stop the killing!
David C. N. Swanson
Virginia is rapidly gaining
steam, and rightly so. Not only has the state of Virginia killed
convicts of very dubious guilt and
then destroyed the evidence so that it could not be tested. But it has
this year finally pardoned a
man (Earl Washington Jr.) whose innocence was clear for 17 years and who
came within a week
of being killed anyway. One of the eight men that Virginia did kill
this year was killed on the
basis of evidence that vanished, reappeared, and was supposedly tested
-- all within about a week,
while Earl Washington waited 8 months for his latest round of testing.
Add to the problem of killing innocent men the fact that overwhelming
evidence continues to
show that the death penalty may encourage crime but certainly doesn't
deter it (as a dwindling
contingent of supporters continues to maintain in what must now be
recognized as a preference
for revenge over crime reduction). Either of these two points provides
a strong case against this
barbaric hate-thy-neighbor anachronism. Add the third argument that the
death penalty is
applied in a manner biased by race (of victim and defendant) and wealth
(of defendant), and the
decision should be an easy one (see a study posted at
www.civilrights.org).
There's an even stronger fourth argument, however. The people of the
state of Virginia
(nominally a democracy) favor a moratorium. A Times-Dispatch poll this
year found that 58
percent of Virginians want a moratorium and 91 percent want DNA testing
for convicts who
have biological evidence to test. A national poll by Peter Hart
Research found that 64 percent of
Americans want a moratorium and 89 percent want DNA testing. Just
because we have now
"elected" (I use the term loosely) a president known to the rest of the
world as a mass
executioner, does not mean we should have to engage in a monstrous
practice that most of us
want halted and numerous organizations of relatives of victims
eloquently oppose.
Virginia Del. Frank Hargrove (R, Hanover) has promised to introduce a
bill to abolish the death
penalty. He should be applauded, and other delegates should be
encouraged to support the
measure. Death Penalty Awareness Day will take place in Richmond on
Jan. 17 (call
888-567-8237 for information).
Currently on Virginia's death row are: a man suffering from bipolar
disorder, another with
severe schizophrenia, another who was 15 at the time of his alleged
crime, another with an IQ of
50, another (Earl Bramblett) with no serious evidence against him, and
another (Bobby Swisher)
whose lawyers bungled his case beyond the usual ludicrous standards.
Stop the killing!
Ron Hardin
> There's an even stronger fourth argument, however. The people of the
> state of Virginia
It's not much of an argument that starts with three weak ones.
The thing to do is figure out why people support the death penalty.
It's neither revenge nor deterrence.
--
Ron Hardin
rhha...@mindspring.com
On the internet, nobody knows you're a jerk.
Dylan Bryan-Dolman
> The thing to do is figure out why people support the death penalty.
> It's neither revenge nor deterrence.
It's sex.
Dylan
=dbd=
Pascal Zerling
Dylan Bryan-Dolman wrote:
> Ron Hardin wrote:
>
> > The thing to do is figure out why people support the
> > death penalty. It's neither revenge nor deterrence.
>
> It's sex.
No. I think it's more like a modern form of human sacrifice.
What I can't figure out is which bloodthirsty dark god the
poor fellows are being offered to? Moloch, perhaps,
who's acquired a fondness for the flesh of adults in his
old age...
Jim Gunson
Ron Hardin <rhha...@mindspring.com> wrote:
> David C. N. Swanson wrote:
> > There's an even stronger fourth argument, however. The people of
the
> > state of Virginia
>
> It's not much of an argument that starts with three weak ones.
>
> The thing to do is figure out why people support the death penalty.
> It's neither revenge nor deterrence.
OK, tell us why.
Do not the death penalty supporters, when asked why,
say either revenge or deterrence ?
Jim Gunson
Sent via Deja.com
http://www.deja.com/
Pascal Zerling
Jim Gunson wrote:
> Ron Hardin wrote:
> > The thing to do is figure out why people support the death penalty.
> > It's neither revenge nor deterrence.
>
> OK, tell us why. Do not the death penalty supporters, when asked
> why, say either revenge or deterrence?
The supporters of the death penalty are not aware of the true,
subconscious reason, which is their desire to take part in the ancient
ritual of human sacrifice. Sacrifice, which is a fixed part of the human
psyche, has gone underground in the modern world, so to speak.
We still carry out sacrifice, we're just doing in subconsciously.
And it's not just the death penalty. Look at the sacrifice of laboratory
animals to the god of Science through vivisection, the sacrifice of
soldiers to the god of War in battle (which the newspapers even
describe as "He made the ultimate sacrifice."). Then there's sacrifice
in the economy when painful savings must be made in one area of
society so that the money can be made available for more important
needs elsewhere (which politicians describe as a need for "sacrifice").
And if you buy into Marxist economics, there's also the daily
sacrifice of the poor to the god of Capitalism. The workers are
exploited because they are underpaid, and must carry out
mechanical, dehumanizing tasks to produce the surplus value
extracted by capitalists.
Ron Hardin
> > The thing to do is figure out why people support the death penalty.
> > It's neither revenge nor deterrence.
>
> OK, tell us why.
>
> Do not the death penalty supporters, when asked why,
> say either revenge or deterrence ?
Well, no. If they say either, it's an emergency measure, like telling
a child at a movie that it's not real.
Here's the locus to start from: the death penalty has something to
do with the place accorded to the voice of the victim, which is absent.
It's an epigram rather than a premise.
Deterrence and revenge are two attempts at explaining it, is all.
But the epigram itself is what has to be touched by any argument against
the death penalty, not the revenge and deterrence reductions of it.
Or another epigram could do it, if you can find one.
Francis Muir
Dylan Bryan-Dolman:
> Ron Hardin:
> > The thing to do is figure out why people support
> > the death penalty. It's neither revenge nor deterrence.
> It's sex.
Certainly so in the case of the late unlamented Lord Chief Justice
Goddard, whose dresser laid out clean linen for him after a death
sentence pronouncement since he, the LCJ, invariably ejaculated as he
donned the black cap and passed sentence of death on the poor
unfortunate standing in the dock.
Jim Gunson
If the desire for a sacrifice was the basis of the supporters'
belief, then they presumably would not mind who was executed.
They might even prefer to execute someone as blameless as possible,
in order to maximise the perceived benefits of a sacrifice.
This is true to a small degree, in that many supporters are
not too fussed about the 'innocent till proven guilty' thing.
However, the major part of their desire for execution rests on
revenge e.g. "shooting's too good for people like that",
"people like that should not be allowed to exist",
are comments that one hears in all sincerity, from death penalty
supporters.
Pascal Zerling
Jim Gunson wrote:
> If the desire for a sacrifice was the basis of the supporters'
> belief, then they presumably would not mind who was executed.
> They might even prefer to execute someone as blameless as possible,
> in order to maximise the perceived benefits of a sacrifice.
That's not how it works. Everyone of us has done some bad things
we feel guilty about. So, we're all Guilty to some extent. Not as
guilty as the murderer who is condemned to death, but still guilty.
When the supporter of the death penalty watches an execution
take place, what he perceives subconsciously is the destruction
of someone who is so guilty that he has become Guilt Personified.
The condemned (i.e. the sacrificial victim) embodies within him
symbolically all the guilt in the world, so when he is destroyed,
the audience feels a sense of relief, the expiation of part of their
own guilt (which had been magically transferred into the victim).
This is the strange logic of sacrifice.
Jeff Inman
You make it sound so negative.
Sayan Bhattacharyya
"Pascal Zerling" <pascal....@kolumbus.fi> wrote:
>
> Jim Gunson wrote:
>
> > Ron Hardin wrote:
> > > The thing to do is figure out why people support the death
penalty.
> > > It's neither revenge nor deterrence.
> >
> > OK, tell us why. Do not the death penalty supporters, when asked
> > why, say either revenge or deterrence?
>
> The supporters of the death penalty are not aware of the true,
> subconscious reason, which is their desire to take part in the ancient
> ritual of human sacrifice.
Okay, but if this is true, then how do people in those benighted
countries where the death penalty has been abolished (such as
the countries in Western Europe) satisfy those desires?
Michael D Richard
: "Pascal Zerling" <pascal....@kolumbus.fi> wrote:
:> subconscious reason, which is their desire to take part in the ancient
:> ritual of human sacrifice.
: Okay, but if this is true, then how do people in those benighted
: countries where the death penalty has been abolished (such as
: the countries in Western Europe) satisfy those desires?
Xavier Onassis
"Ron Hardin" <rhha...@mindspring.com> wrote in message
news:3A532D...@mindspring.com...
I have a problem with this argument. It is the State that does
the executing because it is the State that is offended. The
State could just as well decide that its offense is assuaged
by life imprisonment, or even caning. (There's a lot to be
said for caning -- it prevents a lengthy relationship between
the State and the malefactor while letting the malefactor
inescapably know that he displeased the State).
The victim and kin are certainly hurt, but that is a matter of
tort.
In the legal system the State commands a monopoly of violence.
Various wrongs (torts) may be compensated for an individual through
the courts provided by the State. Regardless of the severity of
offense to the victim and kin, they do NOT have the right to revenge
to compensate for the offense.
The pro-victim argument is a fraudulent political argument where for
political gain we argue that the State is acting on behalf of the
victim, whereas in reality it acts on its own behalf.
On occasion a wealthy murderer is successfully sued by an injured
family, the Goldberg (name?) family for instance in the OJ case.
For most of us there is no compensation for grievous wrongs like
murder. The system doesn't work because most of us do not have
the means to use the court, and the wrongdoer does not have the
means to make it worthwhile. The State nevertheless reserves its
monopoly on violence and revenge.
--
Xavier Onassis
Pascal Zerling
Sayan Bhattacharyya wrote:
> Pascal Zerling wrote:
> > The supporters of the death penalty are not aware of the true,
> > subconscious reason, which is their desire to take part in the
> > ancient ritual of human sacrifice.
>
> Okay, but if this is true, then how do people in those benighted
> countries where the death penalty has been abolished (such as
> the countries in Western Europe) satisfy those desires?
They don't. They repress their desire for human sacrifice, or
sublimate it into other areas of life such as artistic creation, or
perhaps watching team sports. But you know, an event as
existentially extreme as a public execution will involve arguments
by experts from all walks of life. You've seen the legal argument,
and the consideration of the victim's point of view, expressed
by others in this thread. And there are yet others, such as the
economic argument that it is not worth paying the cost of
keeping the killer alive, or the argument from functionalist
sociology that eliminating these individuals serves a useful
purpose in society. What I wanted to highlight was the sacral
element in the act of killing another human being, including
by the State. It is, of course, pure speculation to argue that the
ancient ritual of sacrifice was gradually transformed over
millennia into other social phenomena in the modern world,
such as the death penalty, the vivisection of laboratory animals,
death in battle, or the exploitation of workers under capitalism.
But I'm not the only one to be interested in these rather morbid
ideas. One of my favourite writers, Roberto Calasso, deals
with these same subjects in his book _The Ruin of Kasch_,
which I would recommend if you're intereseted in thinking
more about these things. He brings up many other depth-
psychological aspects of sacrifice, such as the idea that the
very act of selecting something, such as a flower, also means
killing it, as when we pick up the flower, we must uproot it.
Ron Hardin
> The pro-victim argument is a fraudulent political argument where for
> political gain we argue that the State is acting on behalf of the
> victim, whereas in reality it acts on its own behalf.
The state is supporting the place of the victim's voice, not
the victim; and it has an interest in that place surviving
in society in general.
Perhaps societies with a tradition of individualism are more likely
to have the idea.
The more planning-organized societies might see it otherwise.
Jim Gunson
the death penalty and the other doesn't, yet both want to
expiate their guilt in the manner you describe. Belief in
the Resurrection is the obvious outlet, but subconsciously is
the deathpenalty supporter more incapable of coming to terms
with his unexpiated guilt through less gruesome means ?
Why did the people who performed human sacrifice
preferentially choose virgins, or is that just a myth ?
Jim Gunson
Georg Fertig
On Thu, 4 Jan 2001, Ron Hardin wrote:
> Xavier Onassis wrote:
> > The pro-victim argument is a fraudulent political argument where for
> > political gain we argue that the State is acting on behalf of the
> > victim, whereas in reality it acts on its own behalf.
>
> The state is supporting the place of the victim's voice, not
> the victim; and it has an interest in that place surviving
> in society in general.
>
> Perhaps societies with a tradition of individualism are more likely
> to have the idea.
Including Saudi Arabia, Texas, and China.
--
Georg Fertig, Hist. Seminar, Domplatz 20-22, 48143 Münster.
Ron Hardin
> > Perhaps societies with a tradition of individualism are more likely
> > to have the idea.
>
> Including Saudi Arabia, Texas, and China.
There's other ways to get a death penalty, which no doubt then can
be argued against in other ways.
The idea in question above however is a place accorded to the voice of the
victim, which is what supports the death penalty in the individualistic
USA.
Xavier Onassis
> Xavier Onassis wrote:
> > The pro-victim argument is a fraudulent political argument where for
> > political gain we argue that the State is acting on behalf of the
> > victim, whereas in reality it acts on its own behalf.
>
> The state is supporting the place of the victim's voice, not
> the victim; and it has an interest in that place surviving
> in society in general.
You are making an assertion in place of a rebuttal. I said "it isn't",
you replied "it is." This is getting noplace.
> Perhaps societies with a tradition of individualism are more likely
> to have the idea.
Heh, heh. Society and Individualism, les mots se jurent.
> The more planning-organized societies might see it otherwise.
Heh, heh. And that leads to vegetarianism, and we can't have
that! We'll lose our precious bodily fluids.
--
Xavier Onassis
Ron Hardin
> > > The pro-victim argument is a fraudulent political argument where for
> > > political gain we argue that the State is acting on behalf of the
> > > victim, whereas in reality it acts on its own behalf.
> >
> > The state is supporting the place of the victim's voice, not
> > the victim; and it has an interest in that place surviving
> > in society in general.
>
> You are making an assertion in place of a rebuttal. I said "it isn't",
> you replied "it is." This is getting noplace.
Why is that?
Pascal Zerling
Jim Gunson wrote:
> How do you distinguish between two people, one who supports the
> death penalty and the other doesn't, yet both want to expiate their
> guilt in the manner you describe? Belief in the Resurrection is the
> obvious outlet, but subconsciously is the death penalty supporter
> more incapable of coming to terms with his unexpiated guilt through
> less gruesome means? Why did the people who performed human
> sacrifice preferentially choose virgins, or is that just a myth?
In some ancient societies, innocent virgins were sacrificed, in others,
convicted criminals. Christianity itself is obviously based on a sacrificial
myth -- the crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. The rough thesis
which I'm defending (and it's not just mine; for a fuller account of it see
Roberto Calasso's book _The Ruin of Kasch_) is that sacrifice is a sort
of hidden element in the modern collective unconsciousness. It's present
in many, surprising places. I gave one possible account of how it might
be possible to interpret a public execution as a sacrificial ritual (this
application of the idea is my own; Calasso doesn't discuss it). Sacrifice
is a Jungian archetype, but not in Jung's deterministic biological sense
(so that it's the same for everyone) but so that the way it manifests itself
varies from person to person. The people who don't support the death
penalty have a different kind of mentality from those who do. Perhaps,
as you suggest, the death penalty supporters are more bloody-minded
than those who oppose it, and they need the powerful drug of watching
a public execution to expiate their own guilt. The opponents of the
death penalty find alternative, less horrific, ways of bringing sacrifice
into their lives, such as by believing in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
This is all very speculative, you understand, and the theory is far from
perfect. I happen to find the idea of the presence of sacrifice in modern
life thought-provoking, but I'm not sure how true the idea is. There
seems to be no way to verify or falsify Calasso's thesis, so it's not
really a scientific theory.
Ron Hardin
> perfect. I happen to find the idea of the presence of sacrifice in modern
> life thought-provoking, but I'm not sure how true the idea is. There
> seems to be no way to verify or falsify Calasso's thesis, so it's not
> really a scientific theory.
Take a look at sexual-preditor hysteria.
On scapegoating in general, Kenneth Burke ``A Grammar of Motives'' pp 406-408
gets to the point.
However sacrifice is a reduction when it does not apply.
Pascal Zerling
Ron Hardin wrote:
> Take a look at sexual-preditor hysteria. On scapegoating
> in general, Kenneth Burke ``A Grammar of Motives'' pp 406-408
> gets to the point. However sacrifice is a reduction when it does
> not apply.
But do you think a public execution can be interpreted as a sacrificial
ritual or not? And if not, would you say Roberto Calasso applies the
concept of sacrifice to too many cases because he is a Roman Catholic?
I tend towards this interpretation myself.
Steve Hayes
>On occasion a wealthy murderer is successfully sued by an injured
>family, the Goldberg (name?) family for instance in the OJ case.
>For most of us there is no compensation for grievous wrongs like
>murder. The system doesn't work because most of us do not have
>the means to use the court, and the wrongdoer does not have the
>means to make it worthwhile. The State nevertheless reserves its
>monopoly on violence and revenge.
Perhaps the state should set up a criminal victims compensation fund for
victims of violent crimes, with compensation being determined at the time of
sentensing the perpetrator, to save the cost of a separate court case. And the
perpetrator's contribution to the fund being determined at the same time.
Steve Hayes
E-mail: haye...@yahoo.com
Web: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/7734/litmain.htm
Marcy Thompson
>The people who don't support the death
>penalty have a different kind of mentality from those who do.
Explain the people who hold one opinon about the
death penalty and then change their minds.
ObBook: Crossing, a memoir
Marcy
--
Marcy Thompson
ma...@squirrel.com
Ron Hardin
I don't think they are, that is, such an interpretation would be made
by an enthusiast of sacrifice theory anxious to apply it yet again.
It doesn't get to an interesting truth for this case though.
For sexual predator hysteria I think it applies very well.
It's possible to dream up public executions that match your theory
but I think not in the US.
I don't know about Calasso one way or the other. Mortification isn't
the same as sacrifice, or at least the scapegoating which is what seems
to be in mind.
Bruce McGuffin
> But do you think a public execution can be interpreted as a sacrificial
> ritual or not? And if not, would you say Roberto Calasso applies the
> concept of sacrifice to too many cases because he is a Roman Catholic?
> I tend towards this interpretation myself.
So where are these public executions you keep talking about taking place?
Bruce McGuffin
Xavier Onassis
"Steve Hayes" <khan...@global.co.za> wrote in message
news:3a547e40...@news.saix.net...
> On Wed, 3 Jan 2001 19:44:45 -0600, "Xavier Onassis" <x...@bogus.net>
wrote:
>
> >On occasion a wealthy murderer is successfully sued by an injured
> >family, the Goldberg (name?) family for instance in the OJ case.
> >For most of us there is no compensation for grievous wrongs like
> >murder. The system doesn't work because most of us do not have
> >the means to use the court, and the wrongdoer does not have the
> >means to make it worthwhile. The State nevertheless reserves its
> >monopoly on violence and revenge.
>
> Perhaps the state should set up a criminal victims compensation fund
for
> victims of violent crimes, with compensation being determined at the
time of
> sentensing the perpetrator, to save the cost of a separate court case.
And the
> perpetrator's contribution to the fund being determined at the same
time.
I want to think about that. Perhaps such a fund would spur
professional victims. Perhaps citizens would object to the burden
of compensation (taxes) when the burden properly belongs to the
malefactor.
One must always look at how people may misuse a well-intentioned
program.
Maybe we can privatize the concept (that should make Ron Hardin
happy). Insurance companies could offer victim insurance. Maybe
we could make such insurance mandatory like auto liability
insurance. So, instead of paying a socialistic tax you pay
a free market insurance premium.
Golly. We're on to something here.
--
Xavier Onassis
Don Tuite
Xavier Onassis wrote:
> One must always look at how people may misuse a well-intentioned
> program.
