given its implicit assumptions of moral choice, free selection of employment and rational voting for political candidates, etc. Determinism is, in the last analysis, from the social control point of view, a dangerous doctrine, for it removes from individuals the sense of striving towards the ‘good’ beavhiour. As we shall see later, it tends to obliterate the distinction between what is (behavioural norms) and what should be (prescriptive norms). Other people (the therapist and the expert) can change ‘what is’ in the direction of what they perceive as ‘what should be’. But the individual is not accountable for his actions and he is not likely on his own accord to change his behaviour without parallel change in significant determining factors (environmental or genetic). The resolution of the conflict between free will and determinism is achieved by the adoption of what we have termed neo-classicism. Namely, a qualitative distinction is made between the majority who are seen as capable of free choice and the minority of deviants who are determined.

We wish to turn, now, to the evolution of positivism and to the reasons for the emergence and continuing appeal of biological positivism in particular. The first attempts to tackle the problem of crime scientifically were social rather than biological. The transition between classicism and positivism was largely effected by the ‘moral statisticians’, Quetelet and Guerry, and is well exemplified in Guerry’s assertion, made in 1863 (p. lvii), that:

The time has gone by when we could claim to regulate society by laws established solely on metaphysical theories and a sort of ideal type which was thought to conform to absolute justice. Laws are not made for men in the abstract, for humanity in general, but for real men, placed in precisely determined circumstances.

Quetelet (a Belgian mathematician of wide intellectual concerns) and Guerry (a French lawyer) working independently, but almost simultaneously, had drawn very similar conclusions from the publication from 1827 onwards, of the first sets of national criminal statistics (in France). As the figures continued to be published, on an annual basis, it became more and more clear to Quetelet and Guerry, first, that the annual totals of recorded crime remained extra-ordinarily constant, and, second, that the contribution of the various types of crime to the annual total fluctuated hardly at all.

Such a discovery carried with it the clear implication that (officially- recorded) crime was a regular feature of social activity, as distinct from being the product of individual (and therefore arbitrary) propensities to

asocial activity. There was, then, some fundamental feature of the existing social arrangements that gave rise to regular outcomes; so that it must be possible, theoretically, to specify the causes with a view to eliminating the outcome. Quetelet’s ‘social physics’ and Guerry’s ‘moral statistical analysis’ were concerned, above all, therefore, with specifying the relationship between different features of the social arrangements and different (especially criminal) outcomes. In this respect, they have been said to have provided the groundwork for the much more thoroughgoing revolution in theory undertaken by Emile Durkheim some few years later.2

The work of Quetelet and Guerry stemmed from the publication of social statistics, these in turn being a reflection of concern with social unrest (cf. Morris, 1957, ch. 3). For the next half-century, the analysis of crime was in a sociological vein, ranging from the work of Mayhew to Bonger3 _{and the audience was concerned with reform. Then, in} 1876, Cesare Lombroso published L’Uomo Delinquente and the whole focus of analysis drastically changed from the social to the individual. As Lindesmith and Levin (1937, p. 661) put it:

What Lombroso did was to reverse the method of explanation that had been current since the time of Guerry and Quetelet and, instead of maintaining that institutions and traditions determined that nature of the criminal, he held that the nature of the criminal determined the character of institutions and traditions.

Indeed Terence Morris (1957, p. 41) has argued that:

The founding of a school of ‘criminal anthropology’ seems to have resulted in the total or near total eclipse of the work of sociologists in the criminological field. The genetic theories of crime which have been subsequently replaced by psychological theories of crimes seem to have excited so much interest that sociological theories, particularly in Europe, have been of