At the macro and micro level, the perspective of crime research

Author: Xie Yong
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Publish Date: 2005-02-23
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The words written at the beginning of this preface are a collection of papers I have written on the study of criminology. The division and arrangement of the papers follow a horizontal structure, which is the logical structure assigned by the author to the papers in this collection. Since I firmly believe in the following methodological principle: that understanding any existing static "structure" cannot be separated from understanding its generative process, I feel obligated to explain the intellectual development history of this collection to the readers, as a kind of annotation to the collection. Like most of my peers, my primary and secondary school life was marked by the Cultural Revolution from the very beginning. Due to the experiences of my family during the Cultural Revolution, I was inseparably linked with relocation and transfers from the very start of my schooling. During the height of the Cultural Revolution, my father, under the pressure of the circumstances, quietly burned six bags of "forbidden books" that might have brought even greater trouble. The connection between this incident and me became apparent a few years later. From then on, one of the difficulties in my daily life was to search everywhere to find surviving "spiritual garbage" to satisfy my hunger. After graduating from high school, I first underwent three years of re-education in the mountains before being admitted to the Department of Philosophy at Xiangtan University in early 1978. The reason I chose the Department of Philosophy, on the surface, was the result of exploring the mysterious philosophical world of Einstein under the oil lamps in the youth dormitories, but in reality, it was because I was unable to fix my interest in a specific discipline at that time. I wanted to learn all kinds of new knowledge I had never heard of before, and I stubbornly believed that I could grasp the spiritual essence of all knowledge. American educator Bruner said: "Any subject can be taught effectively to any child at any stage of development in a way that is sound in intellectual terms." This sounded so reasonable to me. As a result, I chased after the shadows of different instructors on campus: dialectics of nature, biology, physics, epistemology, logic, philosophy of science, psychology, and finally chose social psychology and sociology. In 1985, three years after I started teaching at the university, I was admitted to the Department of Sociology at Nankai University to study social psychology under Professor Kong Lingzhi. In 1988, I obtained a master's degree in law and returned to my alma mater, Xiangtan University, to teach courses such as criminal psychology and criminology. During my studies, although my field of study changed multiple times, there was actually one theme that remained my focus: the issue of how the existential relationship between the subject of cognition and its external world constrained the cognitive process. In my early philosophical studies, I came to the realization that modern and contemporary philosophy, due to its excessive fascination with the great achievements of natural science, had increasingly narrow perspectives, persistently entangling itself in the relationship between human cognition and the world, while failing to give sufficient attention to the more fundamental question of human existence in the world. Inspired by this, at the annual meeting of the Hunan Provincial Society of Dialectics of Nature in 1983, I submitted a paper titled "The Position of the Subject of Cognition in Nature." The paper argued that the relationship between human cognition and the world could only be truly understood within the existential relationship between human existence and the world. It is necessary to first understand what we are and where we are, before we can truly understand what we see. Based on this view, I later co-authored a declaration against epistemologicalism titled "The Essence, Origin, and Impact of the 'Philosophical Basic Problem.'" Subsequently, my interest in learning and research shifted to sociology. However, in the field of sociology, the same type of question that reattracted me again was the same in nature. It has long been recognized that human understanding of society is more clearly constrained by the existential relationship of the subject of cognition than human understanding of nature. For example, the value neutrality problem in social research has long been a topic that has easily sparked intense debates. However, the existential relationship between humans and society does not merely mean "social status," "class" ( means stance or position), or "value orientation." The subject of social cognition, in addition to existing as a bearer of social relations, accepting certain social status and values, also exists as a relatively independent individual, a flesh-and-blood natural person. The movement of his limbs must obey the law of universal gravitation, his sensory activities are limited by specific physiological functions, and his mental operations must follow certain templates of higher nervous activity mechanisms; moreover, the existential characteristics that the subject of social cognition possesses are logically and historically prior to the existential characteristics such as social status mentioned above, and therefore they are more worthy of attention in terms of how they constrain the subject's cognitive capacity, relationships, and processes. At this point, people naturally think of