>
> Maybe we can privatize the concept (that should make Ron Hardin
> happy). Insurance companies could offer victim insurance. Maybe
> we could make such insurance mandatory like auto liability
> insurance. So, instead of paying a socialistic tax you pay
> a free market insurance premium.
There have always been capital crimes, but when did homicide become a
capital crime?
For a long time, wasn't homicide a tort, to be paid by a blood-price
related to the social position of the victim and paid to the family?
And when was intent made a factor in assessing the blame attached to a
homicide?
I think Ron's epigram is something comparatively recent.
And while scapegoating may be ancient enough to be considered Jungian,
state-imposed execution for murder is a different animal entirely. I
think the connection is fanciful.
Don
ObBookRef: The family-feud chapters of _Huckleberry Finn_.
Sue Rickels
"The thing to do is figure out why people support the death penalty.
It's neither revenge nor deterrence."
Pascal Zerling says: "No, it's more like modern form of human
sacrifice."
Marcy Thompson asks:
"Explain the people who hold one opinon about the death penalty and then
change their minds."
In the abstract, I have no problems with truly horrible crimes being
punished by execution--Timothy MacVeigh comes to mind. As a result of
going to capital murder trial Laredo in 1992, I changed my mind because
the system is hopelessly flawed and exists as a mechanism for
scapegoating.
The death penalty for most Americans is an abstract occurrence for the
worst of the worst and they sleep well at night thinking that our
judicial system selects those to be executed in a just manner.
I am ashamed to say I was once one of those. It was a purely academic
argument to me. (I use the death penalty as a topic to teach the
position paper. The arguments for and against are pretty cut and dried
so that I can concentrate on rhetoric and support.)
I believe that the death penalty is a mindless thing for most proponents
who are much like the denizens in Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery." Of
course it's not as fair as that lottery where everyone was equal--the
death penalty clearly discrimates against the poor, minorities, and the
mentally incompetent who are easily trappped.
In terms of scapegoating, I think it's more
like Oedipus Rex where there is a unsolved crime that is polluting the
polis.
Find the murderer the oracle says, cast him out and the plague will end.
Americans are rightfully upset about the plague of violence--especially
violence that appears random--in our country. Capital punishment "sends
a message" that we don't tolerate violence and the sentencing and
execution gives the illusion that we have purged our nation and we are
"safe" for awhile.
As for changing ones' mind, one only has to look closely at any number
of capital cases to see that the system for choosing the scapegoat is
flawed to the point that people who are innocent (not just a
technicality) are on death row. That's real scapegoating. I think that
once people are forced to look closely at capital punishment, as the
governor of Illinois was, many more Americans will reject it and beome
like "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" (to use another freshman lit.
story) who decide a scapegoat is too high a price for a society to pay.
But in order to walk away, they first have to become aware of the
specifics of capital punishment--details of actual cases.
With the Innocence Project and DNA testing, the press is finally giving
some attention to the injustices and the call for a moratorium in
Virginia is an appropriate response. Polls show that most Americans
would prefer life in prison as the ultimate sentence if it really were
"for life."
As a result of my continuing involvement in the Miguel Martinez case, I
have made close friends in Belgium and Sweden and have come to realize
the extent to which the death penalty is a human rights issue to
Europeans. Sadly, all the work against the death penalty is seldom heard
here.
Some background:
In 1992 I went to a captal murder trial in Laredo, the triple-ax
murders, in which three high school kids from the affluent area of town
were involved. I went to the trial with the notion that I could watch
the system at work and perhaps get some insight into how these kids got
so screwed up. Several of my daughters friends, my students and a
colleague knew Miguel Venegas who actually did the killing.
Five days later when Miguel Angel Martinez. age 17, and an accomplice,
was sentenced to death, I was shocked that our system was so flawed to
allow this penalty for his part in the crime.
This was an obvious case of scapegoating. Martinez was convicted by the
law of parties: he was there and didn't leave or stop the killings.
Venegas, who did the killing, has still not been brought to trial, and
the one who provided the weapons and drove them, the son of a district
judge, has never been indicted. Martinez is the son of a single mom from
the projects who never had even a traffic ticket. The so-called defense
lasted 40 minutes. The infamous psychiatrist, Dr. Death ( I forget his
name), testified that Martinez was a danger to society without ever
examining him. Fred Zain, San Antonio serologist who falsified evidence
in West Virginia and South Texas, testified (wrongly we now know) that
Martinez had actually killed one of the victims. The habeas hearing
exposed missing fingerprints, "murder" weapons with no blood (ax), and
animal blood (the knife), and a deal between the district attorney and
the district judge to keep the judge's son from being indicted.
All in all, the whole thing is rank. For a number of years I thought
this could only happen on the Texas border, but the situation in
Illinois and numerous other cases prove otherwise.
Sue
Steve Hayes
>> Perhaps the state should set up a criminal victims compensation fund
>for
>> victims of violent crimes, with compensation being determined at the
>time of
>> sentensing the perpetrator, to save the cost of a separate court case.
>And the
>> perpetrator's contribution to the fund being determined at the same
>time.
>
>I want to think about that. Perhaps such a fund would spur
>professional victims. Perhaps citizens would object to the burden
>of compensation (taxes) when the burden properly belongs to the
>malefactor.
That could be taken care of by having a proportion of all fines set aside for
the fund, and, as I said, the judge, at the time of sentencing could determine
a specific perpetrator's contribution to the fund.
>One must always look at how people may misuse a well-intentioned
>program.
Can you suggest ways in which people would misuse this one? I'm tempted to
think "only in America"?
>Maybe we can privatize the concept (that should make Ron Hardin
>happy). Insurance companies could offer victim insurance. Maybe
>we could make such insurance mandatory like auto liability
>insurance. So, instead of paying a socialistic tax you pay
>a free market insurance premium.
Yeccccch!
>Golly. We're on to something here.
Right, privatise the prisons, and let them be run by the insurance companies,
who could compensate the victims if there was anything left after the
directors and shareholders had got their cut.
Pascal Zerling
Ron Hardin wrote:
> Pascal Zerling wrote:
> > But do you think a public execution can be interpreted as a
> > sacrificial ritual or not? And if not, would you say Roberto Calasso
> > applies the concept of sacrifice to too many cases because he is a
> > Roman Catholic? I tend towards this interpretation myself.
>
> I don't know about Calasso one way or the other.
I spent a couple of hours last night selecting what I think are the
most interesting passages in _The Ruin of Kasch_ where Calasso
discusses sacrifice, and its presence in the modern world. The
following excerpts should give you at least some idea of his
views on sacrifice, but you'd have to read the whole book to
get the full picture:
It is the Spanish War -- rather than the Russian campaign,
which displayed the recurrent ordeal among the powers --
that holds the still only partly deciphered key to Napoleon
and prefigures events which would devastate history. The war
in Spain is the earliest successful vendetta of weakness over
strength. The dour mountain people, the "proud and filthy
beggars" who cruelly harried the French troops and were the
first who "dared to fight as irregulars against the first
modern armies," are not only the forebears of the Partisans
(and later of the guerillas and the terrorists), flouting all
strategy and order, as Carl Schmitt has shown; they are also
the precursors of a vast shape whose features are only now
becoming clear: ethnic revolt, the rejection of the West as
a soft epidermis superimposed on all lands, suffocating them.
At ever shorter intervals the epidermis splits, as in Iran
with the ousting of the Shah and with the murderous fury of
the _mostazafin_, the disinherited paupers, which brings us
back to the Partisan. Behind the Partisan is the Pauper. And
it is the intertwining of these two figures which gives them
their power to spread everywhere -- as well as their capacity
for self-deception. For the Partisan will tend (and always has
tended, without knowing it) to serve an "interested third
party", who in the end disposses the rebels more subtly,
turning them into docile agents (but will it always be this
way?); while the Pauper will tend (and always has tended) to
seize the weapons of the Rich, in order to be even more harshly
oppressed by other Paupers. This bitter revolt, this rejection
of the West, which is achieved by exploiting all the flotsam
of the West, all its words chopped up into sharp fragments,
is a belated, furious reply to the purpose which Léon Bloy in
his theological sarcasm defined as "the lofty idea of the
general sacrifice of the poor." (p. 51-2)
The law can be observed by a single subject. Sacrifice demands
a dual subject. Sacrifice demands a dual subject. For this
reason, in the law we recognize the exoteric side of sacrifice.
Esoteric in its nature, sacrifice can only give way to
storytelling, which vanquishes it in an ordeal involving both.
Storytelling is the esoteric of the esoteric, the secret of
the secret: it teaches us how to live outside the cycle, in
the hashish-like suspension of the word. It is the way of life
that comes to light after the defeat of sacrifice, yet it
retains the gesture of sacrifice diluted in all gestures. But
it is not enough to save Kasch; indeed, it hastens its ruin.
For many generations the priests had strangled the king after
observing the stars; for a few years the inhabitants of Naphta
lived in the memory of the words of Far-li-mas, before Naphta
was destroyed. "Of Naphta's glory years, nothing remained but
the tales of Far-li-mas, which he had brought with him from
the land beyond the eastern sea." (p. 129)
In Naphta a struggle occurs between the order of bloody
sacrifice, which depends on the stars in the sky, and the
order of a life without attachments, which speaks in the
stories of Far-li-mas and will be disguised in history.
Far-li-mas wins the struggle -- and history begins. But it is
a victory that lasts only a short time, the victory of a single
dual subject: Far-li-mas and Sali. In fact, both orders are
condemned to ruin. (p. 131)
The legend of Kasch teaches us that sacrifice is the cause of
ruin, but that the absence of sacrifice is also the cause of
ruin. This pair of simultaneous and contradictory truths hints
at a singular and more obscure truth, which lies in tranquillity:
society is ruin. And from this a sign points us to something
further, something on the bedrock: society is ruin because in
it reverberates the sound of the world -- its incessant,
consuming drone. (p. 133)
Sacrifice does not serve to expiate guilt, as the texbooks say.
Sacrifice _is_ guilt -- the only one.
Sacrifice is self-elaborating guilt. It transforms murder
into suicide. It enables us to see murder from a perspective
in which the vanishing point is suicide -- a point that is so
far away we find ourselves gazing at the origin of all things.
Where we encounter divine suicide: the Creation.
The basis of sacrifice lies in the fact that each one of us
is two, not one. We are not a dense and uniform brick. Each
of us consists of the two birds of the _Upanishads_, on the
same branch of the cosmic tree; One eats, and the other watches
the one that is eating. The revelation of the sacrificial
stratagem -- that sacrificer and victim are two persons, not
one -- is the dazzling, ultimate revelation concerning ourselves,
concerning our double eye. (p. 134)
History is also summed up in the fact that for a long time
men killed other beings and dedicated them to an invisible
power, but that after a certain point they killed without
dedicating the victims to anyone. Did they forget? Did they
consider that act of homage futile? Did they condemn it as
repugnant? All these reasons had some sort of bearing on
the matter. Afterward, nothing remained but pure killing.
Creation is the body of the first victim. In the Creation
the divinity amputates and forsakes a part of itself.
Thereafter the divinity can only observe the amputated limb,
in the hands of necessity.
_Quechcotona_, in Nahuatl, means both "to cut off someone's
head" and "to pick an ear of grain with one's hand." The
perception which lies at the origin of sacrifice is, in
fact, that every act of _picking_ is also a _killing_ --
that any uprooting, any detaching of something from what it
is connected to (and if we go from one link to the next,
this is nothing but the All), is a killing. But life, if it
is to be perpetuated, demands that something be picked.
Sacrifice enshrouds the first uprooting, the first detachment,
the original _decisio_ (from the verb _caedo_, meaning to kill
a sacrificial victim with spilling of blood), in a vast,
delicate, extremely fine network, which links the cavity of
the wound to the All at the moment it is opened. It is possible
to pick merely an ear of grain, but the highest accretion of
power occurs when "picking" means killing a person. Not
uprooting a stem but using the "obsidian butterfly" (as they
used to say in ancient Mexico) to cut a still-throbbing heart
from the torso of a supine victim. When one tears away the
network that links the heart to the whole of the body, one is
inundated with six or seven liters of blood. This is life's
abundance, which is vouchsafed forever only in that blood.
(p. 135)
The Aztecs were perpetually at war, but not out of desire
for conquest. For them, war was mainly a device by which they
procured prisoners, who then became sacrificial victims.
Twenty thousand a year, according to the calculations of some
scholars. In relation to sacrifice, war was a by-product.
When sacrifice ceased to be an institution, it withdrew into
its subordinate power: war. In August 1914, the entire
liturgical apparatus of sacrifice was once again unpacked
from the trunks. The bloody images were dusted off and made
the center of attention in homes and newspapers. During the
Second World War, in contrast, it was enough to focus on a
single word: "holocaust".
Experimentation is sacrifice from which all guilt has been
expunged. The sacrificial pyramid, where blood has soaked
into the hot stones of the altar, becomes a vast slaughterhouse,
spreading horizontally through some nondescript urban neighbourhood.
The slaughterhouses of Chicago, our university laboratories
with their corridors reeking of dismembered frogs, and our
camouflaged power plants in the desert are the sites of a
single cult. They distribute power through violent intervention,
through decisions whereby all is concentrated on procedures, so
that their capacity for control is always being perfected.
Hadn't the Vedic seers already said that "precision, reality
is the sacrifice"? The more perfect the control, the richer the
material to be developed, the more intense the power released,
the more uncontrollable its outcome.
In technology, the _accursed part_, the _fire's part_, has
become experiment's boundless waste, dedicated to the unknown
god, who is the god of the unknown. And, as in sacrifice, it
is the irreversibly destroyed part which guarantees future
life. Only research that is conducted in the dark, that
ventures into unknown, can give sufficient nourishment to
the process. Nothing is more laughable than disputes over
the _limits_ of experimental research. As if that which is
based on the abolition of limits could be contained within
a boundary narrower than that of the All, without negating
itself. Such disputes are fomented by foolish and incredulous
priests against the stern masters of the cult, as if a
brahman had dared to cast doubt on the tenet that the gods
demand sacrifice. (p. 134-7)
The fact that nature is cadenced by recurrences, by time's
breathing, shows that it is a sacrificial object. The world
is a part of divinity that divinity has detached from itself,
allowing it to live according to its own rules and no longer
according to divine whim. But the invisible cord between
divinity and creation is not entirely severed. The divinity
can also take back its world and intervene in it brutally:
it can obliterate order, prevent the stars from returning.
Hence the sacrifice performed by men: along that same cord,
which becomes the column of smoke rising from the sacred
pipe, rises the human offering -- that part of life which
is not allowed to live unless it is reabsorbed by the sky
from which it descended. In surrendering part of the
world to the divinity, the sacrificer wants the divinity
to surrender the rest of the world to him, and to cease
intervening in its arbitrary, uncontrollable way. The
sacrificer also wants the divinity's permission to use the
world. Thus, the first consequence of the eclipse of
sacrifice will be that the world will be used without
restraint, without limit, without any part being devoted
to something else. But here, too, the end overlaps with
the origin, life a reflection and hence reversed: once
sacrifice is dissolved, the whole world reverts, unawares,
to a great sacrificial workshop. There is only one statement
that, amid universal uncertainty, no one would dare
cast doubt upon, since it has become assimilated and
obvious: namely, that the world lives insofar as it
produces. This is the same obvious truth that the _Rig Veda_
recognizes when it says that the world lives insofar as
it sacrifices. Just as originally the divinity could sacrifice
only itself, since nothing else existed, so now the world
sacrifices, under other names, itself to itself, for the
divinity has vanished. The unwitting sacrificers now resemble
the Sadhya, those obscure "gods before the gods" who later
fell "because they considered themselves above sacrifice."
But a power can also fall because it believes that sacrifice
has been enclosed in a room at the Musée de L´Homme.
If industry is a sacrificial workshop, the prestigious value
of the New implies that any innovative object is redolent
of the ashes of immolation. An unknown quantity of material
has been burned to produce it. The New is that part of the
victim which the gods have not touched at their banquet.
The gods devour the precious prototype and leave men the
endless copies. Thus, industry is founded on reproducibilty.
But every movie star is a constellation, incorporated into
the heavens after being devoured by the gods. (p. 138-9)
The whole history of modern philosophy is deeply troubled by
sacrifice, by its terrible truth. In Hegel, the dialectic
is a transcription, an adulterated translation of sacrifice;
Schopenhauer is the _sannyasin_ of the West, the renouncer,
and as such is always connected with sacrifice; Abraham is
the sacrifice around which Kierkegaard's thought revolves;
and Dionysus (and the Crucified, who signs two "letters of
madness" on Janurary 4, 1889, in Turin) is Nietzsche's
sacrifice. In contrast, sacrifice is absent from the
epistemological line running from Kant to the Vienna circle
by way of the formalization of systems. But here the premise
is that knowledge is an artificial limb, to be offered to
science. It is left unsaid that this artificial limb will
later be offered by science to technology, so that the
latter can carry out the sacrifice under the name of experiment,
and so that finally the sacrifice can be multiplied through
the methods of production. (p. 146)
LAW AND ORDER
It is significant that we say "law and order" -- that it is
not enough to say only "law" or only "order". In fact, the
word "order" does not repeat, does not _echo_, the meaning
of "law". Order is what the law, on its own, cannot achieve.
Order is law plus sacrifice, the perpetual supplement, the
perpetual extra that must be destroyed so that order may
exist. The world cannot live by law alone, because it needs
an order that law alone is unable to provide. The world needs
to destroy something to make order; and it must destroy it
outside the law, with pleasure, with hatred, with indifference.
The modern age is founded on the misguided assumption
that the words "law" and "order" are synonyms, that we say
"law and order" because if we use an emphatic pleonasm we will
command more respect. Destruction, precisely because it no
longer has an acknowledged existence, takes shape in darkness,
gathers together, adapting its dimensions to the law that
would claim to deny it. The more vast and ramified the law,
the more devastating the destruction that eludes it. Every
war arises for the purpose of creating the order which is
law is always powerless to produce. The Marxist idea of
revolution acknowledges this impotence of the law and at
the same time appropriates the whole apparatus of sacrifice,
exploiting it to establish an order that denies the
metaphysical foundations of sacrifice.
The impotence of the law stems from its inability to deal
with surplus. The law presupposes an undivided subject.
Sacrifice presupposes a dual subject: the sacrificer and the
victim. And the surplus is, in fact, the victim. Therefore,
the law is always the exoteric of sacrifice.
"Surplus value", the modern term for the "accursed part" and
the starting point of the Marxist attack on capital, becomes
the object of a dispute that can only be resolved only by
revolutionary violence, once we have recognized the law's
impotence in dealing with surplus. Surplus value is the object
of the sacrifice, which a new priestly sect wants to conduct
in a different way. But like the haruspices of ancient Rome,
the Marxist priests agree with their enemies when they claim
that the dispute is not about the object of sacrifice (that
is, what is destroyed in sacrifice). Marxists speak of private
property, public property, fair distribution of resources.
They deny that the surplus, instead of belonging to the
oppressor class or the oppressed class, belongs to nature --
the modern name for the Other.
Surplus is the excess of nature with respect to culture,
the part of Nature that culture is obliged to gamble with,
consume, destroy, consecrate. In the process of dealing
with that excess, every culture draws its own portrait.
Law tends toward monotony; its variations are paltry compared
to the rich diversity of forms. And the variety of forms
determines the range of sacrficial games.
Sacrifice is inscribed in our physiology. Any order,
biological or social, is founded on an expulsion, on a quantity
of consumed energy, because order must be smaller than the
matter it orders. The only order without visible expulsion
would be analogous to be metabolism of plant life. It would
be a culture that managed to exist witout being founded on
difference, hence without any foundation at all -- a
culture indistinguishable from the rustling of a tree.
