Capital
Punishment Pt. 4
3.
Expunging Communal Guilt
This
reason was often described in the Bible as the result of heinous
crimes “polluting the land”. However it seems to me best
explained in modern terms as something like:“expunging communal
guilt”. The point seems to be that dealing with the moral aftermath
of serious crimes actually requires repudiation of the crime by the
community. In practical terms this generally means that the community
must punish the offender.
Consider
Numbers 35:33: “Do not pollute the land where
you are. Bloodshed pollutes the land, and atonement cannot be made
for the land on which blood has been shed except by the blood of the
one who shed it.”
Even
those who may dispute what I have said above must admit that this
text is giving a further reason for executing the murderer. Granted
it may be debatable exactly how that applies in our modern society,
but it must alert us to dimensions of crimes such as murder with
which we are, in our present post-modern reverie, unfamiliar – or
to put it bluntly: there is much
more to 'crime and punishment' than the
anti-punishment lobby understands!
This
concept of the community repudiating the actions of a murderer is
further explained in Deuteronomy 21. Here what is described is the
community's response to an unsolved murder. There is an elaborate
ritual in which the community leaders must swear before God (once
again an action that us moderns treat with contempt but which
ancients who possessed a far greater fear of sacrilege held
inviolate) that they did not do it and are not concealing evidence of
who did. “They shall declare: 'Our hands did
not shed this blood, nor did our eyes see it done. … do not hold
your people guilty of the blood of an innocent man.' ... So you will
purge from yourselves the guilt of shedding innocent blood.”
Certainly
there is a
recurring theme in the Bible of God punishing an entire nation or
society for its sins. This is disturbing to us moderns. Even
if we rise to the idea of any punishment for sins, we
want to see it as strictly individual. We look with horror at our
forebears carrying out “punitive raids” against communities from
which individuals had committed atrocities. But what if the truth
actually lies somewhere between us and our forebears? What
if there is a communal or corporate dimension to evil which we are
overlooking?
From
my reading of the Bible to date – and the texts cited above are
examples – there certainly is a societal dimension. It seems to be
tied – particularly in the above texts – to whether or not the
community distances itself from the evil done. I am guessing a bit
here – but suppose it is like our modern concept of being an
“accessory” to a crime. If a person aids and encourages a
criminal act then they become an “accessory before the fact” and
in most jurisdictions liable to the same punishment as the person who
actually committed the crime. Someone who helps cover up the crime
becomes an “accessory after the fact” with lesser penalties.
So
as a society, if we all collude to create the pretence that something
God regards as very evil is not evil, are we not acting together like
an accessory before the fact? There was a popular sociology book some
decades ago entitled “The Social
Construction of Reality”. As I
recall its thesis was that a great deal of our “world taken for
granted” is actually something generated by our society and
instilled during our upbringing. So my extension of that idea is that
if as a society we are “soft” on really evil crimes, then we are
conspiring to create a false reality. A reality which encourages evil
thinking and by that route encourages evil crimes to be committed. (I
mean as a separate route or enabling factor from failure of fear of
punishment).
In
this case the idea of communal guilt is at least plausible.
Conversely, reinforcing social practices that discourage evil,
could plausibly be termed expunging communal guilt.
I
think it is probably “Sociology 1.01” that strong social taboos
are only maintained when the communal abhorrence of breaking them is
reflected the punishment of any offenders. We easily see that if
the worst thing you can do in some “primitive” society is to tear
down the town's idol: we don't need two guesses to work out that the
locals will kill you if you do!
Significantly,
in modern society crimes once seen as truly evil such as rape and
murder attract relatively lenient punishment. But 'sins' against
social-progressive dogma – such as making homophobic, racist or
sexist comments even in jest, are punished via both the new social
media and the established media (generally without any opportunity
for defence let alone a fair trial) most severely – public
humiliation and hounding from society, even loss of employment.
This
suggests to me that the movement against capital punishment was just
one pincer arm of the movement to destroy traditional morality and
replace it with the new and terrible morality of their “brave new
world”.
It
is certainly “Ethics 1.01” that what a society punishes and to
what extent reveals its moral values. Further, the extent to which
truly evil deeds can move a society to moral outrage reveals reveals
that society's own moral fibre. I will say again that the quote I put
in earlier where progressives claim that “No community which
executes criminals can be called 'civilised'.” or the
punchierversion: “any society which executes evildoers is itself
evil” are in fact stating the exact opposite of the true situation.
If
there is no crime that can
be done which is so terrible, so
shocking, so depraved, so evil in a
society that the people decree: “for
that you die!” then that society has
lost moral feeling. And that society is
morally an accessory before the fact. That is I think the
truth seen both by the Bible and ancient ethicists like Aristotle.
Conclusion:
Yes! There is a place for capital punishment. … But as to what
that place is … That is quite another thing.
Next
post: Historic abuses of capital punishment
