Crime & Corruption

"This in turn has more recently seen a galloping increase in both crime and corruption, soon after the changes made after 1977. A parallel development has been occurring in Europe after another social change - the Industrial Revolution. Although the Industrial Revolution began towards the end of the 18th century."
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by S. Pathiravitana

(February, 09, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) While crime and corruption cannot be totally eliminated, we may look for the reasons why they surface from time to time in epidemic form. A glance at history shows that these two social ailments were relatively less when compared with today. Some people think that the reason for this is the severity with which the kings of those times are said to have punished the guilty. But that is not all the truth, and we should not rush to implement more laws hoping that crime and corruption would disappear.

The more laws we have, as the philosophers caution us, the more thieves we breed. The thriving of the legal profession is the more recent proof of this. Incidentally, in those ‘primitive’ times, there were no lawyers, so said Robert Knox about the island of Zeilon .The aggrieved and the accused conducted their own cases. One reason for crime being less in those days is that a king like Hammurabi in Babylonia, now the land of Saddam Hussein, suffered the complainants to undergo the same punishment that was asked for if the charges failed.

Does the king exempt himself from any charges brought against him as the Sri Lankan constitution has laid down for the head of state? Strangely enough, no. What we had was an unwritten constitution. And the unwritten constitution said, as the greatly surprised Dr Davy records in the book he wrote soon after the failure of the 1818 rebellion, that the people had the right to remove him from the throne if he failed to live up to the ten conditions he was expected to observe.

Let us see how Dr Davy lists these ten conditions. A king had to be munificent. Strictly follow the rules of his religion. The deserving were to be remunerated. His conduct had to be upright. And also be mild. He had to be very patient. Never malicious. No torture could he inflict. Merciful to all. And heed good counsel.

And Dr Davy adds: "Should a king act directly contrary to these rules, contrary to the examples of good princes, and in opposition to the customs of the country, he would be reckoned a tyrant, and the people would consider themselves justified in opposing him, and in rising in mass and dethroning him; nor are there wanting instances of extreme cases of oppression, of their acting on this principle, and successfully redressing their wrongs."

If our kings were living today they could easily pass the Amnesty International tests, only AI, just to show they are on the ball, may frown on the people "rising in mass" and dethroning the king. For AI may insist on a no-confidence motion being brought in first before any dethroning is done, so that nobody’s ‘fundamental rights’ would seem to be violated.

Only one man in our post-colonial history tried to revive, at least nominally, the just society of governance in this country that prevailed before the country fell into the hands of the "rapacious West." But what a caricature he made of it. Having called it the "dharmishta samajaya" first thing he did was to invite whom he called the ‘robber barons’ to kill even each other in the process of enriching, as he said, but in fact would have happened, plundering the country for the ‘greater glory of the motherland’. Such language, such imagery, what a horrible mistake it all was!

It is not my intention to point a finger at a particular person or a particular party since all of us act with the best of intentions most of the time, though, of course, the path to hell, as Dante tells us, is paved with good intentions. But many may agree that the Dharmishta society he re-introduced is right at the bottom of our present misery.

It is inevitable that society changes. But it is best that the changes come almost imperceptibly. An overnight change, violently for immediate results, as some of our Marxist friends dream about, is self-defeating. It creates more problems than solutions.

In the instance I have in mind, the change that was brought about in 1977 was not violent. But it also gave rise to a soul-searing violence that this country has not seen in nearly two centuries. The changes we now see in our economy followed the first instalment of changes the British introduced after the downfall of the Kandyan kingdom. The comment of our historian, Paul Pieris when Browning opted to change our economy, the first time is worth repeating:

"The Sinhalese were to be compelled to provide the funds needed for Browning’s experiment and on an outlook on life based on money with the degradation of values involved in a system founded on the search for profit, was thus forced on a country with a civilisation so much more venerable than Britain’s. There is still alive a bhikkhu who remembers his grandfather’s criticism of the new order. ‘This government is not like that of our devi hamduruwo. It is a government of velanda minissu." (Sinhale and the Patriots)

There is no doubt that the sudden replacement of the traditional king with a substitute like Mammon, whose aim in life was the accumulation of money and not merit, did incalculable harm. It was as if in trying to kill an animal you maimed it for life by dislocating its spine. Sinhala culture has been lagging ever since.

‘The degradation of values,’ the destruction of the social structure that prevailed for centuries and the sudden change in direction of our economy is at the bottom of our social disturbances today.

This in turn has more recently seen a galloping increase in both crime and corruption, soon after the changes made after 1977. A parallel development has been occurring in Europe after another social change - the Industrial Revolution. Although the Industrial Revolution began towards the end of the 18th century. its full horror we are beginning to see only today.

