The Fist of Modernity
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- čas přidán 7. 05. 2020
- The foundations of modern policing are based not on justice, but on the punishing of poverty, the imposition of the status quo, the disciplining of the public, the constriction of liberty, and justified as the protection against an ugly, sinful, idle, greedy, and organised criminal class that has no basis in reality.
In this video I look at the birth of the modern police force in Britain, what the historian V.A.C Gatrell calls ‘the policeman state.’
The nineteenth century was a period of great transformation. Urbanization, industrialization, technologicalization , were all, at the heart, a change in the routines of humans.
Modernity, at its simples
t, was about efficiency, speed, production, of the maximizing of health, wealth and profit.
It was about scientifically searching for those rules, those methods, those laws, that would bring about the ideal human order.
The first modern, standardized police forced - the Metropolitan Police - was created in 1829, and continued to expand across the century, increasing from around 20k in 1860 to 54k in 1911.
The preventative police were to be visible, wear uniforms, be of good physique, intelligence, and character - ‘domestic missionaries’ as historian Robert Storch called them.
There was protest:
The Gazette called it ‘a base attempt upon the liberty of the subject and the privilege of local government’ and that the purpose of the police state was to ‘to drill, discipline and dragoon us all into virtue’
A parliament inquiry concluded that ‘such a system would of necessity be odious and repulsive, and one which no government would be able to carry into execution ...the very proposal would be rejected with abhorrence’
And that ‘It is difficult to reconcile an effective system of police, with that perfect freedom of action and exemption from interference, which are the great privileges and blessings of society in this country; and your Committee think that the forfeiture or curtailment of such advantages
would be too great a sacrifice for improvements in police’.
In 1867 the commentator Walter Bagehot wrote that:
‘The natural impulse of the English people is to resist authority. The introduction of effectual policemen was not liked;I know people, old people I admit, who to this day consider them an infringement of freedom. If the original policeman had been started with the present helmets, the result might have been dubious; there might have been a cry of military tyranny, and the inbred insubordination of the English people might have prevailed over the very modern love of perfect peace and order.’
Despite all of this, the fist of modernity raised its clenched rational plan, and swung.
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Sources:
Clive Emsley, Crime and Society in England: 1750-1900, 3rd ed., Harlow: Pearson, 2005
David Taylor, Crime, Policing and Punishment in England, 1750-1914, London: Macmillan Press, 1998
V.A.C. Gatrell, Crime, Authority and the Policeman State
Clive Emsley, Hard Men
Credits:
Policeman photo: www.flickr.com/photos/3136394...
CC2.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/...)
If you enjoyed this video have a look at 'the Shock of Modernity': czcams.com/video/vDrjUQdkpSQ/video.html
Thanks as always to my Patreons for making this possible. If you'd like to help Then & Now survive go to: www.patreon.com/thenandnow
Can I get a text version of the video to translate it for a Russian-speaking audience?
I could listen to you read (me) poetry for eternity and a day
The atmosphere in this one is fantastic.
Love that you touched upon the intersection of race, class, economics, capitalism, and an ongoing inability of a certain type of people to see what can cause poverty. However, there was little said about the relationship of imperialism to the creation of police forces; the techniques that were built, improved and perfected in the control of colonial "subjects", soon to be imported and used back home upon their own citizens.
Leftist nonsense and word salad.
@@SeanWinters My man, if there's any concepts in there that need clarification I am more than happy to help you figure out the tomato from the lettuce.
That Wordsworth poem plus the background music and visuals hit me right in the feels.
what you do is invaluable to developing my own thought
Just make sure you *are* developing your own thoughts and not just copying the opinions of others on topics you can't be bothered to research and ponder yourself.
@@Rakinjo2 no shit
@@julesdudes853 I've taken philosophy courses at university where people sit around, acting all intellectual while basically repeating CZcams commentary videos all day long, not processing any of the information they're given.
Actually thinking is harder than you'd think.
A radical thrust which can only be replaced by another.
Cheers!
"Fisted by Modernity"
mood
This :(
I just want to say your work is amazing and please keep it up! These videos are truly amazing and you deserve hundreds of fold more views.
Love your work man.
You Are an amazing artist. Love your work!
Greatly done. I enjoyed it a lot. 👏
amazing timing on this! thank you!
Great music. Great subject . Imagine what they will say in 50 years about today’s police state .
