The Criminologist’s Burden

This week’s topic is Crime. It seemed like a pretty basic topic at first, but then I realised it is actually a very complicated topic.

In each Hold of Skyrim alone, crime is tracked separately. The Empire does impose a certain consistent law and order type situation, however in their decline, that law and order is also deteriorating.

And who fills in? Anyone who can. Bandits, foreigners, mercenaries, thieves, politicians and religious orders.

Law and order becomes a regional, or professional concern. Without consistent norms and mores across the continent, deviance becomes difficult to identify and define, because deviance then becomes so only in the eye of a particular beholder.

Even where law and order supposedly prevails, corruption is endemic. A notable thief can pay off a bribe in cities where thievery is well organised. A friend of a Jarl can use some degree of pull to get off the hook for certain crimes.

Laws not only vary in place to place, but their enforcement is also varied, Orcs in Strongholds do things differently than Bretons in High Rock.

Necromancy seems to really offend the Psijics and Mages’ Guild, but the College of Winterhold seems pretty “meh” about it, as long as experiments are carefully controlled.

Everywhere you look throughout Tamriel you can see that law enforcement is a total mess. No wonder Nirn translates as “the Arena”. It is an every person for themselves kind of place.

So what it comes down to is that a crime is only a crime if it is personally offensive to the people who know about it. Deviance has become a subjective idea, there is no unifying idea of right and wrong on Nirn.

Morality is totally relative, and as such criminality is as well.

It would be very difficult to measure crime on Nirn. Scholars would constantly bicker about the validity of the statistics, with Thalmor statisticians at odds with Talos-loving number crunchers fighting about crimes of faith; Guild members bribing their way out of trouble; and the aristocracy getting away with murder, while the common folk suffer under the boot heel of local magistrates.

Even murder is a nuanced creature on Nirn, with the Dunmer and their sanctioned assassinations on one hand; and the Green Pact affording a unique set of rights to plant life in Valenwood.

Sex crimes still seem to remain taboo, on a meta-note because that’s an obvious way to avoid undue controversy. And on a non-meta note because they are indeed heinous and treated as such the few times they are mentioned in the lore.

What does this do to the moral fabric of society?

Particularly in the context of finding the next Amaranth, and trying to move life in a forward direction, a lack of consistent law and order undermines these efforts directly. Vivec said he did not make the jump to the Amaranth because he loved his people and that it would not be fair to whisk them off to paradise if they would not understand it.

This implies that to achieve the Amaranth and create the new Dream, we need some form of collective action, collective will, in order to move forward.

And a legal code is an excellent foundation on which to build a collective identity. In Real Life, see how people from different countries wear forward-thinking pieces of legislation as badges of pride, and shameful albatrosses around their necks when they are archaic or regressive policies back home.

The Empire was making a valiant effort, and I commend them, despite some of their errors and misfortunes; they tried to compromise with indigenous cultures, allowing non-harmful social structures to remain, while reforming the worst of them. However, due to the subjective nature of the word “harmful”, errors were made.

The Thalmor are making a…scarier effort. There is less compromise with them. I suspect they are trying for create some kind of collective union for the purpose of apotheosis, but through a forceful dictatorship. Does an autocratic government usually lead to a strong collective sense of law-and-order?

Maybe in the short term, but long term, history is not in their favour. But maybe they do not require a sustainable long term effort. Maybe they just need to keep it together for a short period, so they can blow it all up.

This is an echo of a question we ask ourselves in real life all the time: is there an objective morality we should be following?

I tend to believe personally that objective morality only exists in terms of affording as many people as possible a dignified and sustainable existence.

If we accept my definition of right and wrong to be true, Nirn is a grim and dark place, and with this race to apotheosis and Amaranth echoing throughout their cultures, a nihilistic one as well.

I would be curious to how other people here measure morality and deviance in their headspaces when they make value judgements on Nirn.

Also, if experts on particular races would like to weigh in with interesting examples of normal and deviant behaviour within specific cultures, that would make me happy.