a bonobo humanity?

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