the two opposing methodological tendencies that have long existed in social research: holism and individualism. Holists regard the overall characteristics of society as the starting point for research and believe that only under this premise can individual behavior be deeply explained. Conversely, individualists regard individuals and their behavior as the starting point for research, advocating that the scientific explanation of social phenomena must be based on the explanation of individual behavior. However, in my view, these two different methodological claims actually commit the same error, namely, ignoring the differences in existential levels between social phenomena and individual behavior, blindly pursuing a unified causal explanation for them, and attempting to connect these two types of objects of different levels logically with a single deductive system. This gives the impression that the differences between social phenomena and individual behavior are entirely due to the differences in the observational perspectives of the subject of social cognition, rather than the characteristics of the objects themselves. To view the differences between social phenomena and individual behavior with this epistemological perspective clearly overlooks the historical and concrete constraints of the existential relationship between humans and society on the process of social cognition. As a real subject of cognition, humans are, in terms of their existential form, an individual with specific spatiotemporal characteristics, and therefore their perceptual and cognitive abilities must also have corresponding specificities. For example, the natural language system that people use daily to think and communicate is mainly established based on the life experience of the individual level of humanity. If this language system is used without restraint to describe and explain facts at the level of social wholes, it often leads to the creation of seemingly plausible but actually nonsensical concepts in our research, such as imagining that a society has "goals," a nation has "motivations," and that they can all make "behavioral choices" based on their "goals" or "motivations." This approach of directly using individual-level experience to explain social whole-level facts is only effective in cases where the scale of the specific social system itself is not too large and its internal relationships are relatively simple and consistent. For most modern social systems, the confusion brought by this reductionist approach is far greater than the questions it can answer. Therefore, I strongly advocate that, at least for the present and for a very long time to come, our understanding of social objects should strictly distinguish between the macro and micro levels of objects, and we should not arbitrarily make cross-level explanations of different levels of research objects. It is very clear that this advocacy has a strong tint of Durkheim's influence, and similar discussions can be easily found in Durkheim's "The Methodology of Sociological Studies." However, unlike Durkheim, I tend to place the foundation of my argument on the constraints of the existential characteristics of the subject of cognition on the cognitive process, rather than on the intuitive differences between social phenomena and individual behavior. To examine the practical effectiveness of this advocacy, starting in 1989, in conjunction with the new criminology teaching I accepted, I conducted a systematic review and analysis of the ideological development of criminology in the West and the United States over more than a hundred years. When I observed the various theories that emerged in criminological research in the West and the United States with the paradigms of methodological holism and individualism, I gained my own understanding of the dilemmas faced by contemporary criminological research, and thus came up with the book "Introduction to Criminological Research." In that book, I made the following judgment: The theoretical research of criminology in the West and the United States, as a whole, is dominated by an individualistic tendency over a holistic one, and the ( means deliberately pursuing) theoretical goal of individualistic criminologists is to attempt to provide a unified explanation for criminal phenomena at the macro level and criminal behavior at the micro level. In other words, they attempt to answer two completely different questions with the same theoretical model: "What are the causes of criminal phenomena or crime rates in a society?" and "What are the causes of criminal behavior of an individual?" To facilitate the achievement of this theoretical goal, they usually start with the interaction between individuals and their immediate social environment as the starting point of theoretical analysis, moving separately toward the social and individual ends. However, in doing so, researchers actually place themselves in a situation that is disconnected from both the top and the bottom—upward, because they do not directly involve the characteristics of macro social structures, making it impossible to synthesize existing research materials at the macro object level; downward, because they do not directly involve the psychological and physiological differences of micro individuals, making it difficult to encompass the facts already discovered at the micro level. As a result, the numerous theoretical hypotheses derived from this line of thinking are either mutually contradictory or close to tautological repetition. To get out of this dilemma, in the book, I proposed adopting another strategy for developing theories, namely, first developing theories that are truly suitable