Epilogue

This chapter presents some final thoughts from the author. It suggests that morality is at the heart of every interaction, and crime is a disturbance of how a society wants to understand, define, and regulate these interactions. That goes for every society in every era, including our diversified, network society without any obvious general philosophies of life. The current challenge is to formulate and reformulate our sentiments, ideas, and beliefs to keep each other on the right track. This requires norms and values, including habits, traditions, and the law. Criminal law can even be understood as a canon of morality. It shifted to the middle of the moral space, and became a centre of gravity in organizing our ‘postmodern’ social relations. However, it falls short, because it is too little too late in relation to the big moral space it has to regulate.

Social order in a network society

This chapter first looks at the information age and its networking mindset. It then examines three tenets from the study of complex systems: structure, synchrony, and stability. It describes the concept of ‘improvising society’, which refers to new social forms of processing alignment and fine-tuning. In both tightly structured and more fluid compositions, arrangements and spontaneous play produce a kaleidoscopic image of networks, clusters and subcultures. The improvising society reflects the new institutional relations. Institutions develop on the basis of tradition and renewal, and give society stability. The alignment of one actor (person, organization) with another actor, and vice versa, ad infinitum, is the ordering process of the current network society.

Emerging morality

The criminology of moral order refers to the moral causes of crime and disorder, but also investigates the mechanisms of societal stability and resilience. A vital social balance seems under pressure in super-diverse network societies that have to function without any explicit uniting philosophy of life. The concept of ‘complexity without direction’ has been used to describe the background of the challenges of our times. Many people experience the contemporary world as insecure, but do not have much trust in each other, in the institutions, or in the future. This explains the dominance of the safety and security discourse in politics and among citizens. This chapter argues for a dialogue, in which mutual claims to existence are respected and directed to the actual will of people to live together in one society.

Criminal law as a moral stronghold

This chapter analyses the position of criminal law in order to understand the dominance of the security discourse. In a morally coherent community, criminal law functions as a last resort — an ultimum remedium. This was the case until the 1970s. Due to rising crime figures and societal unease, the position of criminal law shifted from a legal practice on the periphery to a central institution of moral order. The chapter discusses a switch in the relationship between morality and criminal law. After the 1970s, criminal law was no longer the result of consensus on moral issues, but it was the other way round: criminal law became the defining authority in the design of moral space. It is the moral stronghold in a liquid society, an anchor in a complex world without direction. The chapter shows how ‘the victim’ was the key in this ‘inversion’ of morality and criminal law.

The radical secularization of moral space

This chapter attempts to develop an understanding of the moral conditions of secular society by tracing its history. The social impact of the secularization process only really became visible in the 1960s. After the earlier separation of church and state, religion in the West also pulled back on a societal level. Historically and culturally that is quite a unique situation, about which the last word has not yet been said. Many churches emptied, but attention to religion is everywhere. Is this because of Islam? How should we relate to religion and its new visibility? The chapter considers secularization since the 1960s as a large-scale field experiment with morality.

Diversity, radicalization and populism

The rise of populism is the result of a combination of two worries of people and their accompanying discourses: crime and security; and immigration and nationality. The growing tension between communities is fuelled by Islamist terrorism with a geopolitical background. This chapter deals with the issue of migration and integration of minorities, because it is directly related to the issue of moral order. It sketches the Dutch situation on this issue, including some facts and the public debate. It uses this case study to discuss the governance of a super-diverse society. The chapter then goes into detail on violent radicalization of Islamic youngsters and of nationalist groups.

Sexual offences and mutual consent

Central to the morality of any culture are its norms and values on gender, especially on sexual affairs and personal relations. In most Western societies over the last half-century, there has emerged, for example, a wide acceptance of homosexual relations. There is also agreement on the absolute right of self-determination for women. Although there might be a discrepancy between values and reality, this constitutional equality is absent in other parts of the world. Nor has it always been the case in the West. This chapter focuses on the changing views on sexual violence and harassment and the consequences for sexual violence. Studying historical development in sexuality reveals a lot about the morality of a culture. Central to these analyses is the shift from external norms to the idea of mutual consent. It is the only criterion that fits in a secular and liberal context, in which people are autonomous and self-determining.

Securitization in a safe new world

This chapter discusses how security has taken conceptual control of the moral space and has thus taken on an ordering quality. Recent decades have seen a gradual securitization that has merged into a greater technological development of digitalization and data analysis. The secularization process initially contributed to the increase in crimes in the 1970s, but this was stopped in the 1990s because of all kinds of preventative security arrangements. But it also contributed to the fear of crime, through the loss of certainty which coherent philosophies of life can offer. The experience of feeling unsafe was a crucial factor in security politics. More and more pragmatic instruments were deployed to prevent crime and to counter the fear of crime. Security became a societal project, in which everyone got involved. However, security is a concept without a final stage — it is difficult to define in a positive way: what is really safe? For that reason, it even gets metaphysical connotations: an infinite desire for safety and certainty.

A conceptual exploration of moral space

This introductory chapter elaborates on the relation between social organization and morality. It discusses the emergence of a network society, the secular condition, superdiversity, individualized morality and the dominance of the security issue. It argues that Western societies can be characterized with three words: complexity without direction. With digitalization as a driving force, the social order of our times has completely changed compared to the ideologically organized world of some decades ago. Morality is no longer a ‘natural’, but must be understood as emerging from the ethical and normative buzz that arises from an improvising society. This emerging morality is fuelled by inspiring stories, moments of ‘fullness’ (i.e., moral or spiritual feelings), and practices under the condition of the rule of law that respect human diversity and put clear boundaries on subversive actions.