When immorality was excusable

In my endless quest to understand the nexus between morality and immorality, I found myself returning to an observation I made the other day in the context of 1920s speakeasies:

Not a SWAT team in sight! In the days when morality reigned, the police could be paid off. Now that there’s no right and wrong, they’ll shoot you!

While this is hardly a new topic at this blog, it never ceases to intrigue me that immorality was more tolerated when morality officially ruled than it is now. Houses of prostitution flourished during supposedly “Puritanical” Victorian times. Drugs (including heroin and cocaine) were legal and could be bought without prescription. But along with Progressivism came change!

New sex laws in 1910, drug prohibition in 1914, and finally alcohol prohibition in 1919. Building a better world thanks to Mann, Harrison, and Volstead!

In the old days, enforcement of morality was still left up to a quaintly corrupt system known as “vice squads.” They kept the prostitutes in red light districts where decent people didn’t have to see them, made life uncomfortable for junkies and potheads, and while speakeasies were of course raided,  as a general rule the cops who were tasked with morality enforcement knew damned well that people were human, and they could often be paid off. Above all, the morality police had a lot of discretion, and if they felt like it, they might simply decide to look the other way.

Today, hiring a prostitute or buying illegal drugs can lead to SWAT Team raids and money laundering charges; even consumers of legal controlled substances are treated like suspect criminals.

What caused this change in thinking? Might a decline in religion have at least something to do with it? Could there have once been a tacit understanding that all of us have moral failings to one degree or another, and that moral offenses of the human vice variety — even when they were legislatively proscribed — just weren’t quite in the same league with “real” crime?

Now that vice and virtue have been seriously eroded as moral concepts, there’s no need for vice squads. Police don’t want to be seen as (or be seen as) in the morality enforcement business. Hence, human weaknesses are not seen as mitigating the guilt of people caught engaging in what used to be considered morals crimes as they once were. Hence the SWAT Team raids, the militarization of police,  RICO indictments, and money-laundering charges.

This creeping realization that the intolerant bigots of yesterday were more capable of excusing immorality than the intolerant bigots of today makes me ask myself some basic questions about the nature of tolerance.

But even so, how could I ever hope to explain how the intolerant could be more tolerant than the tolerant?

Words fail.


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7 responses to “When immorality was excusable”

  1. Bernie Avatar
    Bernie

    Indiana court rules Americans have no right to resist illegal police entry into home…

    http://www.nwitimes.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/article_ec169697-a19e-525f-a532-81b3df229697.html

  2. SavaShip Avatar

    I like your theory, but I think your questions can be answered without dragging religion into the equation. It is all about power and the corruption caused by power. When a group of people, like police officers, swat teams, judges etc.. have almost completely unchecked power, it is only a matter of time before they view themselves “better” than everyone else. They enforce the “moral” laws and therefore they are “good” and “moral”. This creation of a higher ruling class of people has caused the ruling class to have little or no regard for the lives and property of those underneath them.

    If you dare to question one of these chosen ones, you must be a criminal. If you don’t fully and blindly support their agendas, you ARE a criminal in their minds. If you try to stop one of them from committing a felony, once again, YOU become the felon.

    These are the terrible results of the creation of a ruling class, with elevated rights and privileges over all citizens, and it’s not right. The sooner people understand this is a simple class issue, the easier it will be for them to take the appropriate actions of eliminating the special protections to members of that ruling class.

  3. KTWO Avatar
    KTWO

    SavaShip is basically correct. Our society has rewards police power so we get more of it.

    Perhaps the better phrasing would be that we have rewarded a militarization of the police.

    Look at TV, it runs endless series portraying the police and many more covert law enforcement teams as demigods.

  4. Randy Avatar
    Randy

    I don’t think a decline in religion has anything to do with the attitude shift you note. I think the change is the result of several things coming together at once some 100-120 years ago that made tougher vice enforcement politically popular.

    Short version, in the late 19th century, science (sociology in this case) and religion agreed that vice was problematic. With the “science” confirming the dominant religion’s views toward vice and the progressive, can-do spirit of the age, there had to be be “real” enforcement of vice laws to end the “scientifically” proved scourge that vice was believed to be.

    This led to the change you note. Breakers of vice laws were no longer seen as weak humans, but as the violaters of “scientifically” derived, and therefore, just laws.

  5. Kurt Avatar
    Kurt

    Randy May–I like your theory. It also comports well with these memorable lines from Auden: “Thou shalt not sit. With statisticians nor commit. A social science.”

  6. cas Avatar
    cas

    “New sex laws in 1910, drug prohibition in 1914, and finally alcohol prohibition in 1919. Building a better world thanks to Mann, Harrison, and Volstead!”

    Doesn’t that time period also correspond with the rise of the Progressive movement taking charge of the federal government? I’m sure that’s just a coincidence…

  7. SDN Avatar
    SDN

    What changed? Three words: Asset forfeiture laws.

    When the cops don’t have to ask for bribes, but can simply steal on whim, you can expect the growth of law-enforcement abuses.

    The historical precedents are many. Check out The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology by Robbins. He documents extensively that the number of witchcraft persecutions was 1,000 times greater in France and Germany, where the witch-finders could confiscate the accused property upon accusation, than in England, where the common law prevented that. It is a horrifying account.