Every sacrifice is the recognition of an Other. After all
emancipations have been achieved, the West will be unable
to recognize anything but itself. Its paralysis, which is
hidden behind the turmoil of praxis, results from the fact
that it no longer knows to whom it should give itself. But
although the gods fell, the hypostases did not. Thus, the
world ultimately gives itself to the clumsy, sinister
procession that Max Stirner described -- to Reason, Liberty,
Humanity, the Cause. But awakening from those hypostases
is bitter, more so than awakening from any other superstition.
(p. 148-9)
"Nodding the head." The last gesture remaining in the face
of life's blows was the gesture that, according to the
oracle, the sheep should make before being sacrificed:
"Descendant of Theopropos, the gods forbid you to slay
the sturdy race of sheep. But if, after a libation, an
animal willingly nods its head toward the purifying water,
I say that you may appropriately sacrifice it." (p. 154)
From the tangled skein of sacrifice, the West chose a
single thread, which it wanted to separate from all the
others: the expulsion of the sacred through the killing
of the sacrificial victim. Without any great regret, it
renounced eating the sacred, gave up absorbing a tolerable
part of the source of all power, of the inexhaustible _soma_.
Henceforth, domestic cooking was enough -- or at most a
banquet among friends, with perhaps a few courtesans
chattering away. But there remained something murky and
shocking in those sacrificial practices: The impurity
(before it became focused entirely in the victim) was in
the subject himself, in the sacrificer -- and it oppressed
his life, which he now wanted to be simply transparent
and cruel. At the end of a long, obscure process, sacrifice
became trial by law. With the advent of the law, guilt,
which belongs to the sacrifice and above all to the
sacrificer, is immediately displaced onto the victim. He
is no longer called the "victim" but the "guilty party."
When life is brought to trial ("life being guilty," as
Joseph de Maistre will one day remark), the law severs
the connection between guilt and the process of life. In
a trial by law, guilt is outside the law; all it expects
of the law is to be stabbed through by it. Between
_Oedipus the King_ and the Gospels, sacrifice has completed
its transformation into trial. Henceforth the law will
choose the victim. Yet a fully effective trial -- inasmuch
as it liberates us from the sacred -- is a trial in which
the innocent is condemned. This fact reveals that the law
has always been and will forever be overwhelmed by something
prior to it, stronger than it. Pilate washes his hands
because he feels that the law is powerless to absolve. Christ
is condemned not by the law but by the impotence of the law.
He is condemned by the crowd and its priests.
The sacred is concentrated in the victim, is suppressed in
the victim, and emanates from the victim. In any case, the
sacred must be killed, because it inspires terror: its
perpetual contagion makes life impossible. The only other
alternative is a modern invention: keep the sacred from
being seen. Thus, it is either terrifying or unperceived.
But the situation in which the sacred is not perceived for
what it is reproduces, in reverse, the situation in which
original terror prevails. It is something widespread,
omnipresent, which inspires to kill almost without reason
and which drives them to inflict fierce tortures -- on
themselves, on anyone at all.
The specifically modern sacrifice is an immense industrial
undertaking which rejects the name and memory of sacrifice.
One speaks of entire classes as subjects for elimination,
or of the inevitable "dropouts" who are ejected from the
machinery of society every day. But all this is something
society owes itself. Thus, divine beings are still anointed,
still recline in furs, still adorn themselves with flowers
and snow-white draperies before an invisible knife descends
on them. Astral archons in the form of young women, arrested
for shoplifting in department stores or killed by Veronal.
(p. 155-6)
The extinction of sacrifice. The victim gradually loses
its power. We become detached from the animal -- it is no
longer considered so close to us that it can be substituted
for us. Humans, now protected by the law, are rejected as
victims. Thus, the last victim will be a god condemned by
the law. (p. 169)
Nothing is so repugnant -- or so pathetic -- as the
language of sacrifice on the lips of someone who does
not know its premises. Nothing is so devatating as the
act of sacrifice in the hands of someone who does not
know its premises. Nothing is so irrepressible as the
return of the words and gestures of sacrifice in someone
who does not know its premises. (p. 173)
From the sacrifice, through the brahman, to the renouncer.
From the renouncer, through the individual, to technology.
The process, which began as an attempt at maximum affirmation
of the world (and devout dominion of the world) in the
doctrine of the Vedic seers and shrank to the analytic
negation of the world (with Buddha), begins expanding again
with the renouncer, the individual-outside-the-world. It
culminates in the emancipated and enlightened individual-
in-the-world and through him, in the anonymous subject of
technology, an enterprise of dominion, control, affirmation --
though it is no longer clear of what, since the quata have
meanwhile dissolved the world beyond any possible localization.
(p. 179)
Henceforth the name of the new sacrifice will be _experiment_.
The sacrificial attitude continues to operate in it, but it
operates invisibly, unwittingly. Whereever it surfaces it is
rejected, rightly, as a relic.
In the Western world, governments and newspapers often
speak of "sacrifices" when the state of the economy demands
drastic measures. The word nowadays appears only slightly
less frequently than technical terms like "inflation". It
is another of the many signs of the presence of the archaic.
In present-day usage, "sacrifice" connotes a series of
economic interventions implying that individuals renounce
certain goods. But in this usage the word loses its most
basic meaning: destruction. Here nothing must be destroyed.
It is assumed that the goods to be renounced will be much
more useful and much better employed in other ways. Part
of the money that would have been spent on consumer goods,
on images of play and pleasure, will serve to augment the
funds of the State. The word "sacrifice" would be out of
place, therefore, if it did not reaffirm that in the realm
of the divine the counterpart of the individual is society
itself -- because it knows best how to utilize what the
individual gives up, how to make it productive in the realm
of the invisible. In contrast, there is a true sacrifice,
one that implies destruction, taking place at every moment
on the planet; this sacrifice is known as experiment. It
is premised on the cancellation of every metaphysical
memory of sacrifice -- a cancellation so extreme that,
as a result of a sinister misnomer, researchers speaking
laboratory jargon talk of "sacrificing" animals when they
get rid of them after experiments. Yet the scientist who
uses this term will be unable to assign a meaning to it
once he has left the laboratory: he regards it as a
remnant of superstitious beliefs. Economists, on the
contrary, feel no embarrassment about using it. On one
side, an actual sacrifice that cannot be named; on the
other, a fictitious sacrifice that is always named --
these two prongs silently hold the world in their vise,
until the day the contrasts and contradictions in the use
of the word "sacrifice" are annulled: with war, the
richest of experiments. In wartime, the word "sacrifice"
occupies the front pages of the papers even more than
during economic crises, and everyone knows that it
involves blood, destruction, and death. Uniformed soldiers
are interviewed and declare that they are prepared to
make the "supreme sacrifice". The entire nation declares
itself ready for "sacrifice" every day. In the end,
monuments to the fallen are all that remains. (p. 181)
The triple deception of sacrifice. Humans deceive the
gods, through substitution of the victim. The officiants
deceive the victim, hiding the knife among the ears of
grain because up to the end they fear he will rebel.
And humans are deceived by the gods, who demand sacrifice
in order to guarantee life -- but then, through the act,
allow death to be confirmed.
The rice thrown at newlyweds originated in the grains of
barley that were once scattered over the sacrificial
victim. The grains evoke the ancient practice of stoning
the victim -- the surest method of killing, because it
permits one to kill the victim without even touching him.
Transition from sacrifice to experiment. In sacrifice,
everything is based on the premise of an other, of many
others, invisible, who respond to the _right action_.
By making an irrevocable offering, man indicates that
he is ready to listen and that he anticipates a reply --
and he must repeat this sign of receptiveness over and
over again. Experiment is based on the premise that the
_right action_ grows out of accumulation. The researcher
tests a thousand acts in uncertainty and darkness; only
one of them will be the _right action_. All the others,
which entail a dissipation of energy, are lost, tributes
to an unknown. The application of the _right action_
to the world, and the possibility of repeating it forever,
will lead to an increase of power corresponding to
the life exalted by sacrifice. (p. 214)
The central role that sacrifice played in archaic
societies has been assumed by experimentation.
The cruel priests who raised the knife over the altar
are now the authors of conspiracies and plots. (p. 248)
Jeff Inman
> For a long time, wasn't homicide a tort, to be paid by a blood-price
> related to the social position of the victim and paid to the family?
Perhaps the assumption that all folks
are equal implies that the only suitable
payment would be the murderer's own life.
ObShortStory: "Revenge", by Jim Harrison
Xavier Onassis
to disagree with in your account.
Scapegoating is not limited to the death penalty. Right
now a wrongful conviction that bothers me is that of
Paris Drake in NY. He was convicted of bashing a woman's
head in with a hunk of concrete, and sentenced to 25 years.
The victim, Nicole Barrett, survived just barely, and is now
in prolonged recovery.
But from the NY Times accounts, although the paper doesn't
say so, he didn't do it. He is a petty criminal whose worst
offense was burglary and selling phony cocaine.
While he was in Rikers awaiting trial for this offense, another
woman had her head bashed in with a hunk of concrete. Maybe it
was a brick this time. Even the Manhattan district attorney
didn't see how he could pin the latest on Drake. So, the
police rounded up a homeless man, Bently Louis Grant, for
the offender. Just like the "usual suspects" in Casablanca.
They "scoured" the homeless shelters in the first case too,
in finding Paris Drake.
The logical conclusion would have been, oops, we got the
wrong guy. But no, they would have New Yorkers believe that
there were two crazies bashing women's heads in.
It turned out that at the time of the attack, a security
video had recorded Grant at a Virgin record and CD store,
but the DA and the police FAILED to notify the defense of
this exculpating evidence! Grant's defender stumbled on
the video independently, and subpoenaed it. The prosecution
then suddenly discovered they had the video, what do you
know. In the meantime Grant was in the slammer
awaiting trial and certain conviction. Slowly and regretfully
the court freed him. This bashing case has been completely
dropped from the public view.
Drake and Grant had alibis. Drake was at his girlfriend's
at the time of the attack. Both were positively identified
by eyewitnesses; Grant by three at two different lineups,
Drake by one, a lawyer, after several failed attempts in
lineups. She (the eyewitness) needed help by the police
to finally identify Drake. Yep, the eyewitnesses swore
that Grant did it despite his presence elsewhere being
recorded on a security video; and swore that Drake did it.
BTW, Drake's alibi was not presented at trial, if the
papers can be believed, no doubt because the jury would
discount a girlfriend's testimony. Besides, if the jury
did discount her testimony, the prosecutor could get her
for perjury and attempting to obstruct justice. Also, in
Drake's case, the police had enough time to get a jailhouse
snitch to testify that Drake confessed to him (the snitch)
while at Rikers.
And, reading the NY Times carefully, it appears that there
have been a number of similar cases, and not just against
women. Men have been victims too. There is a madman in NY
who sneaks up behind people (my guess is people of slight
build) and bashes them in the head with whatever material
is at hand: hunks of concrete, bricks, 2x4s, and in one
very recent case, his fist if the NY Times can be believed.
Paris Drake, a no account, is the designated sacrificial
victim. Your police are protecting you, they got the guy.
Crazy man? What crazy man. We got him, you're safe.
The NY Times had an orgy of sentimentality on this case.
That poor girl (Nicole Barrett) come from Athens TX to NY for
her career! And such a terrible thing happens. But NY cares!
Why, during the Thanksgiving day parade, the girls marching
band from Athens TX was given a special place, and the NY
Times loved it. Wonderful news. As sophisticated as the
NY Times pretends, they love syrup.
The police know Drake is innocent. The Manhattan prosecutor
knows it. His defense attorney knows it (give him credit,
he believes Drake, and is appealing). The NY Times reporter,
Finkelstein knows it too though she is too careful to say
anything.
The case stinks. It is just one of thousands and thousands
around the country.
And Giuliani, ahh, Giuliani. It's the homeless, you see. Get
them, and you solve NY's problems.
ObBooks: "Beggars hang that gentlemen may dine."
--
Xavier Onassis
"Sue Rickels" <sric...@webtv.net> wrote in message
news:24156-3A...@storefull-131.iap.bryant.webtv.net...
ted samsel
Soccer riots?
--
TBSa...@infi.net
http://home.infi.net/~tbsamsel/
'Do the boogie woogie in the South American way'
Hank Snow (1914-1999)
THE RHUMBA BOOGIE
Richard Harter
<dcs...@cstone.net> wrote:
[snip Swansonian rhetoric]
One can object to the death penalty (as I do) on the grounds that by
being a citizen one is forced into unwilling complicity in legalized
murder. One can also look at death in the ritual of execution is
simply an ugly accident of fate. There are many victims of ugly
accidents, far more than are victims of legalized ritual killings.
Is it any less unfair that a hapless pedestrian is killed by a drunk
driver or that someone dies of food poisoning because they ate at a
restaurant where the food handling was unsanitary?
Richard Harter, c...@tiac.net
http://www.tiac.net/users/cri
Leviticus summarized in one sentence -
There are things man is not meant to know.
Francis Muir
ted samsel:
>
> Sayan Bhattacharyya wrote:
> > Okay, but if this is true, then how do people in those benighted
> > countries where the death penalty has been abolished (such as
> > the countries in Western Europe) satisfy those desires?
> Soccer riots?
For millions in England it is in the hearing about the doctor who killed
300+ patients because he was "fascinated by death".
Michael L. Siemon
Harter) wrote:
+ On Mon, 01 Jan 2001 22:22:59 -0500, "David C. N. Swanson"
+ <dcs...@cstone.net> wrote:
+
+ [snip Swansonian rhetoric]
+
+ One can object to the death penalty (as I do) on the grounds that by
+ being a citizen one is forced into unwilling complicity in legalized
+ murder. One can also look at death in the ritual of execution is
+ simply an ugly accident of fate. There are many victims of ugly
+ accidents, far more than are victims of legalized ritual killings.
+ Is it any less unfair that a hapless pedestrian is killed by a drunk
+ driver or that someone dies of food poisoning because they ate at a
+ restaurant where the food handling was unsanitary?
Well, the oppressively deliberate & institutional _insistence_ on the
judicial murder, and its supposed locus in the consent of the governed,
is in fact quite different: but that seems to be the point you are
leading off from, so I'm not sure what you are asking. "Unfairness"
is a rather inadequate category for classifying deaths, in the face of
the massive grinding of state machinery in the name of "justice" when
justice is demonstrably denied in huge numbers of cases. There are lots
of "unfairnesses" around, some of which may _want_ to be taken up into
political causes. But executions by the state are inescapably political
acts, with all sorts of symbolic attachements...
ObTrilogy: _Oresteia_
--
Michael L. Siemon We must know the truth, and we must
m...@panix.com love the truth we know, and we must act
according to the measure of our love.
-- Thomas Merton
Sue Rickels
Richard Harter writes:
"One can also look at death in the ritual of execution is simply an ugly
accident of fate. There are many victims of ugly accidents, far more
than are victims of legalized ritual killings. Is it any less unfair
that a hapless pedestrian is killed by a drunk driver or that someone
dies of food poisoning because they ate at a restaurant where the food
handling was unsanitary?"
Among the many victims of ugly accidents are tens of thousands who die
in hospitals each year from the careless errors of nurses, doctors and
staff who are supposedly committed to saving lives or "first doing no
harm." That's not fair. Someone is to blame. At least the drunk driver
can receive a sentence for involuntary manslaughter.
Voluntary execution in the name of justice by the state in the name of
us all is an entirely different beast. The demographic profile of death
row inmates is that of mostly young males of color without the financial
means to hire a decent lawyer.
Is it their fate that the judicial system picks them for this penalty?
Is it simply an accident of fate that on occasion evidence is withheld,
destroyed, even falsified in order for the state to gain the ultimate
penalty? The deliberativeness of the state in picking a small number of
demographically vulnerable murderers to be executed is not just fate, in
the meaning of chance.
You and I might be fated to eat that Wendy's burger carelessly
undercooked with e. coli or die because the doctor prescribed the wrong
dose of augmentin for our nosocomial pneumonia. But it is unlikely that
either of us would end up on death row even if there were
circucumstances implicating us in a capital crime. Women in particular
are pretty much exempt from this "fate." Look at the hue and cry to not
execute Carla Faye Tucker a few years back.
Sue
Lewis Mammel
> For a long time, wasn't homicide a tort, to be paid by a blood-price
> related to the social position of the victim and paid to the family?
This is a significant theme in The Charterhouse of Parma, where
it is repeatedly emphasized that Fabrizio's "involvement" in
the death of a social underling would normally be discretely
overlooked, and was only seized on by his enemies as means of
persecuting him.
Considering the statements made regarding fate and omens, and
the general "inner" mood of Stendhal's work, I think we can
take his subsequent troubles as a reflection of felt guilt,
much as the Erinyes seem to be.
I was also interested in the repercussions of Odysseus'
slaughter of the suitors. In Homer, he has to fight off
a subsequent posse action against him, which ends the story,
but Robert Graves gives an account of even further wanderings
which seem to be a form of penance.
Throughout Homer, I was impressed with the fact of actual
lawlessness in all respects. It gives an instructive view
on the psychology and sociology that finally find their
expression in law.
Lew Mammel, Jr.
Richard Harter
wrote:
What I am raising, perhaps not very clearly, is the issue of the
particularity and inconsistency. Some deaths attract political
attention, others do not. An objection to the death penalty (and the
injustice system generally) is that it is unfair and unequal in its
workings. What I am pointing to is that to the persons involved these
events, these executions and ponderous prosecutions, have the same
effect as ugly accidents - the actual effects as distinct from their
feelings about them. People lose jobs, suffer crippling accidents,
and die randomly regularly. Certain particular kinds of misfortunes
are marked as political material, others are not. There is no great
consistency in our concern for life and liberty.
Ron Hardin
> Voluntary execution in the name of justice by the state in the name of
> us all is an entirely different beast. The demographic profile of death
> row inmates is that of mostly young males of color without the financial
> means to hire a decent lawyer.
His victims are also of color.
Ron Hardin
> feelings about them. People lose jobs, suffer crippling accidents,
> and die randomly regularly. Certain particular kinds of misfortunes
> are marked as political material, others are not. There is no great
> consistency in our concern for life and liberty.
100,000 people die every day in the world; unless one is somebody
I know, than it's none of my business. Sometimes though one
can trade on a death for gain or entertainment, in the case
of media and its audience respectively. The correct moral position
is that it's wrong to trade on it and it's wrong to be entertained
by it and flip off the TV.
I don't see any inconsistency though.
Sue Rickels
Sue Rickels wrote:
"Voluntary execution in the name of justice by the state in the name of
us all is an entirely different beast. The demographic profile of death
row inmates is that of mostly young males of color without the financial
means to hire a decent lawyer."
Ron Hardin responded:
"His victims are also of color."
I am not sure of your meaning--does "his" refer to "young black males"
(their victims)? If so, I don't disagree.
My point remains that the death penalty is scapegoating. If the state
were after just punishment or deterrence, we would need many more
executions than we have (even here in Texas). But capital punishment is
selective and goes after the vulnerable in society simply because it's
easier. It doesn't make our country safer, but it gives us the illusion
that someone is paying for our society's violence.
The scapegoating theory gains credibility as we learn of more and more
innocent people on death row. It is no longer an academic issue based
on theoretical pro's and con's. The body politic is not served by the
system which is putting innocent people on death row. Unless, of
course, we decide that scapegoating is necessary in the Republic.
I rest my case with the excerpts from a lead story in today's (January
6, 2001)
_New York Times_.
"Two Death Row Inmates Exonerated in Louisana" by Sara Rimer
"Michael Ray Graham Jr. walked off death row at the Louisiana State
Penitentiary at Angola three days after Christmas wearing a prison issue
denim jacket that swam on his slight frame. He was carrying two manila
envelopes containing all his worldly possessions.
