Posts Tagged ‘capital punishment’
capital punishment ‘is good’
Once again, the Central Politburo of the Testosterone Party of China – the world’s leading executioner
I still do a bit of teaching, or presiding over English conversation classes, though I’ve retired from the profession. Recently I’ve been taking a very low level English language group, and one of the women, visiting the country for a short period from China, expressed outright disbelief that capital punishment didn’t exist in Australia. ‘Kill bad people is good, we strong country’, were her words, more or less. She clearly doesn’t realise that China is an outlier on this issue. Every single country in Europe, without exception as far as I’m aware, has abandoned the practice, and that includes such ‘problematic’ countries as Turkey, Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Romania, Moldova and Montenegro. Outside of Europe, there’s Canada, New Zealand, Liberia…. many African countries in fact, and virtually all South American countries. Much easier to name those countries that still maintain the practice, and they include many of the usual suspects – Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, the USA (in about half of their states), Iraq, Yemen…
State killing came in many forms in those good old days. Hanging was the thing in Australia, in obeisance to our British overlords. La Guillotine, once a popular French restaurant here in Adelaide, was a quaint reminder of Robespierre and the Terror – though the guillotine was in use right up to 1977. We’ve had gas chambers, electric furniture, garrotting, Zyklon B, stoning, keelhauling (possibly mythical), crucifixion (not fiction) and burning at the stake (popular for women), and of course a variety of individualised torture-killings beloved of kings and despots down the ages. In fact the further back in time you go, the more grotesquely elaborate the punishment seems to become – but of course, the past is where the barbarians come from. I wonder what they’ll say about us in a thousand years’ time, if our species survives.
I don’t think it’s too much to claim that capital punishment and other brutalities tend to go with more patriarchal societies. The connection can obviously be made with the more fundamentalist religious societies – the Abrahamic god of the three religions being as male as male can be. But what about supposedly atheist China, with its Chinese Testosterone Party? Well, Confucianism has had a profound impact on their society for well over 2000 years, and it’s every bit as patriarchal as Judaism, Christianity and Islam – and it’s also been massively influential in Korea, Vietnam, Japan – the whole region of South-East Asia. It’s a kind of operational synergy – these religions and politico-social systems were born out of patriarchy and they’ve strengthened and sustained that patriarchy through the past couple of millennia. The post-religious age, for example here in Australia and in western Europe, particularly Scandinavia, is only a few decades old by comparison. We might call it humanism, or naturalism, but by whatever name, it is here to say, and it will steadily encroach upon older ways of thinking and living. Without even analysing the situation I’d be willing to bet my house, if I owned one, on it being the case that the US states that retain the death penalty are those that are most avowedly religious. It’s a matter of ‘turn the other cheek, that way we can slit the whole throat, not just half’.
Anyway, China really is a hard nut to crack. Of course, as with all extremely top-down societies, a change of leadership might bring some progress. Xi Jinping has recently set himself up as the nation’s monarch, but he’s in his seventies now… Neighbouring countries might be influential too, but a powerful country like China obviously tends to dominate its neighbours, as in the case of Burma/Myanmar. One development that might help to speed up the transition to a more humane and remedial treatment of criminals is the one I’m using now – social media. Another is travel. Both help to broaden the mind, to inform us on how the other half live. Or in China’s case, the other 80% or so.
So I’m trying to do my bit. When I next see my Chinese conversation student, I hope to gently inform her that many many countries – almost all of the richest, safest and happiest countries in the world – have given up on executing their citizens for their crimes. Some, like Norway, have created prisons that are heavily focussed on education and re-integration into society, and building or rebuilding family and other human connections.
