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Crime and Moral Beliefs
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16277 |
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BOOK WORLD
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3 / 1989 |
2,592 Words |
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Carl F.H. Henry
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Jack Katz's explanation of deviant behavior by recourse to moral and spiritual sentiments, as opposed to materialistic, socioecological, and psychological factors, marks a significant turn in the study of criminology.
For good reason, both academicians and political bureaucrats will find the California sociologist's explorations of criminal deviance disturbing, in view of the conventional practice of explaining the causation of crime in terms of the external factors. The very title of Katz's work, Seductions of Crime, links deviant behavior not with poverty or heredity but with beguilement; and the subtitle, "Moral and Sensual Attractions in Doing Evil," connects crime at once with morality, sensuality, and evil.
Katz faults socioeconomic causal analysis on the grounds that many similarly conditioned persons commit no crimes, or do so only sporadically and that the circumstances of many who do commit crimes do not fall into the projected analytic patterns. Against views that simply attribute crime to such background considerations as heredity, poverty and race, Katz focuses on offenders' feelings and studies closely the criminal's attraction to inner enticements and to a sense of moral transcendence. The volume therefore explores sensual and ethical states of mind to explain criminal conduct. In short, Katz locates a major determinant of deviance in criminal consciousness.
Repeatedly Katz urges us to ask: "What does the criminal suppose that he is doing when he does the crime?" The internal aspects of deviant experience, he insists, are more significant than external considerations. "The dominant political and sociological understanding that crime is motivated by materialism is poorly grounded empirically indeed… it is more a sentimentality than a creditable casual theory." In his view, modern social thought has been unable to acknowledge the embrace of evil in examining the seductions of crime.
Murder and primordial evil
In arguing that the criminal is usually more interested in emotional satisfaction than in financial gain, Katz draws heavily upon the language and the insights of religion. This is because he sees a parallel between the exhilaration of religious transcendence and the titillation of criminal deviance. The reader may find this comparison both perverse and provocative. Judaism indeed began as a religion of slaves, or an underclass, and biblical faith offered a man a means of escape from conditions of abject humiliation. Katz seems to find in so called senseless murders the reenactment--in an inverted and demonic sense--of this process. He cites as proof text Paul Ricoeur's The Symbolism of Evil. "Dread of the impure and rites of purification are in the background of all our feelings and all our behavior relating to fault." Shunning the behaviors prescribed by the god of mainstream society, the deviant typically bolsters his self-esteem by restoring to the behavior associated with what Ricoeur calls the god of primordial evil. Here the sacred appears primordial, in the form of dread.
A confused emotional dynamic underlies criminal acts, Katz holds, one in which a playful use of the symbolism of social deviance interacts with a paranoic shame of human conformity. The result is the profoundly attractive enticement of a deviant
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