After 14 years in prison and with the state dismissing all charges
against him because of "a total lack of credible evidence" linking him
to the crime for which he was convicted, all that Mr. Graham received in
compensation was a $10 check from the prison for transportation.
..............................................................
"Albert Ronnie Burrell, 45, was convicted, in a separate trial, of the
same crime as Mr. Graham, the 1986 murder of an elderly couple in
northern Louisiana, and he also spent nearly 14 years on death row at
Angola. The state also dismissed all charges against him at the end of
December, and Mr. Burrell, who is retarded and cannot read or write,
came within 17 days of execution in 1996. He was released from death row
on Tuesday. He was also issued a denim jacket several sizes too large
and a $10 check for transportation. Mr. Burrell climbed into his
stepsister Estelle's pickup truck and rode to her small ranch in East
Texas.
"I didn't have nothing to do with that," Mr. Burrell said in a telephone
interview today, referring to the crime.
Mr. Burrell and Mr. Graham bring to eight the number of wrongfully
convicted death-row inmates exonerated nationwide in the past year.
Ninety-two death-row inmates have been exonerated since the death
penalty was reinstated in 1973.
The cases of Mr. Graham and Mr. Burrell, which are almost identical, are
examples of serious prosecutorial misconduct, their lawyers say. With no
physical evidence linking either to the crime, the two men were
convicted largely on the testimony of a jailhouse snitch, Olan Wayne
Brantley, who a law enforcement official acknowledged was known as Lyin'
Wayne.
Mr. Brantley said that both men, while in jail, had confessed to killing
the elderly couple. Mr. Brantley admitted at his trial that he had spent
time in several mental hospitals, for manic depression, and that he had
written so many bad checks that he could not keep track of them.
No witness put them at the scene of the killing, nor did ballistics
tests of their guns link them to the deaths.
In granting a new trial for Mr. Graham last March, a district judge
found, among other things, that the prosecution did not disclose that a
plea agreement had been made with Mr. Brantley and that Mr. Brantley had
previously been found to be mentally incompetent. The judge also noted
that the prosecutor in the case, Dan Grady, had given an affidavit
saying that he viewed the case against Mr. Graham and Mr. Burrell as "so
weak that the case should never have been brought to the grand jury."
The kind of prosecutorial misconduct in the cases of the two men is not
unusual, said Mr. Graham's lawyer, Ms. Fournet.
"It is a problem that is inherent in the criminal justice system," Ms.
Fournet said."
...........................................................
"Exonerations of death-row inmates like Mr. Graham and Mr. Burrell, and
the concerns they raise about the possibility of executing an innocent
person, have led to growing criticism about the fairness of the
administration of the death penalty. While support for the death penalty
is still high, at 66 percent, it is the lowest in 19 years, and experts
say the exonerations are largely responsible for the decline."
Sue
Sue Rickels
Sue Rickels wrote:
"Voluntary execution in the name of justice by the state in the name of
us all is an entirely different beast. The demographic profile of death
row inmates is that of mostly young males of color without the financial
means to hire a decent lawyer."
Ron Hardin responded:
"His victims are also of color."
I am not sure of your meaning--does "his" refer to "young black males"
Sue Rickels
Sue Rickels wrote:
"Voluntary execution in the name of justice by the state in the name of
us all is an entirely different beast. The demographic profile of death
row inmates is that of mostly young males of color without the financial
means to hire a decent lawyer."
Ron Hardin responded:
"His victims are also of color."
I am not sure of your meaning--does "his" refer to "young black males"
Sue Rickels
Richard Harter says:
"Some deaths attract political attention, others do not. An objection to
the death penalty (and the injustice system generally) is that it is
unfair and unequal in its workings. What I am pointing to is that to the
persons involved these events, these executions and ponderous
prosecutions, have the same effect as ugly accidents...."
Effect is different from cause. Accidents by definition are not
deliberate. Capital punishment by the state--imposed fairly or not--is
deliberate. Prosecutors do not have to ask for the death penalty in
cases that qualify as capital murder. Frequently they do not. The
decision is usually political.
Because the death penalty is imposed by the state it is inherently
political, unlike the undercooked Wendy's burger or even hospital
errors.
Sue
Richard Harter
So? Did I say that it was not political? Two people die. One death
is the occasion for politics, the other is not. Both people are dead.
One death is visible to the political mind, the other is not.
Richard Harter, c...@tiac.net, http://www.tiac.net/users/cri
One of the uses of women is that their motivations, though often
similar, are less elaborately disguised than those of men.
- John Kenneth Galbraith, _The Great Crash_, p81.
Ron Hardin
> Effect is different from cause. Accidents by definition are not
> deliberate.
``Suppose I tie a string across a stairhead. A fragile relative,
from whom I have expectations, trips over it, falls, and perishes.''
Austin _Philosophical Papers_ ``Three Ways of Spilling Ink'' p.274
a good read to undo the idea that such similarly related words are opposites;
indeed even the idea that intentional is the negation of unintentional.
Ron Hardin
> "Voluntary execution in the name of justice by the state in the name of
> us all is an entirely different beast. The demographic profile of death
> row inmates is that of mostly young males of color without the financial
> means to hire a decent lawyer."
>
> Ron Hardin responded:
>
> "His victims are also of color."
>
> I am not sure of your meaning--does "his" refer to "young black males"
> (their victims)? If so, I don't disagree.
>
> My point remains that the death penalty is scapegoating.
But it isn't. Scapegoating is a reduction of it, as are deterrence and
revenge theories. There may be a need for explanation of support for the
death penalty, but that doesn't mean that a particular explanation is any good.
To say again my epigram, that I take as a starting point from which
a critical theory can attempt an explanation, ``The death penalty has
something to do with the place accorded to the victim's voice, which
is missing.'' I claim this is enough to express why the death penalty
is supported. Any critical theory, in a poetic mode, will either succeed
in producing a good gloss of it or it will not, eg. scapegoating, revenge,
deterrence do not.
Saying that the victims are black means that society takes them as
seriously as whites, a positive back at the epigram, which proves
if it needed proving that scapegoating is a reduction. In scapegoating
it is a negative, their voices having been projected away.
I am not dogmatic about my epigram; finding a better one is a poetic operation
that should be encouraged. It's more likely to come from supporters of the
death penalty who are interested in the right way than from opponents.
That is, I support the death penalty, but am not at all happy with the
arguments for it, because they are wrong poetically.
MAN...an ancient race
In article <3A51498A...@cstone.net>,
dcs...@cstone.net wrote:
> Movement to abolish or at least temporarily halt the death penalty in
> Virginia is rapidly gaining
> steam, and rightly so. Not only has the state of Virginia killed
> convicts of very dubious guilt and
> then destroyed the evidence so that it could not be tested. But it
has
> this year finally pardoned a
> man (Earl Washington Jr.) whose innocence was clear for 17 years and
who
> came within a week
> of being killed anyway. One of the eight men that Virginia did kill
> this year was killed on the
> basis of evidence that vanished, reappeared, and was supposedly tested
> -- all within about a week,
> while Earl Washington waited 8 months for his latest round of testing.
>
> Add to the problem of killing innocent men the fact that overwhelming
> evidence continues to
> show that the death penalty may encourage crime but certainly doesn't
> deter it (as a dwindling
> contingent of supporters continues to maintain in what must now be
> recognized as a preference
> for revenge over crime reduction). Either of these two points
provides
> a strong case against this
> barbaric hate-thy-neighbor anachronism. Add the third argument that
the
> death penalty is
> applied in a manner biased by race (of victim and defendant) and
wealth
> (of defendant), and the
> decision should be an easy one (see a study posted at
> www.civilrights.org).
>
> There's an even stronger fourth argument, however. The people of the
> state of Virginia
> (nominally a democracy) favor a moratorium. A Times-Dispatch poll
this
> year found that 58
> percent of Virginians want a moratorium and 91 percent want DNA
testing
> for convicts who
> have biological evidence to test. A national poll by Peter Hart
> Research found that 64 percent of
> Americans want a moratorium and 89 percent want DNA testing. Just
> because we have now
> "elected" (I use the term loosely) a president known to the rest of
the
> world as a mass
> executioner, does not mean we should have to engage in a monstrous
> practice that most of us
> want halted and numerous organizations of relatives of victims
> eloquently oppose.
>
> Virginia Del. Frank Hargrove (R, Hanover) has promised to introduce a
> bill to abolish the death
> penalty. He should be applauded, and other delegates should be
> encouraged to support the
> measure. Death Penalty Awareness Day will take place in Richmond on
> Jan. 17 (call
> 888-567-8237 for information).
>
> Currently on Virginia's death row are: a man suffering from bipolar
> disorder, another with
> severe schizophrenia, another who was 15 at the time of his alleged
> crime, another with an IQ of
> 50, another (Earl Bramblett) with no serious evidence against him, and
> another (Bobby Swisher)
> whose lawyers bungled his case beyond the usual ludicrous standards.
>
> Stop the killing!
>
> http://www.cstone.net/~dcswan
>
>
--
http://thenewrepublic.com/ & http://www.newcriterion.com/
http://www.observer.com/arts.htm
http://www.chicagoreader.com/movies/
http://www.villagevoice.com/film/ &
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Square/8781/seadevil.jpg
Sue Rickels
Ron Hardin quotes J.L. Austin:
"Suppose I tie a string across a stairhead. A fragile relative, from
whom I have expectations, trips over it, falls, and perishes.´´
Sounds like murder to me, but a prosecutor would have a devil of a time
getting an indictment, much less the death penalty. But, I shoulda
known better than to wander into the causality issue--David Hume made a
big impression on me my first semester in graduate school. Thanks for
the Austin reference. I'll track down _Philosophical Papers_ next week.
It's been a long time since I played with language analysis.
Sue
Xavier Onassis
scapegoating because blacks are executed for murdering blacks
is belabored.
Here is a story of two whites both convicted of the same murder
with total disregard for legalities, facts, and justice. Both
did heavy time for nothing. It is so good they were treated
with the same dignity blacks are. Ten dollars, too.
--
Xavier Onassis
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/06/national/06EXON.html
January 6, 2001
Two Death-Row Inmates Exonerated in Louisiana
By SARA RIMER
Michael Ray Graham Jr. walked off death row at the Louisiana State
Penitentiary at Angola three days after Christmas wearing a prison issue
denim jacket that swam on his slight frame. He was carrying two manila
envelopes containing all his worldly possessions.
After 14 years in prison and with the state dismissing all charges
against him because of "a total lack of credible evidence" linking him
to the crime for which he was convicted, all that Mr. Graham received in
compensation was a $10 check from the prison for transportation.
"I thought about framing it," Mr. Graham, 37, who had worked as a roofer
before he went to prison, said in a telephone interview yesterday from
his mother's home in Roanoke, Va.
It had taken him 24 hours on a Greyhound bus to get home. The ticket
cost $127. One of his lawyers, Michele Fournet, paid for it.
In the interview today, Mr. Graham said he was trying hard not to be
bitter about what had happened.
"I don't like being angry," Mr. Graham said. "I am, but I can keep it
under control. I really haven't sat down and thought about how angry I
can be."
The first few days he was home, he was afraid to leave the house, he
said.
"It just feels like they're looking at me like, aren't you supposed to
be in jail," he said. "Why don't you have handcuffs and shackles on?"
Mr. Graham said he was hoping to get a driver's license and a secondhand
truck so he could go back to work as a roofer. Besides paying his bus
fare home, Ms. Fournet gave him $100 when he left death row.
"I'm down to about eight dollars," Mr. Graham said. "I've bought
cigarettes, clothes. We went out to eat a few times."
As for the $10 check from the Louisiana State Penitentiary, Mr. Graham
said he no longer had it.
"We got in Atlanta about 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning," he said. "I was
feeling so good to be free. When I jumped off the bus, I saw a guy
sitting on a ledge. He was asking for change, and he was cold. I
remembered the check and went across the street and cashed it for him. I
was happy to give it to him."
Every inmate who is released from Angola is given a $10 check for
transportation, regardless of where they are heading.
"We can't afford to send them out of state," said Cathy Fontenot, a
prison spokeswoman. "We're not responsible for getting them home. They
could ask to go to Africa or Australia."
Exonerations of death-row inmates like Mr. Graham and Mr. Burrell, and
the concerns they raise about the possibility of executing an innocent
person, have led to growing criticism about the fairness of the
administration of the death penalty. While support for the death penalty
is still high, at 66 percent, it is the lowest in 19 years, and experts
say the exonerations are largely responsible for the decline.
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company
"Ron Hardin" <rhha...@mindspring.com> wrote in message
news:3A5799...@mindspring.com...
Ron Hardin
>
> IMO, Ron Hardin's argument that the death penalty is not
> scapegoating because blacks are executed for murdering blacks
> is belabored.
>
> Here is a story of two whites both convicted of the same murder
> with total disregard for legalities, facts, and justice. Both
> did heavy time for nothing. It is so good they were treated
> with the same dignity blacks are. Ten dollars, too.
Scapegoating is a reduction of the death penalty to something else.
Death penalty in error doesn't disturb anything more than any other thing in
error does. You take reasonable precautions in various ways including
appeals, but not unreasonable precautions, like anything else.
There are much more deadly mistakes around and it doesn't bother anybody
except the federal agency in charge of safety of that particular thing,
which has hearings to show that it is not at fault and find a real
scapegoat in the matter.
Vlorbik
you keep saying this[1] as if it means something.
or was in some way interesting.
as an "epigram", "it's sex" has it way beat.
on the internet, everybody knows
*you're* a jerk.
[1]
Here's the locus to start from: the death penalty has something to
do with the place accorded to the voice of the victim, which is absent.
<A HREF="http://people.delphi.com/vlorbik">vlorbik</A>
http://people.delphi.com/vlorbik
Stephen Hayes
Pascal Zerling wrote in a message to Dylan Bryan-Dolman:
PZ> From: "Pascal Zerling" <pascal....@kolumbus.fi>
PZ> Dylan Bryan-Dolman wrote:
> Ron Hardin wrote:
>
> > The thing to do is figure out why people support the
> > death penalty. It's neither revenge nor deterrence.
>
> It's sex.
PZ> No. I think it's more like a modern form of human sacrifice. What I
PZ> can't figure out is which bloodthirsty dark god the poor fellows
PZ> are being offered to? Moloch, perhaps, who's acquired a fondness
PZ> for the flesh of adults in his old age...
I once read an interesting book called "The ethics of punishment" by a guy
called Moberley.
His theory was that punishment is a kind of sacrament.
One definitition of a sacrament in Christian theology is that it is "an outward
and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace".
Punishment, according to Moberley, is "an outward and visible sign of an inward
and spiritual disgrace."
He wasn't speaking specifically of capital punishment, but it applies to that
as much as anything.
It's interesting to see how fashions in capital punishment change, in those
countries that still practise it (how many do?).
Here in South Africa hanging was the method of choice. In other countries there
were the guillotine, the electric chair, the firing squad, and do doubt a few
others.
It seem that in the USA, one of the main countries practising capital
punishment, poisoning is now the most popular method - shades of Socrates!
Keep well
Steve Hayes
WWW: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/7734/steve.htm
E-mail: haye...@yahoo.com
FamilyNet <> Internet Gated Mail
http://www.fmlynet.org
Stephen Hayes
Pascal Zerling wrote in a message to Jim Gunson:
PZ> From: "Pascal Zerling" <pascal....@kolumbus.fi>
PZ> Jim Gunson wrote:
> Ron Hardin wrote:
> > The thing to do is figure out why people support the death penalty.
> > It's neither revenge nor deterrence.
>
> OK, tell us why. Do not the death penalty supporters, when asked
> why, say either revenge or deterrence?
PZ> The supporters of the death penalty are not aware of the true,
PZ> subconscious reason, which is their desire to take part in the
PZ> ancient ritual of human sacrifice. Sacrifice, which is a fixed part
PZ> of the human psyche, has gone underground in the modern world, so
PZ> to speak. We still carry out sacrifice, we're just doing in
PZ> subconsciously.
Those are pretty sweeping assertions - do you have any evidence for them?
PZ> And it's not just the death penalty. Look at the
PZ> sacrifice of laboratory animals to the god of Science through
PZ> vivisection, the sacrifice of soldiers to the god of War in battle
PZ> (which the newspapers even describe as "He made the ultimate
PZ> sacrifice."). Then there's sacrifice in the economy when painful
PZ> savings must be made in one area of society so that the money can
PZ> be made available for more important needs elsewhere (which
PZ> politicians describe as a need for "sacrifice"). And if you buy
PZ> into Marxist economics, there's also the daily sacrifice of the
PZ> poor to the god of Capitalism. The workers are exploited because
PZ> they are underpaid, and must carry out mechanical, dehumanizing
PZ> tasks to produce the surplus value extracted by capitalists.
Interesting examples, but does that make them "a fixed part of the human
psyche"?
Stephen Hayes
Pascal Zerling wrote in a message to Ron Hardin:
PZ> From: "Pascal Zerling" <pascal....@kolumbus.fi>
> Take a look at sexual-preditor hysteria. On scapegoating
> in general, Kenneth Burke ``A Grammar of Motives'' pp 406-408
> gets to the point. However sacrifice is a reduction when it does
> not apply.
PZ> But do you think a public execution can be interpreted as a
PZ> sacrificial ritual or not? And if not, would you say Roberto
PZ> Calasso applies the concept of sacrifice to too many cases because
PZ> he is a Roman Catholic? I tend towards this interpretation myself.
How many countries still practise public execution?
Do you think capital punishment has the same significance in countries where
execution takes place in private?
Ron Hardin
> you keep saying this[1] as if it means something.
> or was in some way interesting.
> as an "epigram", "it's sex" has it way beat.
> on the internet, everybody knows
> *you're* a jerk.
How do you know it doesn't mean anything?
Pascal Zerling
Stephen Hayes wrote:
> I once read an interesting book called "The ethics of
> punishment" by a guy called Moberley. His theory was
> that punishment is a kind of sacrament. One definitition
> of a sacrament in Christian theology is that it is "an outward
> and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace". Punishment,
> according to Moberley, is "an outward and visible sign of
> an inward and spiritual disgrace." He wasn't speaking
> specifically of capital punishment, but it applies to that as
> much as anything.
That's interesting because what originally attracted me to
Calasso was his idiosyncratic theological reinterpretation
the Freudian and Marxian idea of the deceptiveness of
appearances, and the need to look for deep structures to
explain phenomena. Just as Freud said that what our
personality appears to be like on the surface, in our
conscious life, is not what we're really like, since there
are all these subconscious forces at work, so Marx
claimed that capitalism is also not what it appears to be
on the surface. The appearance is of fair competition,
while the deep, hidden reality is the exploitation of
workers by capitalists.
In the excerpts from his book _The Ruin of Kasch_
that I posted in rec.arts.books a few days ago,
Roberto Calasso says that "the law is the exoteric of
sacrifice" (so that sacrifice is the "esoteric" or
hidden reality behind the law). The appearance
may be of justice and fairness, but the deep reality
is the scapegoating of the poor with the psychological
purpose of expiating our own guilt. This really does
seem to be a valid interpretation of some cases,
such as the wrongful conviction of the young Latino
man for murder in the trial in Texas described by
Sue Rickels in an earlier article in this thread.
Calasso reinterprets Freud and Marx using his own
sacral categories, with the concept of sacrifice
playing a key role. The exploitation of workers is
a modern form of sacrifice, and the subconscious
can also be understood using these same religious
concepts.
Now, what liberals and positivists like Karl Popper
have always said is that the strategy of Freud and
Marx is bogus. There is no deep, authentic reality
underneath appearances. The surface phenomena are
what is real. Early positivists like Ernst Mach were
criticized for this methodological position because
it seemed to rule out the reality of any unobservable
entities, including atoms (which are manifestly real).