Then again, she may not turn up.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_by_country
https://www.firststepalliance.org/post/norway-prison-system-lessons
reveries of a solitary wa*ker: wa*k 2
bulldog Tommy about to land a bookish blow
The Darwin book continues to be a rollicking good read, I’m into the post Origin period, where shit hits the fans and Darwin’s fans, led by that young Turkish bulldog Tommy Huxley, shovel shit on the opposition, captained by soapy Sam Wilberforce and the brains of high Anglicanism, Dicky Owen – the most gifted naturalist of his age, to be fair. What’s fascinating is that the Origin precipitated the last great politico-religious struggle in England, a very drawn-out affair which crossed the Atlantic and continues in the US to this day, but in England it has been a slow-acting poison to conservative Anglicanism. Liberal Anglicanism, essentially a bridge to atheism, has swallowed natural selection with a sort of diffident, dumb grace, flexible as to their god’s ever-changing plan. As a semi-student of history though, I can well understand Darwin’s own diffidence about publicizing his theory. It was bad enough for the time, had it been a century earlier (impossible of course given the eighteenth century state of knowledge) he would absolutely have been martyred for it. As it was, during the couple of decades between formulating his theory and going public, the public, especially the disaffected Chartist ‘rabble’, had become increasingly keen for a weapon to strike down the High Clergy and the swanningly civilised aristos, and apes for ancestors, monkeys for uncles, even gorillas for girlfriends, fitted the bill perfectly. Darwin, of course, presented his case as dispassionately as humanly possible, with nary a mention of human descent, and afterwards kept his head down in Downe, obsessing over pigeons and orchids and sexual selection (actually chipping away very effectively at the god-did-it argument), while Tommy Huxley, Joe Hooker and co fought the good Darwinian battle in the big smoke with consummate derring-do (don’t believe a word of this by the way, as if you would). Darwin was anything but a fighter – he had vomiting fits at the very thought of confrontation – but in his oddly reclusive way he was always the leader, because unlike many of his supporters, even the closest ones, he knew he was right. His aim, his obsession, with all his apparently arcane researches, was to keep adding to the mountain of evidence.
There are many intriguing things about Darwin. He was vain but genuinely humble, highly-strung and emotional but profoundly analytical, a hypochondriac and yet a real invalid for stretches of his life, and of course a revolutionary who hated revolutionaries. As a young, footloose, disgustingly well-heeled intellectual, he could think of nothing better than to make a pleasant living as a naturalist-clergyman, like many a gentleman among his family’s connections. By his career’s end, the naturalist-clergyman was becoming a relic, probably more due to his own productions than to any other cause.
The founding father of eugenics, atheism, Nazism, bestiality and please don’t get me started
And this leads to a consideration of his most profound impact, outside the confines of science, what makes him the most controversial and contested, and in some circles reviled, figure of the past two hundred years, and that is his, and his theory’s, complete denial of human specialness. A specialness which is at the heart of the Abrahamic religions, without which not.
This recognition of human relatedness to other species, the bringing of humans back to the pack, wasn’t an anti-Christian urge by any means, it was more a result of his obsessive interest in solving the problems of adaptation and basic survival of creatures such as barnacles, earthworms and pigeons. This obsession gave him great respect for the sometimes barely fathomable complexity and ingenuity of even the most ‘basic’ life-forms. He saw human complexity as a continuation of that adaptive process, but biologists and many other scientists were, at that time, unable to shake off notions of human exceptionality. Owen, Wallace, Luis Agassiz, Asa Gray, Charles Lyell, St George Mivart and others of Darwin’s time, all had qualms about, or simply rejected outright, the implications for humanity of Darwinian natural selection, and these represented the scientific mainstream, essentially. Darwin himself was able to weather the storm through the support of strong allies such as Hooker and Huxley, his own ability to avoid and deflect controversy, his inaccessibility at Downe, his long-suffering but profoundly loyal wife, and his habit of retreating into the messy fine detail of his studies. He also, through voluminous correspondence – he would’ve loved the world of email and Facebook – built up a huge network of scientific boffins, breeders and farmers, with whom he was unfailingly polite and charming while exploiting their specialist knowledge. So he was able to adapt very well to the challenges thrown at him.
eeek
I’m writing here as if delivering a lecture, and I do wish I could reach more people. I don’t have too many contacts with a penchant for science, or for history, but then I don’t have many contacts. But enough complaining (mea culpa after all), I note that the vaccination controversy drags on, with too many people standing on their ‘right’ to not vaccinate their children, which shows up the problems with the rights concept, which I’ve always considered artificial but a useful fiction which has helped to build a more humane global society, and speaking of globalism the battle to save the lives of Australians under the death penalty is almost over, but we should continue the battle to the end because it’s a bad law and national sovereignty be damned, and that should be the same for any national under any national or state law. Which makes me wonder, I’m not a lawyer, but what would happen if an Australian citizen was charged with a capital offence and sentenced to death in the notorious US state of Texas? Maybe they only kill US citizens, that’d keep them out of international trouble, but what we need to keep working on is an international code of ethics and an international law and I do think we’re creeping towards it slowly slowly.
capital punishment – green doesn’t do it, red does, and yellow’s moving away