These are simply some thoughts on the justification of the death penalty that offers no transformation and substantiates an ideology of murder.
After working through the Reader, Hannah Arendt's On Totalitarianism and Denial...the question arises as to the complexity of the argument made by Arendt when she called Eichmann a nobody and the greatest evils banal. Accused by some critics at the time of being an apologist, it was the drama of the courtroom and the increasing theatrics that threatened to move the trial into a showpiece with Eichmann as a sacrificial element of a ritualistic purging and symbolic victory over the Holocaust - not least of which should be achieved through exacting revenge upon the unassuming, pencil-pushing, lacking in all defining characteristics Eichmann. Arendt claims that someone so bereft of reflection, yet with a keen sense of attention to details - and in this sense, the greatest void is that of which he is unaware of - and that is the moral ambiguity of his choices, especially if we are to believe his claims of not being an Anti-Semite as truthful as Arendt does. Given the circumstances, it is not surprising that he would deny this racism, but, it is perhaps because she doesn't want that lack to be the focus, but to hone in on how evil deeds are carried out by men and women who feel an obligation, a conscientiousness to their work, but lack the common sense and empathy that other people will suffer because of the decisions they make.
Because of Arendt's argument, it is now Eichmann's sentencing and execution that becomes suspect. Did he deserve to die? By most accounts, if we are to assume an eye for an eye as just, he would have to die a million times over, because that would bear the truth of the mathematical compensation that such Old Testament logic pronounces as just. Justice in this case, however, is a mathematical impossibility. But that is not all, nor most important. There can be no justice with the death penalty because to invoke the death penalty is to adopt the logic of the murderer and support and justify their own actions as just. The logic follows that by eliminating those who do not fit into our worldview - those who break the laws - and the way we think society should operate - and in this case, as a commonality to the abstraction of this - those crimes committed against humanity. In Eichmann's case, he is the obedient nothing, careerist without a voice, who is non-committal to carrying out murder if the responsibility lies with some authority figure somewhere else (leader or God, there are always plenty of authorities to which personal responsibility can be acquiesced). If we look at common criminals, who are the murderers of today? The ones that are caught are often the castaways, individuals who have not been able to integrate with society, those who are angry and resentful at their lot in life and those who have over the years harbored and cultivated a wish to take revenge on those who they deem not worthy of life (entire groups begin to form that share simple solutions by scapegoating the overgeneralized and marginalized populations) - who become the targets? the naïve, the blessed by wealth, health, family and whatever else from which envy is born, or the weak who are despised for not stopping the criminal from acting - and then society or the people who make up that other group upon which hatred is foisted, and this turns people towards the self-same logic of the death penalty as a possibility in sentencing - the want for revenge upon those abstracted waves of anger and that reform crystallized in the symbolic sacrificial others that have soured life for us. Is there justice in adopting the logic of the murderer? Or does it actually support their way of thinking and thereby confirm that the actions that followed their thoughts were correct? - that they were correct in the way they conducted themselves by committing their crime(s)?
I don't believe that justice can emerge from a policy of retribution, because there is no transformation, and for a murderer to understand the wrong that they committed, they must be met with the rules of society that spare them their justified murder - why, because their murder was a crime and it should make logical sense that it then cannot be punished by the same action. A possible other option is a rehabilitation with the aim to promote understanding - and as against much as this pushes against the very human desire to seek revenge - it provides the possibility of justice - given that there is a disengaged third party that can have a chance at being impartial and offering what is needed in the form of integrating the criminal back into the acknowledgment of the rules of society (i.e. no one should murder) and for that to happen, time and care have to replace the resentment and anger until there is a form of acceptance, a form of debt, that the guilty must feel, contemplate and desire to repay before any form of execution would bear a semblance to justice - and it is precisely at the moment when justice would become possible that it becomes unworthy of the transformation that has taken place towards a life that is resolved to be better and work towards a common good - an execution becomes abhorrent and the waste of a human life so evident - to destroy is easy, but it is ever so difficult to build upwards, and the rewards of a life transformed make justice and death as punishment mutually exclusive terms.
Even in extreme cases, where labels like evil incarnate, devil's brood and others that are loaded with addictive emotional turmoil and accompanied by religious deep-rooted imagery that fosters the idea of a sacrificial offering as the only means to inner peace - these are illusory since they rely on the idea of a blood debt and in the equality of the life beautiful and bountiful that is often taken could somehow be compensated with the already destroyed and chaotic - is that a just compensation? Even in terms of the Old Testament, it is clearly not. And yet, it is the belief in debt on a religious level, as if life is but economic activity and that to dispatch one sinner we might excuse the rest - but even in those cases, justice cannot result from executing an individual that has not grown or transformed (become closer to the group from which the victim was taken) into knowing a form of repentance, of expanding their morality to impose the death of their own anger and resentment - that should be the true death penalty at work! The death of their ego, the death of their old self that thought others to be unworthy, the thought that propelled them to action in their own sense of unworthiness. It is here where we can see that in the Reader, Schlink has to have Hannah learn about the Holocaust before she can execute the sentence she deems fit upon herself - it is a tragedy that the film shifts the focus from this discourse on justice onto the relationship and fear of abandonment from Michael, rather than remain with a focus on the argument that she judges herself rather consequently and without mercy - she wastes her reformation and thereby commits an even greater injustice - for destroying the potential of all those that she selected, all those she let burn in the church, and she herself exiting after her transformation into a valuable, compassionate and understanding person. This is, however, also a tragedy in the sense that she has rehabilitated herself to the point that she has embraced the value of society and of those others who make up her social world - that they have been included in her calculations of conscientiousness and what she considers the appropriate thing to do. She didn't open the door before, and now she fails to unlock the door a second time to burn herself inside. Death is not impartial, yet justice is - execution as a penalty for crimes only further supports the notion that justice is impossible (which is a lie) and so the next best thing is revenge or retribution, arguments that should be repulsive to the impartial judge and jury and while these may be enticing to the offended, they leave no greater sense of meaning - no greater sense of justice - no sense of compensation - than the loss of their loved one.
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