Like I said, we see the world differently. I will certainly agree that, raised in an environment that trains them to be better people, a person is less likely to become a criminal. By the same token, someone raised in a crack house is more likely to grow up and get in trouble with the law.

But that still isn't "society." That's often the result of the choices the parents made, and maybe their parents before them. There is a balance to these things, and the balance right now in the popular culture seems to be leaning a bit too far in the "determism" direction.

"Society" sometimes has a tendency to be shorthand for "government," and it's real easy to fall into the trap of assuming that all we need are a few more trillions in social spending and a few more programs to reach Utopia.

It's also possible that what we need is a bit more of a popular culture and social standard that values good traditions, morality, intact families, and the real needs of children being the top priority in those families. Just because something has been around for a while doesn't make it a bad thing, and just because something is new and modern doesn't make it a good thing.

A good test case for how this works is the evolution of the American black family over the past fifty years, under the influence of social engineering, government programs above and beyond the civil rights issue. If discrimination was the issue driving black family problems, a common statement, then by all good sense the black family situation should have improved as they moved further from the influences of slavery, and gained more of their rights in the 1960s and beyond. In point of fact it's gone exactly the other way as "society" (the welfare state) tries to help them.