Abstract
Criminological interest in the concept of social harm has exploded over the past two decades and rightly so. Social harm’s broader critical analytical lens brings the most pressing and systemic issues facing humanity into criminology’s purview, thereby broadening criminology’s horizons while simultaneously extending our discipline’s wider import beyond crime and the criminal justice system. While these are maintained to be positive developments for the discipline, this chapter critically appraises the state of the concept of social harm. While frequently used in both academia and everyday life, the chapter argues that as it stands, the concept of social harm is not as healthy as it might seem. On the contrary, social harm is argued to be in a conceptually underdeveloped state of practical and philosophical disorder. This disorder is located in failures to properly comprehend the nature of the concept of social harm; the political and moral philosophy of liberalism; and associated trends of postmodern cynicism. Finally, the chapter explores how this disorder has allowed the perpetuation of liberal capitalism’s assumption of harmlessness; a vital ideological process which facilitates the continuation and disavowal of liberal capitalism’s most severe political, socio-cultural, economic and environmental harms.
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Notes
- 1.
A couple of clarifications are in order here. Firstly, the author by no means exempts himself from such comments. My work to-date has used the ostensibly self-evident concept of social harm as a starting point to facilitate critical study of the most normalised forms of leisure and consumption. In doing this work, I became aware and uncomfortable with the somewhat flimsy conceptual foundations upon which my research was built. On what basis could I claim that the leisure practices, consumption habits and cultures I was looking at were genuinely harmful? The present argument, therefore, is a product of self-critique and conversation with my own work, as much as it is with the work of others.
- 2.
- 3.
One could take the assumption of harmlessness back further to the primitive social practice of human or animal sacrifice. Cultural anthropologists have identified that sacrifices were performed to ward off greater evils such as the wrath of Gods, who were seen as life-giving and life-taking deities and were therefore appeased with sacrifices of people, animal, or the destruction of crops in an attempt to win the favour of the Gods, cheat death, and achieve immortality (Becker 1975; Dupuy 2014). Similarly, Ehrenreich (1997) traces the practice back further to when humans were prey, prior to their evolution into confident and dominant hunters (Harari 2015). She argues that pre-hunter humans are likely to have operated as scavengers, feeding off the kills of larger predators and, when preyed upon themselves, would often sacrifice a member of the group—perhaps an outsider or invalid—to a predator to ensure the safety of the rest of the group. Like Gods, predators were life-giving and life-taking creatures, which Ehrenreich suggests partially explains the tendency for particular animals to represent Gods in primitive or ancient societies. To fail to perform these sacrifices was to invite disaster on the group. Today, however, our deity is arguably ‘the market’. Just as ancient and primitive societies performed sacrifices to see how the Gods would respond, it is common to hear contemporary politicians and financial and business elites trying to anticipate how ‘the market’ will ‘react’ when deciding on whether to enact particular policies or make investments. ‘The market’ is spoken of as a sentient, ethereal, and almost supernatural entity that is unpredictable, its desires unknowable, and holds our lives in its hands.
- 4.
Reports suggest that as of mid-April 2020, Bezos had increased his net worth by $24bn since the beginning of the pandemic in January 2020.
- 5.
It is important to note, however, that in many cases such ‘knowledge’ has little impact upon our enjoyment of the commodity, the gentrified space, or the tourist destination. This is why exposés on the brutal realities of how particular industries produce, distribute, and dispose of their commodities in immensely harmful ways scarcely generate the widespread behaviour change they desire without additional incentives or prohibitions. As Kuldova (2019) points out, we know that the shirt or the dress we have just bought has no immanent or magical qualities. They are simply clothes made of basic materials which are produced in environmentally harmful ways by borderline slave labour in some far-flung corner of some far-flung country. But nevertheless, this is not how they actually appear to the consumer. In spite of this knowledge, they still seem to contain certain magical qualities.
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Raymen, T. (2021). The Assumption of Harmlessness. In: Davies, P., Leighton, P., Wyatt, T. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Social Harm. Palgrave Studies in Victims and Victimology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72408-5_4
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