More recently, positivism has been criticized by
social historians because it doesn't seem to allow
for the reality of social structures. Economic,
political, linguistic and social-psychological
structures cannot be directly observed. But, the
historians argue, they are real nonetheless. They
consist of relations of interaction between agents,
who are themselves observable. Social structures
are real because they have causal powers -- they
affect the individuals who make up society.
I've always found this criticism more valid in the
case of psychoanalysis than Marxian economics. It seems
obvious that there really are social classes in
capitalist society which are mainly defined by
property ownership, and the liberal criticisms of
Marxian class analysis can themselves be questioned
as politically motivated. Conservatives have a real
need to undermine the intellectual credibility of
the Marxist critique of capitalism because they want
to resist calls for the redistribution of wealth.
Freud's psychological concepts are far less
plausible than Marx's economic concepts.
I do think there is a certain similarity between the
Fredian and Marxian ideas of surface vs. deep reality,
and both are in some sense analogous to religious
thought. The religious mystic claims to have access
to a deeper, hidden reality that cannot be perceived
by the common man. And Durkheim said that, in the
modern world, the social sphere is the locus of the
sacred. So, why couldn't the psyche, the labour
process under capitalism, and social structures in
general, all be interpreted using sacral categories?
Calasso pushes this idea to its logical limit, and
interprets these phenomena in terms of one key
concept -- sacrifice.
I'm not sure if I really believe Calasso, and I'm
inclined to support the positivist criticism of Freud,
but it's refreshing to see a thinker trying to tie
together so many things using one idea. Most
scholars today who write about cultural history
go out of their way to avoid what they call
"reductionism". One mustn't try to interpret too
many things using one idea. It's better to balance
many conflicting historical forces and interpretations.
This seems reasonable, but it can also be pretty
unenlightening. It doesn't take a bold stand. It
doesn't take risks, or venture into the unknown.
It's more gutsy in some way to try to push one idea
as far as it will go, as Calasso does. This could
be done with many different ideas, and each new
version of cultural history could be interesting
and illuminating, without claiming to be the ultimate
truth.
Jeff Inman
> Don Tuite wrote:
>
> > For a long time, wasn't homicide a tort, to be paid by a blood-price
> > related to the social position of the victim and paid to the family?
>
> This is a significant theme in The Charterhouse of Parma, where
> it is repeatedly emphasized that Fabrizio's "involvement" in
> the death of a social underling would normally be discretely
> overlooked, and was only seized on by his enemies as means of
> persecuting him.
>
> Considering the statements made regarding fate and omens, and
> the general "inner" mood of Stendhal's work, I think we can
> take his subsequent troubles as a reflection of felt guilt,
> much as the Erinyes seem to be.
>
> I was also interested in the repercussions of Odysseus'
> slaughter of the suitors. In Homer, he has to fight off
> a subsequent posse action against him, which ends the story,
> but Robert Graves gives an account of even further wanderings
> which seem to be a form of penance.
But are these really necessarily penance
for the slaughter of the suitors? Why
not suppose that the slaughter of the
suitors was the beginning of penance for
something else? After all, Athena herself
helped with the arrangements.
> Throughout Homer, I was impressed with the fact of actual
> lawlessness in all respects. It gives an instructive view
> on the psychology and sociology that finally find their
> expression in law.
To which lawlessness are you referring?
Homer seems one of the last places in
western civilization where there actually
were laws. These days we just have
lawyers and rules, which are not the same
thing at all, in fact just the opposite.
When the laws are clear, who needs a
lawyer? Or maybe one wants a lawyer to
change the laws. A curious kind of
lawlessness.
mot...@webtv.net
For every random murder, a random hanging.!!
Random hangings may not be the only answer to random killings,
but at least they are as much an attempt,
as random births might be,
at balancing the books.
---
Moe Tychos
. .. .. .. ..
Moggin
>>> Perhaps societies with a tradition of individualism are more likely
>>> to have the idea.
Georg Fertig:
>> Including Saudi Arabia, Texas, and China.
Ron:
> There's other ways to get a death penalty, which no doubt then can
> be argued against in other ways.
> The idea in question above however is a place accorded to the voice
> of the victim, which is what supports the death penalty in the
> individualistic USA.
Where individuals are reduced to "the victim" and assigned
a single, uniform voice.
-- Moggin
Richard Harter
Indeed. Being dead, they speak with the tones of silence. But then,
they don't need to - the living are more than willing to speak for
them.
Ron Hardin
> > The idea in question above however is a place accorded to the voice
> > of the victim, which is what supports the death penalty in the
> > individualistic USA.
>
> Where individuals are reduced to "the victim" and assigned
> a single, uniform voice.
That would be a leftist reduction. They don't tend to favor the death
penalty.
Dylan Bryan-Dolman
> Moggin wrote:
> > Where individuals are reduced to "the victim" and assigned
> > a single, uniform voice.
>
> That would be a leftist reduction. They don't tend to favor the death
> penalty.
O grasshopper, when you have progressed beyond dualism -- the bare error to
which all reductions reduce -- then you will be able to appreciate the
grandeur and terror of Broadway tunes, and you will not wish to snatch
people's sinful little lives away just because they slaughter and maim.
Same goes for you, Moggin, except replace "Broadway tunes" with "the Voice
in the Whirlwind."
Good times and bum times
I've seen em all and, my dear
I'm still here
Plush velvet sometimes
Sometimes just pretzels and beer
But I'm here
I've stuffed the dailies
In my shoes
Strummed ukeleles
Hummed the blues
Seen all my dreams disappear
But I'm here ...
Oh my my yes...
Dylan
=dbd=
Ron Hardin
> O grasshopper, when you have progressed beyond dualism -- the bare error to
> which all reductions reduce -- then you will be able to appreciate the
> grandeur and terror of Broadway tunes, and you will not wish to snatch
> people's sinful little lives away just because they slaughter and maim.
I liked the Capeman, a story asking about redemption.
Nobody has noticed the last stanza
But he can't leave his fears behind
He recalls each fatal thrust
The screams carried by the wind
Phantom figures in the dust
an allusion via a missing word to what would have been necessary
for redemption, and was not discovered.
Wordsworth's Lucy quatrains might alert somebody to it,
for it's the same word alluding to the word that is missing.
A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
-Mammel,L.H.
>Lewis Mammel <lhma...@ameritech.net> wrote:
>> I was also interested in the repercussions of Odysseus'
>> slaughter of the suitors. In Homer, he has to fight off
>> a subsequent posse action against him, which ends the story,
>> but Robert Graves gives an account of even further wanderings
>> which seem to be a form of penance.
>
>But are these really necessarily penance
>for the slaughter of the suitors? Why
>not suppose that the slaughter of the
>suitors was the beginning of penance for
>something else? After all, Athena herself
>helped with the arrangements.
I don't follow this at all. Why would Athena's sponsorship
imply he was doing penance? And for what? This makes no sense.
... and I'm not saying his additional wanderings are
necessarily a form of penance, I'm saying they SEEM like it.
The suitors have usurped his home, his kingdom and his honor, and
to regain these he must vanquish them, which he does with some
relish. The point I was making in this context was that Homer
does not toss the suitors aside as props, as we tend to do by closing
the action with the slaughter of the suitors. Homer reminds us
that these were substantial and well connected men, and their
deaths bring consequences. Odysseus must fight yet another
action to bring events to a close, although with Athena's aid this
is not so bloody.
The thing is, there is the additional matter of wandering with the
oar, which Teiresias had prophesied, but which is not accounted for
in the Odyssey. This was supposed to be an appeasement of Poseidon,
I believe, and is in the nature of a penance. It is rather poignant
since these further wanderings deny his long sought rest, and it was
my thought that his guilt for killing the suitors was involved. It
reminds me of Moses being denied entrance into the Promised Land.
>> Throughout Homer, I was impressed with the fact of actual
>> lawlessness in all respects. It gives an instructive view
>> on the psychology and sociology that finally find their
>> expression in law.
>
>To which lawlessness are you referring?
Well, there were no laws and no judges in the society
as depicted, only mores.
> Homer seems one of the last places in
> western civilization where there actually
> were laws. These days we just have
> lawyers and rules, which are not the same
> thing at all, in fact just the opposite.
> When the laws are clear, who needs a
> lawyer? Or maybe one wants a lawyer to
> change the laws. A curious kind of
> lawlessness.
So We have pretend laws because we don't obey the
"real" laws. OK fine. You can put it that way if you want.
I didn't say the society had no structure, just no laws
as the term was understood by the Greeks as well as ourselves,
and it is this which is interesting. It is indeed "a curious
kind of lawlessness" since that term is usually taken to imply
a conflict with existing law. That's why I used the term
"actual lawlessness."
Lew Mammel, Jr.
Moggin
> O grasshopper, when you have progressed beyond dualism -- the bare error to
> which all reductions reduce -- then you will be able to appreciate the
> grandeur and terror of Broadway tunes, and you will not wish to snatch
> people's sinful little lives away just because they slaughter and maim.
> Same goes for you, Moggin, except replace "Broadway tunes" with "the Voice
> in the Whirlwind."
Thank god for small favors. I hate Broadway tunes (unless
you'd count "Summertime," and even then I go for the Big
Brother and the Holding Company version, accept no substitutes).
But I have plenty of appreciation for the voice from the
whirlwind. There's no doubt it can carry a tune, and you won't
hear me say otherwise.
-- Moggin
Moggin
>>> The idea in question above however is a place accorded to the voice
>>> of the victim, which is what supports the death penalty in the
>>> individualistic USA.
Moggin:
>> Where individuals are reduced to "the victim" and assigned
>> a single, uniform voice.
Ron:
> That would be a leftist reduction. They don't tend to favor the death
> penalty.
That would be your reduction. The one above, I mean: not
your comment about leftists. I've never thought of you as a
lefty -- you come across to me as a right-wing Derridian. (Not
too many those.) Anyway, you took a bunch of different
people -- dead ones, it happens -- lumped them together as "the
victim" and gave them all one voice, which by an odd
coincedence sounds just like yours. Guess that's individualism
in the USA.
-- Moggin
Ron Hardin
> That would be your reduction. The one above, I mean: not
> your comment about leftists. I've never thought of you as a
> lefty -- you come across to me as a right-wing Derridian. (Not
> too many those.) Anyway, you took a bunch of different
> people -- dead ones, it happens -- lumped them together as "the
> victim" and gave them all one voice, which by an odd
> coincedence sounds just like yours. Guess that's individualism
> in the USA.
No, it's not the victim but the _place_ accorded to his voice.
There's no voices, they're dead.
The inclination comes from Levinas more than Derrida, that is it
could be elaborated along Levinas's lines into ethics, better than
a theory of revenge or deterrence could find its way back into
ethics (whether to be found wanting or not) without fatal totalizations.
Moggin
> No, it's not the victim but the _place_ accorded to his voice.
> There's no voices, they're dead.
A place accorded the voice of the victim, exactly. That's
one victim, one voice, audible or otherwise. Just like one
man, one vote: a perfectly good principle til it comes time to
decide which man the vote belongs to.
-- Moggin
Ron Hardin
It's not a response to channeling the dead but to an ethical
structure, that you would be more inclined to locate in the
social structure of an individualistic society. It would be
how it formalizes ethics, namely how it formalizes the Other
as transcendent of every arrangement.
dialec...@my-deja.com
Ron Hardin <rhha...@mindspring.com> wrote:
> It's not a response to channeling the dead
> but to an ethical structure, that you would
> be more inclined to locate in the social
> structure of an individualistic society.
> It would be how it formalizes ethics, namely
> how it formalizes the Other as transcendent
> of every arrangement.
to say that ethics is transcendent of every
arrangement is a religious idea. you're right
that atheistic leftists, at least those that
interpret history materialistically, think
ethics is not transcendent, but a part of the
social structure (more precisely: a part of
the superstructure, which is determined by the
material base of society). do you think that
ethics is devalued, demeaned if it doesn't
refer to an Other which transcends the social
context? but look at how the adherents of
that mystical view of ethics actually treat
other human beings. I don't see any evidence
that belief in the transcendence of ethics
makes people behave more morally. whereas
belief that ethics is a part of the social
structure makes you want to take action to
change society given that it treats certain
classes of people unjustly. your mystical,
transcendent ethics is a prescription for
quiescence and fatalism.
Ron Hardin
> to say that ethics is transcendent of every
> arrangement is a religious idea. you're right
> that atheistic leftists, at least those that
> interpret history materialistically, think
> ethics is not transcendent, but a part of the
> social structure (more precisely: a part of
> the superstructure, which is determined by the
> material base of society). do you think that
> ethics is devalued, demeaned if it doesn't
> refer to an Other which transcends the social
> context? but look at how the adherents of
> that mystical view of ethics actually treat
> other human beings. I don't see any evidence
> that belief in the transcendence of ethics
> makes people behave more morally. whereas
> belief that ethics is a part of the social
> structure makes you want to take action to
> change society given that it treats certain
> classes of people unjustly. your mystical,
> transcendent ethics is a prescription for
> quiescence and fatalism.
I'm following Levinas on ethics preceding ontology
(_Totality and Infinity_ eg), and leaving a place for
the social structure to refer back to that, accepting
the opening it leaves in the structure of the structure.
On its being a religious idea, I have no quarrel provided
that religion is not that in the popular association.
Levinas ``A Religion for Adults'' _Difficult Freedom_ p.17
``The moral relation therefore reunites both self-consciousness and
consciousness of God. Ethics is not the corollary of the vision of
God, it is that very vision. Ethics is an optic, such that everything I
know of God and everything I can hear of His word and reasonably
say to Him must find an ethical expression. In the Holy Ark from
which the voice of God is heard by Moses, there are only the tablets
of the Law. The knowledge of God which we can have and which is
expressed, according to Maimonides, in the form of negative
attributes, receives a positive meaning from the moral `God is
merciful', which means: `Be merciful like Him.' The attributes
of God are not given in the indicative, but in the imperative.
The knowledge of God comes to us like a commandment, like a Mitzvah.
To know God is to know what must be done...''
That version of things provides a method of reading religions in
general, rather than the reverse.
Pallex
> > Perhaps societies with a tradition of individualism are more likely
>
> Including Saudi Arabia, Texas, and China.
Always seems to be hot places which have the biggest problems with
human rights. Cooler places (northern Europe, Canada) seem to be a bit
more `chilled`, so to speak.
Jeff Inman
> Jeff Inman <j...@my-deja.com> wrote:
> >Lewis Mammel <lhma...@ameritech.net> wrote:
>
> >> I was also interested in the repercussions of Odysseus'
> >> slaughter of the suitors. In Homer, he has to fight off
> >> a subsequent posse action against him, which ends the story,
> >> but Robert Graves gives an account of even further wanderings
> >> which seem to be a form of penance.
> >
> >But are these really necessarily penance
> >for the slaughter of the suitors? Why
> >not suppose that the slaughter of the
> >suitors was the beginning of penance for
> >something else? After all, Athena herself
> >helped with the arrangements.
>
> I don't follow this at all. Why would Athena's sponsorship
> imply he was doing penance?
I just meant that Athena's sponsorship implies
that he's doing something that has justification,
however obscure it may seem sometimes.
> And for what? This makes no sense.
> ... and I'm not saying his additional wanderings are
> necessarily a form of penance, I'm saying they SEEM like it.
>
> The suitors have usurped his home, his kingdom and his honor, and
> to regain these he must vanquish them, which he does with some
> relish. The point I was making in this context was that Homer
> does not toss the suitors aside as props, as we tend to do by closing
> the action with the slaughter of the suitors. Homer reminds us
> that these were substantial and well connected men, and their
> deaths bring consequences. Odysseus must fight yet another
> action to bring events to a close, although with Athena's aid this
> is not so bloody.
He had Athena's sponsorship the first time, too.
The bloodiness there was not apparently something
unholy. (Just the opposite, it seems to me.)
But, yes, there are repercussions. I don't see
this so much as an indication that the slaughter
of the suitors was an offense as that the purging
and restoration of his household required
something more complicated and far reaching than
killing a roomful of men. And that strikes me as
part of the more likely role of "penance" in the
story: part of being on an outward journey for 10
or 20 years (I've forgotten how long the journey
takes) is the neglected inner work. Okay,
"neglected" is the wrong word. But there is some
undone work with integrating Odysseus' many
fantastic experiences with the inner world which
is, among other things, the foundation of his
relationship with Penelope. He's got some debts,
and one of those is to Poseidon. The task of
carrying the oar is not merely a punishment, but
also an opportunity for realization and
integration.
> The thing is, there is the additional matter of wandering with the
> oar, which Teiresias had prophesied, but which is not accounted for
> in the Odyssey. This was supposed to be an appeasement of Poseidon,
> I believe, and is in the nature of a penance. It is rather poignant
> since these further wanderings deny his long sought rest, and it was
> my thought that his guilt for killing the suitors was involved. It
> reminds me of Moses being denied entrance into the Promised Land.
I agree with you about the poignancy of that task,
but I just don't see that it derives much from the
suitors. That action was righteous.
> >> Throughout Homer, I was impressed with the fact of actual
> >> lawlessness in all respects. It gives an instructive view
> >> on the psychology and sociology that finally find their
> >> expression in law.
> >
> >To which lawlessness are you referring?
>
> Well, there were no laws and no judges in the society
> as depicted, only mores.
Oh, is that all?
> > Homer seems one of the last places in
> > western civilization where there actually
> > were laws. These days we just have
> > lawyers and rules, which are not the same
> > thing at all, in fact just the opposite.
> > When the laws are clear, who needs a
> > lawyer? Or maybe one wants a lawyer to
> > change the laws. A curious kind of
> > lawlessness.
>
> So We have pretend laws because we don't obey the
> "real" laws. OK fine. You can put it that way if you want.
I just did. But I wasn't drawing attention to
obedience so much as to apprehension, and even
participation. While you are right that there
don't seem to be written laws that apply to all
men, in Homer, I think the relationship between
men and gods is much more rich and organic as a
result. And the result seems to me to be more
like what I'd call genuine "lawfulness" than it
is in the more modern formulation.
I don't mean to beat any dead horses here, but
something that appeals to me about the
"lawlessness" in _Job_ is a similar feeling there
that the laws are really more genuine when they
come out of an organic relationship with the
Powers That Be. It doesn't mean that the laws
have to be comprehensible to be apprehended, maybe
just the opposite, like Bohr said of Quantum
Mechanics: "If you aren't confused by quantum
mechanics, then you haven't properly understood
it." [Pardon if I've bungled it a bit.]
> I didn't say the society had no structure, just no laws
> as the term was understood by the Greeks as well as ourselves,
> and it is this which is interesting. It is indeed "a curious
> kind of lawlessness" since that term is usually taken to imply
> a conflict with existing law. That's why I used the term
> "actual lawlessness."
But there are certainly conflicts with existing
laws. The sacrifice of Iphegenia (do I have the
name right?) was clearly a violation of law, even
though the law had never been written, and that
episode was the only situation in which it
applied. The offending of Circe, by Odysseus'
crew was a violation of law. In all these cases,
the "law" is whatever is needed to maintain a
proper relationship with the gods. And, yes, part
of the beauty of the thing is that the gods
themselves are in conflict, in the _Iliad_,
especially, and so the law is conflicted and
therefore protean; it is being discovered or
created as we go. But that doesn't seem the same
as "lawlessness" to me.
To return to the metaphor of our previous
discussion, the modern situation is the result of
Gilgamesh having slain Humbaba. The result is
something that can be ordered by a comprehensible
law, but the catch is that this spells the end of
Enkidu and Gilgamesh. Obtaining lawfulness, I
might put it, has come at the cost of the Meaning
that makes law worth having. Without God, to put
it in terms of a discussion I sort of had with
Pascal Zerling, there is no ethics. Pascal
attempted at first to suggest that metaphysics
could rescue ethics, but it soon turned out that
he was full of shit. Ethics is dead. We have
only efficacy.
