The way to reduce crime is not by building more prisons and hiring more police - the US already has more of its population in prison than any other country in the world. Obeying the law out of a fear of punishment is more the quality of a military regime than of a democracy. True crime reduction must start in the social control realm - people must be socialized to control themselves.

     The inherent conflicts between freedom and obedience, individuality and community, and progress and equality all collide in the social control realm. All of these opposing concepts are essential ingredients to an ideal society, but finding an acceptable balance between them is a continuing struggle. It may sound as though I am being too harsh on the tenets of the social control system, but there are many circumstances behind their demise.

     The family was reinvented during the Industrial Revolution - making the institution unstable and ineffective. Before the Industrial Revolution, parents worked at home, passing down their trades to their children. What we now call the "extended family" was the norm then - what current politicians call the "traditional family" has only existed for about a century. After the exploitation of women and children ended, the concept of the father being the bread-winner and the mother being the child-rearer became the norm. The new economy encouraged a "nuclear family" instead of one where all family was considered immediate family. The rearing of children was too expensive and too difficult for two adults, so family size decreased and the stresses of child-rearing and self-sacrifice involved lead to unparalleled divorce rates.

     Additionally, technology during the Industrial Revolution progressed at mind-boggling rates. For the first time in history, children knew more then their parents did. Parents were no longer storehouses of knowledge to be learned from, but were people who could not escape the radically different era of their childhood. They were not only out of touch with the current world, but they rebelled against change and progress. Children turn to their peers and to the world of media for their guidance. And children to their parents were no longer assets (eg someone to carry on the family business or support them in their old age), but they were now economic and social liabilities. Nothing has done more to destroy the institution of family than the Industrial Revolution and the social changes that it involved.

     The "developed nations" are no longer agrarian societies, and so the family institution of that time may be no more appropriate than the Industrial Revolution family structure is now. Children need guidance and compassion from their parents, which is not possible if they are never together. Children need guidance into THEIR world that is difficult for prior generations to supply...but that guidance must be trustworthy and not destructive to the relationship between the parents and children. Children need a stable environment, one in which they are protected from harm and yet allowed to safely explore. Rearing children today in a complex world takes more than two people to be done properly. Perhaps it is time to re-evaluate our current construct of family and see if it cannot be improved...for the future of our children and our society.

     And what about the family structure in the "developing nations" which ARE agrarian based societies. I have purposely not discussed this, since in an ideal society there would be no such thing as "developed" and "developing" societies. This world has enough riches for everyone and it is only the flaws of our economic system which prevent it from being distributed in a just way. If ecology can teach us anything it is that we are all connected..the difficulties of one nation affects us all. The core of compassion and consideration for others demand that this extreme inequality between nations be balanced. A child should not die 30 years sooner than another simply because he was born in a different geographic location. Such inequalities has no place in an ideal society. There may be a need to reduce energy consumption or search for other sources besides fossil-fuels, and there may be a need for population control, but all problems have solutions if we only try to solve them and are willing to change.

     The change in the family structure brought on by the Industrial Revolution also had a devastating effect on the institution of religion. Religion and it's refusal to change with the times was just another thing to be ignored by the children as they tried to live in their radically different world. The more the religious leaders yelled, the more they were ignored.

     Don't stand behind your pulpit and insist that God created the world in six days when the human endeavor of science tells us otherwise. The world is not flat and it is not the center of the universe. God gave us minds to discover and learn. The more we learn about our world, the more we learn about Him. So, Genesis was wrong (or our interpretation of these writings were wrong)...we are all adults here and should be able to deal with that. When we call the writings of men "Scripture", we have to expect it to be found in error once in a while. Don't stand in your marriage ceremonies and say the wife must obey her husband as though he were God, marriage is an equal partnership not a dictatorship. Paul was wrong when he justified slavery, subordinated women and reinforced the hatred of homophilial people. By insisting that we live in the world as it was in the first century, religion has lost its relevance. The church has conformed itself to the world of tradition and myth instead of being transformed by the renewal of its mind.

     As the moral and spiritual guide of society, the church should insist on certain moral guidelines - indeed, that is its traditional function. But it is also supposed to re-evaluate every single guideline in the light of discovery and see if that guideline was perhaps mistaken, or only applicable to a different time and place. To insist that right and wrong (or our understanding of it) never changes is naive. God never changes, but religion and morality, which often has little to do with God, does and must change. Knowledge and progress should not be the enemies of religion, they should be its companions.