A Tangential Conversation about Justice, Punishment, and Forgiveness
A Preview to "Crime and Punishment and the Tragedy of Cancel Culture"
(Photo by Zhang Ye)
Fast links to my review series, “Crime and Punishment and the Tragedy of Cancel Culture”:
A Tangential Conversation about Justice, Punishment, and Forgiveness
As the idea of justice becomes important in my review on Crime and Punishment, I think it is worth going on a tangent and spending a few words about justice, and the peace that it is supposed to bring between us. Since this is supposed to be a short conversation on a large topic, I am going to bring in Hannah Arendt’s insight about justice, forgiveness and punishment, so I don’t need to bear the brunt weight of thinking through the ginormous subject in a hasty, babbling manner. But introducing another thinker into the conversation comes with its own responsibility. The structure of the conversation predicts the adrift into the context in which Hannah Arendt conceived her terms of justice.
Hannah Arendt’s proposal about forgiveness and punishment sits front and center in her concern disclosed in the Human Condition: how can men be trusted with the responsibility of inhabiting and sharing a world when technology and the unpredictability of human action, seemingly threaten to destroy the world with gradual diplomatic deterioration, and then a sudden outburst of violent annihilation.
In the time The Human Condition was written, in the backdrop of the proliferation of nuclear weapon technology and the heating up of the cold war of the 1950s, both the progression of technology and the chain of political events seems to be part and parcel of an automated course of politics that points to mutual annihilation. If there is any political mechanism that may release us from this automated course of doom, it must first restore the often forgotten human agency that is responsible for enacting and perpetuating the automated chain of events. These mechanism, embedded in the faculty of our political action, for which Hannah Arendt coined with the Latin word, vita activa, must reconcile with the philosophy that it was through human decisions, not automated courses of events, that the world was led to the threat of mutual annihilation; while the action of the generation before set the world on the precedence of an impossible circumstance, the circumstances are never quite affixed for any generation for an head-on collision of mutual annihilation.
To our concern of justice, justice in Hannah Arendt’s context is tasked with a two fold assignment. On the one hand, it is tasked with recognizing the human figure who enacted crimes under the modern disguise of automation and inevitability to justify the punishment. On the other hand, it is tasked to recognize the human fragility from the modern myths of superhuman invincibility to reconcile with the criminal with forgiveness. But either through punishment or through forgiveness, justice hinges on recognizing the character of the criminal apart from the crime he/she has committed. It demands both the personification of the punisher/forgiver and the criminal for it to initiate a course of reparation that amends a previous course of criminality.
Justice, being our initiative political action of augmenting the wrongs of the past transforms into the category of crime, punishment and forgiveness to personify the human criminal amidst the course of seemingly inevitable chain of events. Forgiveness and punishment for or against a criminal involves the recognition of the criminal in separation from the crime he/she committed, so that the criminal may be prosecuted in the context of human interaction besides the context of reparation. It sets a solid ground for reparation that reparation does not need to combat the facts of criminality while repairing the damages. But such solid ground is only possible through either forgivness or punishment that establishes a human to human relation between the society and the criminal. They set the precedence that “a crime is enacted by a criminal who by choice commits the crime. As we choose to forgive/punish the criminal for who he/she is, we also recognize our agency for reparation.” (these are my words, not Hannah Arendt’s.)
But with the popularization of modern social sciences, the problem of crimes are transformed into problems of adverse socio-economic conditions that necessitates wrongdoing in several “disenfranchised communities”. To fix the problems of wrongdoings, the solution of social science becomes promoting different “causes” of social justice that claim to fix the problem from its social “root”. The idea of social justice deals with the social condition from which the crime emerges, and transforms our idea of crime into wrongdoings that occur in divisive social interaction and conditions. As the problems of crimes are being transformed into problems of wrongdoings it announces a contempt for the human agency of the criminal who comes from “disenfranchised communities”. It is as if criminals from different “disenfranchised communities” don’t even have the human agency to commit crimes; as if criminals are mere statistical points that react to their environments.