Jeff
Francis Muir
>
> > > Perhaps societies with a tradition of individualism are more likely
> > > to have the idea.
> >
> > Including Saudi Arabia, Texas, and China.
>
> Always seems to be hot places which have the biggest problems with
> human rights. Cooler places (northern Europe, Canada) seem to be a bit
> more `chilled`, so to speak.
Counter examples: Chile and Niger.
finn
l...@ihgp160h200.ih.lucent.com (-Mammel,L.H.) wrote:
> In article <93cra6$qfn$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>, Jeff Inman <j...@my-deja.com> wrote:
> >Lewis Mammel <lhma...@ameritech.net> wrote:
>
> >> I was also interested in the repercussions of Odysseus'
> >> slaughter of the suitors. In Homer, he has to fight off
> >> a subsequent posse action against him, which ends the story,
sort of. that's where the action stops, but teiresias has told odysseus,
and O's told penelope that he's got more wandering to do before he can
settle at home. however, i got the sense that the extra leg of wandering
brought more of a sense of closure -- perhaps a time for reflection --
rather than actual penance. there wasn't any great gnashing of teeth
when O tells his wife he's not home for good.
> The suitors have usurped his home, his kingdom and his honor, and
> to regain these he must vanquish them, which he does with some
> relish. The point I was making in this context was that Homer
> does not toss the suitors aside as props, as we tend to do by closing
> the action with the slaughter of the suitors. Homer reminds us
> that these were substantial and well connected men, and their
> deaths bring consequences.
a good point.
> Odysseus must fight yet another
> action to bring events to a close, although with Athena's aid this
> is not so bloody.
and jove averts the possibility of more bloodshed with a well-timed
lightening bolt, and everybody makes up. the gods save the day again.
> The thing is, there is the additional matter of wandering with the
> oar, which Teiresias had prophesied, but which is not accounted for
> in the Odyssey. This was supposed to be an appeasement of Poseidon,
> I believe, and is in the nature of a penance.
what did O did to piss poseidon off in the first place? (before the
polyphemos incident.)
> It is rather poignant
> since these further wanderings deny his long sought rest, and it was
> my thought that his guilt for killing the suitors was involved. It
> reminds me of Moses being denied entrance into the Promised Land.
again, i'm not so sure. O really doesn't seem all that cut up about it.
at the end of the Odyssey, he's cleaned house, to to speak, and another
leg of wandering is only postponing a return to his bed.
> >> Throughout Homer, I was impressed with the fact of actual
> >> lawlessness in all respects. It gives an instructive view
> >> on the psychology and sociology that finally find their
> >> expression in law.
> >
> >To which lawlessness are you referring?
>
> Well, there were no laws and no judges in the society
> as depicted, only mores.
didn't the gods themselves serve as law and judge?
re: lawlessness, i found the cyclops interesting in that respect. my
translation, lattimore's, made a point of noting just how "lawless" the
cyclops were. i wish i had the book in front of me, but IIRC, polyphemos
& his ilk did as they pleased, without any consideration for others; and
still the gods provided them sustenance without the one-eyed guys having
to do a lick of work. i don't recall polyphemos even making sacrifice,
but perhaps i disremember. the benefits of being the offspring of gods,
perhaps?
--
f
otINOKYad
Michael S. Morris
Wednesday, the 10th of January, 2001
Jeff Inman wrote:
Without God, to put it in terms of a discussion
I sort of had with Pascal Zerling, there is no
ethics. Pascal attempted at first to suggest that
metaphysics could rescue ethics, but it soon
turned out that he was full of shit. Ethics is dead.
We have only efficacy.
I don't understand why ethics needs rescuing. It
seems to me much more rather like physics. Capable of
application and development on its own limited terms. Both
ethics, such as it can be developed, and physics, such
as it can be developed, come inferentially prior to the
metaphysical foundations we might like to discover underpinning
them.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Dylan Bryan-Dolman
> l...@ihgp160h200.ih.lucent.com (-Mammel,L.H.) wrote:
> > I don't follow this at all. Why would Athena's sponsorship
> > imply he was doing penance?
>
> I just meant that Athena's sponsorship implies
> that he's doing something that has justification,
> however obscure it may seem sometimes.
Please. Atreides, etc. The gods require penance for actions the gods
compel all the the time.
Dylan
=dbd=
Jeff Inman
> Jeff Inman wrote:
> Without God, to put it in terms of a discussion
> I sort of had with Pascal Zerling, there is no
> ethics. Pascal attempted at first to suggest that
> metaphysics could rescue ethics, but it soon
> turned out that he was full of shit. Ethics is dead.
> We have only efficacy.
>
> I don't understand why ethics needs rescuing. It
> seems to me much more rather like physics. Capable of
> application and development on its own limited terms. Both
> ethics, such as it can be developed, and physics, such
> as it can be developed, come inferentially prior to the
> metaphysical foundations we might like to discover underpinning
> them.
I disagree. An atheistic (or "non-spiritual")
physicist can still get something done, because
his vocabulary is sufficient for the task, as it
is presently understood. But a non-spiritual
ethicist (e.g. David Swanson?) has only outrage
and rhetoric at his disposal. Granted, people may
not notice this if they happen to share the values
of the splutterer, or they may even become
intoxicated or overpowered by his values, so that
in any event they are willing to grant his
premises without argument. But such a one seems
to me to have no rigorous intellectual foundation.
Pascal Zerling wrote this to Jeff Davis:
] Some people want to believe that there is something
] to ethics beyond asserting that seeing an infant tortured
] death makes me feel bad, or that the destruction of six
] million Jews is wrong because I have a negative emotional
] response to it. Metaphysics is at its most respectable
] when it is used to ground the objectivity of ethics.
It finally turned out that he was talking about a
noble "effort" of metaphysics to achieve this
goal, even though the goal itself is not achieved.
I might rather say that the problem, though
insoluable, still provides fertile ground for
artfulness and fine human feeling. If you want to
call that "ethics", well, okay, I guess. But if
"ethics" is supposed to refer to something more
"scientific", then maybe you'd better give an
example of it actually achieving anything.
Then again, on second thought, maybe the physicist
is in the same position, after all. Not sure.
Of course, there's plenty of room for inquiry into
the experience of ethics, the unreduced objects of
moral compulsion, and so forth. That's an
interestingly sticky wicket, but I think such
scientists would not allow themselves to be
labelled, regarding their spiritual orientation.
Pallex
Are these examples of `chilled`, or `hot, tired and emotional` places?
msmo...@netdirect.net
Thursday, the 11th of January, 2001
Jeff Inman:
Without God, to put it in terms of a discussion
I sort of had with Pascal Zerling, there is no
ethics. Pascal attempted at first to suggest that
metaphysics could rescue ethics, but it soon
turned out that he was full of shit. Ethics is dead.
We have only efficacy.
I said:
I don't understand why ethics needs rescuing. It
seems to me much more rather like physics. Capable of
application and development on its own limited terms. Both
ethics, such as it can be developed, and physics, such
as it can be developed, come inferentially prior to the
metaphysical foundations we might like to discover underpinning
them.
Jeff:
I disagree. An atheistic (or "non-spiritual")
Umm, to me at least "spiritual" comes across as
a very mushy, over-abused word. I don't know
what it means to be "non-spiritual".
Jeff:
physicist can still get something done, because
his vocabulary is sufficient for the task, as it
is presently understood. But a non-spiritual
ethicist (e.g. David Swanson?) has only outrage
and rhetoric at his disposal.
Nonsense. He comes hard-wired to all appearances
with an understanding that some actions he might
do, he ought not to do. I'm thinking of C.S. Lewis
here. He *was* an atheist. He was, more or less, an
anti-physicist, more at home amongst his beloved medieval
and classical authors than with modern reductionist
materialists. It was his sense that there *are*
moral laws written on the human heart that led him
to his religious conversion. I.e., for Lewis
ethics *preceded* his belief in God, the existence of
moral Law for him implied a Lawgiver. For many
religious physicists, something like the same is
true. The order and beauty that they see in nature
implies a cosmological God. God is built from the
ground up, not from the top down. I am personally
something like this myself. I don't believe in God.
I do believe in ethics and in physics. They are
both much more primitive and immediate to me. God
is an inference that I can see were possible to make
from them, but I don't see that there is enough evidence
for me to make that inference (plus I guess I see
contradictory data, too, which holds me back from
making that inference).
Jeff:
Granted, people may
not notice this if they happen to share the values
of the splutterer, or they may even become
intoxicated or overpowered by his values, so that
in any event they are willing to grant his
premises without argument. But such a one seems
to me to have no rigorous intellectual foundation.
I don't understand what this rigorous intellectual
foundation would be. It's like the guy who was saying
we needed to use quantum mechanics to predict the
electronic orbital structures of high-Z atoms, or
we must abandon quantum mechanics. This is just nonsense.
We live in a messy world. We live in the sublunar sphere.
We see as through a glass darkly. The physics we
know is partial. The ethics we know is partial.
Somewhere in the chain of reason must be a first
link, an axiom or two. One can always deny premises
for the sake of argument. But, deny as you will,
it will be noted that you behave as though you
believe in the acceleration of gravity downward
from 12th-story balconies, and that you seem
to understand and agree with the outrage at Auschwitz.
Heck, even Nazi perpetrators seem to have understood
the moral outrage of what they were did (which
was Goldhagen's point).
I do not understand the demand for proof of axioms,
what it would mean even to have "a rigorous
intellectual foundation". If such a foundation were
complete, it seems to me it must necessarily be
the opposite of rigorous, i.e. wrong.
Jeff Inman:
Pascal Zerling wrote this to Jeff Davis:
Some people want to believe that there is something
to ethics beyond asserting that seeing an infant tortured
death makes me feel bad, or that the destruction of six
million Jews is wrong because I have a negative emotional
response to it. Metaphysics is at its most respectable
when it is used to ground the objectivity of ethics.
It finally turned out that he was talking about a
noble "effort" of metaphysics to achieve this
goal, even though the goal itself is not achieved.
I might rather say that the problem, though
insoluable, still provides fertile ground for
artfulness and fine human feeling. If you want to
call that "ethics", well, okay, I guess. But if
"ethics" is supposed to refer to something more
"scientific", then maybe you'd better give an
example of it actually achieving anything.
Well, I don't know what you mean by "scientific",
but it seems to me that this is just the muck
of modern philosophy which tries to reduce ethics
to the material plane. Many examples seem evident
to me from C.S. Lewis's list of "the Tao" from the
back of _The Abolition of Man_. Ethical understanding,
at a deep level, seems to me to transcend human
cultural boundaries. I know of no single instance of
a truly different and distinct ethics having been
devised and then accepted by human beings. We don't
seem to be capable of that---even though we do seem to
be quite capable of the most horrible behaviour imaginable,
we do not seem to be capable of believing that such
behaviour isn't wrong.
Jeff:
Then again, on second thought, maybe the physicist
is in the same position, after all. Not sure.
It seems to me he is in exactly the same position.
He has starting assumptions, I suppose. But it
is significant that Nature answers his inquiries
in a certain way. Always that way, and no other.
He doesn't seem to be able to build Coyote theories
of star-formation. He can make myths about Coyote,
and derive great benefit, beauty, significance
from such myths. But mythology entails a different *mode* of
response from Nature than physics. And it plainly has
its own objective rules. There is a large infinity
of myths possible about star-formation, and an infinity
of them will fall short of Coyote in terms of benefit,
beauty, or significance.
Jeff:
Of course, there's plenty of room for inquiry into
the experience of ethics, the unreduced objects of
moral compulsion, and so forth. That's an
interestingly sticky wicket, but I think such
scientists would not allow themselves to be
labelled, regarding their spiritual orientation.
It is inquiry which, as long as it attempts to remain
scientistically material, is doomed to inquire into
the wrong thing. The ethical is simply metaphysically
distinct from the material, howeversomemuch they
interact.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
dialec...@my-deja.com
msmo...@netdirect.net wrote:
> Ethical understanding, at a deep level, seems to me to
> transcend human cultural boundaries. I know of no single
> instance of a truly different and distinct ethics having
> been devised and then accepted by human beings. We don't
> seem to be capable of that---even though we do seem to
> be quite capable of the most horrible behaviour imaginable,
> we do not seem to be capable of believing that such
> behaviour isn't wrong.
I think you're dead wrong about that. Many ancient cultures
had very different conceptions of ethics from ours. The best
example I can think of is human sacrifice. The societies
that practiced human sacrifice did not think of it as evil
as we would today. Human sacrifice was a sacred, good thing.
Let me quote again what Roberto Calasso said about the
Aztecs:
"The Aztecs were perpetually at war, but not out of desire
for conquest. For them, war was mainly a device by which they
procured prisoners, who then became sacrificial victims.
Twenty thousand a year, according to the calculations of some
scholars. In relation to sacrifice, war was a by-product."
That is a striking fact about Aztec civilization, and good
evidence that you're wrong when you claim that:
> The ethical is simply metaphysically distinct from the
> material, howeversomemuch they interact.
I would assert that historical materialism is correct to
construe ethics as a part of the superstructure, which
depends on the material base of society. Capitalist society
has a certain kind of ethics, and ancient Aztec society had
a completely different conception of right and wrong.
The Aztecs considered it to be a great honour to be chosen
as a victim of human sacrifice. This is the gist of my
disagreement with Ron Hardin, who holds that ethics is
synonymous or coextensive with religion.
PS. I've chosen to post under the name "dialectician" and
stop using the name "Pascal Zerling". I won't go into the
details of why I originally used that name, but let's just
say it's a private joke between me and some of my friends
who are lurking in rec.arts.books, and revolves around the
fact that there is a real person named "Pascal Zerling"
but he is a sort of a Forrest Gump like guy...
msmo...@netdirect.net
Thursday, the 11th of January, 2001
I said:
Ethical understanding, at a deep level, seems to me to
transcend human cultural boundaries. I know of no single
instance of a truly different and distinct ethics having
been devised and then accepted by human beings. We don't
seem to be capable of that---even though we do seem to
be quite capable of the most horrible behaviour imaginable,
we do not seem to be capable of believing that such
behaviour isn't wrong.
dialectician nee Pascal Zerling:
I think you're dead wrong about that.
I think I am not. What I say is said in full cognizance of
examples such as you have in mind.
The issue concerns whether I need to demonstrate
anthropologically universal agreement among
ethical systems in order to underpin my belief
that there is a universal *something* that ethical
systems address. That would be silly. In analogy to
physics it would be like claiming Newton's 2nd Law
wasn't valid in ancient Greece because it was
unknown to them.
Obviously ethical systems have evolved over time.
Ethical thinkers have advanced new ethical rules,
and these rules have been evaluated, criticized,
adopted or rejected. And obviously there are huge
grey areas where all the rules in the world will
not serve to guide us, and there are obviously
strong disagreements about the correct rules are.
But I don't think that examples of atrocious
*behaviours* in history amount to a demonstration
that those behaviours either were felt to be ethical
within their cultural setting, or that, if they were,
the culture itself was simply ignorant of a
quite objective ethical rule, in much the same way
as cultures have plainly been ignorant of scientific
rules.
dia:
Many ancient cultures
had very different conceptions of ethics from ours.
So many like to assert. But I'm afraid I do not
buy it.
dia:
The best example I can think of is human sacrifice.
I don't think of it as a very good example. We
plainly live in a civilization which descends
from human sacrificial roots. Again, it's like
Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry. The Greeks
knew about how the angles of a triangle in a plane
added up to two right angles. They did not know about
how it could be different for the angles in triangles
in curved spaces. We see a little more of geometry
than they did. Why can we not see the end of human
sacrifice as a progress towards a more nearly objectively
correct ethics?
dia:
The societies
that practiced human sacrifice did
not think of it as evil
as we would today.
Actually, this is quite unclear with respect to
the Aztecs. Human sacrifice at a modest level
seems to have been common throughout Mesoamerica,
but the Aztecs were feared and loathed by many central
Mexican tribes for the extreme degree at which they
practiced human sacrifice.
dia:
Human sacrifice was a sacred, good thing.
Yes and no. Aztec human sacrifice for instance
didn't seem so good to the Tlaxcalans, who joined
in alliance with Cortez against the Aztecs.
dia:
Let me quote again what Roberto Calasso said about the
Aztecs:
"The Aztecs were perpetually at war, but not out of desire
for conquest. For them, war was mainly a device by which they
procured prisoners, who then became sacrificial victims.
Twenty thousand a year, according to the calculations of some
scholars. In relation to sacrifice, war was a by-product."
That is a striking fact about Aztec civilization,
No. There are scholars as well who argue that the twenty-thousand
number comes from Bernal Diaz and Cortez and other
conquistadores who greatly exaggerated "human sacrifice"
in order to justify their own predations. Personally
I tend to believe Bernal and Cortez about the scale
of Aztec sacrifice, but please understand that Calasso
is *writing literature* and not to be confused with
history or even anthropology.
dia:
and good
evidence that you're wrong when you claim that:
"The ethical is simply metaphysically distinct from the
material, howeversomemuch they interact."
I'm sorry, but it seems no evidence at all.
People plainly behave differently than they
feel they ought to behave. It's the oughts
we are concerned about with respect to ethics,
and I do not believe we have a single ought
from the Aztecs that is unfiltered through
the lens of their Spanish conquerors.
dia:
I would assert that historical materialism is correct to
construe ethics as a part of the superstructure, which
depends on the material base of society.
Then it seems to me you will always miss seeing
what ethics is.
dia:
Capitalist society has a certain kind of ethics,
and ancient Aztec society had a completely different
conception of right and wrong.
Maybe this makes a nice myth for thoroughgoing
materialists to believe in. But, given that
it simply doesn't work if examined in detail,
given that you cannot *predict* "the ethics"
from the material base, the materialism it
seems to me is self-defeating. In exactly the
way that all "human science" fails as science.
dia:
The Aztecs considered it to be a great
honour to be chosen as a victim of human
sacrifice.
This is a modern myth. There is plenty of
evidence to the contrary, starting with the
historical fact that so many central American tribes
united in alliance with Cortez against the
Aztecs.
dia:
This is the gist of my disagreement
with Ron Hardin, who holds that ethics is
synonymous or coextensive with religion.
I can't see why ethics would be
either synonymous or coextensive
with religion. In fact, it plainly is not,
as there have been clear believers in ethics
who eschewed religion. There are people whose
belief in ethics led them from atheism to
theism, and there are others whose belief in
ethics took them from theism to atheism.
In any event, please understand: I do
not buy this ooh-ahh sort of multiculturalism
as an argument against the independent
reality of ethics.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Moggin
>>> No, it's not the victim but the _place_ accorded to his voice.
>>> There's no voices, they're dead.
Moggin:
>> A place accorded the voice of the victim, exactly. That's
>> one victim, one voice, audible or otherwise. Just like one
>> man, one vote: a perfectly good principle til it comes time to
>> decide which man the vote belongs to.
Ron:
> It's not a response to channeling the dead but to an ethical
> structure, that you would be more inclined to locate in the
> social structure of an individualistic society. It would be
> how it formalizes ethics, namely how it formalizes the Other
> as transcendent of every arrangement.
An "individualistic society" which makes individual people
into the victim. But let me try a different angle. What
makes you believe that execution is uniquely capable of marking
the place of the victim's voice? Why wouldn't your epigram
work as well or as badly with some other outcome? I'll give an
example: "Forgiveness has something to do with the place
accorded to the voice of the victim, which is absent." Where's
the difference, structurally?
-- Moggin
Moggin
> Moggin <mog...@mediaone.net>:
>> I hate Broadway tunes (unless you'd count "Summertime," and even
>> then I go for the Big Brother and the Holding Company version,
>> accept no substitutes).
> Why is it better than, say, Billie Holiday's version?