Not that there was no horror soon after it began. The standard version of history of this period was either minimised or presented rather jocularly. The case of Robert Blinco, a pauper child, is particularly poignant. He was one among 80 pauper children around ten years old who were employed in a factory where when Blinco made a trivial mistake he was literally hung over his machine by his wrists, his knees barely touching the machinery. The children were punished day and night for the slightest fault and some were sexually abused.

Men like Ned Ludd and Robert Owen in Britain came forward to stem this distressing tide of events. The former destroyed machines and the latter built model homes and factories for his workers which became the envy of Europe. Saint-Simon or to give him his full pedigree, Count Henri de Romvroy de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier both of France, and of course, Karl Marx, were all dreaming of creating a new society where man breathed freely and work was not slavery.

Their work still goes on. And the wonder is that both reformers and politicians still believe that material prosperity and comfort through more economic development will bring joy to the world. But facts prove otherwise. A recent sociological study of an Italian village in the South makes some interesting revelations.

The sociologist, Edward Bansfield, says, as quoted by Edward Goldsmith in his book The Way, "With economic development, however, the community and the intermediate associations disintegrate." In a book published in the Fifties titled Liberty or Equality - the Challenge of our Time, a political writer, Erik von Kuhenelt-Leddin says, "Formerly man lived in groups. A man had to belong to some group and could belong to several groups at the same time. Now there was to be only one framework... " Apparently, the new ‘affluence’ was disruptive of that earlier life of group activity. Now they were living only for themselves.

But to grasp what he is saying even better, we have only to look at what is happening in our own country. Here, too, we have had what the economists call growth and development. In the export trade, for instance, we have launched in the Middle East a trade in women - our future mothers, wives and daughters.

It is now either the second or third largest dollar spinner for our country. But in the twenty or more years this trade has flourished, no politician or academic thinker has upped to deplore the cultural degradation it has brought about in the country.

On the contrary, each succeeding government has proudly boasted how much it has done in the way of encouraging this trade and remains silent on the evil that is going on in our hearths and homes.

We are now wondering why there are so many suicides in this country, why there is a record consumption of alcohol and the seizure of huge hauls of heroin and child molestations and rapes as never before.

Is this the kind of economic development we want, quantity not quality? Or do we care less on how we get rich and what we should do with our new wealth?

But let us go back to the West. There is a slight difference there. It is directly a result of the influence of the industrial culture; the same into which the IMF and the World Bank are pushing us now regardless of the cultural degradation it has brought upon the West. The family, as it was, is no more. All that is left of the old family structure in Europe is an atomized society leaving what is called a nuclear family. But even that is now disintegrating and we now hear of a puzzling concept - the single parent family.

And is the West better for the vast amount of material goods it produces for the satisfaction of our needs and for the satisfaction of our greed? Here are some statements that are relevant in this context: "Crime is increasing at a record rate in the UK, in America and elsewhere...recorded crimes are merely the ‘tip of an iceberg’ no more than a quarter of those actually committed...The crime rate in the US is even higher and it is worse still in many South American countries..."(Report of Britain’s Humberside Police Superintendent, John Taylor, quoted in The Way).

Alienation is a term that has come in to recent use promoted by industrialism, which prefers to deal with robots and not human beings. If you do need workers, they are best when they work like robots and not like creative human beings. In earlier days every pair of hands was greatly valued and appreciated.

Nearly a 100 years ago when Eliot wrote his Wasteland he did not quite realise it would literally come true. Here is what a physician living in one of Britain’s council estates says in describing his immediate environment:

I live in a wasteland. In the council estate the glass of many of the windows has been replaced by plywood; such gardens as there are have reverted to grey green scrub, with empty beer and soft drink cans, used condoms and loose sheets of tabloid newspapers in place of flowers; and the people trudge through the desolation as disconsolately as in any communist city.

It is interesting to know that the man who enlightened Europe with his seminal book, The Wealth of Nations, at a time when economics began to dominate European society, had a sixth sense about the subject he had devoted his whole life to. Of the commercial society that was just coming into being in the late 18th century he is reported to have spoken of "the depletion of the moral legacy" one could expect from it.

Adam Smith is praised for the many things he had said about the pre-industrial economy. But about the degradation of values that modern economics has necessarily brought with it, or as he called it "the depletion of the moral legacy," it is only now when that depletion is being spread over the entire globe under the name of globalisation, that a few discerning people have begun to stir Nonetheless, we are in for more crime and more corruption.