for the characteristics of objects at the macro and micro levels separately, and then seeking communication between the macro and micro levels. However, the communication here does not refer to describing and explaining social criminal phenomena and individual criminal behavior within the same logical system, but rather refers to the creative utilization of theories and knowledge at both the macro and micro levels by the problem-solver when solving specific criminal problems. In other words, this communication is not logical identity in theoretical form, but comprehensive innovation in practical form. The above reflections on the methodology of criminal research, in addition to being recorded in "Introduction to Criminological Research," are also reflected in a group of articles in this collection. The group of articles titled "The Glory and Dilemma of Methodological Individualism" shows my reflection on methodological individualism and how this reflection moved from the general level of methodology to the level of methodological individualism in criminal research. However, in terms of my actual line of thought at that time, before forming the above methodological awareness, my main interest was still focused on the micro level of crime. Therefore, the third group of articles in this collection, "The Micro Perspective of Criminal Research: Criminal Psychology," if arranged in the order of writing time, should actually be placed at the beginning of the collection. In the early 1980s, I proposed the concept of "dual personality consciousness," which, in retrospect, can be seen as an instinctive response to the rapid changes in social psychology and consciousness at the beginning of the reform and opening up. There was originally a plan to conduct a relatively comprehensive and in-depth analysis of this social psychological phenomenon, but I felt unprepared and abandoned it. However, I still believe today that the phenomenon of dual personality consciousness is a major phenomenon in the field of social consciousness since modern times, and it has had a profound impact on the evolution of social culture and the development of individual personality since modern times. In fact, it is also an important cultural condition for the formation and maintenance of criminal tendencies in specific groups and individuals. Additionally, at the level of criminal psychology research, I also believe that criminal tendencies can generally be understood as special differences in individual psychology and behavior. The production of these differences is neither innate nor sudden, and their initial formation mechanism should be sought in the early differences of individual life and their interaction with the early environment. Following this line of thought, I have also conducted some preliminary explorations on the family environment factors that affect the socialization of young children. On the one hand, due to the adjustment of the curriculum in the Law Department of Xiangtan University, criminology replaced criminal psychology as a restricted elective course for undergraduates. On the other hand, because of the major transformation in China's social changes in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the replacement of the planned economy with the market economy and the replacement of the administrative society with the civil society, led to a rapid shift of my research interest on crime from the micro level to the macro level. During this transition process, I formed the above methodological awareness. After completing the writing of the book "Introduction to Criminological Research," I consciously broke free from the ideological constraints of methodological individualism and no longer attempted to seek explanations for criminal phenomena in a specific society from the atomic level of social structure, i.e., individual characteristics and individual interaction characteristics, but rather turned to the macro features of social structure itself and its evolution, attempting to observe and understand criminal phenomena and their changes in contemporary Chinese society from such a perspective. The second group of articles in this collection, "The Macro Perspective of Criminal Research: Criminology," is the crystallization of this thinking. The main part of this group of articles is the reflection on the phenomenon of corporate crime. The reason I paid special attention to the phenomenon of corporate crime at that time was, on the one hand, because this criminal phenomenon was just emerging and had attracted widespread attention, and on the other hand, because corporations are more directly and closely linked to the macro social structure of a specific society than individuals, making them more convenient to observe and analyze from the macro perspective of criminal research. As my observation and reflection on this aspect deepened, along with the gradual formation of civil society in our society, I found that the criminal phenomena in our society were undergoing a profound change, with traditional crimes dominated by natural persons being replaced by crimes dominated by various organizational forms, which were increasingly becoming the main challengers to the legitimate social order. Following this line of thought, my observational scope later expanded to organized crime phenomena. The above is the origin of this collection of papers. Adding these words before the dozen or so old texts is to take this opportunity to share my thoughts with peers who have similar academic interests. Although it is already the internet age, the realm of "meeting friends through writing" remains sacred in my heart. Xie Yong August 10, 2004, Changsha