By Thomas Sowell, Creators Syndicate, Inc.

January 1994 – Now that barbarism is a misdemeanor in Los Angeles and the stabbing of teenage tennis star Monica Seles goes completely unpunished in Germany, it may be time to consider whether what we are seeing are isolated episodes of madness or more foreboding signs of a general degeneration in Western civilization. While Americans are of course more aware of the deterioration of standards in the United States, other parts of the Western world are sharing in the ominous trends.

Australia, for example, does not yet have as severe crime problems, or other social problems, as the United States, though it is moving in the same direction as the U.S. and other Western nations. Over a period of 25 years, robberies nearly tripled and burglaries and rapes more than tripled in Australia, even adjusting for population growth.

While such trends have become all too common—and all too accepted in Western countries, they do not apply to Japan, which has accepted Western science and technology, but refuses to accept Western notions about social behavior or law enforcement. In their recent national election, one of the charges used to try to discredit political opponents was that they would make Japanese society like the United States.

A hundred years ago, being like the United States was held up as an ideal in Japan. There was even talk of changing Japan’s official language to English. Today, we are what the Japanese warn themselves against imitating.

Crime is only the most tangible and painful sign of social degeneration in this country, in Europe and in other European-offshoot societies. The deterioration of educational standards in our schools and colleges, the decline of the family, the devastating impact of drugs and venereal diseases (including AIDS), and the growth of teenage suicide are just some of the ominous trends at work.

In material terms, both economic and military, we are uniquely blessed. No other nation can match our output per capita or the standard of living based on it, nor does anyone have the military power to challenge us to all-out war.

History shows many great nations and civilizations declining and falling, but we may be the first to destroy ourselves entirely from within. How did we get into this predicament? This is no doubt a long story. But has anyone noticed how many of the adverse trends plaguing us today began in the 1960s?

In our educational system, test scores began to decline in the 1960s. At no time in the past 30 years have Scholastic Aptitude Test scores, for example, been as high as they were in 1963. A couple of years ago, the verbal S.A.T. hit an all-time low.

In an era when we expect and almost accept rising murder rates, it is hard to realize that murder rates were going down for more than a decade—until the 1960s. Teenage pregnancy was also declining for more than a decade—until the 1960s.

Among the intelligentsia, the decade of the 1960s is still celebrated as a time when “exciting” new ideas swept across the land and created new political, legal and social doctrines.

So it was. We are now living with the consequences.

One of the common denominators of Western societies since the 1960s has been a growing tendency to excuse anti-social behavior (including crime) by blaming “society” instead of the individuals who commit these deeds. Collective guilt has replaced individual responsibility.

Back in the 1960s, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Earl Warren, said that “all of us must assume a share of the responsibility” for rising crime, which he attributed to such “root causes” as slum conditions which “for decades we have swept under the rug.”

He neglected to mention that murder rates were falling throughout those decades, contrary to his theory—and that this trend reversed itself and murder rates skyrocketed only after he and his fellow justices began creating sweeping new “rights” for criminals during the 1960s.

Chief Justice Warren was not just one man with an odd idea. He symbolized a whole way of thinking that took hold throughout Western society. Twenty years later, a poster in New Zealand said: “Crime can’t happen in a community that cares.”

All this was not just talk. It was reflected in actions that ranged from banning executions to reducing the powers of the police to lighter sentencing and more parole, probation, and other ways out for criminals.

What happened in Los Angeles and in Germany were just logical extensions of the same trends. There is no point getting angry about those particular decisions if we don’t do something about the whole mindset of an age that led to such travesties.

Japan, incidentally, does not have either the level of crime or the trends in crime found in the West. There is not the slightest evidence that Japan has discovered those mystical “root causes” of crime. It hasn’t even looked for them. It just locks up the criminals.

Closer to home, the small ghetto community of East Palo Alto, California, was last year the “murder capital” of the United States in terms of the people killed per capita. But this year the murder rate is down drastically in East Palo Alto, and so are other serious crimes.

Has East Palo Alto suddenly  discovered those “root causes” of crime that the intelligentsia talk about? No. They just have a lot more cops on the streets now and a lot more criminals behind bars. Even in a high crime area, most of the people are not criminals. If you can take the ones who are out of circulation, you can make a big dent in the problem.

But, before you can do that, you have to get your own head on straight.