They'll either be fondly nostalgic for our time of unwavering liberty compared to theirs, or think of us as living through the dark ages of a backslide into feudalism.
So, so good. Reminds me of Adam Curtis documentaries.
Please make a bts video on the creative process behind these video essays
This is so good. Particularly when contrasting with your video about the East India Company
Really cool video. Honestly probably one of the better ones I've seen from your channel. I like these videos where you seem to explore topics more so than a specific thinker, or a topic from the perspective of a thinker. Your ideas hold up on their own merit.
Astonishing video essay, replete with facts regarding the brutality, the violence ,of the state and capitalist class war as set in stark contrast with the inclusion of transparent historic pseudo-educational police propaganda. Highly recommended.
Great Video 💯
Wish I knew what those beautiful poem excerpts were.
I just made it go from 1k to 1.1k . Feels good. BTW great video. Needs more views. I am always impressed at how much footage you manage to find from over a century ago.
it makes me think about how much of what is stated as fact now will be laughed at, how much unnecessary suffering continues until we discover, or admit, that we don't have it right
thanks for the video!
Great vid! some really interesting points, loved the visuals and music. I feel like I want to voice an opinion but Im not sure what my opinion is.
Thank you ❤️
Great insight!
Very deep look at how and why crime exists.
Crime happens when one places him/herself as above another that they see as not worthy of an object that other worked for.
You welcome.
@@richardhines8622 Well, that is an opinion I strongly disagree with, but you knew that.
Can I get a text version of the video to translate it for a Russian-speaking audience?
You should take a look at the origins of US policing. From what I can gather there is a regional split along the Mason-Dixon Line. Policing in the Deep South originated in the slave patrols that enforced the laws supporting chattel slavery, while the police of the Northern states evolved to police the rapidly industrializing cities.
Great video and channel, btw.
In the context of now when the "class of business men" are taking claim of all production and value in society this historical depiction of judicial implementation is timely. For the institution of policing to be continuous it would need to be adopted by broad social structures. Despite the lack of these structures existing in the initial justification of the formation of said institution they would have in some sense be absorbed. They likelihood is that they came from the people organising the institution.
My thinking that the reason why the "class of business men" is abandoning the policing structures now is for the same reason "they" helped create the institution in the first place. When the institution absorbs more of the societal functions, the evidence of the criminal class becomes less apparent. Therefore the remarkable similarity of the language and project within the justification for policing used by current conservative politics means that somehow their place, class, in society is be undermined. The lack of evidence for their claims and projection onto others not in their "class" says more about their detachment from societal engagement than anyone else's morals.
Policing and prisons have existed for as long as the state has existed. The modern prison industrial complex, as far as I know, did not exist prior to the formation of the modern capitalist state. This video barely does anything to actually substantiate the argument that the institution of policing itself is what's unjust. Even when overlooking the rampant bias-and assuming that the findings of the single study cited are actually borne-out across multiple studies-policies like punitive justice, the war on drugs, segregation, criminalization of prostitution are more morally bankrupt than the mere existence of police (at least from a consequentialist standpoint).
End these policies and you've already ended the bulk of the war on poverty. Police are law enforcement first and foremost. If the laws the institution enforces stop being unjust, then the institution itself stops being unjust. The only "truly" unethical aspect of policing is that its often structured vertically-in the form of a police state. If it were done via mutual aid, or through the creation of a policing task-force alongside a civilian oversight committee, it wouldn't be unjust.
When I as black American am more likely to get killed in my own neighborhood-by my own people-than I am to be killed in war or by a cop, you can't sit here an tell me crime ridden and impoverished communities wouldn't benefit from policing. Not only are black Americans considerably more likely to be killed in their own communities from black on black homicide than they are cops, black homicide cases receive considerably less funding for investigation than white homicide cases. Nowadays it seems like the left is too proccupied with petty moralizing, and citing outdated literature to posit in worthwhile perspectives on city.
If you want to know more about the systemic and historical under-funding black homicide cases, I highly recommend you read Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by Jill Leovy. The world would be a much better place if people stopped pretending not to be racist/classcist and actually did something ameliorate these issues.
"With violence at every turn, you’d think that cops must be churning out case after case. But they’re not. As it turns out, most homicides involving black male victims go unsolved and unpublicized, despite (or perhaps because of) their prevalence.