Such transformation of crimes into wrongdoing also announces an ambivalent self-degrading attitude. As criminals are translated as statistical points, the category of punishment/forgiveness becomes meaningless. If a criminal commits a crime only because of his/her circumstances, his/her humanity by which we punish/forgive the criminal becomes irrelevant, since it plays no part in the occurrence of wrongdoing. Associated with the erosion of the personification of the criminal is the erosion of the forgiver/punisher. There is no one to be punished/forgiven therefore there is no one to punish/forgive. In this impossible intra-human mechanism, it is common to hastily accept the mass produced phrase: “ If I were in his/her shoes, I would have done the same.” Such phrases, besides disguising oblivion in the name of fraudulent forgiveness, also draws a quick equation between the criminal who chose to commit the crime, and everybody else who chooses not to commit the crime.
Despite the encompassing applicational potentials of social scientific methodologies, from time to time, there are crimes of eccentric nature, such as a serial killer who grew up in a wealthy loving family and kills for no particular socio-economic motives. In these cases, it is obvious that there is no use of asking the experts the prevalent liberal question, “why did he/she do it?” Obviously, a criminal commits a crime because he/she chooses to commit the crime. Ironically, it is through cases of eccentric crimes, we see the rare moments where the social scientific methodology becomes conspicuously inappropriate to the presence of human agency. And tragically, it is in these crimes of eccentric nature that we are forced to confront the criminal as a human actor, regardless of their age.
The deprivation of justice and the capitulation of the idea of human agency is a prevalent condition of modern society, but it is by no means the norm of the ideas by whose name the condition was prescribed. The very fact that we can still attach this vague sense of modernity in separation from what came before modernity suggests that the deprivation of justice is rather an historical condition, not a rational end state of mind which we now all have to accept. The very historical quality of this perversion of condition is what justifies Hannah Arendt’s often criticized Eurocentric approach to the problem. Hannah Arendt treats the problem as an historical problem whose inception was always a combination of specific human coincidence/intention, communication/miscommunication, and inspiration/misunderstanding; therefore her looking back into the western transformation between classics and modernity as a specific problem in European intellectual history.
Considering Hannah Arendt’s argument through historical lenses, our historical circumstances seem equally if not more peculiar than the time her argument was made. Hannah Arendt dove into the manifold of vita activa with the faith that within our political faculty, there are sets of political mechanisms revolving around the idea of human agency. By the agency of these political mechanisms, she placed her bet on the potential of novel political action that can lead the world out of the seemingly deadlock of nuclear annihilation. You may ask, with the ending of the cold war and the likelihood of nuclear annihilation fading to the background (which just re-emerged due to recent politics between the US, Russia, and China), how can I claim that our historical condition be more peculiar? The real intolerable idea is not the nuclear annihilation itself, but the idea that such annihilation is unavoidable regardless of our actions. The menace of cold war turned hot is the idea that human agency is chained by some mysterious historical inevitability beyond human power to augment. Such inevitability, in the context of the 50s, seems to point towards certain nuclear war. The idea of historical inevitability might sound absurd in our time. But historical inevitability was a very real concept in Hannah Arendt’s time either in the Communism belief in an end state of inevitable proletariat dictatorship, or the Nazi belief in the evolution theory of racial competition, and its end state of Aryan race domination. In the context of these totalitarian ideologies, human agencies were transformed into actors of superhuman historical inevitabilities. As the idea of historical inevitability seems to have faded away from our political ideas, another type of inevitability has occupied the terms with which we think of politics. This idea of inevitability of our time is embedded in the philosophy of social science.
Politics in our day and age are almost completely replaced by discussions of economy and sociology. These disciplines assume that we are all but data points that follow behavior patterns just like how an apple follows the rules of gravity. And despite the tremendous applicational utility of social sciences, the peace we have between us are rendered to the philosophical narrative that the emergence of such peace is but an arrangement of adequate data points. In the social arrangement and rearrangement of human statistics, there are no human agencies or initiatives playing any role. While blatant wrongs occasionally broke the contingence of peace from time to time, there are no appropriate human reactions in the confine of the statistical reconfigurations of social conditions. The only possible human reaction is to hide under oblivion for the long wait of an reemergence of another coincidental peace.
April 24, 2023
Kado
Photo by Zhang Ye// @sh.bos.ny, @yeahzhang
An entry for Zhang Ye’s photos is coming next week.