Crime and Punishment and the Tragedy of Cancel Culture, Pt1
The Peace Within Us and the Peace Between Us
(Photo by Zhang Ye)
Fast links to my review series, “Crime and Punishment and the Tragedy of Cancel Culture”:
The Peace Within Us and the Peace Between Us
A Tangential Conversation about Justice, Punishment, and Forgiveness
Can we murder a person if we don't need to bear the consequence? Dostoevsky takes us through great lengths to justify the seemingly ridiculous question that is often brushed away by the genteel society. Through the mouth of his characters, Dostoevsky asks: what if the murderee lives a grotesque lifestyle whose whole existence hinges on the continuous suffering of those beneath him or her? What if the murderer does the killing for a noble cause with the most genuine intention? What if the world indeed becomes a better place with the absence of the murderee? What if the murderer does the deed with the full scale of cautionary measures to ensure that he does not benefit personally from his action? What if, besides the absence of the murderee, the world benefits from the murdering of the murderee?
When we put these reasons in plain words, they completely offend our sense of decency. But what if I remind you that we have been exercising even worse intellectual gymnastics to justify the blatant crimes that are committed in plain sight? We justify the invasion of Iraq by the manufactured evidence of imaginary weapons of mass destruction. When our troops couldn’t find any trace of WMD, we shift our narrative to blame Saddam Hussein for his oppression against the people of Iraq, his non-existencing block to the UN biological weapon investigators, and justify the criminal war with the still pending democratization of Iraq. We justify bailing out the banks in 2009 to protect the middle class homeowners who have been financially responsible for their equity. When it becomes clear that the subprime mortgage is a fundamentally fraudulent product whose material serves no purpose other than obscuring the natural risk of the real estate market, we justify letting those who created the Ponzi scheme off the hook with trickle down theory. When Edward Snowden exposed how the NSA monitors our privacy, we justify the persecution against him in the name of rule of law. When he offers to stand trial under the condition that the trial be made public, we let the government tell us “the nature of Edward Snowden’s crime concerns national security; a public trial compromises the security of those who are protecting this country in secret.” The list goes on and on and on with much more large and small offenses that could not be listed in full in this writing, with the latest heinous crimes being those of Donald Trump’s.
From a long long time ago, we all became proficient in the kind of functionalism moral reasoning seditiously teased by Dostoevsky. The only difference is that Dostoevsky feeds us these crooked intellectual reasoning in bits and pieces through discrete conversations among the characters whose conspiratorial characteristic immediately raises our alarm; while we announce our own intellectual gymnastics shamelessly with a strange sense of normalcy whose fundamental philosophy hinges on our acceptance of living in an upside down world.
To the question, “can we accept a crime if there is no consequence”, Dostoevsky’s answer is an emphatic no. But his answer does not appeal to our already hollowed sense of morality. He appeals to our still corroding sense of justice. In the story, the moral mode of self-harmony already ceases to be relevant before the crime is committed. Surviving in a system that constantly seeks for subjects of exploitation already consumes the possibility of inner peace. Simply by living in such a system, there are bound to be faceless victims that are not eviscerated by a definable crime. It is a system that chews and spits out a family with three children within a week after the bread bringer passes away. It is a system where no amount of individual goodwill halts the constant metabolism of expulsion and consumption of unproductive human capitals. The disposition of the system renders our act of conscience irrelevant to its grand scheme of consumption and exploitation, hence the irrelevance of our moral peace. Committing a crime we cannot tolerate ourselves committing makes no difference to our already intolerable moral existence. The only type of character who is able to retain inner peace is the naive and selfless prostitute, who could not recognize her own place in a system that feeds on exploitation, hence suffers from her inability to cope with the system.
With the absence of inner peace, there is still the question of peace between us. There is still the question of how we are going to live with each other with an illusion that can still convince us of our humanity when a blatant crime is committed among us. That is the question of justice. In the context of blatant crimes and its pending punishment, justice consists of the mechanism where we put a crime behind us, and return to the norms defined by the system. If the theater of morality expands between the demands of conscience and the individual action that makes good the demand of conscience, justice expands on the space between us where criminal behaviors are singled out from the norm so we may still have a norm between the criminal and the bystander. When morality fails to define our inner human peace, justice and peace among us becomes the last defense for a sense of minimum normality. In this sense, Crime and Punishment is rightly categorized in the genre of literature instead of moral philosophy taking place in the form of cautionary tales. It tells a story of the characters finding peace among each other by recognizing the crime.
But living together is also almost impossible when justice is not served. When justice does not occur, the first thing that is compromised is our ability to call things as they are. A murder is now called the step towards the “universal greatness of humanity”. A war crime is called the necessary evil to pass the torch of democracy. Torturing is called enhanced investigation. Shameless schemes are called brilliant marketing strategies that unfortunately capitulate to risk variables. Suppression of freedom of speech and invasion of privacy is now patriotic. Denial of judicial process to admitted innocent kidnapees at Guantanamo is called prevention of terrorism and anti-American sentiment. When we amend the way we speak the truth, we amend our words and narratives in a way that never really makes a lot of sense, but helps us move on alongside the crimes that are committed, to live with the monsters who committed the crimes. But we are never quite able to forgive the crimes that are committed, because you cannot forgive a crime when they are not recognized as a crime. Without forgiveness, we are constantly caught between hysterical spite and loathing oblivion to the things in the room that are too conspicuous to ignore.
April 14, 2023
Kado
Photo by Zhang Ye// @sh.bos.ny, @yeahzhang
An entry for Zhang Ye’s photos is coming up soon.