The conviction rate - that is, the number of convictions divided by the number of cases - for black homicides is significantly lower than those of other demographic groups. For instance, in the early 1990s in Los Angeles, around 36 percent of perpetrators of murders of black people were convicted. That’s not much better than the 30-percent conviction rate in Jim Crow-era Mississippi!"-(Ghettoside Key Idea #2: In most cases, the perpetrators of homicides are never prosecuted: lifeclub.org/books/ghettoside-jill-leovy-review-summary)
Crime is just as much a war on poverty as policing. If capital, and order aren't protected and maintained within a community, it will be impoverished. Capital will from instead of to it as a destination.
Power, in the sense of the police in the video, seems to be something that requires an opposing force to consolidate itself (in this case a largely imagined criminal class). Something that cannot exist without reminding what it is against. Then what could be a kind of freedom that could provide an alternative to such power?
It is, I think, a freedom that denies any fixated opposition. If power puts two things into conflict, prioritizing one over the other, we should not stop at pointing out the irrational nature of such hierarchy. We should also disrupt the very opposition by throwing new terms, acting in an unexplainable manner by the traditional structures of power. What I expect from such activity is not an elimination of power, but of a different structure of power that hopefully has more room for change. In other words, replacing one symptom for another. I believe this is the best we can do in the current situation where our thought more or less operates upon traditional logic that can only think two things in terms of opposition.
But who knows, maybe thinkers like Irigaray will bring about fundamental shift?
Nature is a modern idea
#ModernTrap
#EmbracePostModernity
Where do you find the footage you use in your videos? Been enjoying your channel recently, has been a light during this morbid period of time.
I consider this the media event of the year.
Where do you take these old documentaries from?
can find a lot of them on archive.org.
People are so easy to manipulate at the base level. My goodness. Its too easy with the correct authoritative voice and production value
Were you inspired by any of Foucault’s work on this? (Or any theorist or Philo in general?)
Also, have you read any of Orwell’s essays or books and been influenced by them in creating any content?
After following this channel for several years it’s safe to say yes & yes.
Maybe I'm just weird but I have to watch the vides on this channel at 1.5 x speed. Not just this channel but all videos on CZcams. Relatively, it's like I'm watching videos made by people travelling at 3/4 the speed of light, or are on a planet that look's like Earth but instead has a mass 1000 time's the mass of the Sun. A theory is that as gravity increases so does entropy. In psychology, increased entropy of thoughts and behaviours are associated with increased anxiety. I dunno...? It seems heavy man.
great video as always, focusing on how ideology is used to control us by justifying increasingly authoritarian laws and tactics.
Why is this set to restricted?
You got a source for this judge's ruling?
"14:56 streets exist is passage a judge ruled
15:00 in 1913 there is no such thing as a
15:03 right in the public to hold meetings as
15:05 such in the street
"
it isn't whether you are beign rational or not. It is what is your end goal. Acting rationally simply means acting in a way condusive to achieving your goal.
So - prior to the Bobbies - if someone committed murder - WHO brought them to the judge? How were they brought in? Was it "Citizen's arrest"? Or what?
Genealogy doesn't make crimes any less than crimes. Its just a glorified historical recollection.
Couldn't agree more.
from PERSIA ArmeniA Israel with Passion
One must note that all human social orders have about them a coercive domain of activity, whether through exhortation, physical enforcement of cultural & political, yet always largely 'local' norms as to place & time. Wittvogel, in _Oriental Despotism_ ( to-day an 'racist' title ) provides an extended commentary of the historically perhaps most common mode of social control of masses through forced labour on public projects such as dams & irrigation.
Indeed, since our species-urbanisation the majority of humans to have lived may be said to have passed their lives, 'brutal, short' AND ordered about, under such despotic conditions. All the more remarkable then the brief half-millennium of the Renascence civilisation, that over time fostered the moral, social, creative & political cultural individual of now-waning North Atlantic world.
Whereas to-day said 'individuals' have declined into legions of grossly diabetic 'consumers', all slyly 'ordered about' by a new DIGITAL despotism; this, of course, marks the end of the Late Modern human 'individual', now lost amid clouds of CO 2 emitted by ever-larger 4WD motor vehicles, the apotheosis of 'self-expression'' by these end-time western [ or, abroad, westernised_ ] 'personalities.