Mm. You got me there. The Billie Holiday version is damn
good, too. Kinda like the original Dylan recording of "All
Along the Watchtower" compared to Hendrix.' But I'd choose the
ones turned up to eleven.
> Just for the record, I don't think there's that much difference
> between Big Brother and the Holding Company, and the Blues Brothers.
> White kids singing show tunes.
I've made a half-dozen guesses about what that means, none
of them very convincing. The guesses, I mean. Your point
might be highly persuasive. I just can't figure out what it is.
-- Moggin
Moggin
>>> No, it's not the victim but the _place_ accorded to his voice.
>>> There's no voices, they're dead.
Moggin:
>> A place accorded the voice of the victim, exactly. That's
>> one victim, one voice, audible or otherwise. Just like one
>> man, one vote: a perfectly good principle til it comes time to
>> decide which man the vote belongs to.
Ron:
dialec...@my-deja.com
Mike Morris wrote:
> dialectician/Pascal Zerling wrote:
> > The Aztecs considered it to be a great
> > honour to be chosen as a victim of human
> > sacrifice.
>
> This is a modern myth. There is plenty of evidence
> to the contrary, starting with the historical fact
> that so many central American tribes united in
> alliance with Cortez against the Aztecs.
Resistance to the Aztec practice of human sacrifice
by other Indian tribes does not prove that the Aztecs
themselves considered it to be wrong. Also, here is
a description of the Aztec ritual of human sacrifice
by a scholar who says explicitly that being selected
as an _ixiptla_ or sacrificial victim, was considered
a great honour:
"'Ordinary' priests, known as _tlamacaqui_, 'fed' the
idols in the temples, tended the temple fires or burned
incense in censers with long handles shaped like snakes.
Priests also had charge of the sacred painted books and
ran a _calmecac_ school where young boys were trained
for the priesthood. Discipline, and self-discipline,
were ruthless, not least in the priests' daily practice
of using cactus spines to draw blood from their ears,
tongues, thighs and other parts of the body as an
offering to the gods.
Not all priests were eligible to perform human
sacrifice. This task was reserved for an élite, the
_tlenamacac_. The major site in Tenochtitlan where
sacrifices were performed in public was the Templo
Mayor, almost a city in its own right, surrounded by
walls and 25 hectares in extent in the centre of the
city. A sacrifice, _ixiptla_, or 'god's image', would
be ceremonially bathed in advance to wash out all
impurities and clothed in the robes and distinguishing
badges of the god for whose sake he was to die. The
_ixiptla_ then had to climb one of the two steep
stairways leading to the summit, where he would be
spreadeagled on the altar with four priests holding
down his arms and legs and another holding his head.
Using a special obsidian-bladed knife, the _tlenamacac_
would cut the chest open with one swift movement,
rip out the heart and hold it up as an offering to
the Sun.
Great honour accrued to an _ixiptla_, who was
seen as emulating the self-sacrifice by which the gods
had created the Sun, and he himself became a deity at
death. There was, too, a special lustre in becoming an
_ixiptla_ to Tezcatlipoca_. His festival required a
young man of sixteen or seventeen who, for a year, was
garbed in gold and fine cotton, garlanded with flowers
and had his every need fulfilled by eight special
attendants before mounting the steps to die.
Needless to say, the Spaniards regarded human
sacrifice as an abomination, all the more so since,
according to Cortés, 'priests dress in black and never
comb their hair from the time they enter the priesthood
until they leave' (Cortés, 2nd letter, p. 105).
Consequently, the Spanish accounts depicted priests as
figures of horror, their faces painted black, their
bodies disfigured from driving maguey spines into their
flesh and with unwashed, uncombed hair and clothes
matted by the blood they spilled in such profusion."
(_The Aztecs_ by Brenda Ralph Lewis_, p. 62-3)
So, the Aztecs thought the sacrificial victim actually
became a god himself at death. I'd say they had a
rather different ethical interpretation of the
significance of the event of human sacrifice from
our own!
For other examples of different ethical systems in the
past, how about slavery in the U.S. during the 18th
century? Thomas Jefferson, for example, owned many black
slaves, while preaching about the universal rights of
mankind. Or the fact that in the Middle Ages, noblemen in
many European countries were allowed to kill their own
serfs with impunity...
Ron Hardin
> An "individualistic society" which makes individual people
> into the victim. But let me try a different angle. What
> makes you believe that execution is uniquely capable of marking
> the place of the victim's voice? Why wouldn't your epigram
> work as well or as badly with some other outcome? I'll give an
> example: "Forgiveness has something to do with the place
> accorded to the voice of the victim, which is absent." Where's
> the difference, structurally?
An individualistic society does not calculate victimhood out,
always leaving an opening. It strikes me as the left's position
that it should always be calculated out and be made into a system;
the right's that everything is case by case and good is done
by minute particulars, which is the opposite of reduction.
My epigram only locates the support of the death penalty; another
epipgram can always try to work another direction. Does, in fact,
poetically speaking, forgiveness have something to do with
the place accorded to the voice of the victim, which is absent?
Well you can only forgive a wrong done to you, which, say you are
a grieving relative, you could do, but it doesn't seem to touch
the place accorded to the voice of the victim. Perhaps the
victim is a saint and you want it as a remembrance? But why
isn't it the law of the jungle when you don't want to, on the
other side? A poetical difficulty, that yours depends on somebody
in a position to forgive, which is at least better expressed in
another way, fatal to the epigram.
dialec...@my-deja.com
Mike Morris wrote:
> The issue concerns whether I need to demonstrate
> anthropologically universal agreement among
> ethical systems in order to underpin my belief
> that there is a universal *something* that ethical
> systems address.
It is trivially true that ethics in all times and
places addresses something universal -- it concerns
the question of which actions are considered good
and which evil. The dispute between the two of us
concerns the extent of the variation in the answer
to that question. I think that some societies approve
of actions which we consider evil, such as human
sacrifice in the case of the Aztecs, and this
shows that even the most basic laws of ethics are
not universal. There is no continuous evolution from
Aztec ethics to our own ethics that preserves
something universal of significance. There are sharp
breaks, discontinuities in the historical change
from one ethical system to another. Therefore, ethics
is not universal.
> Obviously ethical systems have evolved over time.
> Ethical thinkers have advanced new ethical rules,
> and these rules have been evaluated, criticized,
> adopted or rejected. And obviously there are huge
> grey areas where all the rules in the world will
> not serve to guide us, and there are obviously
> strong disagreements about the correct rules are.
> But I don't think that examples of atrocious
> *behaviours* in history amount to a demonstration
> that those behaviours either were felt to be ethical
> within their cultural setting, or that, if they were,
> the culture itself was simply ignorant of a
> quite objective ethical rule, in much the same way
> as cultures have plainly been ignorant of scientific
> rules.
Ethical rules have existed for as long as there have
been societies with some basic level of organization.
This includes even small bands of hunters and gatherers.
But the ethical thinking of pre-civilized peoples was
very different from our own. The most important difference
was that primitive tribes did not have a universal
conception of humanity. The members of other tribes
were not considered to be human. They did not have the
same value as the members of one's own tribe. The
members of other tribes could be treated like animals,
as the practice of cannibalism shows.
The idea that there is such as thing as the collection
of all human beings, each of which has in some sense the
same value, is a recent invention, which many people
still reject today. Racists do not think that people
with a different skin colour have the same value as
people with the same skin colour as themselves. The idea
of universal humanity probably dates to the ancient
Egyptians, who apparently invented the idea of the
immortal soul.
> Why can we not see the end of human sacrifice as a
> progress towards a more nearly objectively correct
> ethics?
The whole point of Calasso's book _The Ruin of Kasch_
is that there has been no significant moral progress
in history. In the place of human sacrifice what we
have is the exploitation of the poor of the Third
World by global capitalism. Calasso's response to
this fact is to embrace Jesus Christ as his Lord
and Saviour. My response to it is to defend the right
of Third World countries to pursue an independent
path of development, and not be the economic slaves
of the West. Your response is to deny it, and
assert the Whiggish view of world history against
all the evidence. You're not alone in doing that.
My favourite philosopher Ernest Gellner does exactly
the same thing, and that is my main disagreement with
him, and the reason I'm a Social Democrat, while
Gellner was a rightwinger.
> > The societies that practiced human sacrifice did
> > not think of it as evil as we would today.
> Actually, this is quite unclear with respect to
> the Aztecs. Human sacrifice at a modest level
> seems to have been common throughout Mesoamerica,
> but the Aztecs were feared and loathed by many central
> Mexican tribes for the extreme degree at which they
> practiced human sacrifice.
My understanding is that some scholars think human
sacrifice developed among the Aztecs into a vital
social institution, which they thought helped to
regulate all the cycles of nature. In the final
years of their civilization, they sacrificed more
and more victims in the false belief that this
was necessary to maintain the seasons, day and
night, and so on. In other words, the Aztecs became
control freaks, a bit like the technocrats of our
own bureaucratic capitalistic society. Only they
lacked our sophisticated methods of incremental
social engineering, and had to resort to magic.
> Personally I tend to believe Bernal and Cortez about
> the scale of Aztec sacrifice, but please understand
> that Calasso is *writing literature* and not to be
> confused with history or even anthropology.
Calasso is admittedly writing literature, but his
writings address serious moral, historical, and
philosophical questions. Is Tolstoy's _War and Peace_
disqualified as serious reflection on Napoleon
because it is a novel? Isaiah Berlin certainly
didn't think so, and wrote a famous essay about
Tolstoy's conception of history.
> People plainly behave differently than they
> feel they ought to behave. It's the oughts
> we are concerned about with respect to ethics,
> and I do not believe we have a single ought
> from the Aztecs that is unfiltered through
> the lens of their Spanish conquerors.
The historical facts about the Aztecs speak for
themselves, as the quote from Brenda Ralph Lewis's
book _The Aztecs_ shows. Her book was published
in 1999 and so draws on the most recent scholarship.
As it happens, the picture she paints of Aztec society
is not very different from Calasso's account in
_The Ruin of Kasch_. The Aztecs were terribly cruel
by our standards, and that is the whole point.
The Aztecs disagree radically with us about how
we ought to behave. They believed that human sacrifice
was a good thing.
> > I would assert that historical materialism is
> > correct to construe ethics as a part of the
> > superstructure, which depends on the material
> > base of society. Capitalist society has a certain
> > kind of ethics, and ancient Aztec society had a
> > completely different conception of right and wrong.
>
> Maybe this makes a nice myth for thoroughgoing
> materialists to believe in. But, given that
> it simply doesn't work if examined in detail,
> given that you cannot *predict* "the ethics"
> from the material base, the materialism it
> seems to me is self-defeating. In exactly the
> way that all "human science" fails as science.
There is no need to be dogmatic about historical
materialism and say that we can predict ethics
based on the material base. Only dogmatic Marxists
believe that. But what is clear is that with the
rise of pre-capitalist society ethical thinking
began to change radically. There was a big debate
in early Georgian England, for example, about
greed. The clergy condemned the new self-seeking
ethic of the market economy, while others like
Bernard Mandeville, defended it. Eventually the
defenders of capitalist ethics began to win.
Adam Smith's _The Wealth of Nations_ is already
written with much more confidence than Mandeville's
_The Fable of the Bees_. Finally, everyone came
to accept the charging of interest on debt, for
example, which had been univerally condemned as
evil for millennia, all the way from Aristotle
to the Christian theologians of the Middle Ages.
Who complains about usury any more? This
transformation in the ethical thinking in the
West is the subject of Albert O. Hirschman's
classic study _The Passions and the Interests:
Political Arguments for Capitalism before its
Triumph_.
Michael S. Morris
Friday, the 12th of January, 2001
dia:
The Aztecs considered it to be a great
honour to be chosen as a victim of human
sacrifice.
I said:
This is a modern myth. There is plenty of evidence
to the contrary, starting with the historical fact
that so many central American tribes united in
alliance with Cortez against the Aztecs.
dia:
Resistance to the Aztec practice of human sacrifice
by other Indian tribes does not prove that the Aztecs
themselves considered it to be wrong.
Sorry, but it doesn't have to. What it does do, however,
is suggest that persons from *the same cultural milieu* did
not exactly consider Aztec human sacrifice an honour. The
evidence points to the fact that the Aztecs were considered
extreme.
dia:
Also, here is a description of the Aztec ritual of
human sacrifice by a scholar who says explicitly
that being selected as an _ixiptla_ or sacrificial victim,
was considered a great honour:
[Passage read and deleted.] Do you understand how *thin*
is the historical and archaeological evidence upon which she
is basing her "visualization" of Aztec sacrifice? I've read a
good fraction of the historical sources, as well as secondary
works. I have reproductions of a couple of the Aztec
codices.
This is *exactly* what I meant by saying it is a modern myth.
And it is promulgated by moderns in exactly this way---trying
to emphasize the cultural distance and strangeness of the sacrifice,
emphasizing the idea that it was not horrible, but sacred and
honorific. The evidence for that claim is practically nonexistent.
More mileage could be gotten perhaps out of the much
more modest Mayan sacrificial practices.
dia:
So, the Aztecs thought the sacrificial victim actually
became a god himself at death.
I don't think anyone knows what the Aztecs thought.
What we have are historical and archaeological theories
*about* what they thought or how it might have worked.
We do not know.
dia:
I'd say they had a rather different ethical
interpretation of the significance of the event
of human sacrifice from our own!
I don't see how, and there is the obvious hostility
of the surrounding tribes to suggest that this is
not the case at all. But if, for instance, we did believe
that sacrificial victims became gods, it seems like we,
too, might find that the application of the Golden Rule
would lead us to perform human sacrifice on our fellow
travellers. So, I don't see the ethical distance as all that great,
even in this case, which I think probably misstates Aztec
belief (because of our essential ignorance about Aztec belief).
Consider the film "The Matrix", in which the world in which
we live is really a virtual reality, a computer simulation,
and the actual reality is that we are all "brains in vats"
farmed by machines for our tissues and our metabolism
used as a power source. Killing people in the normal
world becomes possibly (not in that film, but we can imagine
a situation otherwise) no different than "killing" them in a video
game. A different physics/metaphysics leads to a different
applied ethics, to be sure, but the root ethical principles do not
seem to have been altered.
dia:
For other examples of different ethical systems in the
past, how about slavery in the U.S. during the 18th
century? Thomas Jefferson, for example, owned many black
slaves, while preaching about the universal rights of
mankind.
I've read a great deal of Jefferson, too. He writes quite
clearly that black slavery is wrong, and should be abolished,
and that the United States will have to pay a terrible price
for doing this to these people, if God is just.
I don't see any evidence at all that his ethical beliefs were
any different than yours or mine on the subject of
slavery.
dia:
Or the fact that in the Middle Ages, noblemen in
many European countries were allowed to kill their own
serfs with impunity...
Why do you think that behaviour is a good indicator
of ethics? Isn't it obvious from the horrors of the
20th-century that there is a distinction between
behaviour and ethical beliefs?
Also, what about progress? What about my analogy
with physics, or geometry? It is obvious that
the angles in spherical triangles added up to
more than two right angles in 300 B.C., whether
or not Euclid understood this. Non-Euclidean
geometry is more of an *extension* and *development*
of Euclidean geomtry than a negation of it.
It is possible to trace differing ideas about ethics
through history, though the differences in *ideas*
are not the same thing as differences in *practices*,
and not to be confused with them. But, it is also
possible to trace a change of ideas about physics or
about geometry through history and human geography.
This change of ideas does not, however, lead us to
suspect that the principles of physics or the theorems
of geometry have changed through time. The only thing that
has changed is that humans have known rather more or
less of them. So, I see no evidence from anthropology
that the principles of ethics couldn't be exactly the same
in this respect as geometry or physics. What changes is
our knowledge of an unchanging thing.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Jeff Inman
> I said:
> Ethical understanding, at a deep level, seems to me to
> transcend human cultural boundaries. I know of no single
> instance of a truly different and distinct ethics having
> been devised and then accepted by human beings. We don't
> seem to be capable of that---even though we do seem to
> be quite capable of the most horrible behaviour imaginable,
> we do not seem to be capable of believing that such
> behaviour isn't wrong.
I think there are myriad arguable examples of
humans with conflicting ethical views on a
situation, but, even if there weren't, this still
feels like a diversion from the question. Is
there an answer you can give as to *why* the wrong
things are wrong that you could expect to be
compelling to someone who didn't share your views?
I presume you expect that your explanation of,
say, lightning would make sense to Martians.
> dialectician nee Pascal Zerling:
> I think you're dead wrong about that.
>
> I think I am not. What I say is said in full cognizance of
> examples such as you have in mind.
>
> The issue concerns whether I need to demonstrate
> anthropologically universal agreement among
> ethical systems in order to underpin my belief
> that there is a universal *something* that ethical
> systems address. That would be silly. In analogy to
> physics it would be like claiming Newton's 2nd Law
> wasn't valid in ancient Greece because it was
> unknown to them.
Not so silly as you imply. You seem to think that
the pertinent "worldview", and the objects which
correspond to it (of which the 2nd law is a
member), has some necessity in itself, and
therefore is outside of invention. But is there
really any support for that conclusion? Seems to
me that the 2nd law is like the designated hitter
rule, or the moves to the Twist, or the text of
Ovid. If you've got it, then there it is, but if
you're into bird omens, instead, then that's what
you've got instead.
> Obviously ethical systems have evolved over time.
> Ethical thinkers have advanced new ethical rules,
> and these rules have been evaluated, criticized,
> adopted or rejected.
Do you suppose that this implies that there is any
kind of "advance" involved?
[...]
> dia:
> Many ancient cultures
> had very different conceptions of ethics from ours.
>
> So many like to assert. But I'm afraid I do not
> buy it.
>
> dia:
> The best example I can think of is human sacrifice.
>
> I don't think of it as a very good example. We
> plainly live in a civilization which descends
> from human sacrificial roots. Again, it's like
> Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry. The Greeks
> knew about how the angles of a triangle in a plane
> added up to two right angles. They did not know about
> how it could be different for the angles in triangles
> in curved spaces. We see a little more of geometry
> than they did. Why can we not see the end of human
> sacrifice as a progress towards a more nearly objectively
> correct ethics?
Do you think the end of human sacrifice (assuming
it has come) is indeed "progress towards a more
nearly objectively correct ethics" ? I don't see
how you arrive at that conclusion at all, aside
from the presumable fact that you prefer it.
[...]
> dia:
> I would assert that historical materialism is correct to
> construe ethics as a part of the superstructure, which
> depends on the material base of society.
>
> Then it seems to me you will always miss seeing
> what ethics is.
What is ethics?
[...]
> In any event, please understand: I do
> not buy this ooh-ahh sort of multiculturalism
> as an argument against the independent
> reality of ethics.
I don't think oo-ahh multiculturalism is what
you're up against, here. Multiculturalism
elevates the pluralism in values that come from
coexisting cultures, itself, as a value. The
issue here is something more fundamental, namely,
a question: how would one know the independent
real ethics when he saw it?
Michael S. Morris
Friday, the 12th of January, 2001
I said:
The issue concerns whether I need to demonstrate
anthropologically universal agreement among
ethical systems in order to underpin my belief
that there is a universal *something* that ethical
systems address.
dia:
It is trivially true that ethics in all times and
places addresses something universal -- it concerns
the question of which actions are considered good
and which evil.
It is also trivially true that all times and places and circumstances
are unique, and therefore that there is an ingredient which
is the opposite of universal about the application of ethics
to the situation.
dia:
The dispute between the two of us
concerns the extent of the variation in the answer
to that question.
