What Is To Be Done? 253
be achieved at the cost of sacrificing cherished values. And while
strategic goals are certainly justifiable, for example using the
struggle for justice as a way of exposing injustice and using benevolence
as a way of exposing inhumanity, these goals should not
override immediate human needs.
The 'pragmatic' element stands against all forms of premature
theoretical and political closure, all quests for cognitive certainty
which rule out certain solutions as being conceptually impure or
politically inadmissible. If the guiding values of social intervention
are made clear (justice, good or whatever else might be offered)
then the only question is: what difference does this particular
policy make? Each proffered solution must thus be weighed up in
terms of its consistency or inconsistency with preferred values, the
alternative solutions realistically available at the moment of
choice, and the likelihood of the programme being able to realize
(intentionally or otherwise) the desired goals with the minimum
cost.
A programme which comes near to this vision is Nils Christie's.26
In order to escape the long historical oscillation between either
changing the offender or inflicting a just measure of pain (those
beautiful theories which always get into the hands of barbarians),
Christie tries to abandon utilitarianism in favour of a clear moral
position. Punishment must be understood, without euphemism, to
mean the delivery of pain; the moral position is to reduce or
severely restrict the use of man-inflicted pain in order to achieve
social control.
With this definition and programme, Christie then re-reviews the
history of classical and positivist criminology. Because his criteria
are clear (,morally pragmatic' as I would see them), each stage or
current option can be evaluated without either mindless progressivism
(everything gets better) or analytic despair (everything gets
worse). He sees gains in neo·dassicism, for example - in its exposure
of injustices in a system which pretended to treat people,
its honest confrontation with the problem of pain, the protection
it promised against unjust pain delivery, and the way it allowed
values to be made more explicit. He also sees a loss, however, in
neo-classicism's elevation of the criminal act to sole importance.
This opened up the hidden agenda of simply inflicting more pain,
created (like the theory of general deterrence) the illusion that
there can be an abstract, simple and 'scientific' solution to crime
and, above all, denied the legitimacy of the values (kindness, compassion)
and the knowledge (limits to human autonomy) which
dictated the hidden agenda of positivism.