Therefore, the historical question emerges:
MUST all social orders centered above all on material expressions of ( rivalrous ) )individualism necessarily subside in to ensuing environmental ruin?
*****
Would love to...too scared...they've won
The Utilitarian techno-fist of the law. The Bobby of capitalism.
You pronounced Bagehot incorrectly.
Police will 100% of the time side with the extreme left or right wing statist that hold captive the rest of society. I met a cop once at a party and he told me he is completely cool with civilians not having rights to bare arms because he's a "LEO" and he would never have his arms taken away. I'm sure this channel isn't the greatest supporter of the 2nd amendment but this comment goes with the theme of the video, so I figured I'd post.
The background music is way too loud, besides annoying.
Well this is what you get when you live in a top down system
The Tory ideology hasn’t changed one bit.
Policing and prisons have existed for as long as the state has existed. The modern prison industrial complex, as far as I know, did not exist prior to the formation of the modern capitalist state. This video barely does anything to actually substantiate the argument that the institution of policing itself is what's unjust. Even when overlooking the rampant bias-and assuming that the findings of the single study cited are actually borne-out across multiple studies-policies like punitive justice, the war on drugs, segregation, criminalization of prostitution are more morally bankrupt than the mere existence of police (at least from a consequentialist standpoint).
End these policies and you've already ended the bulk of the war on poverty. Police are law enforcement first and foremost. If the laws the institution enforces stop being unjust, then the institution itself stops being unjust. The only "truly" unethical aspect of policing is that its often structured vertically-in the form of a police state. If it were done via mutual aid, or through the creation of a policing task-force alongside a civilian oversight committee, it wouldn't be unjust.
When I as black American am more likely to get killed in my own neighborhood-by my own people-than I am to be killed in war or by a cop, you can't sit here an tell me crime ridden and impoverished communities wouldn't benefit from policing. Not only are black Americans considerably more likely to be killed in their own communities from black on black homicide than they are cops, black homicide cases receive considerably less funding for investigation than white homicide cases. Nowadays it seems like the left is too proccupied with petty moralizing, and citing outdated literature to posit any worthwhile perspectives on socitey.
If you want to know more about the systemic and historical under-funding of black homicide cases, I highly recommend you read Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by Jill Leovy. The world would be a much better place if people stopped pretending not to be racist/classcist and actually did something ameliorate these issues.
"With violence at every turn, you’d think that cops must be churning out case after case. But they’re not. As it turns out, most homicides involving black male victims go unsolved and unpublicized, despite (or perhaps because of) their prevalence.
The conviction rate - that is, the number of convictions divided by the number of cases - for black homicides is significantly lower than those of other demographic groups. For instance, in the early 1990s in Los Angeles, around 36 percent of perpetrators of murders of black people were convicted. That’s not much better than the 30-percent conviction rate in Jim Crow-era Mississippi!"-(Ghettoside Key Idea #2: In most cases, the perpetrators of homicides are never prosecuted: lifeclub.org/books/ghettoside-jill-leovy-review-summary)
Crime is just as much a war on poverty as policing. If capital, and order aren't protected and maintained within a community, it will be impoverished. Capital will flow from instead of to it as a destination.
But either way you isn’t have a choice you want to live in a top down society with “liberty” you need police
Interesting video and all but you seem to be against this? The system works in your favor.
Can't you be against a system that works in your favor? The fact that people in Bangladesh are exploited to make cheap clothes that I can buy in The Netherlands, works in my favor. I still wish it would be different.
1st comment
Very vague...😂
It's said that grip of the pan is made out of wood so one doens't but their fingers, but ACTUALLY *describe situation as nefarious process of capitalism.*
It's claimed that the seats at a bus station often have a cubicle and roof to prevent a wating person from bad weather, but ACTUALLY *describe situation as nefarious process of capitalism.*
The issue I have with those narratives is that it's just far too easy to wrap them on any topic. One can for sure see that the upper class would want to argue away that crime is a symptom of class differences, but why does this history lesson convey that having policemen on the street is a bad idea? Sounds as one must either imagine that human nature is such that in principle we could live in absolute harmony, or that coming together and planing how to police justice is always a slippery slope that ends badly. There's an interesting dicussion about the extent to which a community should set and demand virtuous behaviour. And I'd not by cynical about a tool just because it can be used to hit people. I support the ideal of a smart and respectable executive staff.
How can you talk criminal justice an not bring up race, they go hand and hand