No. The dispute is twofold. My first claim is that the
extent of variation in the answer to that question
is in fact much less than the example of Aztec sacrifice
would suggest. I.e., that *behaviours* are not
a good guide to what the answer would be. My second
claim is that actual variation in the human answer,
could you poll different cultures, might reflect variation
in human knowledge of ethics, rather than variation
in ethics itself (in the same way that differing ideas
about physics through time reflects differing levels of
knowledge or ignorance about physics, rather than a
different physical reality).
dia:
I think that some societies approve
of actions which we consider evil,
I have no doubt that this is so.
dia:
such as human sacrifice in the case of the Aztecs,
Not an example that makes your case very well,
as it is so historically problematic. (I.e. we have
no pre-Columbian Aztec writing which addresses
the question.)
dia:
and this shows that even the most basic laws of ethics are
not universal.
It shows nothing of the kind. Any more than Aristotle's
ignorance of the Law of Inertia means that the Law of Inertia
was not valid in Aristotle's time.
dia:
There is no continuous evolution from
Aztec ethics to our own ethics that preserves
something universal of significance.
Well, I certainly think there is a continuous evolution which
joined Aztec beliefs about ethics into "our own",
so I don't know what you mean here.
dia:
There are sharp breaks, discontinuities in the
historical change from one ethical system to
another.
I do not see that the breaks are all that sharp.
In fact, what is more surprising is that after the
briefest of contact, an Aztec such as Moctezuma
should so thoroughly understand Cortez.
dia:
Therefore, ethics is not universal.
Beliefs about ethics are hardly universal, but
that is a far cry from concluding that ethics is not
universal.
I said:
Obviously ethical systems have evolved over time.
Ethical thinkers have advanced new ethical rules,
and these rules have been evaluated, criticized,
adopted or rejected. And obviously there are huge
grey areas where all the rules in the world will
not serve to guide us, and there are obviously
strong disagreements about the correct rules are.
But I don't think that examples of atrocious
*behaviours* in history amount to a demonstration
that those behaviours either were felt to be ethical
within their cultural setting, or that, if they were,
the culture itself was simply ignorant of a
quite objective ethical rule, in much the same way
as cultures have plainly been ignorant of scientific
rules.
dia:
Ethical rules have existed for as long as there have
been societies with some basic level of organization.
Correct. And, many of those ethical rules have been
remarkably constant and consistent over several thousand years.
That is the truly astounding observational fact. The
variation is as nothing compared with this.
dia:
This includes even small bands of hunters and gatherers.
But the ethical thinking of pre-civilized peoples was
very different from our own. The most important difference
was that primitive tribes did not have a universal
conception of humanity. The members of other tribes
were not considered to be human. They did not have the
same value as the members of one's own tribe. The
members of other tribes could be treated like animals,
as the practice of cannibalism shows.
This just seems like a question of application,
not of the ethical rules themselves. The Rule is:
Treat humanely those in my tribe. Treat like
animals those in the other tribe. What has changed
is not the treatment so much as the definitions of
"my" and "other".
dia:
The idea that there is such as thing as the collection
of all human beings, each of which has in some sense the
same value, is a recent invention, which many people
still reject today.
People who reject Enlightenment liberalism,
either for ideological reasons of the right or
ideological reasons of the left, reject this idea
of human equality, yes. But, in terms of our
disagreement, so what? I believe in ethical
progress. I believe that human knowledge of ethics
can become better, has become better in fact
on many fronts. My political philosophy---liberalism---
is based in fact on this premise, that there is such
a thing as the One True Ethics, and that this ethics
says something about the equal liberty and equal
ethical responsibility of human beings.
dia:
Racists do not think that people with a different
skin colour have the same value as people with the
same skin colour as themselves.
Gag me with a spoon, as they say in the business.
It always comes down to those evil racists and
homophobes, doesn't it? What about the goddam leftists,
which abound in this newsgroup, and what about
the utter derision and contempt that they hold other
people in? What about their political agendas,
which always and everywhere involve the tyrannous
submerging of the individual pursuits of happiness
of millions of human beings in the elite-determined-and
-dictated "good of the group"?
dia:
The idea of universal humanity probably dates
to the ancient Egyptians, who apparently invented
the idea of the immortal soul.
Maybe, maybe not. In writing, the evidence is
there, but that of course continges upon there being
a plentiful lack of evidence everywhere else. In any event,
I would refuse to assert that the painters of Lascaux or
Altamira did not have the idea of the immortal soul.
I said:
Why can we not see the end of human sacrifice as a
progress towards a more nearly objectively correct
ethics?
dia:
The whole point of Calasso's book _The Ruin of Kasch_
is that there has been no significant moral progress in history.
Sounds like a powerful disrecommendation for Calasso's _The Ruin
of Kasch_ a miss.
dia:
In the place of human sacrifice what we
have is the exploitation of the poor of the Third
World by global capitalism.
So, the book degenerates into stupid
leftist mythologizing? I thought this was supposed
to be much better stuff than that.
In any event, and looking at the ruin of
this planet that illiberal regimes gave us in 1945,
what is obvious is that global capitalism has raised
about a third of the population of the planet out of
the dust of poverty and that it promises to do the
same for the rest when and if we can rid the
rest of the will to totalitarian power known as
communism.
dia:
Calasso's response to this fact is to embrace
Jesus Christ as his Lord and Saviour. My
response to it is to defend the right of Third
World countries to pursue an independent
path of development, and not be the economic
slaves of the West. Your response is to deny it,
My response is to observe reality, and that
in reality this "independent path of development"
ends up being another name for tyranny more
often than not.
dia:
and assert the Whiggish view of world history against
all the evidence.
The evidence of Calasso's imaginings? Or the
evidence of Taiwan's prosperity? Which kind
of evidence do you mean?
dia:
You're not alone in doing that.
Probably a function of my latent racism.
Though what could be more fundamentally
racist than the moral relativism you suggest
with respect to the Aztecs, I do not know.
dia:
My favourite philosopher Ernest Gellner does exactly
the same thing, and that is my main disagreement with
him, and the reason I'm a Social Democrat, while
Gellner was a rightwinger.
I do not know what "rightwinger" means to a Social
Democrat. To me, "rightwinger" means "conservative"---
out to use the power of law and the state against liberty to further
the dictated traditional good. To me, "leftwinger" means
"progressive" or "socialist"---out to use the power of
law and the state against liberty to further the dictated
future good. I am liberal, against using the power of law
or the state wherever it is not absolutely necessary, and
for limiting the state's power to interfere for any collective
reason absolutely against the power of every individual to pursue
happiness in his own way.
dia:
The societies that practiced human sacrifice did
not think of it as evil as we would today.
I said:
Actually, this is quite unclear with respect to
the Aztecs. Human sacrifice at a modest level
seems to have been common throughout Mesoamerica,
but the Aztecs were feared and loathed by many central
Mexican tribes for the extreme degree at which they
practiced human sacrifice.
dia:
My understanding is that some scholars think human
sacrifice developed among the Aztecs into a vital
social institution, which they thought helped to
regulate all the cycles of nature. In the final
years of their civilization, they sacrificed more
and more victims in the false belief that this
was necessary to maintain the seasons, day and
night, and so on. In other words, the Aztecs became
control freaks, a bit like the technocrats of our
own bureaucratic capitalistic society. Only they
lacked our sophisticated methods of incremental
social engineering, and had to resort to magic.
I have read several modern accounts, and, yes,
theories like this are made about it. These theories,
though, are what I have called "modern myths", in
that, built on the very flimsiest of evidence, they end up
looking more like reflections of the theorists'
contemporary concerns than anything else. These scholars
may be right in their speculations, or they may be wrong.
But their theories about Aztec intentions and beliefs
come from very little evidence about Aztec intentions and beliefs.
I said:
Personally I tend to believe Bernal and Cortez about
the scale of Aztec sacrifice, but please understand
that Calasso is *writing literature* and not to be
confused with history or even anthropology.
dia:
Calasso is admittedly writing literature, but his
writings address serious moral, historical, and
philosophical questions.
OK, then understand that his answers to these serious
questions may depend on the details. God may be
in the details.
dia:
Is Tolstoy's _War and Peace_ disqualified as serious
reflection on Napoleon because it is a novel? Isaiah Berlin
certainly didn't think so, and wrote a famous essay about
Tolstoy's conception of history.
As a serious reflection on history, no of course it is not
disqualified. History itself, however, it is not.
I said:
People plainly behave differently than they
feel they ought to behave. It's the oughts
we are concerned about with respect to ethics,
and I do not believe we have a single ought
from the Aztecs that is unfiltered through
the lens of their Spanish conquerors.
dia:
The historical facts about the Aztecs speak for
themselves,
No, they do not. This is the problem with the Aztecs
as an example in the way you have introduced them.
dia:
as the quote from Brenda Ralph Lewis's
book _The Aztecs_ shows. Her book was published
in 1999 and so draws on the most recent scholarship.
But, understand: We have no Aztec account of
anything precolumbian that has not been filtered
through Spanish hands. There is no history of
the Aztecs, in the classical sense of the word.
There is no writing. We have Spanish sources
from after and during the Conquest, and we have
a couple of Aztec sources filtered through Spanish hands.
And we have a thin archaeological record. We
also, I suppose, have several layers of political action
and reaction from after the Conquest. We do not
have Aztec voices addressing the ethical question
of human sacrifice. I don't think we have a single such
voice. So, Ms. Lewis's interpretation amounts to an
interpretation built on very thin historical evidence, howsomever
new it is.
dia:
As it happens, the picture she paints of Aztec society
is not very different from Calasso's account in
_The Ruin of Kasch_. The Aztecs were terribly cruel
by our standards, and that is the whole point.
The Aztecs disagree radically with us about how
we ought to behave. They believed that human sacrifice
was a good thing.
Well, again, we don't know that they believed this. There
is evidence I think that maybe they didn't . The reason
those non-Aztec tribes did not like the Aztecs was precisely
because many of the victims were neither honoured nor willing
to be sacrificed.
dia:
I would assert that historical materialism is
correct to construe ethics as a part of the
superstructure, which depends on the material
base of society. Capitalist society has a certain
kind of ethics, and ancient Aztec society had a
completely different conception of right and wrong.
I said:
Maybe this makes a nice myth for thoroughgoing
materialists to believe in. But, given that
it simply doesn't work if examined in detail,
given that you cannot *predict* "the ethics"
from the material base, the materialism it
seems to me is self-defeating. In exactly the
way that all "human science" fails as science.
dia:
There is no need to be dogmatic about historical
materialism and say that we can predict ethics
based on the material base.
Then why should we believe that materialists are
"correct"?
dia:
Only dogmatic Marxists believe that. But what
is clear is that with the rise of pre-capitalist society
ethical thinking began to change radically.
Why not "with the rise of naval power"? Or,
"with the decline of beekeeping"?
dia:
There was a big debate in early Georgian England,
for example, about greed. The clergy condemned the
new self-seeking ethic of the market economy, while
others like Bernard Mandeville, defended it. Eventually the
defenders of capitalist ethics began to win.
And impoverished people began to move up into
middle-class wealth.
dia:
Adam Smith's _The Wealth of Nations_ is already
written with much more confidence than Mandeville's
_The Fable of the Bees_. Finally, everyone came
to accept the charging of interest on debt, for
example, which had been univerally condemned as
evil for millennia, all the way from Aristotle
to the Christian theologians of the Middle Ages.
Who complains about usury any more?
Lots of people. Pound was one. I think they are
wrong about that, however.
dia:
This transformation in the ethical thinking in the
West is the subject of Albert O. Hirschman's
classic study _The Passions and the Interests:
Political Arguments for Capitalism before its
Triumph_.
And you see this transformation as utterly arbitrary?
I mean, you think there is no fundamental reason to
prefer the condemnation of usury to its acceptance?
Or vice versa?
Why are you a Social Democrat, by the way?
Wouldn't being a fascist be just as good?
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
dialec...@my-deja.com
Mike Morris wrote:
> But if, for instance, we did believe that sacrificial
> victims became gods, it seems like we, too, might
> find that the application of the Golden Rule would
> lead us to perform human sacrifice on our fellow
> travellers. So, I don't see the ethical distance
> as all that great, even in this case, which I think
> probably misstates Aztec belief (because of our
> essential ignorance about Aztec belief).
I don't think your attempt to make a clean separation
between ethical beliefs and religious beliefs is
plausible. For a believing Christian or Jew, for
example, his or her ethical belief that killing another
human being is wrong is intimately connected
religious beliefs. The commandment "Thou shalt not
kill" is a part of the decalogue, after all, which is
the revealed word of God. To kill someone in order
to do him a favour by making him into a deity would
be unacceptable for reasons that involve both ethics
and religion, and there is no way to untangle these
two elements in the judgement that killing is wrong.
If that person were to really believe that sacrificial
victims became gods, he would no longer be himself,
but would have been transformed into someone else
with totally different religious beliefs, and *therefore*
also totally different ethical beliefs (which now
allowed him to carry out human sacrifice without
any moral qualms). He would now have a mind that was
very similar in key ways to the minds of the ancient
Aztecs. So, I think your hypothetical situation,
while strictly speaking logically possible, is
psychologically and anthropologically incorrect.
> Consider the film "The Matrix", in which the world
> in which we live is really a virtual reality, a
> computer simulation, and the actual reality is
> that we are all "brains in vats" farmed by machines
> for our tissues and our metabolism used as a power
> source. Killing people in the normal world becomes
> possibly (not in that film, but we can imagine a
> situation otherwise) no different than "killing"
> them in a video game. A different physics/metaphysics
> leads to a different applied ethics, to be sure, but
> the root ethical principles do not seem to have
> been altered.
I've seen the movie, and it's pure fantasy. We're not
talking about hypothetical science fiction worlds, but
about the real religious beliefs of people in two
different cultures. Each actual cultural system is an
integrated whole which includes religious, ethical,
and many other interconnected beliefs. You can't
arbitrarily change one element, and *assume* the rest
of the culture and beliefs stays the same. Culture
cannot be studied like in a physics experiment where
you can choose a control variable to alter (such as
the 'kind of physics/metaphysics' in your
gedankenexperiment above), and then observe how the
dependent variable (applied ethics in your example)
changes. You just can't isolate elements of culture
like that. All the parts of culture are interconnected
in countless ways you can't control, so if you
change one element, unpredictable changes occur
in many other places.
> > Or the fact that in the Middle Ages, noblemen
> > in many European countries were allowed to kill
> > their own serfs with impunity.
> Why do you think that behaviour is a good indicator
> of ethics? Isn't it obvious from the horrors of the
> 20th-century that there is a distinction between
> behaviour and ethical beliefs?
Yes, but the point is that people in the Middle Ages
believed that if a nobleman loses his temper and
kills one of his serfs in a fit of rage, he has *not*
committed murder. What he did was an acceptable
thing given the fact that the serf was his property.
It is only later in history that killing another
human being was always considered to be murder,
and thus a punishable act under the law. This shows
that the ethical beliefs of people in the Middle Ages
were radically different from our own.
> Also, what about progress? What about my analogy
> with physics, or geometry? It is obvious that
> the angles in spherical triangles added up to
> more than two right angles in 300 B.C., whether
> or not Euclid understood this. Non-Euclidean
> geometry is more of an *extension* and *development*
> of Euclidean geomtry than a negation of it.
> It is possible to trace differing ideas about
> ethics through history, though the differences
> in *ideas* are not the same thing as differences
> in *practices*, and not to be confused with them.
> But, it is also possible to trace a change of
> ideas about physics or about geometry through
> history and human geography. This change of ideas
> does not, however, lead us to suspect that the
> principles of physics or the theorems of geometry
> have changed through time. The only thing that
> has changed is that humans have known rather
> more or less of them. So, I see no evidence from
> anthropology that the principles of ethics couldn't
> be exactly the same in this respect as geometry
> or physics. What changes is our knowledge of an
> unchanging thing.
Your analogy between physical and mathematical
beliefs on the one hand, and ethical beliefs on
the other, is not valid. Scientific beliefs are
either objectively true or false depending on
whether or not they correspond to the real facts
of the matter. It is either true or false that
connecting three points on the surface of a sphere
with shortest distances produces a triangle whose
angular sum is greater than 180 degrees. And it
is either true or false that the acceleration
produced when a force acts upon a body is
proportional to the force and inversely
proportional to the mass of the body. But there
are no such real facts of the matter that would
correspond to ethical judgements. What fact
would you appeal to decide whether abortion
is right or wrong? What fact determines whether
female circumcision is right or wrong? There
are no such facts, and therefore the advocate
of each side in these disputes has an equally
sound opinion. Rational people within the same
culture hold diametrically opposed views about
these and many other ethical questions. There
simply is no objective way that these disputes
could ever be resolved. It comes down to a
matter of values, and values cannot be reduced
to facts.
Moggin
> An individualistic society does not calculate victimhood out,
> always leaving an opening. It strikes me as the left's position
> that it should always be calculated out and be made into a system;
> the right's that everything is case by case and good is done
> by minute particulars, which is the opposite of reduction.
In this particular case the right (I mean you) has reduced
some number of individuals to "the victim" while reducing
their however-many voices to one, viz. "the voice of the victim"
which you claim can be marked only by execution, trusting
that the system will choose the right people to be placemarkers.
> My epigram only locates the support of the death penalty; another
> epipgram can always try to work another direction. Does, in fact,
> poetically speaking, forgiveness have something to do with
> the place accorded to the voice of the victim, which is absent?
Dunno. Does execution have something to do with the place
accorded to the voice of the victim, which is absent? And
what something might that be which becomes not-a-thing when the
outcome is, e.g., forgiveness?
> Well you can only forgive a wrong done to you, which, say you are
> a grieving relative, you could do, but it doesn't seem to touch
> the place accorded to the voice of the victim.
Irrelevant, since you just told me that you're not talking
about "channeling the dead," but rather about "an ethical
structure." Doesn't matter if you're dead or you're merely the
relative of a dead person. That's neither here nor there.
Question is why execution is the only thing which fits into the
structure. I gave forgiveness as an alternative, just to
illustrate. Another would be writing fifty times on a
blackboard, "I must not be so-oh-oh-oh." Why don't they fit as
well or badly as the electric chair?
> Perhaps the
> victim is a saint and you want it as a remembrance?
Perhaps that's beside the point. I'm asking why execution
is the uniquely valid choice. You say it occupies the place
of the victim's voice: doesn't speak for the victim, but marks
the space of what's missing. O.k. -- but why can only an
execution serve as a placemarker? Why isn't, e.g., forgiveness
an equally good or bad possibility? Or "I must not be
so-oh-oh-oh"? Granted, it didn't dissuade Maxwell from killing
the judge, but you're not arguing about deterrence.
> But why
> isn't it the law of the jungle when you don't want to, on the
> other side?
The law of the jungle was just an invention of some jungle
lawyers trying encourage business. But if you're defending
the death penalty on grounds of an-eye-for-an-eye, o.k. I have
enough of the Old Adam in me to understand that.
> A poetical difficulty, that yours depends on somebody
> in a position to forgive, which is at least better expressed in
> another way, fatal to the epigram.
Your executions are equally arbitrary: the execution that
you insist marks the place of the voice of the victim, and
your execution of my alternative epigram. To execute, you need
someone to condemn. Ditto to forgive. But again, that's
irrelevant, since we're talking about a marker for the victim's
voice, not an expression of anyone's wishes.
-- Moggin
Ron Hardin
> Your executions are equally arbitrary: the execution that
> you insist marks the place of the voice of the victim, and
> your execution of my alternative epigram. To execute, you need
> someone to condemn. Ditto to forgive. But again, that's
> irrelevant, since we're talking about a marker for the victim's
> voice, not an expression of anyone's wishes.
I was doing a poetic analysis of your forgiveness in the place
of my execution. They're different.
(I don't think that execution marks the place of the voice of the
victim. That's your jargonizing or it, not mine.)
If you want to speculate about rules epigrams have to follow,
you're welcome to; a better approach would be a better epigram,
and the criterion is poetic.