Experts, by definition, are conspirators against common sense, writes John Waters
The thought struck me last week in the middle of a radio debate with a criminologist on the subject of Ireland's apparently (note my careful layman's qualifier) accelerating murder rate. The first two items on the news at the top of that morning's programme concerned violent killings, but this did not in any way dilute the criminologist's determination to prove that murder is a media invention.
I made a crude sketch of comparison with New York City, where the homicide rate is now, following a massive spike in the 1980s, back to roughly where it was in the early 1960s.
Less than a half-century ago, murders in Ireland were in single figures. This year, to date, there have been 60 homicides, and it is likely that the final 2007 figure will be 1,000 per cent up on when I was a boy.
The expert, pursuing a familiar line, sought, in a series of increasingly fatuous arguments, to deny the validity of this telling comparison. I wasn't allowing, she said, for the distinction between murder and manslaughter. The population of New York had fallen since the early 1960s. Irish juries had been reluctant to convict for murder while the death penalty remained in place. Far from having a murder crisis, she insisted, Ireland remains one of the safest, most violence-free places in the world.
It would be possible to go through this criminologist's arguments one by one and demonstrate why they are bogus, but this would be to engage in the semanticism she so typically sought to foist on a discussion of something that is really as straightforward as glancing at a clock to tell the time.
I do not need statistics to tell me that there are many more murders happening in Ireland today than when I was growing up. My sense that this is so has nothing to do with media hype or over-reporting. It is an impression gleaned in the same way as I glean a myriad of other impressions about the society I live in. It is based on what we used to call common sense.
Of course, Irish crime statistics are notoriously inadequate, and it is difficult to make precise comparisons between one country, or one era, and another. But, even allowing for the imprecisions of the available data, the general, approximate picture is stark. Moreover, that general statistical picture reflects what we had just been hearing on the news - what we have been hearing on the news for quite some time now. Looked at year-on-year, the figures appear to support these persistent assertions that the public have been bombarded with an exaggerated view of rising crime. But when you survey the graph of criminality climbing inexorably since the 1960s, it becomes clear that the public's growing sense of the matter is well founded.
When the experts declare that the public's impression of growing crime rates is a media distortion created to sell newspapers, we do not, of course, believe them. But nevertheless, in the face of such learned certainty, the layman is rendered silent, inarticulate or confused. We don't think there could really be such a divergence between the facts and our own sense of things, but the vehemence of the expert bulldozes us into an uneasy silence. This means that such analyses have considerable influence in damping down a growing sense of public unease that, if left undamped, might lead to the kind of remedial action that worked so well in New York.
It is interesting to speculate on the motivations of these "experts". Superficially, you might decide that they prefer to be saying something unexpected rather than something obvious, and so will continue to promote an exotic theory even in the face of overwhelming evidence. There's no doubt that these specialists tend to have a contempt for the media, which they regard as pursuing an unscientific approach to reality. But perhaps the most significant factor is that, as a consequence of our way of educating them, experts tend to subscribe, in the manner of a faith, to a modernising ideology which, in an involuted and perverse way, regards criminality as a backhanded compliment to the robustness of the progress agenda. In a certain skewed sense our culture tends to regard rising crime rates as evidence that we are becoming like "other modern societies". Murder and mayhem are therefore not merely inevitable but, in a certain sense, provide reassurances that the modernising project is unfolding correctly.
This is why I chose to compare Ireland with New York, the crucible of modernity, and long unassailable, for uncomplicated reasons, as the home of the TV copshow. Today, no matter how you mince it, Dublin has the fastest-growing murder rate in Europe, and is now within striking distance of the NYC per capita homicide rate. There's no reason, if we could knock a few scripts together, why Dublin couldn't become the new copshow capital.
I have this idea for a series about the Irish criminologist who goes along to murders scenes and insists that the victims have expired as a consequence of media hype.