Crime and Punishment and the Tragedy of Cancel Culture, final part
A Brief Historical Reflection
(Photo by Zhang Ye, “9/11 Memorial”)
Fast links to my review series, “Crime and Punishment and the Tragedy of Cancel Culture”:
A Tangential Conversation about Justice, Punishment, and Forgiveness
A Brief Historical Reflection
It is eerie how little historical distance we are able to read Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment in our time. To be precise, it is eerie that Dostoevsky is able to remind us what does justice and forgiveness means to the society through his literary dystopian world. Dostoevsky, too, lived in an era of illusionary peace where internal contradictions were exported by military interventions to foreign affairs. It was a time when the Russian Empire was touted as “ Europe’s last defender against revolution”, when internal contradictions between the growing urban bourgeoisie and the country monarchical society clashed in the streets of Saint Petersburg. It was little before Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina reveals the strange joyful loathing of the social elites, and, in its desperate search for a cause, romanticizing the military glory in a land so remote to Saint Petersburg.
It was a time when terrorism and anarchism was considered genuine political philosophy in certain groups, before Lenin adhered communism programmes to a tangible social order with elements of totalitarian coercion. It was a time when Mikhail Bakunin, through his naive and oblivious aspiration for anarchism, was able spell out the contradictory logic of imperialism:
“ Out of 80 million inhabitants of Russia, how many serious scholars do we have?...Perhaps twenty or thirty. And those twenty or thirty scholars are to govern the entire world. Can you imagine a despotism more preposterous or abominable than that?... By contrast to all metaphysicians, positivists, and scholarly or unscholarly worshippers of the goddess science, we maintain that natural and social life always precedes thought, but is never its result. ”
In a sweeping claim, Bakunin divided knowledge into knowledge of the dominant class and knowledge of the people, as if knowledge and intellectual activities can be conveniently segregated like how society and power can be divided into classes and institutions. But Bakunin did point to the very real phenomena of his time: power and domination hiding behind rationalcratic excuses. It was in such an era, Dostoevsky wrote Crime and Punishment. And strangely, the connecting fabric between justice and forgiveness is still alive in the literary landscape of that time.
Just barely two months before the publication of this article, the mainstream media presented quite a spectacular spectacle by coincidence. CNN and MSNBC, on the one hand, were running stories about the “Likely Imminent Indictment of Donald Trump”, on the other hand, recounting “The Legacy of the War in Iraq 20 Years Later”. For these crimes of new and old, they invited prominent “legal experts”, “military experts”, “ex-government officials” for discussions. In their respective programs, pundits went through genuine depths about the legal process and technicalities involved in the pending indictment of Donald Trump, and the historical progression and transformation of the war in Iraq. But as these two programs are juxtaposed on my Youtube browser, it is almost impossible not to notice the corruption of our judicial system. While legal experts with Ivy League law degrees explained the legal process and details that are supposed to uphold the whole integrity of justice, we constantly forgot the absence of justice in the unjust result produced by this system that can be easily recognized by simple reductio ad absurdum. While the crimes of old gradually fade away from our memories, they recite heartwarming stories about individual efforts to genuinely amend the impossible consequences of a criminal war, and brush away the real crime.
Before we know it, we are permanently confined in this transitory state between living and dying. We are not quite able to live with the history that brought us here, but also not quite able to start life afresh without a history. Through our dying vail, we are not quite able to recognize what is happening, but also not quite able to deny the commotions taking place around our sickbed. To our dying justice, no amount of genuine charity, love, beauty and warmth brings the living breath back to our dying corpse. It also doesn’t take long for our corroding sense of nominal imperative to transform words of love, equality, and community into biennial poetries that are so prevalent in the vocabulary landscape of the mainstream so called liberal politics.
We live in a world where things are read to us in backward riddles in a variety of rhythms, beautiful cadences, and melodies. While our disarrayed inner peace constantly perpetuates us to reach for peace with each other, we find ourselves confined in a city full of strange signs and symbols. The silent megaphone broadcasting from everywhere and nowhere is disorienting. It tries to teach us to be proficient gibberish speakers. The hierarchy is not authoritarian, totalitarian, republican nor democratic. It is a tribe of shamans and wizards hypnotizing the hunters and the gatherers. The shamans and wizards will lure you to learn their language, with their flamboyant culture and costumes and degrees, but they will never admit you to their rank. It is their genuine act. They talk amongst themselves to animate human conversations so you can learn the way they speak. They just want to teach you how to forget, and live a fabulous life as an animal.
May 17, 2023
Kado
Photo by Zhang Ye// @sh.bos.ny, @yeahzhang
See full entry to Zhang Ye’s Instagram albums here. For the featuring photo of this article, “9/11 Memorial”, I specifically like how the buildings reflected off the memorial pond. The contrast between the stability of the buildings and the evasive texture of the rippling water is strangely peaceful. The white framing, (although Zhang Ye only device it for technical reasons to adhere to Instagram formatting specifications,) also helps dampen the blow of the image that rippls off the initial tragic event.